Hidden Water

The slow, monotonous days of Summer crept listlessly by like dreams which, having neither beginning nor end, pass away into nothingness, leaving only a dim memory of restlessnes...

A demon of unrest, twin devil to that which had so clutched and torn at the sensitive spirit of Rufus Hardy, seemed to rise up with the dawn of that ill-omened day and seize upo...

Between the mouth of Hell's Hip Pocket and the cow camp at Carrizo Creek there lie three high ridges and three broad valleys, all running north and south from the Peaks to Bronc...

Winter, the wonted season of torrential rains, six weeks' grass, and budding flowers, when the desert is green and the sky washed clean and blue, followed close in the wake of t...

The sun was well up over the cañon rim when the tired visitors awoke from their dreams. Kitty Bonnair was the first to open her eyes and peep forth upon the fairy world which pr...

The rain came to Hidden Water in great drops, warmed by the sultry air. At the first flurry the dust rose up like smoke, and the earth hissed; then as the storm burst in tropic...

To the Eastern eye, blinded by local color, the Four Peaks country looked like a large and pleasantly variegated cactus garden, sparsely populated with rollicking, fun-loving co...

For a year the shadowy clouds had flitted past Hidden Water, drifting like flocks of snowy birds to their resting-place against the Peaks, and as the wind raged and the darkness...

After many long, brooding days of sunshine, when the clean-cut mountains gleamed brilliantly against the sky and the grama grass curled slowly on its stem, the rain wind rose up...

From lonely ranches along the Salagua and Verde, from the Sunflower and up the Alamo, from all the sheeped-out and desolate Four Peaks country the cowboys drifted in to Hidden W...

The sheep were on the run, drifting across Bronco Mesa as if the devil was after them, and Creede could hardly stay on his horse from laughing--but when he drew near to Hidden W...

The rush and thunder of cow ponies as they hammered over the trail and plunged down through the rocks and trees had hardly lost its echoes in the cliffs when, with a flash of co...

The morning dawned as clear on Bender as if there had never been storm nor clouds, and the waxy green heads of the greasewood, dotting the level plain with the regularity of a v...

The trail to Hidden Water leads up the Salagua, alternately climbing the hard mesa and losing itself in the shifting sand of the river bottom until, a mile or two below the mout...

The beef herd was safely delivered at Bender, the feeders disposed of at Moroni, and the checks sent on to the absentee owner, who did not know a steer from a stag; the _rodéo_...

In the days of Ahaz, king of Judah, Isaiah the son of Amoz is reported to have seen in a vision a wolf which dwelt with a lamb, while a lion ate straw like an ox, and a weaned c...

The Mormon settlement of Moroni proved to belong to that large class of Western "cities" known as "string-towns"--a long line of stores on either side of a main street, brick wh...

There was a big fire out under the mesquite that night and a band of cowboys, in all the bravery of spurs, shaps, and pistols, romped around it in a stage-struck exuberance of s...

Of all the cowmen at Hidden Water, Rufus Hardy was the only man who would discuss the matter at length. A change had come over him now; he was very thin and quiet, with set line...

On the edge of the barren mesa and looking out over the sandy flats where the Salagua writhed about uneasily in its bed, the _casa_ of Don Pablo Moreno stood like a mud fort, ba...

There were signs of impending war on Bronco Mesa. As God sent the rain and the flowers and grass sprang up they grappled with each other like murderers, twining root about root...

There is a mocking-bird at Hidden Water that sings the songs of all the birds and whistles for the dog. His nest is in a great cluster of mistletoe in the mesquite tree behind t...

The sun rose clear for the hundredth time over the shoulder of the Four Peaks; it mounted higher, glowing with a great light, and the smooth round tops of the bowlders shone lik...

The gentle hand of sleep, which held Hardy in a grip that was akin to death, blotting out the past and dispelling all remembrance of his sorrows, failed utterly to abate the fig...

After lashing the desert to a frazzle and finding the leaks in the Hotel Bender, the wind from Papaguería went howling out over the mesa, still big with rain for the Four Peaks...