They rode on in silence. A row ahead was tolerably certain, Sid thought. If Vasquez had reached them first by the railroad they would probably get a hot reception!
Two hours later their cavalcade filed out of the mountains and headed across a wide and hot plain. It was like riding into an entirely new world. Odd twisted and contorted cactus vegetation now covered the desert. Every plant and tree was different from anything the boys had ever seen before. Even the mountains were different, for instead of having the usual foothills they rose, gray and jagged and bare in the blue sky, abruptly from a flat and sandy floor. A faint tinge of green on their sides showed that the queer vegetation of this arboreal desert climbed up for a considerable distance even on that dry and inhospitable soil.
In front of them stretched a wide and flat plain, clear to the bases of the distant gray mountains. Sparse galleta grass and patches of gray sand dotted with creosote bushes covered it. There were clumps of mesquite, looking like dwarfed and twisted locust trees; here and there a bright green patch which, on riding closer, developed on to a palo verde, its bright green branches and twigs a dense lacery of glistening green. Sid rose close to one, looking for its leaves for apparently it had none. They were infinitesimal, spiky little things, adding nothing to its beauty, which he saw came entirely from the palo verde’s masses of sap-green branches.
As they rode further to the southwest, multitudes of what looked like tall green fence posts appeared. They covered the ridges, each as straight as a lance and as thick as a tree. They were small saguarro or giant cactus, ribbed and pleated in green, and covered with thorns. Further west they grew larger and put forth branches like huge candelabra.
To Sid’s naturalist soul all this arboreal desert was weird and beautiful and interesting. The tree choya, a clubby specimen with stiff branches of thorn bristles at the ends of crooked branches, began to appear; then the ocatilla, the “Devil’s Chair,” as Big John called it, a tree with no trunk but with more arms than an octopus and each branch covered with thorns and small green leaves bunched along a green stem as hard as iron.
Towards evening, across the gray-green miles, a small brown visita or mission outpost came to view. It was merely a large hut of adobe, but the bell in its upper tower told its purpose instantly. The boys thrilled as they looked at it, for they were now nearing the Papago Reservation and it was quite possible that Vasquez had forestalled them by train from Tucson.
Big John reined in the white mustang. “Nobody to home, thar, these days,” quoth he. “The Injuns is all away at the cornfields. We gotto ride in thar though, an’ help ourselves to water afore these hosses kin go further.”
Sid would have preferred to keep away, but there was no choice. Water was king in this country! They had to get it, if it meant encountering a thousand malignant school-teachers. Vasquez’s subtle Spanish mind had no doubt led him to reason that they must come here. But what redskin reinforcements he might have picked up in that lonely mission station imagination could not conjecture.
Slowly the miles lessened; the building loomed up brown and enigmatical in the setting sun before them. ’Dobe houses, each with a mesquite pole veranda in front, appeared like magic among the green stakes of saguarros on the hillsides; then a round stone oven out in the valley near the schoolhouse became plain to sight.
They were perhaps yet a mile away when around the corner of the building appeared a man on horseback. A cape or serapé of some sort hung over his shoulders, but it was too far away to get any sense of color from it. Niltci squinted his keen eyes and gazed at him long and fixedly while the others reined up.