Under the towering ramparts of Montezuma’s Head the horses were watered and canteens were filled. The wide flat stretch of arboreal desert across to the Growlers lay before them. It would be twenty miles of riding in the hot sun. Extra bags of feed were bought and hung over the saddle bows before they started, and from a lone cowman, an old settler who had come here for peace and quiet, Big John borrowed a five-gallon canvas water bag.
That “valley” was a flat stage floor, surrounded by an amphitheater of bare, granite mountains. They rose all about them, interminable distances away. Yet every mile of that crossing proved interesting, for the boys never grew tired of studying this abundant desert plant life. Saguarros in troops and regiments marched up and over the ridges or filled in the foregrounds of mesquite and palo verde at appropriate intervals. Patches of galleta grass that simply could not be ignored invited the horses to a step and a munch of fodder. Gambel’s quail ran through the bushes in droves and caused many a chase and much popping of the small six-shooters that the boys carried. An occasional road runner darted through the creosotes, long-legged and long-tailed. Desert wrens sang from the white choyas where their nests lay adroitly concealed from predatory hawks. It was high noon before the Growler mountains were reached. They rose abruptly out of the plain, so very steep and sudden that Scotty was convinced that the foothills that properly belong to all mountains must lay buried in the sand underneath the horses’ hoofs. A minute before, the cavalcade had been trotting easily across a table-land like a hall floor; in the next step the horses were laboring up a steep and rocky trail that raised them higher and higher with each step.
At an elevation of some eight hundred feet they paused in a gap that broke through to the west and the party spied out the land spread out like a map below. Red and jagged mountains rose across the flat valley of a red and scowling land below them. A blue haze enveloped it all, out of which rose dark purple cones of extinct volcanoes, hundreds of them. It all seemed a black and purple mass of peaked hills, devoid of vegetation, sizzling in the sun. “Petrified hell,” Big John had well named it!
As they looked, the haze of vapors shifted slowly, and out of the far distances appeared for a brief while a faint line of higher mountains, culminating in a couple of smooth and wrinkly teeth etched faintly against the blue.
“That’s old Pinacate, boys,” said Big John. “Look hard at her; for you won’t see her again for a long while yet.”
“Pinacate or bust!” said Sid solemnly. “Red Mesa must be somewhere between here and it, then, John, since we are now due northeast of the old boy.”
“Mebbe,” retorted Big John, shaking his head. “Search me! If thar’s a mesa, such as we have up in the Hopi country, anywhere down hyar—I’ll eat it! Hey, Niltci!”
The Navaho youth grunted negatively. He had the keenest eyes of them all. If there was a mesa, such as he was familiar with in his own country, he would have been the first to spy it out and exclaim over it.
“Welp! Let’s get movin’,” said Big John. “Thar’s a leetle tank somewhere down this trail, ef she ain’t gone dry. She don’t last long after the rains in this country.”
He and Niltci started on down the granite, but Sid and Scotty tarried to look out once more over this lava land, iron-bound and torrid in the heat of midday.