Tales of lonely trails by Zane Grey (free novel 24 .TXT) 📕

Navajo mustang. An evidence of how extremely short the Jap's legs were made itself plain in the fact that stirrups could not be fixed so he could reach them with his feet. When he used any support at all he stuck his feet through the straps above the stirrups. How funny his squat, broad figure looked in a saddle! Evidently he was not accustomed to horses. When I saw the mustang roll the white of his eyes and glance back at Takahashi then I knew something would happen sooner or later.

Nineteen miles on Don Carlos reduced me to a miserable aching specimen of manhood. But what made me endure and go on and finish to camp was the strange fact that the longer I rode the less my back pained. Other parts of my anatomy, however, grew sorer as we progressed. Don Carlos pleased me immensely, only I feared he was too much horse for me. A Mormon friend of mine, an Indian trader, looked Don over in Flagstaff, and pronounced him: "Shore one grand hoss!" This man had broken many wild horses, and his compliment pleased me. All the same the nineteen miles on Don hurt my vanity almost as much as my body.

We camped in a cedar pasture off the main road. This road was a new one for us to take to our hunting grounds. I was too bunged up to help Nielsen pitch our tent. In fact when I sat down I was anchored. Still I could use my eyes, and that made life worth living. Sunset was a gorgeous spectacle. The San Francisco Peaks were shrouded in purple storm-clouds, and the west was all gold and silver, with low clouds rimmed in red. This sunset ended in a great flare of dull magenta with a background of purple.

That evening was the try-out of our new chuck-box and chef. I had supplied the men with their own outfit and supplies, to do with as they liked, an arrangement I found to be most satisfactory. Takahashi was to take care of R.C. and me. In less than half an hour from the time the Jap lighted a fire he served the best supper I ever had in camp anywhere. R.C. lauded him to the skies. And I began to think I could unburden myself of my conviction.

I did not awaken to the old zest and thrill of the open. Something was wrong with me. The sunset, the camp-fire, the dark clear night with its trains of stars, the distant yelp of coyotes—these seemed less to me than what I had hoped for. My feelings were locked round my discomfort and pain.

About noon next day we rode out of the cedars into the open desert—a rolling, level land covered with fine grass, and yellow daisies, Indian paint brush, and a golden flowering weed. This luxuriance attested to the copious and recent rains. They had been a boon to dry Arizona. No sage showed or greasewood, and very few rocks. The sun burned hot. I gazed out at the desert, and the cloud pageant in the sky, trying hard to forget myself, and to see what I knew was there for me. Rolling columnar white and cream clouds, majestic and beautiful, formed storms off on the horizon. Sunset on the open desert that afternoon was singularly characteristic of Arizona—purple and gold and red, with long lanes of blue between the colored cloud banks.

We made camp at Meteor Crater, one of the many wonders of this wonderland. It was a huge hole in the earth over five hundred feet deep, said to have been made by a meteor burying itself there. Seen from the outside the slope was gradual up to the edges, which were scalloped and irregular; on the inside the walls were precipitous. Our camp was on the windy desert, a long sweeping range of grass, sloping down, dotted with cattle, with buttes and mountains in the distance. Most of my sensations of the day partook of the nature of woe.

September seventeenth bade fair to be my worst day—at least I did not see how any other could ever be so bad. Glaring hot sun—reflected heat from I the bare road—dust and sand and wind! Particularly hard on me were what the Arizonians called dust-devils, whirlwinds of sand. On and off I walked a good many miles, the latter of which I hobbled. Don Carlos did not know what to make of this. He eyed me, and nosed me, and tossed his head as if to say I was a strange rider for him. Like my mustang, Night, he would not stand to be mounted. When I touched the stirrup that was a signal to go. He had been trained to it. As he was nearly seventeen hands high, and as I could not get my foot in the stirrup from level ground, to mount him in my condition seemed little less than terrible. I always held back out of sight when I attempted this. Many times I failed. Once I fell flat and lay a moment in the dust. Don Carlos looked down upon me in a way I imagined was sympathetic. At least he bent his noble head and smelled at me. I scrambled to my feet, led him round into a low place, and drawing a deep breath, and nerving myself to endure the pain like a stab, I got into the saddle again.

Two things sustained me in this ordeal, which was the crudest horseback ride I ever had—first, the conviction that I could cure my ills by enduring the agony of violent action, of hot sun, of hard bed; and secondly, the knowledge that after it was all over the remembrance of hardship and achievement would be singularly sweet. So it had been in the case of the five days on the old Crook road in 1918, when extreme worry and tremendous exertion had made the hours hideous. So it had been with other arduous and poignant experiences. A poet said that the crown of sorrow was in remembering happier times: I believed that there was a great deal of happiness in remembering times of stress, of despair, of extreme and hazardous effort. Anyway, without these two feelings in my mind I would have given up riding Don Carlos that day, and have abandoned the trip.

We covered twenty-two miles by sundown, a rather poor day's showing; and camped on the bare flat desert, using water and wood we had packed with us. The last thing I remembered, as my eyes closed heavily, was what a blessing it was to rest and to sleep.

Next day we sheered off to the southward, heading toward Chevelon Butte, a black cedared mountain, rising lone out of the desert, thirty miles away. We crossed two streams bank full of water, a circumstance I never before saw in Arizona. Everywhere too the grass was high. We climbed gradually all day, everybody sunburned and weary, the horses settling down to save themselves; and we camped high up on the desert plateau, six thousand feet above sea level, where it was windy, cool, and fragrant with sage and cedar. Except the first few, the hours of this day each marked a little less torture for me; but at that I fell off Don Carlos when we halted. And I was not able to do my share of the camp work. R.C. was not as spry and chipper as I had seen him, a fact from which I gathered infinite consolation. Misery loves company.

A storm threatened. All the west was purple under on-coming purple clouds. At sight of this something strange and subtle, yet familiar, revived in me. It made me feel a little more like the self I thought I knew. So I watched the lightning flare and string along the horizon. Some time in the night thunder awakened me. The imminence of a severe storm forced us to roll out and look after the tent. What a pitch black night! Down through the murky, weird blackness shot a wonderful zigzag rope of lightning, blue-white, dazzling; and it disintegrated, leaving segments of fire in the air. All this showed in a swift flash—then we were absolutely blind. I could not see for several moments. It rained a little. Only the edge of the storm touched us. Thunder rolled and boomed along the battlements, deep and rumbling and detonating.

No dust or heat next morning! The desert floor appeared clean and damp, with fresh gray sage and shining bunches of cedar. We climbed into the high cedars, and then to the piñons, and then to the junipers and pines. Climbing so out of desert to forestland was a gradual and accumulating joy to me. What contrast in vegetation, in air, in color! Still the forest consisted of small trees. Not until next day did we climb farther to the deepening, darkening forest, and at last to the silver spruce. That camp, the fifth night out, was beside a lake of surface water, where we had our first big camp-fire.

September twenty-first and ten miles from Beaver Dam Canyon, where a year before I had planned to meet Haught this day and date at noon! I could make that appointment, saddle-sore and weary as I was, but I doubted we could get the wagons there. The forest ground was soft. All the little swales were full of water. How pleasant, how welcome, how beautiful and lonely the wild forestland! We made advance slowly. It was afternoon by the time we reached the rim road, and four o'clock when we halted at the exact spot where we had left our wagon the year before.

Lee determined to drive the wagons down over the rocky benches into Beaver Dam Canyon; and to that end he and the men began to cut pines, drag logs, and roll stones.

R.C. and I rode down through the forest, crossing half a dozen swift little streams of amber water, where a year before all had been dry as tinder. We found Haught's camp in a grove of yellowing aspens. Haught was there to meet us. He had not changed any more than the rugged pine tree under which a year past we had made our agreement. He wore the same blue shirt and the old black sombrero.

"Hello Haught," was my greeting, as I dismounted and pulled out my watch. "I'm four hours and a quarter late. Sorry. I could have made it, but didn't want to leave the wagons."

"Wal, wal, I shore am glad to see you," he replied, with a keen flash in his hazel eyes and a smile on his craggy face. "I reckoned you'd make it. How are you? Look sort of fagged."

"Just about all in, Haught," I replied, as we shook hands.

Then Copple appeared, swaggering out of the aspens. He was the man I met in