a narrow stage with painted drops.” He flung out a hand in broad gesture. “Look at the setting that God has painted here for us to play our parts in — the parts that He has chosen for us! Your mother played upon the same stage, and mine. Do you think them failures? And both were beautiful girls — as beautiful as you.”
“Oh, but you don’t understand after all, Custer!” she cried. “I thought you did.”
“I do understand that, for your sake, I must do my best to persuade you that you have as full a life before you here as upon the stage. I am fighting first for your happiness, Grace, and then for mine. If I fail, then I shall do all that I can to help you realize your ambition. If you cannot stay because you are convinced that you will be happier here, then I do not want you to stay.”
“Kiss me,” she demanded suddenly. “I am only thinking of it, anyway, so let’s not worry until there is something to worry about.”
CHAPTER II
THE MAN BENT his lips to hers again, and her arms stole about his neck. The calf, in the meantime, perhaps disgusted by such absurdities, had scampered off to try his brand-new legs again with the result that he ran into a low bush, turned a somersault, and landed on his back. The mother, still doubtful of the intentions of the newcomers, to whose malevolent presence she may have attributed the accident, voiced a perturbed low; whereupon there broke from the vicinity of the live oak a deep note not unlike the rumbling of distant thunder.
The man looked up.
“I think we’ll be going,” he said. “The Emperor has issued an ultimatum.”
“Or a bull, perhaps,” Grace suggested as they walked quickly toward her horse.
“Awful!” he commented as he assisted her into the saddle.
Then he swung to his own.
The Emperor moved majestically toward them, his nose close to the ground. Occasionally, he stopped, pawing the earth and throwing dust upon his broad back.
“Doesn’t he look wicked?” cried the girl. “Just look at those eyes!”
“He’s just an old bluffer,” replied the man. “However, I’d rather have you in the saddle, for you can’t always be sure just what they’ll do. We must call his bluff, though; it would never do to run from him — might give him bad habits.”
He rode toward the advancing animal, breaking into a canter as he drew near the bull and striking his booted leg with a quirt:
“Hi there, you old reprobate! Beat it!” he cried.
The bull stood his ground with lowered head and rumbled threats until the horseman was almost upon him; then, he turned quickly aside as the rider went past.
“That’s better,” remarked Custer as the girl joined him.
“You’re not a bit afraid of him, are you, Custer? You’re not afraid of anything.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t say that,” he demurred. “I learned a long time ago that most encounters consist principally of bluff. Maybe I’ve just grown to be a good bluffer. Anyhow, I’m a better bluffer than the Emperor. If the rascal had only known it, he could have run me ragged.”
As they rode up the side of the basin, the man’s eyes moved constantly from point to point, now noting the condition of the pasture grasses or again searching the more distant hills. Presently, they alighted upon a thin, wavering line of brown, which zigzagged down the opposite side of the basin from a clump of heavy brush that partially hid a small ravine, and crossed the meadow ahead of them.
“There’s a new trail, Grace, and it don’t belong there. Let’s go and take a look at it.”
They rode ahead until they reached the trail at a point where it crossed the bottom of the basin and started up the side they had been ascending. The man leaned above his horse’s shoulder and examined the trampled turf.
“Horses,” he said. “I thought so, and it’s been used a lot this winter. You can see even now where the animals slipped and floundered after the heavy rains.”
“But you don’t run horses in this pasture, do you?” asked the girl.
“No; and we haven’t run anything in it since last summer. This is the only bunch in it, and they were just turned in about a week ago. Anyway, the horses that made this trail were mostly shod. Now what in the world is anybody going up there for?” His eyes wandered to the heavy brush into which the trail disappeared upon the opposite side of the basin. “I’ll have to follow that up to-morrow — it’s too late to do it today.”
“We can follow it the other way toward the ranch,” she suggested.
They found the trail wound up the hillside and crossed the hogback in heavy brush, which, in many places, had been cut away to allow the easier passage of a horseman.
“Do you see,” asked Custer as they drew rein at the summit of the ridge, “that although the trail crosses here in plain sight of the ranch house, the brush would absolutely conceal a horseman from the view of any one at the house? It must run right down into Jackknife Cañon. Funny none of us have noticed it, for there’s scarcely a week that that trail isn’t ridden by some of us!”
As they descended into the cañon, they discovered why that end of the new trail had not been noticed. It ran deep and well marked through the heavy brush of a gully to a place where the brush commenced to thin, and, there, it branched into a dozen dim trails that joined and blended with the old, well-worn cattle paths of the hillside.
“Somebody’s mighty foxy,” observed the man; “but I don’t see what it’s all about. The days of cattle runners and bandits are over.”
“Just imagine!” exclaimed the girl. “A real mystery in our lazy, old hills!”
The man rode in silence and in thought. A herd of pure-bred Herefords, whose value would have ransomed half the crowned heads remaining in Europe, grazed in the several pastures that ran far back into those hills; and back there somewhere that trail led, but for what purpose? No good purpose, he was sure, or it had not been so cleverly hidden.
As they came to the trail which they called the Camino Corto, where it commenced at the gate leading from the old goat corral, the man jerked his thumb toward the west along it.
“They must come and go this way,” he said.
“Perhaps they’re the ones mother and I have heard passing at night,” suggested the girl. “If they are, they come right through your property below the house — not this way.”
He opened the gate from the saddle and they passed through, crossing the barranco and stopping for a moment to look at the pigs and talk with the herdsman. Then, they rode on toward the ranch house a half mile farther down the widening cañon. It stood upon the summit of a low hill, the declining sun transforming its plastered walls, its cupolas, the sturdy arches of its arcades into the semblance of a Moorish castle.
At the foot of the hill, they dismounted at the saddle-horse stable, tied their horses, and ascended the long flight of rough concrete steps toward the house. As they rounded the wild sumac bush at the summit, they were espied by those sitting in the patio around
