flanking the white mustache, to a mouth strong, full-lipped and
undeniably large, ready alike for laughter or for sternness.

The nose--to follow the creases back again--was fleshy and beaked at
the tip; it narrowed at the level bridge and broadened again where it
joined the forehead, setting the eyes well apart. The eyes themselves
were blue, just a little faded--for the man was sixty-two--and there
were wind-puckers at the corners of them. But they were keen eyes,
steady, sparkling and merry eyes, for all that; they were deep-set and
long, and they sloped a trifle, high on the inside corners; pent in by
pepper-and-salt brows, bushy, tufted and thick, roguishly aslant from the
outer corners up to where they all but met above the Wellingtonian nose.
A merry face, a forceful face: Pete was a little man, five feet seven,
and rather slender than otherwise; but no one, in view of that face, ever
thought of him as a small man or an old one.

The faint path merged with another and another, the angles of convergence
giving the direction of the unknown water hole; they came at last to the
main trail, a trunk line swollen by feeders from every ridge and arroyo.
It bore away to the northeast, swerving, curving to pitch and climb in
faultless following of the rule of roads--the greatest progress with the
least exertion. Your cow is your best surveyor.

They came on the ranch suddenly, rounding a point into a small natural
amphitheater. A flat-roofed dugout, fronted with stone, was built into
the base of a boulder-piled hill; the door was open. Midnight perked his
black head jauntily and slanted an ear.

High overhead, a thicket of hackberry and arrow-weed overhung the
little valley. From this green tangle a pipe line on stilts broke