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| Transcriber’s Note:  A number of very obvious        |
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[Illustration:  “Under the hat
brim drawn forward to his
line of vision his eyes ... 
Gazed forth keen and observant”]
THE IRON
FURROW
BY GEORGE C. SHEDD
Frontispiece by

Henry A. Botkin
A.L.  Burt company

Publishers  New York
Published by arrangement with Doubleday, Page & Company
Copyright, 1919, 1920, by

Doubleday, page & company

all rights reserved, including
that of

translation into foreign languages,

including the Scandinavian
Printed in the united states

at

the country life press, garden
city, N.Y.
THE IRON FURROW
THE IRON FURROW
CHAPTER I
The Ventisquero Range stretches across the circumference
of one’s vision in a procession of mountains
that come tall and blue out of the distant north and
seemingly march past to vanish in the remote south
like azure phantoms.  The mountains wall the horizon
and dominate the mesa, their black forest-clad flanks
crumpled and broken and gashed by canons, lifting
above timber-line peaks of bare brown rock that pierce
the clouds floating along the range.  At sunrise
they cast immense shadows upon the mesa spreading
westward from their base; and at sunset they reflect
golden and purple glows upon the plain until the earth
appears swimming in some iridescent sea of ether; while
over them from dawn till dusk, traversed by a few
fleecy clouds, lies the turquoise sky of New Mexico.
At a certain point in the range a small canon opens
upon the mesa with a gush of gravel and sand that
flows a short way into the sagebrush and forms a creek
bed.  Tucked back in the little canon there is
a considerable growth of bushes and trees, cool and
fresh-looking in the shadow of the gorge during the
summer season, a splash of vivid green there at the
bottom of the dusty gray mountain, but at the canon’s
mouth this verdure ceases.