Old Rimrock
To the close observer even at a distance, there was a difference in the figures as they struggled through the sagebrush. The man who rode a big black stallion, leading two others was outfitted in all black. A horned toad startled by the intrusion darted across the trail from the shelter of one sage-brush to another—'In a country that raises sage-brush, horned toads, and hell,' and Big John laughed softly to himself. The June sun was dropping low in the west over the black Colorado range. Purple haze began to thicken in the timbered notches. Gray foothills, round and billowy, rolled down from the higher country. The land burned like hot slag, and except for a panting lizard here and there, or a dust-gray jack-rabbit, startled from its covert, nothing animate stirred upon its face. They were smooth, sweeping, with long velvety slopes and isolated patches of aspens that blazed in autumn gold. Splotches of red vine colored the soft gray of sage. Old Rimrock, a mountain scarred b