the blue clear air of the Arizona morning a sage hen slipped with her young through the coarse grass by the irrigation ditch, and a flock of quail raised and fluttered before the quick rhythmic beat of a loping horse along the trail in the mesquite thicket.
The slender gallant figure of his rider leaned forward looking, listening at every turn, and at the forks of the trail where a clump of squat mesquite and giant sahuarro made a screen, she checked the horse, and held her breath.
“Good Pat, good horse!” she whispered. “They’ve got nothing that can run away from us. We’ll show them!”
Then a man’s quavering old voice came to her through the winding trail of the arroya. It was lifted tunefully insistent in an old-time song of the mining camps:
Oh, Mexico! we’re coming, Mexico!
Our six mule team,
Will soon be seen,
On the trail to Mexico!
“We made it, Pat!” confided the girl grimly. “We made it. Quiet now–quiet!”
She peered out through the green mesquite as Captain Pike emerged from the west arroya on a gray burro, herding two other pack animals ahead of him into the south trail.
He rode jauntily, his old sombrero at a rakish angle, his eyes bright with enthusiasm supplied by that which he designated as a morning “bracer,” and his long gray locks bobbed in the breeze as he swayed in the saddle and droned his cheerful epic of the trail:
A–and when we’ve been there long enough,
And back we wish to go,
We’ll fill our pockets with the shining dust
And then leave Mexico!
Oh–Mexico!
Good-bye my Mexico!
Our six mule team will then be seen
On the trail from Mexico.
“Hi there! you Balaam–get into the road and keep a-going, you ornery little rat-tailed son-of-a-gun! Pick up your feet and travel, or I’ll yank out your back bone and make a quirt out of it! For–”
My name was Captain Kidd as I sailed
As I sailed,
My name was Captain Kidd,
As I sailed!
My name was Captain Kidd
And most wickedly I di-i-id
All holy laws forbid
As I sailed!
The confessor of superlative wickedness droned his avowal in diminishing volume as the burros pattered along the white dust of the valley road, then the curve to the west hid them, and all was silence but for the rustle of the wind in the mesquite and the far bay of Singleton’s hounds circling a coyote.
But Pat pricked up his ears, and lifted his head as if feeling rather than hearing the growing thud of coming hoofs. The girl waited until they were within fifty feet, when she pursed up her lips and whistled the call of the meadow lark. It sounded like a fairy bugle call across the morning, and the roan was halted quickly at the forks of the road.
“Howdy, señorita?” he called softly. “I can’t see you, but your song beats the birds. Got a flag of truce? Willing to parley with the enemy?”
Then she emerged, eyeing him sulkily.
“You were going without seeing me!” she stated with directness, and without notice of the quizzical smile of comradeship.
“Certainly was,” he agreed. “When I got through the scrap with your disciple of kultur, my mug didn’t strike me as the right decoration for a maiden’s bower. I rode out of the scrap with my scratches, taking joy and comfort in the fact that he had to be carried.”
“There was no reason for your being so–so brutal!” she decided austerely.
“Lord love you, child, I didn’t need a reason–I only wanted an excuse. Give me credit! I got away for fear I’d go loco and smash Singleton for interfering.”
“Papa Phil only did his duty, standing for peace.”
“Huh, let the Neutral League do it! The trouble with Singleton is he hasn’t brains enough to lubricate a balance wheel,–he can’t savvy a situation unless he has it printed in a large-type tract. Conrad was scared for fear I’d stumbled on a crooked trail of his and would tell the boss, so he beat me to it with the lurid report that I made an assault on him! This looks like it–not!” and he showed the slashes in his sombrero to make room for the blue banda around his head. “Suppose you tell that Hun of yours to carry a gun like a real hombre instead of the tools of a second-story man. The neighbors could hear a gun, and run to my rescue.”
The girl regarded his flippancy with disapproval.
“He isn’t my Hun,” she retorted. “I could worry along without him on our map,–but after all, I don’t know a single definite thing against him. Anyway, it’s decided I’ve got to go away somewhere to school and be out of the ranch squabbles. Papa Phil thinks I get in bad company out here.”
“Meaning me?”
“Well, he said Captain Pike was demoralizing to the youthful mind. He didn’t mention you. And Cap certainly did go the limit yesterday!”
“How so?”
“Well, he went to the Junction for his outfit stuff–”
“Yes, and never showed up at the adobe until the morning star was in the sky!”
“I know,” she confessed. “I went with him. We stayed to see a Hart picture at the theater, and had the time of our young lives. At supper I announced that I was going to adopt Cap as a grandfather,–and then of course he had to go and queer me by filling up on some rank whiskey he had smuggled in with the other food! My stars!–he was put to bed singing that he’d ‘Hang his harp on a willow tree, and be off to the wars again’–You needn’t laugh!”
But he did laugh, his blue eyes twinkling at her recital.
“You poor kid! You have a hard time with the disreputables you pick up. Sure they didn’t warn you against speaking to this reprobate?”
“Sure nothing!” was the boyish reply. “I was to be docked a month’s spending money if I dared go near Pedro Vijil’s adobe again while you were there, which was very foolish of Papa Phil!” she added judicially. “I reckon he forgot they tried that before.”
“And what happened?”
“I went down and borrowed double the amount from old Estevan, the trader at the Junction, and gave him an order against the ranch. Then Cap and I sneaked out a couple of three-year-olds and raced them down in the cottonwood flats against some colts brought down by an old Sierra Blanca Apache. We backed our nags with every peso, and that old brown murderer won! But Cap and I had a wonderful day while our coin lasted, and–and you were going away without saying good-bye!”
Kit Rhodes, who had blankly stated that he owned his horse and saddle and little beyond, looked at the spoiled plucky heiress of Granados ranches, and the laughter went out of his eyes.
She was beyond reason loveable even in her boyish disdain of restriction, and some day she would come back from
