The mesa trail begins in the campoodie at the corner of Naboth's field, though one may drop into it from the wood road toward the cañon, or from any of the cattle paths that go up along the streamside; a clean, pale, smooth-trodden way between spiny shrubs, comfortably wide for a horse or an Indian.

But if some clever politician happens to get hold of Shoop, there isn't a man in this mesa country that could win against him.

The firs hold on almost to the mesa levels,there are no foothills on this eastern slope,and whoever has firs misses nothing else.

Ahead, the cañon broadened to the mesa lands, where the distant green of a line of trees marked the boundary of the Armigo rancho.

Native to the mesa meadows is a pale iris, gardens of it acres wide, that in the spring season of full bloom make an airy fluttering as of azure wings.

He's just the type that the mesa people like.

Picked up half-starving on the mesa road, near St. Johns, he had been brought to the ranch by Pat, where a month of clean air and industry had reshaped the tramp to something like a man.

By every mesa spring one may expect to find a single shrub of the buckthorn, called of old time Cascara sagradathe sacred bark.

The mesa stream cleared from a ropy red to a sparkling thread of silver banked with vivid green.

Just as the mesa twilights have their vocal note in the love call of the burrowing owl, so the desert spring is voiced by the mourning doves.

Now and then one or another of the blind keepers of the camp will come across to where you sit gossiping, tapping her way among the kitchen middens, guided by your voice that carries far in the clearness and stillness of mesa afternoons.

By dusk there are tiny drifts in the lee of every strong shrub, rosy-tipped corollas as riotous in the sliding mesa wind as if they were real flakes shaken out of a cloud, not sprung from the ground on wiry three-inch stems.

After three or four miles along a mesa formation where often we had to circle long detours to avoid the gullies, we came upon another short beach, and beyond it a series of ledges on which basked several hundred seals.

Tiny green shoots appeared in the rusty tangle of last season's mesa grasses.