“Oh, hell!” he exclaimed, aloud.  “I can’t turn nester, an’ even if I did, she couldn’t live out in no mud-roof shack in the bottom of some coulee!  Still, she——­ There I go again, over the same old trail.  This here little girl has sure gone to my head—­like a couple of jolts of hundred-proof on an empty stummick.  Anyhow, she’s a damn sight safer’n ever she was before, an’—­I’ll bet the old man would let me take that Eagle Creek ranch off his hands, an’ stake me to a little bunch of stock besides, if I went at him right.  If it wasn’t for that damn pilgrim!  Bat was right.  He holds the edge on me—­but he’s a man.”  The cowboy glanced anxiously toward the east where the sky was beginning to lighten with the first hint of dawn.  He rose, trampled out his fire, and threw the saddle onto his horse.  “I’ve got to find him,” he muttered, “if Bat ain’t found him already.  I don’t know much about this swimmin’ business but if he could have got holt of a tree or somethin’ he might have made her through.”

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.  These here late lamented dogies’ll cost him somethin’ in damages.”  From force of habit the man read the brands of the dead cattle as he rode slowly down the valley.  “D bar C, that’s old Dave Cromley’s steer.  An’ there’s a T U, an’ an I X cow, an’ there’s one of Charlie Green’s, an’ a yearlin’ of Jerry Keerful’s, an’ a quarter-circle M,—­that belongs over the other side, they don’t need to bother with that one, an’ there’s a——­”