The next morning I set out north over the great misty mesa, wondering how I would ever find Billy. At tracking I was hopeless—I might have tracked a streetcar, but anything else would have had an easy escape. If I could manage to ride in a straight line I knew I would eventually come to the Purgatory River, a stream in whose existence I only dimly believed—it sounded like Dante to me, although I confess I never got that far in the great man’s book. If Billy was down, hurt, dead, it would be only by the purest chance that I found him. The clouds seemed to sink lower and lower; thanks to the mist I could scarcely see a quarter of a mile.

I squished all day across the Mesa de Maya, feeling quite hopeless, but calm and rather detached. From time to time I said a few words to Rosy, who was not exactly in a skipping mood herself. Some idiot had once told me that reciting several stanzas of poetry in times of distress would have a cheering effect. I decided to try that and found that my dull brain had sprung a leak, allowing all the reams of poetry once stored there to trickle out. I, who had faithfully read my Tennyson and my Browning, who once could recite stanza after stanza of Lalla Rookh or Mrs. Hemans, seemed to have retained only one stanza of poetry, and that from the melancholy ballad Cecily Snow had played for Billy:

I was taken sick, so very very sick,
Death on my brow was dwelling,
And none the better will I ever be
Till I get Barbara Allen . . .

It was hardly a stanza to cheer a starving traveler lost on the Mesa de Maya on a rainy day with only a rude mule for company.

The day seemed to last a week; I suppose I must have nodded in my saddle for a few minutes, when my wet nap was rudely interrupted by Rosy, who abruptly broke into a dead run, almost spilling me from the saddle. I lost my stirrups but managed to grab the saddle horn and hang on. We seemed to be racing through some ground-hugging clouds, which, once I got the sleep out of my eyes, proved to be nothing more than a herd of sheep. Then I heard a loud barking and discovered that the reason Rosy was running was because we were being chased by two dogs the size of buffalo yearlings. Indeed, they looked as shaggy as buffalo—Rosy was leaping over whole clusters of sheep in her efforts to escape them.