"
Now riding, now dismounting to lead his horse over some particularly
rough outcropping of rocks, or through an almost impenetrable tangle of
scrub, the man made his way over the divide and came down into the
valley amid a shower of loose rock and gravel, at a point some distance
below the lower end of the canyon.
The mountains were behind him. Only an occasional butte reared its
head above the sea of low foothills that stretched away into the bad
lands to the southward. The sides of the valley flattened and became
ill-defined. Low ridges and sage-topped foothills broke up its
continuity, so that the little creek that started so bravely from the
mountains ended nowhere, its waters being sucked in by the parched and
thirsting alkali soil long before it reached the bad lands.
As his horse toiled ankle-deep in the soft whitish mud, Tex's eyes
roved over the broadened expanse of the valley. Everywhere were
evidences of the destructive force of the flood. Uprooted trees
scattered singly and in groups, high-flung masses of brush, hay, and
inextricably tangled barbed-wire from which dangled fence-posts marked
every bend of the creek bed. And on every hand the bodies of drowned
cattle dotted the valley.
"If I was Johnson," he mused, as his eyes swept the valley, "I'd head a
right smart of ranch hands down here heeled with a spade an' a sexton's
commission.
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