Unable to refrain any longer, Wallie called to ask how much farther.
"Twelve miles, or some such matter." Pinkey added: "I'm so hungry I don't know where I'm goin' to sleep to-night. That restaurant is reg'lar stummick-robbers."
By four o'clock every muscle in Wallie's body was aching, but his fatigue was nothing as compared with his hunger. He tried to admire the scenery, to think of his magnificent prospects, of Helene Spenceley, but his thoughts always came back quickly to the subject of food and a wonder as to how soon he could get it.
In his regular, well-fed life he never had imagined, much less known, such a gnawing hunger. His destination represented only something to eat and it seemed to him they never would get there.
"What will we have for supper, Pinkey?" he shouted, finally.
Pinkey replied promptly: "I was thinkin' we'd have ham and gra-vy and cowpuncher perta-toes; and maybe I'll build some biscuit, if we kin wait fer 'em."
"Let's not have biscuit--let's have crackers."
Ham and gravy and cowpuncher potatoes! Wallie rode along with his mouth watering and visualizing the menu until Pinkey came to a halt and said with a dramatic gesture: "There's your future home, Mr. Macpherson! That's what I call a reg'lar paradise."
As Mr. Macpherson stared at the Elysium indicated, endeavouring to discover the resemblance, surprise kept him silent.
So far as he could see, it in nowise differed from the arid plain across which they had ridden. It was a pebbly tract, covered with sagebrush and cacti, which dropped abruptly to a creek-bed that had no water in it. Filled with sudden misgivings, he asked feebly: "What's it good for?"
"Look at the view!" said Pinkey, impatiently.
"I can't eat scenery."
"It'll be a great place for dry-farmin'."
Wallie looked at a crack big enough to swallow him and observed humorously: "I should judge so."
"You see," Pinkey explained, enthusiastically, "bein' clost to the mountings, the snow lays late in the spring and all the moisture they is you git it."
"I see." Wallie nodded comprehensively. "Why didn't you take it up yourself, Pinkey?"
"Oh, I got to make a livin'."
There was food for thought in the answer and Wallie pondered it as he got stiffly out of the saddle.
"Can I be of any assistance?" he asked, politely.
"You can git the squaw-axe and hack out a place fer a bed-ground and you can hunt up some firewood and take a bucket out of the pack and go to the crick and locate some water while I'm finding a place to picket these horses."
Because it would hasten supper, it seemed to Wallie that wood and water were of more importance than clearing a place to sleep, so he collected a small pile of twigs and dead sagebrush, then took an aluminum kettle from his camping utensils and walked along the bank of Skull Creek looking for a pool which contained enough water to fill the kettle. He finally saw one, and planting his heels in a dirt slide, shot like a toboggan some twenty feet to the bottom. Filling his kettle he walked back over the boulders looking for a more convenient place to get up than the one he had descended.