and the child slipped twenty---five feet deeper. At seven o'clock
we were down to where he was again, though we could no longer
bear him. We dug a little below, bored a bole, and the father
slipped through a pickaxe handle, and fainted away as he felt the
little one slide down again but rest on the handle. We tore off
the boards, took the baby out, and drew him and his father to the
surface. There were two doctors waiting for them, and the next
day neither was much the worse for it."

The man got on his horse and rode away. We agreed that he had
told us a good story, but the next day others assured us that it
had all happened a year before.



VI: BY CAYNONS TO VALENTINE


Besides the cactus, another form of vegetation which began
to attract more and more of Ollie's attention was the red
tumbleweed. Indeed, Jack and I found ourselves interested in it
also. The ordinary tumbleweed, green when growing and gray when
tumbling, had long been familiar to us, but the red variety was
new. The old kind which we knew seldom grew more than two feet in
diameter; it was usually almost exactly round, and with its
finely branched limbs was almost as solid as a big sponge, and
when its short stem broke off at the top of the ground in the
fall it would go bounding away across the prairie for miles. The
red sort seemed to be much the same, except for its color and
size. We saw many six or seven feet, perhaps more, in diameter,