"See you, senor, Dario Ruiz was _compadre_ of Senor Alfredo Bernard, Americanos not understanding all in that word, and the grandfather of Dario was major-domo of the rancho of Soledad at that time the Apaches are going down and killing the people there. That is when the mine was lost. On the skin of a sheep it was told in writing all about it, and Dario had that skin. Sure he had! It was old and had been buried in the sand, and holes were eaten in it by wild things, but Don Alfredo did read it, and I was hearing the reading of it to Dario Ruiz, but of what use the reading when that mine bewitched itself into hiding?"

"But the writing? Did that bewitch itself away also?" demanded Billie.

"How could I be asking of that when Dario was dead down there in the desert, and his wife, that was my cousin Anita, was crazy wild against Don Alfredo the father of you! Ai, that was a bad time, and Don Alfredo with black silence on him for very sorrow. And never again in his life did he take the Sonora trail for adventures or old treasure.

And it is best that you keep to a mind like his mind, senorita. He grew wise, but Dario died for that wisdom, and in Sonora someone always dies before wisdom is found. First it was two priests went to death for that gold, and since that old day many have been going. It is a witchcraft, and no blessing on it!"

"Well, I reckon I'd be willing to cross my fingers, and take the trail if I could get started right," decided Rhodes. "It certainly sounds alluring."

"I did go in once," confessed Pike, "but we had no luck, struck a _temporale_ where a Papago had smallpox, and two dry wells where there should have been water. My working pardner weakened at Paradones and we made tracks for the good old border. That is no trail for a lone white man."

"But the writing, the writing!" persisted Billie. "Tia Luz, you are a gold mine yourself of stories, but this one you never told, and I am crazy about it! You never forget anything, and the writing you _could_ not,--so we know you have the very words of that writing!"

"Yes, that is true too, for the words were not so many, and where some words had been the wild things had eaten holes. The words said that from the mine of El Alisal the mission of Soledad could be seen. And from the door of Soledad it was one look, one only, to the blue canoncita where the alisal tree was growing, and water from the gold of the rose washed the roots of that tree."

"Good G.o.d!" muttered Rhodes staring at the old lady who sat nodding her head in emphasis until her jet and gold earrings were all a-twinkle. "It was as easy as _that_,--yet no one found it?"

"But senor,"--and it was plain to be seen that Dona Luz was enjoying herself hugely as the center of all attention, "the two padres who made that writing met their death at that place--and it was said the _barbaros_ at last killed also the grandfather of Dario, anyway he did die, and the women were afraid to tell even a new padre of that buried writing for the cause that it must have been accursed when it killed all people. That is how it was, and that mission was forsaken after that time. A Spaniard came up from Sinaloa and hunted gold and built Soledad hacienda where that mission had been in that old time, but no one ever found any more of gold than the chickens always are picking, a little here, a little there with a gravel in the craw. No senor, only once the red gold--red as flame--went out of Altar on a mule to the viceroy in Mexico, and the padres never lived to send any more, or see their brothers again. The men who dug that gold dug also their grave. Death goes with it."

"Ugh!" and Billie shivered slightly, and looked at Rhodes, "don't you go digging it!"

His eyes met hers across the table. It was only for an instant, and then Billie got very busy with her coffee which she had forgotten.

"Oh, I'd travel with a mascot to ward off evil," he said. "Would you give me a bead from your string?"

She nodded her head, but did not speak. No one noticed them, for Cap Pike was telling of the old native superst.i.tion that the man who first found an ore bed found no good luck for himself, though the next man might make a fortune from it.

"Why," he continued in evidence, "an Indian who finds even a vein of special clay for pottery doesn't blaze a trail to it for anyone else.

He uses it if he wants it, because his own special guardian G.o.d uncovered it for him, but if it is meant for any other man, that other man's G.o.d will lead him to it when the time comes. That is how they reason it out for all the things covered by old Mother Earth. And I reckon the redder the gold the more secret the old _barbaros_ would be about it, for gold is their sun-G.o.d medicine, or symbol, or something."

"With white priests scattered through Sonora for two centuries one would suppose those old superst.i.tions would be pretty well eradicated," remarked Singleton.

Dona Luz glanced at him as at a child who must be let have his own ideas so long as they were harmless, but Pike laughed.

"Lord love you, Singleton, nothing eradicates superst.i.tion from the Indian mind, or any other mind! All the creeds of the earth are built on it, and a lot of the white ones are still alive and going strong! And as for priests, why man, the Indian priests are bred of those tribes, and were here before the white men came from Spain. It's just about like this: If 'Me und Gott' and the U-boats took a notion to come over and put a ball and chain on all of so-called free America, there might be some pacifist mongrels pretend to like it, and just dote on putting gilt on the chain, and kow-towing to that blood-puddin' gang who are raising h.e.l.l in Belgium. But would the thoroughbreds like it? Not on your life! Well, don't you forget there were a lot of thoroughbreds in the Indian clans even if some of their slaves did breed mongrels! And don't forget that the ships from overseas are dumping more scrub stock on the eastern sh.o.r.es right now than you'll find in any Indian rancheria either here in Pima or over in Sonora. The American isn't to blame for all the seventeen dozen creeds they bring over,--whether political or religious, and I reckon that's about the way the heads of the red clans feel. They are more polite than we are about it, but don't you think for a moment that the European invasion ever changed religion for the Indian thoroughbred. No sir! He is still close to the earth and the stars, and if he thinks they talk to him--well, they just _talk to him_, and what they tell him isn't for you or me to hear,--or to sit in judgment on either, if it comes to that! We are the outsiders."

"Now, Cap," said Billie, "I'm going to take it away. It's too near your elbow, and you have had a double dose for every single one you've been handing out! You can take a rest until the others catch up. Tia Luz, give him a cup of coffee good and strong to help get his politics and religion straightened out."

Pike laughed heartily with the rest of them, and took the coffee.

"All right, dear little b.u.t.tercup. Any medicine you hand out is good to me. But say, that dope about hidden ores may not be all Indian at that, for I recollect that mountaineers of Tennessee had the same hunch about coal veins, and an old lead vein where one family went for their ammunition. They could use it and they did, but were mighty sure they'd all be hoodooed if they uncovered it for anyone else, so I reckon that primitive dope does go pretty far back. I'll bet it was old when Tubal Cain first began scratching around the outcroppings by his lonesomes."

Conrad sauntered along the corridor and seated himself, flicking idly some leather thongs he had cut out from a green hide with a curved sheath knife rather fine and foreign looking. Singleton called him to come in and have coffee, but he would not enter, pleading his evil-smelling pipe as a reason.

"It can't beat mine for a downright bachelor equipment," affirmed Pike, "but I've scandalized this outfit enough, or thereabout, and that venison has killed all our appet.i.tes until breakfast, so why hang around where ungrateful children swat a man's dearest hobbies?"

"If you think you'll get rid of me that way you had better think again," said Billie. "I don't mind your old smokes, or any other of your evil ways, so long as you and Tia Luz tell us more bewitched mine stories. Say, Cap, wouldn't it be great if that old sheepskin was found again, and we'd all outfit for a Sonora _pasear_, and----"

"We would not!" decided the old man patting her hair. "You, my lady, will take a _pasear_ to some highbrow finishing school beyond the ranges, and I'll hit the trail for Yuma in a day or two, but at the present moment you can wind up the music box and start it warbling.

That supper sure was so perfect nothing but music will do for a finish!"

The men drifted out in the corridor and settled into the built-in seats of the plazita, though Rhodes remained standing in the portal facing inward to the patio where the girl's shimmering white dress fluttered in the moonlight beside the shadowy bulk of Tia Luz.

He lit a cigarette and listened for the music box Pike had suggested, but instead he heard guitar strings, and the little ripple of introduction to the old Spanish serenade _Vengo a tu ventana_, "I come to your window."

He turned and glanced towards the men who were discussing horse shipments, and possibilities of the Prussian sea raiders sinking transports on the way to France, but decided his part of that discussion could wait until morning.

Tia Luz had lit the lamp in the _sala_, and the light streamed across the patio where the night moths fluttered about the white oleanders.

He smiled in comical self-derision as he noticed the moths, but tossed away the cigarette and followed the light.

When Captain Pike indulged the following morning in sarcastic comment over Kit's defection, the latter only laughed at him.

"Shirk business? Nothing doing. I was strictly on the job listening to local items on treasure trails instead of powwowing with you all over the latest news reports from the Balkans. Soon as my pocket has a jingle again, I am to get to the French front if little old U. S.

won't give me a home uniform, but in the meantime Dona Luz Moreno is some reporter if she is humored, and I mean to camp alongside every chance I get. She has the woman at the _cantina_ backed off the map, and my future Spanish lessons will be under the wing of Dona Luz. Me for her!"

"Avaricious young scalawag!" grunted Pike. "You'd study African whistles and clicks and clacks if it blazed trail to that lost gold deposit! Say, I sort of held the others out there in front thinking I would let you get acquainted with little Billie, and you waste the time chinning about death in the desert, and dry camps to that black-and-tan talking machine."

Kit only laughed at him.

"A record breaker of a moon too!" grumbled the old man. "Lord!--lord!

at your age I'd crawled over h.e.l.l on a rotten rail to just sit alongside a girl like Billie--and you pa.s.s her up for an old hen with a mustache, and a gold trail!"

Kit Rhodes laughed some more as he got into the saddle and headed for the Granados corral, singing:

_Oh--I'll cut off my long yellow hair To dress in men's array, And go along with you, my dear Your waiting man to be!_

He droned out the doleful and incongruous love ballad of old lands, and old days, for the absurd reason that the youth of the world in his own land beat in his blood, and because in the night time one of the twinkling stars of heaven had dropped down the sky and become a girl of earth who touched a guitar and taught him the words of a Spanish serenade,--in case he should find a Mexican sweetheart along the border!

For to neither of the young, care-free things, had come a glimmer of fore-vision of the long tragic days, treasure trails and desert deaths, primitive devotions and unG.o.dly vengeance, in which the threads of their own lives would be entangled before those two ever heard the music of the patio again--together.

_If in Holland fields I met a maid All handsome fond and gay, And I should chance to love her What would my Mary say?_

_What would I say, dear Willie?

That I would love her too, And I would step to the one side That she might speak with you!_

"Yes, you would--not!" he stated in practical prose to no one in particular. "Not if you were our girl, would she, Pardner?"

Pardner tossed up his head in recognition of the comradeship in the tone, and Kit Rhodes became silent, and rode on to the corrals, happily smiling at some new thoughts.

CHAPTER III

A VERIFIED PROPHECY OF SEnORITA BILLIE

That smile was yet with him when he saw the herd and the vaqueros coming up from the water tanks, and noted Conrad and Tomas Herrara talking together beside Conrad's automobile.

The beat of the many hoofs prevented the two men from noting one horse near them, and words of Conrad came to him clearly.