The Hash-knife Outfit by Zane Grey

Jim Traft did not pause in his rapid stride until he had passed through the walled gateway which permitted egress from Yellow Jacket to the rough brakes of the basin below. Then he slowed up along the brawling brook, waiting to compose himself before he arrived at camp. The fire and tumult within him did not soon die down. "Gosh!" he ejaculated. "I get worse all the time.I'm going to kill somebody, some day--sure as the Lord made little apples." And thoughtful review of the experience he had just passed through in the old Yellow Jacket cabin made him correct his exclamation by adding, "if I don't get killed myself."

He reached the wall and flung himself down in a sunny spot surrounded by green on three sides and dominated by the cracked and caverned cliff. If he was compelled to leave Arizona he would always remember it and cherish it by pictures in mind of this marvellous Yellow Jacket country. If the Tonto Basin, the Cibeque Valley, and especially the Diamond Mesa, across which he had built the now famous drift fence, had fascinated him, what had this wilderness of canyon and forest done? It brought into expression some deep, long-latent force of joy. Hours he had spent alone like this, not worrying over some problem, nor dreaming of Molly--which happened often enough--but not thinking of anything at all. It was a condition of mind Jim had not inquired into, because he realised it was pure happiness, and he feared an analysis would dispel it. And the enchantment fastened down strong upon him, so that it alternated with a serious consideration of what he had just passed through at the outlaw camp.