The sun hid itself behind the line of mountains, and the blue of the sky in the west changed slowly to gold against which the peaks and domes and points were silhouetted as if cut by a graver’s tool, and the bold cliffs and battlements of old Granite grew coldly gray in the gloom.  As the night came on and the details of its structure were lost, the mountain, to the watching man on the Divide, assumed the appearance of a mighty fortress—­a fortress, he thought, to which a generation of men might retreat from a civilization that threatened them with destruction; and once more the man faced back the way he had come.

The far-away cities were already in the blaze of their own artificial lights—­lights valued not for their power to make men see, but for their power to dazzle, attract and intoxicate—­lights that permitted no kindly dusk at eventide wherein a man might rest from his day’s work—­a quiet hour; lights that revealed squalid shame and tinsel show—­lights that hid the stars.  The man on the Divide lifted his face to the stars that now in the wide-arched sky were gathering in such unnumbered multitudes to keep their sentinel watch over the world below.

The cool evening wind came whispering over the lonely land, and all the furred and winged creatures of the night stole from their dark hiding places into the gloom which is the beginning of their day.  A coyote crept stealthily past in the dark and from the mountain side below came the weird, ghostly call of its mate.  An owl drifted by on silent wings.  Night birds chirped in the chaparral.  A fox barked on the ridge above.  The shadowy form of a bat flitted here and there.  From somewhere in the distance a bull bellowed his deep-voiced challenge.

Suddenly the man on the summit of the Divide sprang to his feet and, with a gesture that had he not been so alone might have seemed affectedly dramatic, stretched out his arms in an attitude of wistful longing while his lips moved as if, again and again, he whispered a name.

CHAPTER III.

In the big pasture.

In the Williamson Valley country the spring round-up, or “rodeo,” as it is called in Arizona, and the shipping are well over by the last of June.  During the long summer weeks, until the beginning of the fall rodeo in September, there is little for the riders to do.  The cattle roam free on the open ranges, while calves grow into yearlings, yearlings become two-year-olds, and two-year-olds mature for the market.  On the Cross-Triangle and similar ranches, three or four of the steadier year-round hands only are held.  These repair and build fences, visit the watering places, brand an occasional calf that somehow has managed to escape the dragnet of the rodeo, and with “dope bottle” ever at hand doctor such animals as are afflicted with screwworms.  It is during these weeks, too, that the horses are broken; for, with the hard and dangerous work of the fall and spring months, there is always need for fresh mounts.