138 CALIFORNIA DESERT TRAILS 



more hay. Seeing this, I could do no less for Kaweah, 

 though I claim no credit for it. (I found it easy to ex- 

 cuse Emmons for an occasional outbreak of "cuss 

 words" next day, when I remembered how he not 

 only "regarded the life of his beast," as the righteous 

 man will do, but looked to its comfort as well, and 

 at no small sacrifice of his own.) Being up, and the 

 night warm and still, it seemed a good time for a 

 smoke, so we took a pipe apiece, then a pull at the can- 

 teen, and so to sleep again till four o'clock and dawn. 



By half-past five we were again moving up the 

 caiion. It became constantly narrower, steeper, and 

 rougher, the wagon bumping and lurching along in 

 a dogged kind of way, serenely confident in the sound- 

 ness of hickory and wrought iron. Our surroundings 

 became more interesting now that we were well into 

 the mountains. There was no outlook, for we were 

 shut in on both sides by walls that rose steeply for 

 hundreds of feet, and the canon was ever twisting; 

 but bushes of fair size began to appear, and bird life 

 too came in. It is the open wastes, where nothing is 

 and nothing is to be expected, that wear one's spirits 

 down. 



One hears a good deal on the desert about arsenic 

 water. Prospectors especially are full of tales of 

 arsenic springs, where death snatches the traveller 

 unaware. I believe competent authorities deny that 

 arsenic in dangerous quantity exists in any of the 

 desert water, and account for the fact that men have 

 died from drinking the water of certain springs by 

 the theory that the men in question, arriving at the 

 suspected spring suffering from thirst and perhaps 



