‘Sheep-herder’s miles, Sleepy.’
‘I reckon that’s right.’
They rode in over the crest of a hill and saw the town of Cañonville ahead of them.
‘That’s her,’ proclaimed Hashknife. ‘The first thing on my programme is to wrap m’self around about four eggs and a couple o’ slices of a hawg’s hind leg.’
‘Yea, brother. And set on somethin’ besides a saddle or a cactus. Man, I’m plumb rode out. When we talked about comin’ to Arizona for the winter, I took a look at a map, and I seen a couple of two-inch squares, pink and orange, which represented what we has to cover in order to reach this here destination.[’]
‘It looked easy, Hashknife. There wasn’t a danged thing difficult-lookin’ about it; no hills, no cactus, no sand; jist pink and orange. And only two inches of it. I’d like to meet the jigger that drew the map I looked at.’
Hashknife smiled and shook his head.
‘We shore earned a rest in a sunny land, Sleepy. I’ll bet these broncs will be glad to lean up ag’in’ a load of oats. They wasn’t raised to browse off a Spanish dagger.’
Cañonville looked exactly like several of the Arizona towns they had passed through; a typical Arizona cow-town on a railroad. Many of the buildings were of adobe, the rest weathered frame, with false fronts.
They rode straight to the livery-stable, where they put up their horses, and then went hunting a restaurant. It was there that they met Noah Evans, the deputy sheriff, humped in a chair as he waited for his meal to be served.