From where he rode, facing westward, he could see the Deepwater, cold at all seasons of the year. Flowing swiftly, it gurgled and swished around bowlders of lava and granite and could be forded in but one place in thirty miles, where it spread out over a rocky, submerged plateau on the trail between the CL and Hastings, and where it grew turbulent and frothy with wrath as it poured over the up-thrust ledges. Along its eastern bank lay the ranch, in the valley of the Deepwater, and beyond it a short distance stood the Barrier, following it mile after mile and curving as it curved. The Barrier, well named, was a great ledge of limestone, up-flung like a wall, sheer, smooth and only occasionally broken by narrow crevices which ran far back and sloped gradually upward, rock-strewn, damp, cool, and wild. It stretched for miles to Johnny's right and left, a wall between the wild tumble of the buttes and the smooth, gently rolling, fertile plain, which, beginning at the river, swept far to the eastward behind him, where it eventually became lost in the desert wastes. On one side of the rampart lay the scurrying river and the valley of the Deepwater, rolling, sparsely timbered and heavily grassed, placid, peaceful, restful; on the other, seeming to leap against the horizon, lay the grandeur of chaos, wild and forbidding. Highest above all that jagged western skyline, shouldering up above all other buttes and plateaus, Twin Buttes peremptorily challenged attention. Remarkably alike from all sides, when viewed from the CL ranch-house they seemed to have been cast in the same mold; and the two towering, steep-sided masses with their different colored strata stood high above the Barrier and the chaos behind it like concrete examples of eternity. Twin Buttes were the lords of their realm, and what a realm it was! Around them for miles great buttes rose solidly upward, naked on their abrupt sides except for an occasional, straggling bush or dwarfed pine or fir which here and there held precarious footholds in cracks and crevices or on the more secure placement of a ledge. Deep draws choked with brush lay between the more rolling hills along the eastern edge of the watershed where the Barrier stood on guard, and rich patches of heavy grass found the needed moisture in them. On the slopes of the hills were great forests of yellow pine, a straggling growth of fir crowning their tops. Farther west, where the massive buttes reared aloft, the deep canyons were of two kinds. The first, wide, with sloping banks of detritus, were covered with pine forests and torn with draws; the second, steep-walled, were great, narrow chasms of wind- and water-swept rock, bare and awe inspiring. They sloped upward to the backbone of the watershed and had humble beginnings in shallow, basin-like arroyos, which gradually became boxes in the rock formation as the level sloped downward.