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 cañon, 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.
"That's Weaver's Needle," volunteered Creede, following his companion's eyes. "Every lost mine for a hundred miles around here is located by sightin' at that peak. The feller it's named after was picked up by the Apaches while he was out lookin' for the Lost Dutchman and there's been a Jonah on the hidden-treasure business ever since, judgin' by the results.