"A gold trail?" queried the weary and dejected Pike.

"Any old trail to any old place just so we keep ambling on. You can't live contented under cover, and you know it."

"Well," decided Pike after a rod or two of tramping along the shaly, hot bed of a dry arroya. "I won't bet, for you may be among the prophets. But while you are about it, I'd be thankful if you'd prophesy me a wet trail next time instead of skimpy mud holes where springs ought to be. I'm sick of dry camps, and so is Baby Buntin'."

"_'Oh, there was a frog lived in the spring!'_" chanted Kit derisively. "Cheer up, Cap, the worst is yet to come, for I've an idea that the gang of Mexican vaqueros we glimpsed from the b.u.t.te at noon will just about muss up the water hole in Yaqui canon until it will be us for a sleep there before the fluid is fit for a water bottle. _'Oh, there was a frog lived in the spring!'_ Buntin' Baby, we'll fish the frog out, and let you wallow in it instead, you game little dusty rat!

Say, Pike, when we load up with grub again we'll keep further west to the Cerrado Pintado. I'll follow a hunch of my own next trip."

The older man grunted disdain for the hunches of Kit, even while his eyes smiled response to the ever-living call of youth. To Rhodes there was ever a "next time." He was young enough to deal in futures, and had a way with him by which friends were to be found for even unstable venturings with no backing more substantial than a "hunch."

Not that Kit was gifted with any great degree of fatal beauty--men are not often pretty on the trail, unwashed, unshaven, and unshorn--added to which their equipment had reached the point where his most pretentious garment was a square of an Indian _serape_ with a hole in the middle worn as a poncho, and adopted to save his coat and other shirt on the hard trail.

Cap Pike growled that he looked like a Mexican peon in that raiment, which troubled Kit not at all. He was red bronze from the desert days, and his blue eyes, with the long black lashes of some Celtic ancestor, looked out on the world with direct mild approval. They matched the boyish voice much given to trolling old-time ditties and sentimental foolishness.

He led the dappled roan over the wild dry "wash" where the sand was deep and slippery, and the white crust of alkali over all. Before him swayed the pack mules, and back of him Captain Pike sagged on the little gray burro, named in derision and affection, the Baby Bunting of the outfit.

The jauntiness was temporarily eliminated from the old prospector. Two months of fruitless scratching gravel when he had expected to walk without special delay to the great legendary deposit, had taken the sparkle of hope from the blue eyes, and he glanced perfunctorily at the walls of that which had once been a river bed.

"What in time do you reckon became of all the water that used to fill these dry gullies?" he asked querulously. "Why, it took a thousand years of floods to wash these boulders round, and then leave them high and dry when nicely polished. That's a waste in nature I can't figure out, and this G.o.dforsaken territory is full of them."

"Well, you grouch, if we didn't have this dry bed to skip along, we would be bucking the greasewood and cactus on the mesa above. So we get some favors coming our way."

"Skip along,--me eye!" grunted Pike, as the burro toiled laboriously through the sand, and Kit shifted and stumbled over treacherous, half-buried boulders. "Say, Kit, don't you reckon it's time for Billie to answer my letter? It's over eight weeks now, and mail ought to get in once a month."

Rhodes grunted something about "mail in normal times, but these times were not normal," and did not seem much interested in word from Granados.

He had not the heart, or else had too much, to tell the old man that the letter to Billie never reached her. When Whitely went north he put it in his coat pocket, and then changed his coat! Kit found it a month later and held it, waiting to find someone going out. He had not even mentioned it to Whitely on his return, for Whitely was having his own troubles, and could not spare a man for a four day trip to mail.

Whitely's folks lived north of Naco, and he had gone there direct and returned without touching at Nogales, or hearing of the tragedy at Granados. The latest news of the Mexican revolutions, and the all-absorbing question as to whether the United States would or would not intervene, seemed all the news the worried Whitely had brought back. Even the slaughter of a dozen nations of Europe had no new features to a ranchman of Sonora,--it remained just slaughter.

And one did not need to cross boundaries to learn of killings, for all the world seemed aflame, and every state in Mexico had its own wars,--little or big.

Then, in the records of the tumultuous days, there was scarce s.p.a.ce for the press or people to give thought after the first day or two, to the colorless life going out in mystery under the cottonwoods of Granados, and no word came to tell Rhodes of the suspicion, only half veiled, against himself.

The ranch house of Mesa Blanca was twenty miles from the hacienda of Soledad, and a sharp spur of the Carrizal range divided their grazing lands. Soledad reached a hundred miles south and Mesa Blanca claimed fifty miles to the west, so that the herds seldom mingled, but word filtered to and from between the vaqueros, and Rhodes heard that Perez had come north from Hermosillo and that El Aleman, (the German) had made the two day trip in from the railroad, and had gone on a little _pasear_ to the small rancherias with Juan Gonsalvo, the half-breed overseer. The vaqueros talked with each other about that, for there were no more young men among them for soldiers, only boys and old men to tend the cattle, and what did it mean?

The name of Rhodes was not easy for the Mexican tongue, and at Mesa Blanca his ident.i.ty was promptly lost in the gift of a name with a meaning to them, El Pajarito, (the singer). Capitan Viajo, (the old captain), was accepted by Pike with equal serenity, as both men were only too well pleased to humor the Indian ranch people in any friendly concessions, for back of some of those alert black eyes there were surely inherited records of old pagan days, and old legends of golden veins in the hills.

The fact that they were left practically nameless in a strange territory did not occur to either of them, and would not have disturbed them if it had. They had met no American but Whitely since they first struck Mesa Blanca. One month Kit had conscientiously stuck to the ranch cares while Whitely took his family out, and Pike had made little sallies into the hills alone.

On Whitely's return he had made an errand to Soledad and taken Rhodes and Pike along that they might view the crumbled walls of old Soledad Mission, back of the ranch house. The ancient rooms of the mission padres were now used princ.i.p.ally as corrals, harness shop, and storage rooms.

The situation in itself was one of rare beauty;--those old padres knew!

It was set on a high plain or mesa, facing a wide valley spreading miles away to the south where mother-of-pearl mountains were ranged like strung jewels far against the Mexican sky. At the north, slate-blue foothills lifted their sharp-edged shoulders three miles away, but only blank walls of Soledad faced the hills, all portals of the old mission appeared to have faced south, as did Soledad. The door facing the hills was a myth. And as Rhodes stood north of the old wall, and searched its thirty-mile circle, he could understand how four generations of gold seekers had failed to find even a clue to the wealth those unknown padres had looked on, and sent joyous evidence of to the viceroy of the south. It would take years of systematic search to cover even half the visible range. A man could devote a long lifetime to a fruitless search there, and then some straying burro might uncover it for an Indian herder who would fill his poncho, and make a sensation for a week or two, and never find the trail again!

"It's just luck!" said Kit thinking it all over as he tramped along the arroya bed, "it either belongs to you, or it doesn't. No man on earth can buy it and make it stay, but if it is yours, no man can keep you from it entirely."

"What the devil are you yammering about?" asked Pike grumpily.

"Oh, I was just thinking of how Whitely exploded our little balloon of hopes when he took us over to size up the prospects at Soledad. I wonder if Perez has no white help at all around that place. We did not even see the foreman."

"He's a half-breed, that Juan Gonsalvo. The Indians don't like him.

He's from down Hermosillo way, and not like these Piman children of nature. He and Conrad are up to some devilment, but Whitely thinks Juan took the job, deluded as we are, with the notion that a gold mine was sticking up out of the ground at the Soledad corrals, and it was to be his find. You see, Bub, that story has gone the length of Mexico, and even over to Spain. Oh, we are not the only trailers of ghost gold; there are others!"

The slanting sun was sending shadows long on the levels, and the hills were looming to the east in softest tones of gray and amethyst; the whitish green of desert growths lay between, and much of brown desert yet to cross.

"We can't make the foothills tonight even though there is an early moon," decided Kit. "But we can break camp at dawn and make it before the sun is high, and the water will hold out that long."

"It will hold for Buntin' and the mules, but what of Pardner?" asked the older man. "He's not used to this hard pan gravel scratching."

"But he's thoroughbred, and he can stand it twelve hours more if I can, can't you, old pal?" The tall roan with the dot of black between the eyes returned his owner's caress by nosing his bare neck, and the hand held up to smooth the black mane.

"I'll be glad enough to see him safe across the border in old Arizona," observed Pike. "I can't see how the herders saved him for you at Mesa Blanca when their own stock was picked of its best for the various patriots charging through the settlements."

"Some way, Miguel, the Indian vaquero, managed it, or got his girl to hide it out. Whitely confessed that his Indian cattlemen are the most loyal he can find down here."

"But it's not a white man's land--yet, and I'm downright glad he's shipped his family north. There's always h.e.l.l enough in Sonora, but it's a dovecote to what it's bound to be before the end comes, and so, it's no place for white men's wives."

"Right you are! Say, what was it Whitely heard down in Sinaloa concerning the Enchanted Canon mine?"

"Oh, some old priest's tale--the same dope we got with a different slant to it. The gold nuggets from some shrine place where the water gushed _muy fuerte_, by a sycamore tree. Same old nuggets sent out with the message, and after that the insurrection of the Indians, and the priests who found it never lived to get out. Why, Bub, that is nearly two hundred years ago! Stop and think of the n.o.ble Castilians going over Sonora with a fine tooth comb for that trail ever since and then think of the nerve of us!"

"Well, I'm nearer to it anyway than the Dutchman who trekked in from the south last year with copies of the old mission reports as guide, for the Yaquis killed him, and took his records, while they hide my horse for me."

"Huh! yes, and warn you to ride him north!"

"Correct;--but Pike, it was a warning, not a threat! Oh, I'm coming back all right, all right! That gold by the hidden stream sure has got me roped and hog tied for keeps."

Pike growled good-natured disdain of his confidence, and suggested that the stream, which was probably only a measly mud hole, could have dropped to purgatory in an earthquake tremor since those first old mission days, or filled up with quicksand.

"Right you are, Cap. That's a first-rate idea," agreed Kit the irrepressible. "Next trip we'll start looking for streams that were and are not; we're in the bed of one now for that matter!"

"Somewhere ahead we should come into the trail south from Carracita,"

observed Pike, "but I reckon you'd just as soon camp with Pard out of sight of the trail."

There was silence for a bit as they plodded on up the wide dry bed of the river, and then Kit turned, glancing at the old man keenly.

"I didn't fool you much when I called that gang 'vaqueros,' did I?"

he observed. "Well, they didn't look good to me, and I decided I'd have to fight for my horse if we crossed trails, and--it wastes a lot of time, fighting does."

"No, you didn't fool me. You'd be seven kinds of an idiot to walk in this gully of purgatory when you could ride safely on the mesa above, so I guessed you had a hunch it was the friendly and acquisitive patriots."

"Pike, they were between us and the Palomitas rancherias of Mesa Blanca or I'd have made a try to get through and warn the Indians there. Those men had no camp women with them, so they were not a detachment of the irregular cavalry,--that's what puzzles me. And their horses were fresh. It's some new devilment."

"There's nothing new in Sonora, son. Things happen over and over the same."

The shadows lengthened, and the blue range to the east had sharp, black edges against the saffron sky, and the men plodding along over sand and between boulders, fell silent after the little exchange of confidence as to choice of trail. Once Kit left the gully and climbed the steep grade to the mesa alone to view the landscape over, but slid and scrambled down,--hot, dusty, and vituperative.

"Not a sign of life but some carrion crows moving around in the blue without flop of a wing," he grumbled. "Who started the dope that mankind is the chosen of the Lord? Huh! we have to scratch gravel for all we rake in but the birds of the air have us beat for desert travel all right, all right!"