"Um!" a.s.sented Pike, "but I reckon Whitely's. .h.i.t the trail by now.

There's no real profit in raising stock for the warriors down there; each band confiscates what he needs, and gives a promissory note on an empty treasury."

"Well, the attraction must be pretty strong to hold him down there in spite of conditions," said Billie gloomily.

"Attraction? Sure. Kit's gone loco on that attraction," agreed the old prospector, and then with a reminiscent light in his tired old eyes he added, "I reckon there's no other thing so likely to snare a man on a desert trail. You see, Billie-child, it's just as if the great G.o.d had hid a treasure in the beginning of the world to stay hid till the right lad ambled along the trail, and lifted the cover, and when a fellow has youth, and health and not a care in the world, the search alone is a great game--And when he finds it!--why, Billie, the dictionary hasn't words enough to tell the story!"

"No--I--I reckon not," said his listener in a small voice, and when he looked around to speak to her again she had disappeared, and across the patio Dona Luz was coming towards him in no good humor.

"How is it that poor little one weeps now when you are returned, and not at other times?" she demanded. "Me, I have my troubles since that day they find the Don Filipe shot dead,--_Jesusita_ give him rest!

That child is watching the Sonora trail and waiting since that day, but no tears until you are come. I ask you how is the way of that?"

Captain Pike stared at her reflectively.

"You are a bringer of news, likewise a faithful warden," he observed.

"I'm peaceably disposed, and not wise to your lingo. Billie and me were talking as man to man, free and confidential, and no argument.

There were no weeps that I noticed. What's the reason why?"

"The saints alone know, and not me!" she returned miserably. "I think she is scared that it was the Senor Rhodes who shooting Don Filipe, the vaqueros thinking that! But she tells no one, and she is unhappy.

Also there is reason. That poor little one has the ranchos, but have you hear how the debts are so high all the herds can never pay? That is how they are saying now about Granados and La Partida, and at the last our senorita will have no herds, and no ranchos, and no people but me. _Madre de Dios!_ I try to think of her in a little adobe by the river with only _frijoles_ in the dinner pot, and I no see it that way. And I not seeing it other way. How you think?"

"I don't, it's too new," confessed Pike. "Who says this?"

"The Senor Henderson. I hear him talk with Senor Conrad, who has much sorrow because the Don Filipe made bad contracts and losing the money little and little, and then the counting comes, and it is big, very big!"

"Ah! the Senor Conrad has much sorrow, has he?" queried Pike, "and Billie is getting her face to the wall and crying? That's queer.

Billie always unloaded her troubles on me, and you say there was none of this weeping till I came back?"

"That is so, senor."

"Cause why?"

"_Quien sabe?_ She was making a long letter to Senor Rhodes in Sonora,--that I know. He sends no word, so--I leave it to you, senor, it takes faith and more faith when a man is silent, and the word of a killing is against him."

"Great G.o.dfrey, woman! He never got a letter, he knows nothing of a killing. How in h.e.l.l--" Then the captain checked himself as he saw the uselessness of protesting to Dona Luz. "Where's Billie?"

Billie was perched on a window seat in the _sala_, her eyes were more than a trifle red, and she appeared deeply engrossed in the pages of a week-old country paper.

"I see here that Don Jose Perez of Hermosillo is to marry Dona Dolores Terain, the daughter of the general," she observed impersonally. "He owns Rancho Soledad, and promises the Sonora people he will drive the rebel Rotil into the sea, and it was but yesterday Tia Luz was telling me of his beautiful wife, Jocasta, who was only a little mountain girl when he rode through her village and saw her first. She is still alive, and it looks to me as if all men are alike!"

"More or less," agreed Pike amicably, "some of us more, some of us less. Dona Dolores probably spells politics, but Dona Jocasta is a wildcat of the sierras, and I can't figure out any harmonious days for a man who picks two like that."

"He doesn't deserve harmony; no man does who isn't true--isn't true,"

finished Billie rather lamely.

"Look here, honey child," observed Pike, "you'll turn man hater if you keep on working your imagination. Luz tells me you are cranky against Kit, and that the ranches are tied up in business knots tighter than I had any notion of, so you had better unload the worst you can think of on me; that's what I'm here for. What difference do the Perez favorites make to our young lives? Neither Dolores nor Jocasta will help play the cards in our fortunes."

Wherein Captain Pike was not of the prophets. The wells of Sonora are not so many but that he who pitches his tent near one has a view and greetings of all drifting things of the desert, and the shadowed star of Dona Jocasta of the south was leading her into the Soledad wilderness forsaken of all white men but one.

CHAPTER XII

COVERING THE TRAIL

Each minute of the long days, Rhodes worked steadily and gaily, picking out the high grade ore from the old Indian mine, and every possible night he and the burro and Tula made a trip out to the foot of the range, where they buried their treasure against the happy day when they could go out of the silent desert content for the time with what gold they could carry in secret to the border.

For two days he had watched the Soledad ranch house rather closely through the field gla.s.s, for there was more activity there than before; men in groups rode in who were not herding. He wondered if it meant a military occupation, in which case he would need to be doubly cautious when emerging from the hidden trail.

The girl worked as he worked. Twice he had made new sandals for her, and also for himself in order to save his boots so that they might at least be wearable when he got among people. All plans had been thought out and discussed until no words would be needed between them when they separated. She was to appear alone at Palomitas with a tale of escape from the slavers, and he was carefully crushing and mashing enough color to partly fill a buckskin bag to show as the usual fruits of a prospect trip from which he was returning to Mesa Blanca after exhausting grub stake and shoe leather.

The things of the world had stood still for him during that hidden time of feverish work. He scarcely dared try to estimate the value of the ore he had dug as honey from a hollow tree, but it was rich--rich!

There were nuggets of pure gold, a.s.sorted as to their various sizes, while he milled and ground the quartz roughly, and cradled it in the water of the brook.

By the innocent aid of Baby Bunting, two wild burros of the sierra had been enticed within reach for slaughter, and, aside from the food values, they furnished green hide which under Kit's direction, Tula deftly made into bags for carrying the gold.

All activities during the day were carefully confined within a certain radius, low enough in the little canon to run no risk in case any inquisitive resident of Soledad should study the ranges with a field gla.s.s, though Kit had not seen one aside from his own since he entered Sonora. And he used his own very carefully every morning and evening on the wide valley of Soledad.

"Something doing down there, sister," he decided, as they were preparing for the last trail out. "Riders who look like cavalry, mules, and some wagons--mighty queer!"

Tula came over and stood beside him expectantly. He had learned that a look through the magic gla.s.ses was the most coveted gift the camp could grant to her, and it had become part of the regular routine that she stood waiting her turn for the wide look, the "enchant look," as she had called it that first morning. It had become a game to try to see more than he, and this time she mentioned as he had, the wagons, and mules, and riders. And then she looked long and uttered a brief Indian word of surprise.

"Beat me again, have you?" queried Kit good humoredly. "What do you find?"

"A woman is there, in that wagon,--sick maybe. Also one man is a padre; see you!"

Kit took the gla.s.ses and saw she was right. A man who looked like a priest was helping a woman from a wagon, she stumbled forward and then was half carried by two men towards the house.

"Not an Indian woman?" asked Kit, and again her unchildlike mind worked quickly.

"A padre does not bow his head to help Indian woman. Caballeros do not lift them up."

"Well I reckon Don Jose Perez is home on a visit, and brought his family. A queer time! Other ranch folks are getting their women north over the border for safety."

"Don Jose not bring woman to Soledad--ever. He take them away. His men take them away."

It was the first reference she had made to the slavers since they had entered the canon, though she knew that each pile of nuggets was part of the redemption money for those exiles of whom she did not speak.

But she worked tirelessly until Kit would stop her, or suggest some restful task to vary the steady grind of carrying, pounding, or washing the quartz. He had ordered her to make two belts, that each of them might carry some of the gold hidden under their garments. She had a nugget tied in a corner of her _manta_, and other small ones fastened in her girdle, while in the belt next her body she carried all he deemed safe to weight her with, probably five pounds. At any hint of danger she would hide the belt and walk free.

His own belt would carry ten pounds without undue bulkiness. And over three hundred pounds of high grade gold was already safely hidden near the great rock with the symbols of sun and rain marking its weathered surface.

"A fair hundred thousand, and the vein only scratched!" he exulted. "I was sore over losing the job on Billie's ranch,--but gee! this looks as if I was knocked out in the cold world to reach my good luck!"

In a blue dusk of evening they left the camp behind and started over the trail, after Tula had carefully left fragments of food on the tomb of Miguel, placed there for the ghosts who are drawn to a comrade.

Kit asked no questions concerning any of her tribal customs, since to do so would emphasize the fact that they were peculiar and strange to him, and the Indian mind, wistfully alert, would sense that strangeness and lose its unconsciousness in the presence of an alien.

So, when she went, after meals, to offer dregs of the soup kettle or bones of the burro, she often found a bunch of desert blossoms wilting there in the heat, and these tributes left by Kit went far to strengthen her confidence. It was as if Miguel was a live partner in their activities, never forgotten by either. So they left him on guard, and turned their faces toward the outer world of people.