By sunrise they were ready for the trail, light packs and filled canteens slung upon their shoulders. The car was backed against the bluff that would shade it from the scorching sunlight from early afternoon to sundown. Beside it were the embers of a mesquite-wood fire where they had boiled coffee and fried bacon in the cool of dawn. As a safeguard against the loss of his car, Rawley had disconnected the breaker points from the distributor and carried them, carefully wrapped, in his pocket. There would be no moving of the car under its own power until the points were replaced. And Johnny Buffalo had advised leaving a few things in the car, to ward off suspicion that their outfit had been cached. Furthermore, he had cunningly obliterated their tracks through the deep, fine sand to the ruins of the stamp mill. Even the keen, predatory eyes of an outlaw Indian could scarcely distinguish any trace of their many trips that way.
They crossed the wash, turned into the remnant of an old road leading up the bank to the level above, and followed a trail up the river. Once Johnny Buffalo stopped and pointed down the bank.
“The ferryboat went there,” he explained. “Much land has been eaten by the river since last I saw this place. Many houses stood here. They are gone. All is gone. My people are gone, like the town. Of Queo only have I heard, and him the white men hunt as they hunt the wolf.”
Rawley nodded, having no words for what he felt. There was something inexpressibly melancholy in this desolation where his grandfather had found riotous life. Of the fortunes gathered here, the fortunes lost—of the hopes fulfilled and the hopes crushed slowly in long, monotonous days of toil and disappointment—what man could tell? Only the river, rushing heedlessly past as it had hurried, all those years ago, to meet the lumbering little river boats struggling against its current with their burden of human emotions, only the river might have told how the town was born,—and how it had died. Or the grim hills standing there as they had stood since the land was in the making, looking down with saturnine calm upon the puny endeavors of men whose lives would soon enough cease upon earth and be forgotten. Rawley’s boot toe struck against something in the loose gravel,—a child’s shoe with the toe worn to a gaping mouth, the heel worn down to the last on the outer edge: dry as a bleached bone, warped by many a storm, blackened, doleful. Even a young man setting out in quest of his fortune, with a picturesque secret code in his pocket, may be forgiven for sending a thought after the child who had scuffed that coarse little shoe down here in El Dorado.
But presently Johnny Buffalo, leading the way briskly, his sharp old eyes taking in everything within their range as if he were eagerly verifying his memories of the place, turned from the trail along the river and entered the hills. His moccasined feet clung tenaciously to the steep places where Rawley’s high-laced mining boots slipped. The sun rays struck them fiercely and the “little stinging gnats” which Grandfather King had mentioned in his diary were there to pester them, poising vibrantly just before the eyes as if they waited only the opportunity to dart between the lids.
The thought that perhaps his grandfather had come that way, fifty years ago, filled the toil of climbing up the long gully with a peculiar interest. Fifty years ago these hills must have looked much the same. Fifty years ago, the prospect holes they passed occasionally may have been fresh-turned earth and rocks. Men searching for rich silver and gold might have been seen plodding along the hillsides; but the hills themselves could not have changed much. His grandfather had looked upon all this, and had divided his thoughts, perhaps, between the gold and his latest infatuation, the half-breed girl, Anita. And suddenly Rawley put a vague speculation into words:
“Hey, Johnny! Here’s a good place to make a smoke, in the shade.” He waited until the Indian had retraced the dozen steps between them. “Johnny, there was a beautiful half-breed girl here, when Grandfather made his last trip up the river. She was half Spanish. My grandfather mentioned her once or twice in his diary. Do you remember her?”
“There were many beautiful girls in my tribe,” Johnny Buffalo retorted drily. “What name did he call her?”
“Anita. It’s a pretty name, and it proves the Spanish, I should say.”
The old man stared at the opposite slope. His mouth grew thin-lipped and stern.
“My uncle, the chief, was betrayed in his old age. His youngest squaw loved a Spanish man with noble look. I have the tale from my older brothers, who told me. The child she bore was the child of the Spanish gentleman. My uncle’s youngest squaw—died.” Johnny Buffalo paused significantly. “The child was given to my mother to keep. Her name was Anita. She was very beautiful. I remember. Many visits Anita made with friends near this place. I think she is the same. It was not good for my sergeant to look upon her with love. I have heard my brothers whisper that Anita looked with soft eyes upon the white soldiers.”
Rawley’s young sympathies suffered a definite revulsion. If his grandfather’s dulce corazon were a coquette, her fruitless waiting for his return was not so beautifully tragic after all. There were other white soldiers stationed along the river, Rawley remembered, with a curl of the lip. His romantic imagination had not balked at the savage blood in her veins, since she was a beauty of fifty years ago. But he was a sturdy-souled youth with very old-fashioned notions concerning virtue. He finished his smoke and went on, feeling cheated by the cold facts he had almost forced from Johnny Buffalo.
They reached the head of that gulch, climbed a steep, high ridge where they must use hands as well as feet in the climbing, and dug heels into the earth in a descent even steeper. Rawley told himself once that he would just as soon start out to follow a crow through this country as to follow Johnny Buffalo. One word had evidently been omitted from the Indian’s English education by Grandfather King,—the word “detour.” Rawley thought of the straight-forward march of locusts he had once read about and wondered if Johnny Buffalo had taken lessons from them in his youth.
However, he consoled himself with the thought that a straight line to the mountain would undoubtedly shorten the distance. If the Indian could climb sneer walls of rock like a lizard, Rawley would attempt to follow. And they would ultimately arrive at their destination, though the glimpse he had obtained of the mountain from the ridge they had just crossed failed to confirm Johnny Buffalo’s assertion that it was one day’s travel. They had been walking three hours by Rawley’s watch, and the mountain looked even farther away than from El Dorado. But Johnny Buffalo was so evidently enjoying every minute of the hike through his native hills that Rawley could not bear to spoil his pleasure by even hinting that he was blazing a mighty rough trail.
They were working up another tortuous ravine where not even Johnny Buffalo could always keep a straight line by the sun. In places the walls overhung the gulch in shelving, weather-worn cliffs of soft limestone. Bowlders washed down from the heights made slow going, because they were half the time climbing over or around some huge obstruction; and because of the rattlesnakes they must look well where a hand or a foot was laid. Johnny Buffalo was still in the lead; and Rawley, for all his youth and splendid stamina was not finding the Indian too slow a pacemaker. Indeed, he was perfectly satisfied when the dozen feet between them did not lengthen to fifteen or twenty.
The mounting sun made the heat in that gully a terrific thing to endure. But the Indian did not lift the canteen to his mouth; nor did Rawley. Both had learned the foolishness of drinking too freely at the beginning of a journey. So, when Johnny Buffalo stopped suddenly in the act of passing around a jutting ledge, Rawley halted in his tracks and waited to see what was the reason.
The Indian glanced back at him and crooked a forefinger. Rawley set one foot carefully between two rocks, planted the other as circumspectly, and so, without a sound, stole up to Johnny Buffalo’s side. Johnny waited until their shoulders touched then leaned forward and pointed.
Up on the ridge a couple of hundred yards before them, a man moved crouching behind a bush, came into the open, bent lower and peered downward. His actions were stealthy; his whole manner inexpressibly furtive. His back was toward them, and the ridge itself hid the thing he was stalking.
“He’s after a deer, maybe. Or a mountain sheep,” Rawley whispered, when the man laid a rifle across a rock and settled lower on his haunches.
“Still, it is well that we see what he sees,” Johnny Buffalo whispered back. “We will stalk him as he stalks his kill.”
The Indian squirmed his shoulder out of the strap sling that held his rifle in its case behind him. With seeming deliberation, yet with speed he uncased the weapon, worked the lever gently to make sure the gun was chamber loaded, and motioned Rawley to follow him.
In the hills the old man had somehow slipped into the leadership, and now Rawley obeyed him without a word. They stole up the side of the gulch where the man on the ridge could not discover them without turning completely around; which would destroy his position beside the rock and risk the loss of a shot at his game. He seemed wholly absorbed in watching something on the farther side of the ridge, and it did not seem likely that he would hear them.
A little farther up, a ledge cutting across the head of the gulch hid him completely from the two. An impulse seized Rawley to cross the gulch there and to climb the ridge farther on, nearer the spot which the man had seemed to be watching. He caught the attention of Johnny Buffalo, whispered to him his desire, and received a nod of understanding and consent. Johnny would keep straight on, and so come up behind the fellow.
Unaccountably, Rawley wanted to hurry. He wanted to see the man’s quarry before a shot was fired. So, when a wrinkle in the ridge made easy climbing and afforded concealment, he went up a tiny gully, digging in his toes and trying to keep in the soft ground so that sliding rocks could not betray him.
Unexpectedly the deep wrinkle brought him up to a notch in the ridge, beyond which another gully led steeply downward. Immediately beneath him a narrow trail wound sinuously, climbing just beyond around the point of another hill. He could not see the man up on the ridge, but he could not doubt that the rifle was aimed at some point along this trail. He was standing on a rock, reconnoitering and expecting every moment to hear a shot, when the unmistakable sound of voices came up to him from somewhere below. He listened, his glance going from the ridge to the bit of trail that showed farther away on the point of the opposite hill. The thought flashed through his mind that the man with the rifle could easily have seen persons coming around that point; that he must be lying in wait. Whoever it was coming, they must pass along the trail directly beneath the watcher on the ridge. It would be an easy rifle shot; a matter of no more than a hundred yards downhill.
He stepped down off the rock and started running down the steep gully to the trail. He was, he judged, fully a hundred yards up the trail from where the man was watching above. He did not know who was coming; it did not matter. It was an ambush, and he meant to spoil it. So he came hurtling down the steep declivity, the lower third of which was steeper than he suspected. Had he made an appointment with the travelers to meet them at that spot, he could not possibly have kept it more punctually. For he slid down a ten-foot bank of loose earth and arrived sitting upright in the trail immediately under the nose of a bald-faced burro with a distended pack half covering it from sight.
There was no time for ceremony. Rawley flung up his arms and shooed the astonished animal back against another burro, so precipitately that he crowded it completely off the trail and down the steep bank. Rawley heard the sullen thud of the landing as he scrambled to his knees, glancing apprehensively over his shoulder as he did so. There had been no shot fired, but he could not be certain that the small flurry in the trail had been unobserved.
“Get back, around the turn!” he commanded guardedly and drove before him the two women who had been walking behind the burros.
The first, a fat old squaw with gray bangs hanging straight down to her eyebrows, scuttled for cover, the lead burro crowding past her and neatly overturning her in the trail. But a slim girl in khaki breeches and high-laced boots stood her ground, eyeing him with a slight frown from under a light gray Stetson hat.
“Get back, I say! A man on the ridge is watching this trail with a rifle across a rock. It may be Queo—get back!” He did not stop with words. He took the girl by the arm and bustled her forcibly around the sharp kink in the trail that would, he hoped, effectually hide them from the ridge.
“Are you quite insane?” The girl twitched her arm out of his grasp. “Or is this a joke you are perpetrating on the natives? I must say I fail to see the humor of it.”
“Climb that gully to the top and sneak along the ridge a couple of hundred yards, and you will see the point of the joke,” Rawley retorted with an access of dignity, perhaps to cover the extreme informality of his arrival.
“And why should any one—even Queo—want to shoot us?” True to her sex, the girl was refusing to abdicate her first position in the matter.
“How should I know? He may not be watching for you, particularly. From the ridge he probably saw your pack train around the turn above here, and he may have thought you were prospectors. I don’t know; I’m only guessing. What I do know is what I saw: a man with a rifle laid across a rock, up there, watching this trail. It may not be you he’s after; but I wouldn’t deliberately walk into range just to find out.”
“What would you do, then? Stay here forever?”
“Until my partner and I eliminate the risk, you’d better stay here.” Rawley’s tone was masterful. “I only came down to warn whoever was coming—walking into an ambush.”
The girl eyed him speculatively, with an exasperating little smile. “It all sounds very thrilling; very tenderfooty indeed. And in the meantime, there’s poor old Deacon down there on his back in the ditch. Do you always—er—arrive like that?”
Rawley turned his back on her indignantly and discovered the old squaw sitting solidly where the lead burro had placed her. She was very fat, and she filled that portion of the trail which she occupied. The red bandana was pushed back on her head, and her gray curtain of bangs was parted rakishly on one side. She was staring at Rawley fixedly, a look of terror in her eyes.
He went to her, meaning to help her up. Now that he recalled that first panicky moment, he remembered that the burro had deposited her with some force in her present position. She might be hurt.
But the old squaw put up her hands before her, palms out to ward him off. She cried out, a shrill expostulation in her own tongue which caused the girl to swing round quickly and hurry toward her.
“No, no! He isn’t a ghost! Whatever made you think of such a thing? He doesn’t mean to harm you—no, he is not a spirit. He merely fell down hill, and he wants to help you up. Are you hurt—Grandmother?” Her clear, gray-brown eyes went quickly, defiantly to Rawley’s face.
That young man could not repress a startled look, which traveled from the slim girl, indubitably white, to the squaw whimpering in the trail. She must be trying her own hand at a joke, he thought, just to break even with his fancied presumption in halting their leisurely progress down the trail.
From up on the ridge a rifle cracked. The three turned heads toward the thin, sinister report. They waited motionless for a moment. Then the girl spoke.
“That wasn’t fired in our direction,” she said, and immediately there came the sound of another shot. “And that’s not the same gun,” she added. “That sounds like an old-fashioned gun shooting black powder. Didn’t you hear the pow-w of it?”
“That would be Johnny Buffalo—my Indian partner,” said Rawley. “You folks stay here. I’m going back up there and see what’s doing.”
“Is that necessary?” The girl looked at him quickly. “I think you ought to help turn Deacon right side up before you go.” She leaned sidewise and peered down over the bank. “He’s in an awful mess. His pack is wedged between two bowlders, and his legs are sticking straight up in the air.”
Rawley sent a hasty glance down the bank. “He’s all right—he’s flopping his ears,” he observed reassuringly. “I’ll be back just as soon as I see how Johnny Buffalo is making out. That fellow may have got him. You stay back here out of sight. Promise me.” He looked at her earnestly, as if by the force of his will he would compel obedience.
Her eyes evaded the meeting. “Pickles will have to be rounded up,” she said. “He’s probably halfway to Nelson by this time. And there’s Grandmother to think of.”
“Well, you think of those things until I get back,” he said, with a swift smile. “I can’t leave my partner to shoot it out alone.”