"Feed 'em?" cried Creede, flaring up suddenly. "Did I feed 'em? Well, I should guess yes--I never turned one away hungry in my life. W'y, hell, man," he exclaimed, his anger growing on him, "I slep' in the same blanket with 'em--until I become lousy," he added grimly. "What!" exclaimed Hardy, aghast. "You don't mean to say--" "No," interrupted Creede ironically, "I don't mean to say anythin'--not from now on. But while we're on the subject and to avoid any future misunderstandin' I might just as well tell you right now that I can't see nothin' good in a sheepman--_nothin'!_ I'm like my cat Tom when he sees a rattlesnake, my hair bushes up clean over my ears and I see hell, damnation, and sudden death!" He rose up, frowning, on his mighty horse and gazed at Hardy with eyes that burned deep with passion. "If every sheep and sheepman in Arizona should drop dead at this minute," he said, "it would simply give me a laughin' sensation. God damn 'em!" he added passionately, and it sounded like a prayer. Half an hour later as they passed through the gloomy silence of the box canyon, picking their way over rocks and bowlders and driftwood cast forty feet above the river level in some terrific glut of waters, he began to talk again, evenly and quietly, pointing out indifferent things along the trail, and when at last they mounted the hill and looked down upon Hidden Water his anger was forgotten. "Well," he remarked, throwing out a hand, "there's home--how do you like it?" Hardy paused and looked it over critically--a broad V-shaped valley half a mile in length, beginning at the mouth of a great dry wash and spreading out through trees and hummocks down to the river. A broken row of cottonwoods and sycamores stretched along the farther side, following the broad, twisting bed of the sand wash where the last flood had ripped its way to the Salagua; and on the opposite side, close up against the base of the cliff, a flash of white walls and the shadow of a _ramada_ showed where man had built his puny dwelling high in order to escape its fury. At their feet lay the ranch pasture, a broad elbow of the valley rich with grass and mesquite trees and fenced in with barbed wire that ran from cliff to cliff. Beyond the eastern wall the ground was rough and broken, cut up by innumerable gulches and waterways, and above its ridges there rose the forbidding crags of a black butte whose shoulders ran down to and confined the silvery river. Across the river and to the south the land was even rougher, rising in sheer precipices, above the crests of which towered a mighty needle of rock, standing out against the sky like a cathedral spire, yet of a greater dignity and magnificence--purple with the regal robes of distance.