"I wouldn't let no damned greaser eagle get me, anyway!" The pony had drunk its fill.

Calumet returned the tin cup to the slicker and swung back into the saddle.

Refreshed, the pony took the opposite slope with a rush, emerging from the river upon a high plateau studded with fir balsam and pine.

Bringing the pony to a halt, Calumet turned in the saddle and looked somberly behind him.
For two days he had been fighting the desert, and now it lay in his rear, a mystic, dun-colored land of hot sandy waste and silence; brooding, menacing, holding out its threat of death--a vast natural basin breathing and pulsing with mystery, rimmed by remote mountains that seemed tenuous and thin behind the ever-changing misty films that spread from horizon to horizon.
The expression of Calumet's face was as hard and inscrutable as the desert itself; the latter's filmy haze did not more surely shut out the mysteries behind it than did Calumet's expression veil the emotions of his heart.

He turned from the desert to face the plateau, from whose edge dropped a wide, tawny valley, luxuriant with bunch grass--a golden brown sweep that nestled between some hills, inviting, alluring.