"Man's size," declared Calumet, his snarl relaxing. He sat erect and spoke to the pony:
"Get along, you damned fool! Scared of a side-winder!"
Relieved, deflating its lungs with a tremulous heave, and unmindful of Calumet's scorn, the pony gingerly returned to the trail. In thirty seconds it had resumed its drooping shuffle, in thirty seconds Calumet had returned to his unpleasant ruminations.
A mile up in the shimmering white of the desert sky an eagle swam on slow wing, shaping his winding course toward the timber clump that fringed a river. Besides the eagle, the pony, and Calumet, no living thing stirred in the desert or above it. In the shade of a rock, perhaps, lurked a lizard, in the filmy mesquite that drooped and curled in the stifling heat slid a rattler, in the shelter of the sagebrush the sage hen might have nestled her eggs in the hot sand. But these were fixtures. Calumet, his pony, and the eagle, were not. The eagle was Mexican; it had swung its mile-wide circles many times to reach the point above the timber clump; it was migratory and alert with the hunger lust.
Calumet watched it with eyes that glowed bitterly and balefully. Half an hour later, when he reached the river and the pony clattered down the rocky slope, plunged its head deeply into the stream and drank with eager, silent draughts, Calumet swung himself crossways in the saddle, fumbled for a moment at his slicker, and drew out a battered tin cup. Leaning over, he filled the cup with water, tilted his head back and drank. The blur in the white sky caught his gaze and held it. His eyes mocked, his lips snarled.
"You damned greaser sneak!" he said. "Followed me fifty miles!" A flash of race hatred glinted his eyes. "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.