Elated we certainly were.  And we rushed down the steep hill to look for water.  All our drinking water was gone, and the horses had not slaked their thirst for two days.  Separating we rode up and down the canyon.  R.C. and Romer found running water.  Thereupon with immense relief and joy we pitched camp near the cabins, forgetting our aches and pains in the certainty of deliverance.

What a cold, dismal, bleak, stony, and lonesome place!  We unpacked only bedding, and our little store of food.  And huddled around the camp-fire we waited upon Doyle’s cooking.  The old pioneer talked while he worked.

“Jones’ ranch!—­I knew Jones in the early days.  And I’ve heard of him lately.  Thirty years ago he rode a prairie schooner down into this canyon.  He had his wife, a fine, strong girl, and he had a gun, an axe, some chuck, a few horses and cattle, and not much else.  He built him that cabin there and began the real old pioneering of the early days.  He raised cattle.  He freighted to the settlements twice a year.  In twenty-five years he had three strapping boys and a girl just as strapping.  And he had a fortune in cattle.  Then he sold his stock and left this ranch.  He wanted to give his faithful wife and his children some of the comforts and luxuries and advantages of civilization.  The war came.  His sons did not wait for the draft.  They entered the army.  I heard a story about Abe Jones, the old man’s first boy.  Abe was a quiet sort of chap.  When he got to the army training camp a sergeant asked Abe if he could shoot.  Abe said:  ‘Nope, not much.’  So they gave him a rifle and told him to shoot at the near target.  Abe looked at it sort of funny like and he picked out the farthest target at one thousand yards.  And he hit the bull’s eye ten times straight running.  ‘Hey!’ gasped the sergeant, ’you long, lanky galoot!  You said you couldn’t shoot.’  Abe sort of laughed.  ‘Reckon I was thinkin’ about what Dad called shootin’.’...  Well, Abe and his brothers got to France to the front.  Abe was a sharpshooter.  He was killed at Argonne.  Both his brothers were wounded.  They’re over there yet....  I met a man not long ago who’d seen Jones recently.  And the old pioneer said he and his wife would like to be back home.  And home to them means right here—­Jones’ Ranch!”

Doyle’s story affected me profoundly.  What a theme for a novel!  I walked away from the camp-fire into the dark, lonely, melancholy Arizona night.  The ruined cabins, the broken-down corrals, the stone fence, the wash where water ran at wet season—­all had subtly changed for me.  Leaning in the doorway of the one-room cabin that had been home for these Joneses I was stirred to my depths.  Their spirits abided in that lonely hut.  At least I felt something there—­something strange, great, simple, inevitable, tragic as life itself.  Yet what could have been more beautiful, more splendid than the life of Jones, and his wife, and daughter, and sons, especially