Square Deal Sanderson | Page 7

yet his thoughts were not entirely serious as he rode. The situation had its humorous side.
"Mostly nothin' turns out as folks figure in the beginnin'," he told himself. "Otherwise everything would be cut an' dried, an' there wouldn't be a heap of fun in the world--for butters-in. An' folks which scheme an' plot, tryin' to get things that belong to other folks, would have it too easy. There's got to be folks that wander around, nosin' into places that they shouldn't. Eh, Streak?"
Streak did not answer, and Sanderson rode on, smiling gravely.
He made a dry camp that night in a sea of mesquite at the edge of a sand plain, although, he knew he could not now be far from the Double A range. And in the early light of the morning he found his judgment vindicated, for stretching before him, still in a northeasterly direction, he saw a great, green-brown level sweeping away from his feet and melting into some rimming mountains--a vast, natural basin of gigantic proportions.
Sanderson was almost at the end of his journey, it was early morning, and he was in no hurry. He leisurely prepared his breakfast, sitting on a flat rock as he ate, and scanning the basin.
Mere bigness had never impressed Sanderson; the West had shown him greater vistas than this mammoth basin. And yet his eyes glowed as he looked out and down at the country that lay, slumbering in the pure white light of the dawn.
He saw, dotting the floor of the basin, the roofs of houses. From his height they seemed to be close together, but Sanderson was not misled, and he knew that they were separated by miles of virgin soil--of sagebrush and yucca, and soapweed and other desert weeds that needed not the magic of water to make them live.
When Sanderson finally mounted Streak, the sun was up. It took Streak two hours to descend the slope leading down into the basin, and when once horse and rider were down, Sanderson dismounted and patted Streak's moist flanks.
"Some drop, eh, Streak?" he said. "But it didn't fool us none. We knowed it was some distance, didn't we? An' they ain't foolin' us about the rest of it, are they? The Drifter said to head toward the Big Peak. The Double A would be right near there--in the foothills. Looks easy, don't it? But I reckon we'll have to hump ourselves to get there by feedin' time, this noon, eh?"
A little later, Streak having rested, Sanderson mounted and rode forward, toward the peak of a majestic mountain that loomed far above them.
CHAPTER IV
IH WHICH A MAN IS SYMPATHETIC
It was shortly after noon when Sanderson, urging Streak to the crest of an isolated excrescence of earth surrounded by a level of sage and cactus, saw within several hundred yards of him a collection of buildings scattered on a broad plain that extended back several hundred yards farther until it merged into the rock-faced wall of a butte that loomed upward many feet.
Sanderson halted Streak on the hilltop to glance around. The buildings, evidently, belonged to the Double A ranch, and the country was all the Drifter had claimed for it.
The big stretch of plain--in fact, the entire basin--could be made fertile by the judicious use of water. Sanderson was not an engineer, but he had sufficient natural knowledge of land to enable him to distinguish good land from bad. Besides, near Phoenix he had inspected a gigantic irrigation project, and had talked long with the engineer in charge, and he had learned many things that would not have interested the average cowpuncher.
There was a break in the wall of the butte south of the group of buildings, and out of the break Sanderson could see water tumbling and splashing from one rock ledge to another until it rushed down, forming quite a large stream as it struck the level and swirled hurriedly between two sloping banks near the buildings.
From where Sanderson sat on Streak he could look far back into the break in the butte. The break made a sort of gorge, which widened as it receded, and Sanderson suspected the presence of another basin beyond the butte--in fact, the Drifter had told him of the presence of another basin.
"She'd make some lake, if she was bottled up!" was Sanderson's mental comment after a long examination.
His gaze became centered upon the buildings and the level surrounding them.
The buildings were ordinary, but the country was rugged and picturesque.
Some foothills--which Sanderson had seen from the far side of the basin that morning--rose from the level toward the south, their pine-clad slopes sweeping sharply upward--a series of gigantic land waves that seemed to leap upward and upward toward the higher peaks of some mountains behind them.
Northward, fringing the edge of the plain that began