Sept. 18, 1909.] 
FOREST AND STREAM. 
449 
“Heap plenty left. Him Yaqui gold. Maybe 
you want some, you no wash it out; you take 
gun down there—any kind gun; Yaqui, he 
buy it.” 
“Yes, they’d buy the guns all right,” Sonora 
agreed, “but they’d shoot you in the back after¬ 
ward and so get the guns for nothin’. No, 
Pete, we got too much sense to go down into 
their country; they are bad Injuns.” 
1 “Yes, heap bad, but him no kill me, then 
I no come again sell um more guns. Mexican 
mans down there heap bad, kill, steal plenty. 
Si, an’ rurales all the time ridin’ on line 
watchin. Catch man with gun he put him in 
jail for long time—maybe never come out. 
Rurales, he never catch me. I cross line in 
night, an no leaves any tracks; take grease- 
wood, make broom an sweep sand smooth.” 
“Ha! now, there’s a pointer for us, and we’ll 
just do that sweeping act if we cross the line 
where it is sandy,” said Sonora. 
“Wha’ you goin’, Sonora? What you lookin’ 
:or?” Pete asked. 
AVhy, we re out prospecting, of course,” 
Sonora told him. “Thought we would scratch 
a bit in the mountains out below the head of 
the Gulf. Ever been there?” 
“One time I been there, in the mountains of 
name Sierra del Pincate, an’ other ones of no 
name. Gold is there, no enough, an’ ver’ fine. 
It is one bad place, senor; no water, no any¬ 
thing but sand, rocks, hot sun an’ wind.” 
All the same, were going down there, I got 
a hunch—I had a dream—you sabe, Pete, that 
there are good diggings down there. So, you 
see, we’ve just got to go.” 
^ Pete shrugged his shoulders. “What Senor 
Sonora his heart says, he mus’ do,” said he. 
^011 lookout! You cross line other side 
San Domingo, no many rurales; this side heap 
plenty ridin’ all time. You take heap plenty 
water; you drink heap cactus water, save keg 
water all you can.” 
We gave the well-meaning smuggler some 
tobacco and cigarette papers, and he shuffled 
over to his ki well content. “You bet you he 
knows what he is talking about,” said Sonora, 
"and we'll take his advice. I almost wish that 
I was a Papago; I’d sure make a clean up 
meakin arms into the Yaqui country.” 
We changed our course in the morning more 
■° t ' le we st, and that evening camped at the 
northern end of the Sierra del Ajos, where we 
■vere lucky enough to find a tank—natural 
•eservoir of rabbit- and quail-befouled water. 
Hie burros relished it, we boiled and used it_ 
nit as sparingly as possible. The next day we 
nrned more to the southwest, traveling be¬ 
tween the range we had camped on and the 
nerra de la Cabeza Pieta, a much higher and 
" n ger range. The desert was more barren 
han it had been and the sun hot. Several times 
bunch of antelope showed up for a moment 
r two in the distance, and then loped away 
"to some far screen of greasewood. Quail 
‘ ere Plentiful and so were rattlers. Four or 
Vc c °ttontails were shot for supper. We did 
°t unpack at noon, and about four o’clock, I, 
1r one, was not sorry when Sonora turned 
,ore westward, and in a short time we were 
"packing the burros on the slope of the moun- 
uns of the long name. A few cottonwoods 
rowing in the wash just under our camp 
round had beaconed us thither and with 
honest purpose; there was water in the sandy 
soil at their roots, and by digging a small 
trench, we soon had enough for ourselves and 
the animals. At this place we camped a second 
day. 
Early in the morning Sonora set out alone 
to look out a route for us to cross the line. 
Old-Timer and I climbed about for a time, in 
and out of the washes, but found no indications 
of placer or ores except some very ordinary 
copper float. One can pick that up blind¬ 
folded almost anywhere in Arizona. Up and 
down all the ranges of the Territory there are 
hundreds of men holding down copper claims 
and dreaming of wealth to come. A great 
many of the prospects are really good; they 
have copper, but it will not be mined in the 
time of the present owners. While such big 
ore bodies as those at Jerome, Globe, Bisbee 
and other places last, it cannot be profitable to 
develop isolated veins of the ore. Sonora re¬ 
turned about two o’clock and said that the line 
was only five or six miles south of camp. Pre¬ 
pared with a story of prospecting in the Ajos, 
and lost burros, should he be discovered, he had 
ridden boldly to the line but had seen no 
rurales. But that they passed along it every 
day was evident: They had a well beaten trail 
running along close to the string of monuments 
As there was a good moon, he proposed that 
we pack up about sunset and move on, and we 
agreed that it was the best thing to do. 
Behold us then, about nine o’clock at night 
busily brushing out our burros’ tracks for some 
distance on each side of the international 
boundary line, particularly where they had 
stepped in the rurales’ horse trail. Theoreti¬ 
cally, we may have been wrong in doing this, 
but practically it was the only thing to do. So 
long as Mexico declares that one may not carry 
arms for self defense into her Indian- and 
bandit-infested country, just so long is the 
American prospector going to sneak them in if • 
he can. Thus, too, we avoided making a de¬ 
posit on our burros and outfit, which would be 
a dead loss to us should we lose them. Any¬ 
how, right or wrong, we made clandestine en¬ 
trance into the land of manana, and the rising 
sun found us in a desert that was a desert, 
miles below the line. Far to the southwest a 
low range of mountains rimmed the horizon, 
blood red in the early sunlight; there could be 
no water this side of them; we unpacked the 
burros, gave them each two quarts of the 
precious keg water, turned them loose to chew 
the sparse and stunted greasewood, and cooked 
breakfast. 
The increasing heat of the day prevented our 
getting satisfactory sleep. About noon, red¬ 
eyed and feverish, we pulled ourselves together, 
had a cold lunch, packed up and went on. At 
sundown the mountains seemed to be as far 
away as ever. The wind that had been increas¬ 
ing all the afternoon was now blowing a gale 
and very cold. Straight from the Gulf, it still 
carried with it the odor of the sea. It picked 
up the light desert sand and slatted it in our 
faces, so that we could barely see and breathe. 
Ears flat and heads down, the burros anything 
but willingly faced the storm, but there was 
nothing for us to do save to keep on; the water 
kegs were nearly empty. I will say nothing 
more about our sufferings. When daylight 
came, we were only a mile or two from the 
mountains, and very barren they looked, having 
only a sparse growth of cactus and the various 
shrubs of the country. As we neared them 
we looked and looked for the darker green of 
cottonwood in the washes, but none were to be 
seen. “If there are no nigger-head cactus up 
in those rocks,” said Sonora, “we’re sure in 
for a dry siege.” 
Luckily there were numbers of the spiny 
reservoirs growing among the rocks. We un¬ 
packed near a bunch of them, and soon had 
the burros chewing their spongy, watery pith. 
When their thirst was assuaged, we hashed a 
lot of it and squeezed out some of the soap- 
colored juice for ourselves to drink, and then 
enough more for a pot of coffee. “I’ll tell you 
what,” Old-Timer remarked, “old Natur’— 
whoever or whatever he or it is—always helps 
you out someway. Now, when he found that 
he couldn’t put any ru'nnin’ streams on these 
here deserts, says he, ‘I sure have got to put 
water here somehow fer folks to drink,’ an’ 
right away he makes these juice-filled cactus to 
grow.” 
“You’re sure on,” said Sonora, “but for some 
folks there ought to have been a sign ‘Water 
Here,’ made to grow in the side of ’em. Many 
and many are the tenderfeet who have died 
from thirst right by the side of the plants.” 
“There is a spring of water somewhere here¬ 
about,” said I, and I pointed out to them a 
fine big ram looking down -at us from the 
summit of a butte five or six hundred yards 
away. “Wherever mountain sheep are there 
must be water.” 
“Huh! that don’t prove nothin’, except that 
we’re goin’ to have some nice fat roastin’ ribs 
before long,” Old-Timer exclaimed. “Sheep 
’ll drink right where water is handy, but where 
they ain't any springs they get what they need 
by eatin’ cholla cactus.” 
“Now, listen to me,” said I. “Last summer 
I passed two months in a mining camp three 
miles from Twenty-nine Palms, in the Colorado 
desert of California. That is a country which 
has been pretty thoroughly prospected. There 
was said to be no water in the small isolated 
mountain range southwest of camp. I asked 
how it was, then, that mountain sheep inhabited 
the range, and was told that, except in the 
rainy season, they were entirely dependent 
upon the cholla for water. It did not seem 
possible to me that such a big, full-blooded, 
active animal as the bighorn could find enough 
liquid nourishment in the cholla, it would have 
to eat about a bushel of the thorny buds to get 
a pint of .water. I had plenty of time, so I de¬ 
termined to learn something about those ani¬ 
mals. It was the hardest kind of work, for they 
were very wild; but on the fourth day of my 
watching and scrambling and sneaking about, 
all was made clear, away up in a deep arroya 
I found a spring that had a stream about as 
big as a lead pencil. The sheep themselves guided 
me to it. Once at least in every twenty-four 
hours—and often more frequently—they went 
there to drink.” 
“Well, well, I want to know!” Old Timer 
exclaimed. Sonora was silent for some time, 
and his old partner, unlighted pipe suspended, 
regarded him earnestly, waiting the while for 
him to give his opinion of my discovery: 
“Who’d have thought that a tenderfoot-” 
That term applied to me I could not pass 
