"I said if he stayed in," reminded Pike. "Sure we have crooks galore who drift across, play a cut-throat game and skip back to cover. The border is lined with them on both sides. And Conrad----"

"But Conrad isn't in politics."

"N-no. There's no evidence that he is, but his Mexican friends are.

There are men on the Granados now who used to be down on Soledad, and they are the men who make the trips with him to the lower ranch."

"Tomas Herrara and Chico Domingo?"

"I reckon you've sized them up, but remember, Kit, I don't cross over with you for any political game, and I don't know a thing!"

"All right, Captain, but don't raise too loud a howl if I fancy a _pasear_ occasionally to improve my Spanish."

The old man grumbled direful and profane prophecies as to things likely to happen to students of Spanish love songs in Sonora, and then sat with his head on one side studying Kit ruminatively as he made his notes of the selected stock.

"Ye know Bub, it mightn't be so bad at that, if you called a halt in time, for one of the lost mine trails calls for Spanish and plenty of it. I've got a working knowledge, but the farther you travel into Sonora the less American you will hear, and that lost mine of the old padres is down there along the ranges of Soledad somewhere."

"Which one of the fifty-seven varieties have you elected to uncover first?" queried Rhodes. "The last time you were confidential about mines I thought the 'Three Hills of Gold' were mentioned by you."

"Sure it was, but since you are on the Sonora end of the ranch, and since you are picking up your ears to learn Sonoran trails, it might be a good time to follow your luck. Say, I'll bet that every herder who drifts into the _cantina_ at La Partida has heard of the red gold of El Alisal. The Yaquis used to know where it was before so many of them were killed off; reckon it's lost good and plenty now, but nothing is hid forever and it's waiting there for some man with the luck."

"We're willing," grinned Kit. "You are a great little old dreamer, Captain. And there is a fair chance I may range down there. I met a chap named Whitely from over toward the Painted Hills north of Altar.

Ranch manager, sort of friendly."

"Sure, Tom Whitely has some stock in a ranch over there--the Mesa Blanca ranch--it joins Soledad on the west. I've always aimed to range that way, but the lost mine is closer than the eastern sierras--must be! The trail of the early padres was farther east, and the mine could not well be far from the trail, not more than a day's journey by mule or burro, and that's about twenty miles. You see Bub, it was found by a padre who wandered off the trail on the way to a little branch mission, or _visita_, as they call it, and it was where trees grew, for a big alisal tree--sycamore you know--was near the outcrop of that red gold. Well, that _visita_ was where the padres only visited the heathen for baptism and such things; no church was built there! That's what tangles the trail for anyone trying to find traces after a hundred years."

"I reckon it would," agreed Rhodes. "Think what a hundred years of cactus, sand, and occasional _temblors_ can do to a desert, to say nothing of the playful zephyrs. Why, Cap, the winds could lift a good-sized range of hills and fill the baby rivers with it in that time, for the winds of the desert have a way with them!"

A boy rode out of the whirls of dust, and climbed up on the corral fence where Rhodes was finishing tally of the horses selected for shipment. He was the slender, handsome son of Tomas Herrara of whom they had been speaking.

"It is a letter," he said, taking a folded paper from his hat. "The Senor Conrad is having the telegraph, and the cars are to be ready for Granados."

"Right you are, Juanito," agreed Rhodes. "Tell Senor Conrad I will reach Granados for supper, and that all the stock is in."

The lad whirled away again, riding joyously north, and Rhodes, after giving final directions to the vaqueros, turned his roan in the same direction.

"Can't ride back with you, Cap, for I'm taking a little _pasear_ around past Herrara's rancheria. I want to take a look at that bunch of colts and size up the water there. I've a hunch they had better be headed up the other valley to the Green Springs tank till rains come."

Captain Pike jogged off alone after some audible and highly colored remarks concerning range bosses who a.s.sumed the power of the Almighty to be everywhere the same day. Yet as he watched the younger man disappear over the gray-green range he smiled tolerantly for, after all, that sort of a hustler was the right sort of partner for a prospecting trip.

The late afternoon was a golden haze under a metal blue sky; afar to the east, sharp edges of the mountains cut purple zig-zags into the salmon pink of the horizon. The rolling waves of the ranges were bathed in a sea of rest, and now and then a bird on the mesquite along an arroya, or resting on branch of flaring occotilla would give out the foreboding call of the long shadows, for the heart of the day had come and gone, and the cooler air was waking the hidden things from siesta.

Kit Rhodes kept the roan at a steady lope along the cattle trail, drinking in the refreshing sweetness of the lonely ranges after hours of dust and heat and the trampling horse herds of the corrals.

Occasionally he broke into songs of the ranges, love songs, death laments, and curious sentimental ditties of love and wars of old England as still crooned in the cabins of southern mountains.

_I had not long been married, A happy, happy bride!

When a handsome trooper captain Stepped up to our bedside, "Rise up! rise up! young man," he said, "And go along with me, In the low, low lands of Holland To fight for liberty._"

The ancient song of the sad bride whose lover proved false in the "low, low lands of Holland" trailed lugubriously along the arroya in a totally irrelevant way, for the singer was not at all sad. He was gaily alert, keen-eyed and watchful, keeping time to the long lope with that dubious versification.

"And they're at it again pretty close to the 'low, low lands of Holland,' Pardner," he confided to the horse. "And when you and I make a stake you'll go on pasture, I'll hit the breeze for Canada or some other seaport, and get one whack at the Boche brown rat on my own if official America is too proud to fight, for

_Oh-h! oh-h! Oh-h!

In the low, low lands of Holland, My love was false to me!_"

Then, after long stretches of sand dunes, mesquite thickets, occasional wide canons where _zacatan_ meadows rippled like waves of the sea in the desert air, he swung his horse around a low hill and came in sight of the little adobe of Herrara, a place of straggly enclosures of stakes and wattles, with the corral at the back.

Another rider came over the hill beyond the corral, on a black horse skimming the earth. Rhodes stared and whistled softly as the black without swerving planted its feet and slid down the declivity by the water tank, and then, jumping the fence below, sped to the little _ramada_ before the adobe where its rider slid to the ground amid a deal of barking of dogs and scattering of children.

And although Kit had never seen the rider before, he had no difficulty as to recognition, and on a sudden impulse he whistled the meadow-lark call loudly enough to reach her ears.

She halted at the door, a bundle in her hand, and surveyed the landscape, but failed to see him because he at that moment was back of a clump of towering p.r.i.c.kly pear. And she pa.s.sed on into the shadows of the adobe.

"That's the disadvantage of being too perfect, Pardner," he confided to the roan, "she thinks we are a pair of birds."

He turned at the corner of the corral and rode around it which took him back of the house and out of range from the door, but the dogs set up a ki-yi-ing, and a flock of youngsters scuttled to the corner of the adobe, and stared as children of the far ranges are p.r.o.ne to stare at the pa.s.sing of a traveler from the longed-for highways of the world.

The barking of the dogs and scampering of the children evidently got on the nerves of the black horse left standing at the vine-covered _ramada_, for after a puppy had barked joyously at his heels he leaped aside, and once turned around kept on going, trotting around the corral after the roan.

Rhodes saw it but continued on his way, knowing he could pick it up on his return, as the Ojo Verde tank was less than a mile away. A boy under the _ramada_ gave one quick look and then fled, a flash of brown and a red flapping end of a sash, up the canoncita where the home spring was shadowed by a large mesquite tree.

At first Rhodes turned in the saddle with the idea of a.s.sisting in the catching of the black if that was the thing desired, but it evidently was not.

"Now what has that _muchacho_ on his mind that he makes that sort of get-away after nothing and no pursuer in sight? Pardner, I reckon we'll squander a valuable minute or two and gather in that black."

He galloped back, caught the wanderer but kept right on without pause to the trickle of water under the flat wide-spreading tree--it was a solitaire, being king of its own domain and the only shade, except the vine-covered _ramada_, for a mile.

The startled boy made a movement as if to run again as Kit rode up, then halted, fear and fateful resignation changing the childish face to sullenness.

"_Buenas tardes_, Narcisco."

"_Buenas tardes_, senor," gulped the boy.

"I turned back to catch the horse of the senorita for you," observed Rhodes. "It is best you tie him when you lead him back, but first give him water. Thirst is perhaps the cause he is restless."

"Yes senor," agreed the lad. "At once I will do that." But he held the horse and did not move from his tracks, and then Rhodes noticed that on the flat rock behind him was a grain sack thrown over something, a brown bottle had rolled a little below it, and the end of a hammer protruded from under the sacking.

Ordinarily Rhodes would have given no heed to any simple ranch utensils gathered under the shadow where work was more endurable, but the fear in the face of the boy fascinated him.

"Think I'll give Pardner a drink while I am about it," he decided, and dismounted carelessly. "Got a cup that I can take my share first?"

Narcisco had no cup, only shook his head and swallowed as if the attempt at words was beyond him.

"Well, there is a bottle if it is clean," and Rhodes strode awkwardly towards it, but his spur caught in the loose mesh of the sacking, and in loosening it he twisted it off the rock.

Narcisco gasped audibly, and Rhodes laughed. He had uncovered a couple of dozen empty whiskey bottles, and a tin pan with some broken gla.s.s.

"What you trying to start up here in the canon, Buddy?" he asked.

"Playing saloon-keeper with only the gophers for customers?"