Marah Ryan - The Treasure Trail - A Romance of the Land of Gold and Sunshine

“Oh,” commented Rhodes, “well, let the black have a little water, and lead him out of the way of mine. This gully isn’t wide enough to turn around in.”

Obediently the boy led the black to the sunken barrel catching seepage from the barrel under the drip. Rhodes tossed the sack back to the flat rock and noted an old canvas water bottle beside the heap, it was half full of something–not water, for it was uncorked and the mouth of it a-glitter with shimmering particles like diamond dust, and the same powder was over a white spot on the rock–the lad evidently was playing miller and pounding broken glass into a semblance of meal.

“Funny stunt, that!” he pondered, and, smiling, watched the frightened boy. “Herrara certainly is doing a bit of collecting vino to have a stock of bottles that size, and the poor kid’s nothing else to play with.”

He mounted and rode on, leaving Narcisco to lead the black to his mistress. He could not get out of his mind the fright in the eyes of the boy. Was Herrara a brute to his family, and had Narcisco taken to flight to hide his simple playthings under the mistaken idea that the horseman was his father returned early from the ranges?

That was the only solution Rhodes could find to the problem, though he milled it around in his mind quite a bit. Unless the boy was curiously weak-minded and frightened at the face of a stranger it was the only explanation he could find, yet the boys of Herrara had always struck him as rather bright. In fact Conrad had promoted Juanito to the position of special messenger; he could ride like the wind and never forget a word.

The shadows lengthened as he circled the little cañon of the Ojo Verde and noted the water dripping from the full tanks, ideal for the colt range for three months. He took note that Herrara was not neglecting anything, despite that collection of bottles. There was no wastage and the pipes connecting the tanks were in good condition.

He rode back, care free and content, through the fragrant valley. The cool air was following the lowering sun, and a thin mauve veil was drifting along the hills of mystery in the south; he sang as he rode and then checked the song to listen to the flutelike call of a lark. His lips curved in a smile as he heard it, and with it came the thought of the girl and the barred window of Vijil’s adobe.

She permeated the life of Granados just as the soft veil enwrapped the far hills, and she had seemed almost as far away if not so mysterious. Not once had he crossed her trail, and he heard she was no longer permitted to ride south of the line. The vaqueros commented on this variously according to their own point of view. Some of the Mexicans resented it, and in one way or another her name was mentioned whenever problems of the future were discussed. Singleton was regarded as temporary, and Conrad was a salaried business manager. But on a day to come, the señorita, as her mother’s daughter, would be their mistress, and the older men with families showed content at the thought.

Rhodes never could think of her as the chatelaine of those wide ranges. She was to him the “meadow-lark child” of jests and laughter, heard and remembered but not seen. She was the haunting music of youth meeting him at the gateway of a new land which is yet so old!

Some such vagrant thought drifted through his mind as the sweet calls of the drowsy birds cut the warm silence, now from some graceful palo verde along a barranca and again from the slender pedestal of an occotilla.

“Lucky you, for you get an answer!” he thought whimsically. “Amble along, Pardner, or the night witches get us!”

And then he circled a little at the north of the cañon, and the black horse, champing and fidgeting, was held there across the trail by its rider.

“We are seeing things in broad daylight, Pardner, and there ain’t no such animal,” decided Rhodes, but Pardner whinnied, and the girl threw up her hand.

“This time I am a highwayman, the far-famed terror of the ranges!” she called.

“Sure!” he conceded. “I’ve been thinking quite a while that your term must be about up.”

She laughed at that, and came alongside.

“Didn’t you suppose I might have my time shortened for good behavior?” she asked. “You never even ride our way to see.”

“Me? Why, child, I’m so busy absorbing kultur from your scientific manager that my spare moments for damsels in distress are none too plenty. You sent out nary a call, and how expect the lowest of your serfs to hang around?”

“Serf? That’s good!” she said skeptically. “And say, you must love Conrad about as much as Cap Pike does.”

“And that?”

“Is like a rattlesnake.”

“Don’t know that rattlesnake would be my first choice of comparison,” remarked Rhodes. “Back in Tennessee we have a variety beside which the rattlesnake is a gentleman; a rattlesnake does his best to give warning of intention, but the copperhead never does.”

“Copperhead! that’s funny, for you know Conrad’s hair is just about the color of copper, dusty copper, faded copper–copper with tin filings sifted through.”

“Don’t strain yourself,” laughed Rhodes. “That beautiful blondness makes him mighty attractive to our Mexican cousins.”

“They can have my share,” decided the girl. “I could worry along without him quite awhile. He manages to get rid of all the likeable range men muy pronto .”

Rhodes laughed until she stared at him frowningly, and then the delicious color swept over her face.

“Oh, you !” she said, and Rhodes thought of sweet peas, and pink roses in old southern gardens as her lips strove to be straight, yet curved deliciously. No one had mentioned to him how pretty she was; he had thought of her as a browned tom-boy, but instead she was a shell-pink bud on a slender stem, and wonder of wonders–she rode a side-saddle in Arizona!

She noticed him looking at it.

“Are you going to laugh at that, too?” she demanded.

“Why no, it hadn’t occurred to me. It sort of looks like home to me–our southern girls use them.”

She turned to him with a quick birdlike movement, her gray eyes softened and trusting.

“It was my mother’s saddle, a wedding present from the vaqueros of our ranches when she married my father. I am only beginning to use it, and not so sure of myself as with the one I learned on.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” he observed. “You certainly looked sure when you jumped that fence at Herrara’s.”

She glanced at him quickly, curious, and then smiling.

“And it was you, not the meadow lark! You are too clever!”

“And you didn’t answer, just turned your back on the lonely ranger,” he stated dolefully, but she laughed.

“This doesn’t look it, waiting to go home with you,” she retorted. “Cap Pike has been telling me about you until I feel as if I had known you forever. He says you are his family now, so of course that makes Granados different for you.”

“Why, yes. I’ve been in sight of Granados as much as twice since I struck this neck of the woods. Your manager seems to think my valuable services are indispensable at the southern side of this little world.”

“So that’s the reason? I didn’t know,” she said slowly. “One would have to be a seventh son of a seventh son to understand his queer ways. But you are going along home today, for I am a damsel in distress and need to be escorted.”

“You don’t look distressed, and I’ve an idea you could run away from your escort if you took a notion,” he returned. “But it is my lucky day that I had a hunch for this cañon trail and the Green Springs, and I am happy to tag along.”

They had reached Herrara’s corral and Rhodes glanced up the little gulch to the well. The flat rock there was stripped of the odd collection, and Narcisco stood at the corner of the adobe watching them somberly.