Scott turned back to his examination of the country, but his mind was busy with the old man’s last remarks. He had intimated that patrolmen did not last very long in that particular section, and had warned him specifically against one man. Evidently some of the former patrolmen had been bluffed out. Well, he was willing to admit that he was a tenderfoot with very little knowledge of the stock business, but he made up his mind right there that no one was going to bluff him. He did not believe in going out to meet trouble, but he never dreamed how often the old man’s advice would stand him in good stead. Possibly if he had, he would have thought about it a little longer.
The train skirted the edges of queer, flat-topped mesas which appeared to be scattered carelessly about the plain; timber crowned and green they were in the midst of the dark brown of the dried up plains. Gradually the great mountains were closing in. Irregular saw-tooth ranges took the place of the mesas, deep-cut gulches caused the track to make long detours—twenty miles in one place—to get a mile across a ravine. Far down in one of the narrow valleys he saw a flock of sheep, the first time in his life he had ever seen more than twenty-five in any one bunch.
He was now rapidly approaching the little town which was to be his headquarters. As the train rounded the shoulder of a mountain which jutted out into the valley, he saw it afar off. It looked very small and insignificant in the center of that great flat plain, and also very bare and treeless to a lad from a superbly elm-clad New England village. And all about it the baked plain lay glaring in the late afternoon sun. It seemed a queer place to pick for a town, but it was just like most of the others he had seen in the last two hundred miles.
On either side of the plain, apparently walling it in with an unbroken rim, were the mountains. In the clear atmosphere they seemed to rise sheer from the valley like perpendicular walls. On them the pine forests were draped like a mantle hanging down toward the valley in irregular points and fringes, and between these points like great wedges driven up into the slope from the valley, were triangular patches of aspen marking the cañons.