After a time we came to some low hills helmeted with the outcrop of a
rock escarpment. Hitherto they had seemed a termination of Mount
Graham, but now, when we rode around them, we discovered them to be
separated from the range by a good five miles of sloping plain. Later
we looked back and would have sworn them part of the Dos Cabesas
system, did we not know them to be at least eight miles' distant from
that rocky rampart. It is always that way in Arizona. Spaces develop
of whose existence you had not the slightest intimation. Hidden in
apparently plane surfaces are valleys and prairies. At one sweep of
the eye you embrace the entire area of an eastern State; but
nevertheless the reality as you explore it foot by foot proves to be
infinitely more than the vision has promised.
Beyond the hill we stopped. Here our party divided again, half to the
right and half to the left. We had ridden, up to this time, directly
away from camp, now we rode a circumference of which headquarters was
the centre. The country was pleasantly rolling and covered with grass.
Here and there were clumps of soapweed. Far in a remote distance lay a
slender dark line across the plain. This we knew to be mesquite; and
once entered, we knew it, too, would seem to spread out vastly. And
then this grassy slope, on which we now rode, would show merely as an
insignificant streak of yellow. It is also like that in Arizona.
I have ridden in succession through grass land, brush land, flower
land, desert. Each in turn seemed entirely to fill the space of the
plains between the mountains.
From time to time Homer halted us and detached a man. The business of
the latter was then to ride directly back to camp, driving all cattle
before him. Each was in sight of his right- and left-hand neighbour.
Thus was constructed a drag-net whose meshes contracted as home was
neared.
I was detached, when of our party only the Cattleman and Homer
remained. They would take the outside. This was the post of honour,
and required the hardest riding, for as soon as the cattle should
realise the fact of their pursuit, they would attempt to "break" past
the end and up the valley. Brown Jug and I congratulated ourselves on
an exciting morning in prospect.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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