“Best little desert baker you ever saw, boys,” he laughed. “Many a corn cake I’ve shaken up in her!” He made a thick batter of flour, corn meal and baking powder, and poured the pan about half full. Balancing it on two stones over a bed of coals, he heaped a pile of live coals on the cover. In about fifteen minutes he brushed them off and peered inside.
“Brown as your hand! She’d go better with an egg beaten into the batter. Here’s for another one.”
The boys were too tired and sore to do much beside watch the cake-making. When six of them were done, Big John came riding back from the ranch wagon that had gone into camp out on the flat. He had a bag of oats, a ham, and a sweating canvas bag of water hung to his saddle.
“Shore, fill up the crowd with hog an’ hominy, Colonel,” he grinned. “Ain’t nothing better’n ham and corn cakes been invented since Pharaoh missed the ford, I’m settin’ here to tell ye!”
He got after the ham with his bowie knife, and soon a huge slice was sizzling in the Colonel’s mess kit. The boys went up on the rocks and watched the sunset, unwilling to miss a single moment of their first evening in the desert. A wild and beautiful land was this; color,—red and rose and purple and yellow,—with gleaming glories of the sunset tinting the cloud edges. Deep blue shadows crept out under the flanks of the mesas. All was still and silent; a peace passing understanding brooded over the whole world.
“Gosh, but that’s wonderful!” exclaimed Scotty, fervently, as the sun plunged over the western rim of the world, striking turret and pinnacle and bastion alike brick-red in scarlet edgings of fire. “I tell you, Sid, these moments are what we live for in the open! Will we ever forget this scene?”
“Makes me feel calm, and serene, and—happy!” replied Sid, softly. “Happiness is what everybody is striving after—oh, so hard!—and few or none ever have any. This is the secret of it, to me. A simple, healthful life in the open, and plenty of the big, beautiful outdoors to look at and wonder over,” concluded the youth, surprised at his own eloquence.
“You said it, Sid!” came the Colonel’s deep voice behind them. “My happiest hours have all been out here, where a man can see a big enough chunk of the earth to realize his own insignificant place in the scheme of things. Back east we tend too much to magnify our own importance, and I always feel cramped and worried, and get pestered by trifles. No chance for that out here—in the presence of this!”
He waved his arm to the west. Under a roseate afterglow the grand distances of the desert were bathed in a flood of purples and lavenders, with tints of deep orange on the mesa flanks to the west, while soft, tender shadows of misty blue filled the rugged valleys. They sat in silence, drinking it in, for such wine was good for the soul. The light of a distant watch fire on Walpi shone through the dusk, a tiny point of light fifty miles away. The Hopi Indians, at this time, were performing their mystic rites of the sunset, and a subtle comradeship with them reached out across the desert in the flicker of those rays——
“Chuck pile!—Come and get it!” rang out the mighty horn of Big John’s voice, breaking in on their reverie. The Colonel arose with a sigh of blissful content. “Seems like old times again, Sid! Let’s eat hearty!”