"Well, you see the ponies are fine and fit. I calculate to make between sixty and seventy miles."
"Whew!" I whistled, "you'll wear them out."
"Don't you believe it," replied Jim, "that's nothing awful. Why, don't you know that those buck Indians will cover seventy-five miles in a day and over mountains too? We'd do forty ourselves and not feel it."
"I reckon you are right," came from Tom, "this is certainly fine traveling. We ought to make time."
It was good going. The plain was covered with short, crisp grass. The sun was just coming up and the blue depths of dawn were broken by the shining arrows of the sun. The shadows were stript slowly from the great mesas and the weird buttes and strange desert sculptures stood out in absolute distinctness.
I tell you what, it was fine to be young and fit and free in such a country as lay around us. Hardships and sufferings were ahead of us, we knew that, and many dangers; we had experienced them in the past.
I wish you could have a picture of us as we jogged along, sitting securely, easily on our ponies, our rifles hung on our back, slouch hats flapping about our ears and hiding the sunburned radiance of our countenances as grey clouds do the sun.
Moccasins on our feet; our worn but serviceable clothes that did not altogether conceal our muscular figures. We were hard and fit and we ought to have been. Our hands were black as any Indians and what they gripped they could hold onto. In the rear of the procession trotted the two pack animals.
We may have seemed too young to undertake the responsibilities we had. But Jim was almost seventeen, the age that the famous scout, Kit Carson, started on his career in the West. Tom and I, the twins, were two years younger. Jim was the kingpin and we were auxiliaries.