And he sighed heavily. "Say! These here sandwiches is great!"

"Will you have one?" asked Louise, gracefully proffering the olives.

"Seein' it's you. Thanks. I always take two. The second one for a chaser to kill the taste of the first. It's the only way to eat 'em--if you know where to stop. They do taste like somethin' you done and are sorry for afterwards, don't they?"

"Were you ever sorry for anything?" asked the boy, feeling a little piqued that he had been left out of the conversation.

"I was raised in the West, myself," growled the tramp, scowling. "But that's a good pony you got, Miss. That your saddle too?"

"Yes."

"You rope any?"

"A little. How did you know?"

"Rawhide cover to the saddle-horn is wore with a rope," said Overland, helping himself to a second sandwich.

Then the tramp and the girl, oblivious to everything else, discussed rawhide riatas as compared with the regular three-strand stock rope, or lariat,--center-fire, three quarter, and double rigs, swell forks and old Visalia trees, spade bits and "U" curbs,--neither willing, even lightly, to admit the other's superiority of chosen rig.

The boy Collie listened intently and a trifle jealously. Overland Red and the girl had found a common ground of interest that excluded him utterly. The boy itched for an excuse to make the girl speak to him, even look at him.

The sandwiches gone, Louise proffered Overland tobacco and papers.

Actual tears stood in the ex-cowboy's eyes. "Smoke! Me?" he exclaimed.

"I was dyin' for it. I'd do time for you!"

Then in that boyish spirit that never quite leaves the range-rider, Overland Red took the tobacco and papers and cleverly rolled a cigarette with one hand. In the other he held his battered felt hat. His eyes had a far-away look as he reached forward and lighted his cigarette at the fire. "I was settin' on a crazy bronc', holdin' his head up so he couldn't go to buckin'--outside a little old adobe down in Yuma, Arizona, then," he explained, glancing at the girl. "Did you ever drift away complete, like that, jest from some little old trick to make you dream?"

CHAPTER IV

"ANY ROAD, AT ANY TIME, FOR ANYWHERE"

The boy Collie took the empty tomato-can and went for water with which to put out the fire.

Louise and Overland Red gazed silently at the youthful figure crossing the meadow. The same thought was in both their hearts--that the boy's chance in life was still ahead of him. Something of this was in the girl's level gray eyes as she asked, "Why did you come up here, so far from the town and the railroad?"

"We generally don't," replied Overland Red. "We ain't broke. Collie's got some money. We got out of grub from comin' up here. We come up to see the scenery. I ain't kiddin'; we sure did! 'Course, speakin' in general, a free lunch looks better to me any day than the Yosemite--but that's because I need the lunch. You got to be fed up to it to enjoy scenery. Now, on the road we're lookin' at lots of it every day, but we ain't seein' much. But give me a good feed and turn me loose in the Big Show Pasture where the Bridal Veil is weepin' jealous of the Cathedral Spires, and the Big Trees is too big to be jealous of anything, where Adam would 'a' felt old the day he was born--jest take off my hobbles and turn me out to graze _there_, and _feed_, and say, lady, I scorn the idea of doin' _any_thing but decomposin' my feelin's and smokin' and writin' po'try. I been there! There's where I writ the song called 'Beat It, Bo.' Mebby you heard of it."

"No, I should like to hear it."

The fire steamed and spluttered as Collie extinguished it. Overland Red handed the tobacco and papers to him.

"About comin' up this here trail?" he resumed as the boy stretched beside them on the warm earth. "Well, Miss, it was four years ago that I picked up Collie here at Albuquerque. His pa died sudden and left the kid to find out what a hard map this ole world is. We been across, from Frisco to New York, twice since then, and from Seattle to San Diego on the side, and 'most everywhere in California, it bein' my native State and the best of the lot. You see, Collie, he's gettin' what you might call a liberated education, full of big ideas--no d.i.n.ky stuff. Yes, I picked him up at Albuquerque, a half-starved, skinny little cuss that was cryin' and beggin' me to get him out of there."

"Albuquerque?" queried Louise.

"Uhuh. Later, comin' acrost the Mojave, we got thrun off a freight by mistake for a couple of sewin'-machines that we was ridin' with to Barstow, so the tickets on the crates said. That was near Daggett, by a water-tank. It was hotter than settin' on a stove in Death Valley at 12 o'clock Sunday noon. We beat it for the next town, afoot. Collie commenced to give out. He was pretty tender and not strong. I lugged him some and he walked some. He was talkin' of green gra.s.s and cuc.u.mbers in the ice-box and ice-cream and home and the Maumee River, and a whole lot of things you can't find in the desert. Well, I got him to his feet next mornin'. We had some trouble, and was detained a spell in Barstow after that. They couldn't prove nothin', so they let us go. Then Collie got to talkin' again about a California road that wiggled up a hill and through a canon, and had one of these here ole Mission bells where it lit off for the sky-ranch. Funny, for he was never in California then. Mebby it was the old post-card he got at Albuquerque. You see his pa bought it for him 'cause he wanted it. He was only a kid then. Collie, he says it's the only thing his pa ever did buy for him, and so he kept it till it was about wore out from lookin' at it. But considerin' how his pa acted, I guess that was about all Collie needed to remember him by.

Anyhow, he dreamed of that road, and told me so much about it that I got to lookin' for it too. I knowed of the old El Camino Real and the bells, so we kept our eye peeled for that particular dream road, kind of for fun. We found her yesterday."

"What, this? The road to our ranch?"

"Uhuh. Collie, he said so the minute we got in that canon, Moonstone Canon, you said. We're restin' up and enjoyin' the scenery. We need the rest, for only last week we resigned from doin' a stunt in a movin'-picture outfit. They wanted somebody to do native sons. We said we didn't have them kind of clothes, but the foreman of the outfit says we'd do fine jest as we was. It was fierce--and, believe me, lady, I been through some! I been through some!

"They was two others in checker clothes and dip-lid caps, and they _wasn't_ native sons. They acted like sons of--I'd hate to tell you what, Miss--to the chief dollie in the show. They stole her beau and tied him to the S. P. tracks; kind of loose, though. She didn't seem to care. She jest stood around chewin' gum and rollin' her lamps at the head guy. Then the movin'-picture express, which was a retired switch-engine hooked onto a Swede observation car, backs down on Adolphus, and we was to rush up like--pretty fast, and save his life.

"She was a sa.s.sy little chicken with blond feathers and a three-quarter rig skirt. She had a regular strawberry-ice-cream-soda complexion, and her eyes looked like a couple of gla.s.s alleys with electric lights in 'em. I wondered if she took 'em out at night to go to sleep or only switched off the current. Anyhow, up she rides in a big reddish kind of automobile and twists her hands round her wrists and looks up the track and down the track and sees us and says, 'Oh, w'ich way has he went?

W'ich way did Disgustus Adolphus beat it to?' And chewin' gum right on top of that, too. It was tough on us, Miss, but we needed the money.

"'Bout the eighteenth time she comes coughin' up in that old one-lung machine,--to get her expression right, so the boss kept hollerin',--why, I gets sick and tired. If there's anything _doin_', why, I'm game, but such monkeyin'! There was that picture-machine idiot workin' the crank as if he was sh.e.l.lin' a thicket-full of Injuns with a Gatling, and his fool cap turned round with the lid down the back of his neck, and me and Collie, the only sensible-actin' ones of the lot, because we was actin'

natural, jest restin'. I got sick and tired. The next time up coughs that crippled-up automobile with the mumps on its front tire, and she says, 'Where, oh, where has he went?' I ups and says, 'Crazy, Miss, and can you blame him?'

"She didn't see no joke in that, so the boss he fired us. He wasn't goin' to pay us at that, but I picks up the little picture-machine box and I swings her up over the track kind of suggestive like. 'One!' said I. 'Do we get our money?'

"'Drop that machine!' says he, rushin' up to me.

"'I'm a-goin' to,' says I, 'good and hard. Think again, while I count.

Do we get our money?'

"'You get pinched!' says he.

"'Two,' says I, and I swings the box up by the legs.

"'Hole on!' yells the boss. 'Pay the mutt, Jimmy, and, for Gord sake, get that machine before he ruins the best reel we made yet!'

"We got paid."

"But the bell and Moonstone Canon?" questioned Louise, glancing back at Boyar grazing down the meadow.

"Sure! Well, we flopped near here that night--"

"Flopped?"

"Uhuh. Let's see, you ain't hep to that, are you? Why, we crawled to the hay, hit the feathers, pounded our ear--er--went to bed! That's what it used to be. Well, in the morning, me and Collie got some sardines and crackers to the store and a little coffee. It was goin' over there that we seen the bell and the road and the whole works. I got kind of interested myself in that canon. I never saw so many moonstones layin'

right on top the gravel, and I been in Mex., too. We liked it and we stayed over last night, expectin' to be gone by now."

"And when you leave here?" queried Louise.

"Same old thing," replied Overland cheerfully. "I know the ropes. Collie works by spells. Oh, we're livin', and that's all you need to do in California."

"And that is all--now that you have found the road?"

"Oh, the road is like all of them dreams," said Overland. "Such things are good for keepin' people interested in somethin' till it's done, that's all. It was fun at first, lookin' up every arroyo and slit in the hills, till we found it. Same as them marriages on the desert, after that."

"Marriages?"

"Uhuh. Seein' water what ain't there, like."