“Now Judge, you know I picked you because you would let me do whatever I pleased, and I don’t mean to be disappointed with you. Half the men at the inquest think that Kit Rhodes did come back to do that shooting, and you know Conrad and the very smooth rat of the Charities Society are accountable for that opinion. The Mexican who dragged in Kit’s name is one of Conrad’s men; it all means something! It’s a bad muddle, but Kit Rhodes and Cap Pike will wander back here some of these days, and I mean to have every bit of evidence for Kit to start in with. He suspected a lot, and all Granados combined to silence him–fool Granados!”

“But, just between ourselves, child, are you convinced Rhodes did not make the statement liable to be construed into a threat against Mr. Singleton?”

“Convinced nothing,” was the inelegant reply of his new ward. “I heard him say enough to hang him if evidence could be found that he was north of the line that morning, and that’s why it’s my job to take note of all the evidence on the other side. The horses did not kill themselves. That telegram concerning it did not send itself. Papa Phil did not shoot himself, and that telephone wire did not cut itself! My hunch is that those four things go together, and that’s a combination they can’t clear up by dragging in the name of a man who never saw the horses, and who was miles south in Sonora with Cap Pike when the other three things happened. Now can they?”

CHAPTER VII
IN THE PROVINCE OF ALTAR

There was a frog who lived in the spring:

Sing-song Kitty, can’t yo’ carry me, oh?
And it was so cold that he could not sing,

Sing-song Kitty, can’t yo’ carry me, oh?

Ke-mo! Ki-mo! Dear–oh my!

To my hi’–to my ho–to my–

“Oh! For the love of Mike! Bub, can’t you give a man a rest instead of piling up the agony? These old joints of mine are creakin’ with every move from desert rust and dry camps, and you with no more heart in you than to sing of springs,–cold springs!”

“They do exist, Cap.”

“Uh–huh, they are as real to us this minute as the red gold that we’ve trailed until we’re at the tag end of our grub stake. I tell you, Bub, they stacked the cards on us with that door of the old Soledad Mission, and the view of the gold cañon from there! Why, Whitely showed us that the mission door never did face the hills, but looked right down the valley towards the Rio del Altar just as the Soledad plaza does today; all the old Mexicans and Indians tell us that.”

“Well, we’ve combed over most of the arroyas leading into the Altar from Rancho Soledad, and all we’ve found is placer gravel; yet the placers are facts, and the mother lode is somewhere, Cap.”

“Worn down to pan dirt, that’s what!” grunted Pike. “I tell you these heathen sit around and dream lost mission tales and lost mine lies; dream them by the dozen to delude just such innocent yaps as you and me. They’ve nothing else to do between crops. We should have stuck to a white man’s land, north into Arizona where the Three Hills of Gold are waiting, to say nothing of the Lost Stone Cabin mine, lost not twenty miles from Quartzite, and in plain sight of Castle Dome. Now there is nothing visionary about that, Kit! Why, I knew an old-timer who freighted rich ore out of that mine thirty years ago, and even the road to it has been lost for years! We know things once did exist up in that country, Kit, and down here we are all tangled up with Mexican-Indian stories of ghosts and enchantments, and such vagaries. I’m fed up with them to the limit, for everyone of them we listen to is different from the last. We’ll head up into the Castle Dome country next time, hear me?”

“Sure, I hear,” agreed Kit cheerfully. “Perhaps we do lose, but it’s not so bad. Since Whitely sent his family north, he has intimated that Mesa Blanca is a single man’s job, and I reckon I can have it when he goes–as he will. Then in the month we have scouted free of Whitelys, we have dry washed enough dust to put you on velvet till things come our way. Say, what will you bet that a month of comfort around Nogales won’t make you hungry for the trail again?”

“A gold trail?” queried the weary and dejected Pike.

“Any old trail to any old place just so we keep ambling on. You can’t live contented under cover, and you know it.”

“Well,” decided Pike after a rod or two of tramping along the shaly, hot bed of a dry arroya. “I won’t bet, for you may be among the prophets. But while you are about it, I’d be thankful if you’d prophesy me a wet trail next time instead of skimpy mud holes where springs ought to be. I’m sick of dry camps, and so is Baby Buntin’.”

“‘Oh, there was a frog lived in the spring!’” chanted Kit derisively. “Cheer up, Cap, the worst is yet to come, for I’ve an idea that the gang of Mexican vaqueros we glimpsed from the butte at noon will just about muss up the water hole in Yaqui cañon until it will be us for a sleep there before the fluid is fit for a water bottle. ‘Oh, there was a frog lived in the spring!’ Buntin’ Baby, we’ll fish the frog out, and let you wallow in it instead, you game little dusty rat! Say, Pike, when we load up with grub again we’ll keep further west to the Cerrado Pintado. I’ll follow a hunch of my own next trip.”

The older man grunted disdain for the hunches of Kit, even while his eyes smiled response to the ever-living call of youth. To Rhodes there was ever a “next time.” He was young enough to deal in futures, and had a way with him by which friends were to be found for even unstable venturings with no backing more substantial than a “hunch.”

Not that Kit was gifted with any great degree of fatal beauty–men are not often pretty on the trail, unwashed, unshaven, and unshorn–added to which their equipment had reached the point where his most pretentious garment was a square of an Indian serape with a hole in the middle worn as a poncho, and adopted to save his coat and other shirt on the hard trail.

Cap Pike growled that he looked like a Mexican peon in that raiment, which troubled Kit not at all. He was red bronze from the desert days, and his blue eyes, with the long black lashes of some Celtic ancestor, looked out on the world with direct mild approval. They matched the boyish voice much given to trolling old-time ditties and sentimental foolishness.

He led the dappled roan over the wild dry “wash” where the sand was deep and slippery, and the white crust of alkali over all. Before him swayed the pack mules, and back of him Captain Pike sagged on the little gray burro, named in derision and affection, the Baby Bunting of the outfit.

The jauntiness was temporarily eliminated from the old prospector. Two months of fruitless scratching gravel when he had expected to walk without special delay to the great legendary deposit, had taken the sparkle of hope from the blue eyes, and he glanced perfunctorily at the walls of that which had once been a river bed.

“What in time do you reckon became of all the water that used to fill these dry gullies?” he asked querulously. “Why, it took a thousand years of floods to wash these boulders round, and then leave them high and dry when nicely polished. That’s a waste in nature I can’t figure out, and this godforsaken territory is full of them.”

“Well, you grouch, if we didn’t have this dry bed to skip along, we would be bucking the greasewood and cactus on the mesa above. So we get some favors coming our way.”

“Skip along,–me eye!” grunted Pike, as the burro toiled laboriously through the sand, and Kit shifted and stumbled over treacherous, half-buried boulders. “Say, Kit, don’t you reckon it’s time for Billie to answer my letter? It’s over eight weeks now, and mail ought to get in once a month.”

Rhodes grunted something about “mail in normal times, but these times were not normal,” and did not seem much interested in word from Granados.

He had not the heart, or else had too much, to tell the old man that the letter to Billie never reached her. When Whitely went north he put it in his coat pocket, and then changed his coat! Kit found it a month later and held it, waiting to find someone going out. He had not even mentioned it to Whitely on his return, for Whitely was having his own troubles, and could not spare a man for a four day trip to mail.

Whitely’s folks lived north of Naco, and he had gone there direct and returned without touching at Nogales, or hearing of the tragedy at Granados. The latest news of the Mexican revolutions, and the all-absorbing question as to whether the United States would or would not intervene, seemed all the news the worried Whitely had brought back. Even the slaughter of a dozen nations of Europe had no new features to a ranchman of Sonora,–it remained just slaughter. And one did not need to cross boundaries to learn of killings, for all the world seemed aflame, and every state in Mexico had its own wars,–little or big.

Then, in the records of the tumultuous days, there was scarce space for the press or people to give thought after the first day or two, to the colorless life going out in mystery under the cottonwoods of Granados, and no word came to tell Rhodes of the suspicion, only half veiled, against himself.

The ranch house of Mesa Blanca was twenty miles from the hacienda of Soledad, and a sharp spur of the Carrizal range divided their grazing lands. Soledad reached a hundred miles south and Mesa Blanca claimed fifty miles to the west, so that the herds seldom mingled, but word filtered to and from between the vaqueros, and Rhodes heard that Perez had come north from Hermosillo and that El Aleman, (the German) had made the two day trip in from the railroad, and had gone on a little pasear to the small rancherias with Juan Gonsalvo, the half-breed overseer. The vaqueros talked with each other about that, for there were no more young men among them for soldiers, only boys and old men to tend the cattle, and what did it mean?

The name of Rhodes was not easy for the Mexican tongue, and at Mesa Blanca his identity was promptly lost in the gift of a name with a meaning to them, El Pajarito, (the singer). Capitan Viajo, (the old captain), was accepted by Pike with equal serenity, as both men were only too well pleased to humor the Indian ranch people in any friendly concessions, for back of some of those alert black eyes there were surely inherited records of old pagan days, and old legends of golden veins in the hills.

The fact that they were left practically nameless in a strange territory did not occur to either of them, and would not have disturbed them if it had. They had met no American but Whitely since they first struck Mesa Blanca. One month Kit had conscientiously stuck to the ranch cares while Whitely took his family out, and Pike had made little sallies into the hills alone.

On Whitely’s return he had made an errand to Soledad and taken Rhodes and Pike along that they might view the crumbled walls of old Soledad Mission, back of the ranch house. The ancient rooms of the mission padres were now used principally as corrals, harness shop, and storage rooms.

The situation in itself was one of rare beauty;–those old padres knew!

It was set on a high plain or mesa, facing a wide valley spreading miles away to the south where mother-of-pearl mountains were ranged like strung jewels far against the Mexican sky. At the north, slate-blue foothills lifted their sharp-edged shoulders three miles away, but only blank walls of Soledad faced the hills, all portals of the old mission appeared to have faced south, as did Soledad. The door facing the hills was a myth. And as Rhodes stood north of the old wall, and searched its thirty-mile circle, he could understand how four generations of gold seekers had failed to find even a clue to the wealth those unknown padres had looked on, and sent joyous evidence of to the viceroy of the south. It would take years of systematic search to cover even half the visible range. A man could devote a long lifetime to a fruitless search there, and then some straying burro might uncover it for an Indian herder who would fill his poncho, and make a sensation for a week or two, and never find the trail again!

“It’s just luck!” said Kit thinking it all over as he tramped along the arroya bed, “it either belongs to you, or it doesn’t. No man on earth can buy it and make it stay, but if it is yours, no man can keep you from it entirely.”

“What the devil are you yammering about?” asked Pike grumpily.

“Oh, I was just thinking of how Whitely exploded our little balloon of hopes when he took us over to size up the prospects at Soledad. I wonder if Perez has no white help at all around that place. We did not even see the foreman.”

“He’s a half-breed, that Juan Gonsalvo. The Indians don’t like him. He’s from down Hermosillo way, and not like these Piman children of nature. He and Conrad are up to some devilment, but Whitely thinks Juan took the job, deluded as we are, with the notion that a gold mine was sticking up out of the ground at the Soledad corrals, and it was to be his find. You see, Bub, that story has gone the length of Mexico, and even over to Spain. Oh, we are not the only trailers of ghost gold; there are others!”

The slanting sun was sending shadows long on the levels, and the hills were looming to the east in softest tones of gray and amethyst; the whitish green of desert growths lay between, and much of brown desert yet to cross.

“We can’t make the foothills tonight even though there is an early moon,” decided Kit. “But we can break camp at dawn and make it before the sun is high, and the water will hold out that long.”

“It will hold for Buntin’ and the mules, but what of Pardner?” asked the older man. “He’s not used to this hard pan gravel scratching.”

“But he’s thoroughbred, and he can stand it twelve hours more if I can, can’t you, old pal?” The tall roan with the dot of black between the eyes returned his owner’s caress by nosing his bare neck, and the hand held up to smooth the black mane.

“I’ll be glad enough to see him safe across the border in old Arizona,” observed Pike. “I can’t see how the herders saved him for you at Mesa Blanca when their own stock was picked of its best for the various patriots charging through the settlements.”

“Some way, Miguel, the Indian vaquero, managed it, or got his girl to hide it out. Whitely confessed that his Indian cattlemen are the most loyal he can find down here.”

“But it’s not a white man’s land–yet, and I’m downright glad he’s shipped his family north. There’s always hell enough in Sonora, but it’s a dovecote to what it’s bound to be before the end comes, and so, it’s no place for white men’s wives.”

“Right you are! Say, what was it Whitely heard down in Sinaloa concerning the Enchanted Cañon mine?”

“Oh, some old priest’s tale–the same dope we got with a different slant to it. The gold nuggets from some shrine place where the water gushed muy fuerte, by a sycamore tree. Same old nuggets sent out with the message, and after that the insurrection of the Indians, and the priests who found it never lived to get out. Why, Bub, that is nearly two hundred years ago! Stop and think of the noble Castilians going over Sonora with a fine tooth comb for that trail ever since and then think of the nerve of us!”

“Well, I’m nearer to it anyway than the Dutchman who trekked in from the south last year with copies of the old mission reports as guide, for the Yaquis killed him, and took his records, while they hide my horse for me.”

“Huh! yes, and warn you to ride him north!”

“Correct;–but Pike, it was a warning, not a threat! Oh, I’m coming back all right, all right! That gold by the hidden stream sure has got me roped and hog tied for keeps.”

Pike growled good-natured disdain of his confidence, and suggested that the stream, which was probably only a measly mud hole, could have dropped to purgatory in an earthquake tremor since those first old mission days, or filled up with quicksand.

“Right you are, Cap. That’s a first-rate idea,” agreed Kit the irrepressible. “Next trip we’ll start looking for streams that were and are not; we’re in the bed of one now for that matter!”

“Somewhere ahead we should come into the trail south from Carracita,” observed Pike, “but I reckon you’d just as soon camp with Pard out of sight of the trail.”

There was silence for a bit as they plodded on up the wide dry bed of the river, and then Kit turned, glancing at the old man keenly.

“I didn’t fool you much when I called that gang ‘vaqueros,’ did I?” he observed. “Well, they didn’t look good to me, and I decided I’d have to fight for my horse if we crossed trails, and–it wastes a lot of time, fighting does.”

“No, you didn’t fool me. You’d be seven kinds of an idiot to walk in this gully of purgatory when you could ride safely on the mesa above, so I guessed you had a hunch it was the friendly and acquisitive patriots.”

“Pike, they were between us and the Palomitas rancherias of Mesa Blanca or I’d have made a try to get through and warn the Indians there. Those men had no camp women with them, so they were not a detachment of the irregular cavalry,–that’s what puzzles me. And their horses were fresh. It’s some new devilment.”

“There’s nothing new in Sonora, son. Things happen over and over the same.”

The shadows lengthened, and the blue range to the east had sharp, black edges against the saffron sky, and the men plodding along over sand and between boulders, fell silent after the little exchange of confidence as to choice of trail. Once Kit left the gully and climbed the steep grade to the mesa alone to view the landscape over, but slid and scrambled down,–hot, dusty, and vituperative.

“Not a sign of life but some carrion crows moving around in the blue without flop of a wing,” he grumbled. “Who started the dope that mankind is the chosen of the Lord? Huh! we have to scratch gravel for all we rake in but the birds of the air have us beat for desert travel all right, all right!”

“Well, Bub, if you saw no one’s dust it must be that gang were not headed for Palomitas or Whitely’s.”

“They could strike Palomitas, and circle over to the east road without striking Whitely’s home corrals,” said Kit thoughtfully.

“Sure they could, but what’s the object? If it’s cattle or horses they’re after the bigger ranch is the bigger haul?”

“Yes,–if it’s stock they’re after,” agreed Kit somberly.

“Why, lad, what–what’s got you now?”

“I reckon it’s the damned buzzards,” acknowledged the younger man. “I don’t know what struck me as I sat up there watching them. Maybe it’s their blackness, maybe it’s their provender, maybe it was just the loco of their endless drifting shadows, but for a minute up there I had an infernal sick feeling. It’s a new one on me, and there was nothing I could blame it on but disgust of the buzzards.”

“You’re goin’ too shy on the water, and never knew before that you had nerves,” stated Pike sagely. “I’ve been there; fought with a pardner once,–Jimmy Dean, till he had to rope me. You take a pull at the water bottle, and take it now.”

Kit did so, but shook his head.

“It touches the right spot, but it was not a thirst fancy. It was another thought and–O Bells of Pluto! Pike, let’s talk of something else! What was that you said about the Sinaloa priest story of the red gold? You said something about a new slant on the old dope.”

“Uh-huh!” grunted Pike. “At least it was a new slant to me. I’ve heard over and over about uprising of Indians, and death of the two priests who found their mine, but this Sinaloa legend has it that the Indians did not kill the priests, but that their gods did!”

“Their gods?”

“Yeh, the special gods of that region rose up and smote them. That’s why the Indians barred out other mission priests for so long a spell that no white man remembered just where the lost shrine of the red gold was. Of course it’s all punk, Bub, just some story of the heathen sheep to hide the barbecuing of their shepherds.”

“Maybe so, but I’ve as much curiosity as a pet coon. What special process did their gods use to put the friars out of commission?”

“Oh, lightning. The original priests’ report had it that the red gold was at some holy place of the tribes, a shrine of some sort. Well, you know the usual mission rule–if they can’t wean the Indian from his shrine, they promptly dig foundations and build a church there under heavenly instructions. That’s the story of this shrine of El Alisal where the priests started to build a little branch chapel or visita, for pious political reasons–and built it at the gold shrine. It went down in the priests’ letter or record as gold of rose, a deep red gold. Well, under protest, the Indians helped build a shack for a church altar under a great aliso tree there, but when lightning struck the priests, killed both and burned the shack, you can see what that manifestation would do to the Indian mind.”

Kit halted, panting from the heart-wearying trail, and looked Pike over disgustedly.

“Holy mackerel! Pike, haven’t you any imagination? You’ve had this new side to the story for over a month and never even cheeped about it! I heard you and Whitely talking out on the porch, but I didn’t hear this!”

“Why, Bub, it’s just the same old story, everyone of them have half a dozen different sides to it.”

“But this one explains things, this one has logic, this one blazes a trail!” declared the enthusiast. “This one explains good and plenty why no Indian has ever cheeped about it, no money could bribe him to it. Can’t you see? Of course that lightning was sent by their wrathy gods, of course it was! But do you note that place of the gold, and place of the shrine where the water rises, is also some point where there is a dyke of iron ore near, a magnet for the lightning? And that is not here in those sandy mesas and rocky barrancas–it’s to the west in the hills, Pike. Can’t you see that?”

“Too far from the old north and south trail, Bub. There was nothing to take padres so far west to the hills. The Indians didn’t even live there; only strayed up for nuts and hunting in the season.”

“Save your breath!” jeered Kit. “It’s me to hike back to Mesa Blanca and offer service at fifty dollars per, and live like a miser until we can hit the trail again. I may find a tenderfoot to buy that valley tract of mine up in Yuma, and get cash out of that. Oh, we will get the finances somehow! I’ll write a lawyer soon as we get back to Whitely’s–God! what’s that?”

They halted, holding breath to listen.

“A coyote,” said Pike.

“No, only one animal screams like that–a wildcat in the timber. But it’s no wildcat.”

Again the sound came. It was either from a distance or else muffled by the barrier of the hill, a blood-curdling scream of sickening terror.

A cold chill struck the men as they looked at each other.

“The carrion crows knew!” said Kit. “You hold the stock, Pike.”

He quickly slipped his rifle from its case, and started up the knoll.

“The stock will stand,” said Pike. “I’m with you.”

As the two men ran upward to the summit and away from the crunching of their own little outfit in the bed of the dry river, they were struck by the sound of clatter of hoofs and voices.

“Bub, do you know where we are?” asked Pike–“this draw slants south and has brought us fair into the Palomitas trail where it comes into the old Yaqui trail, and on south to hell.”

“To hell it is, if it’s the slavers again after women,” said Kit. “Come quiet.”

They reached the summit where cacti and greasewood served as shield, and slightly below them they saw, against the low purple hills, clouds of dust making the picture like a vision and not a real thing, a line of armed horsemen as outpost guards, and men with roped arms stumbling along on foot slashed at occasionally with a reata to hasten their pace. Women and girls were there, cowed and drooping, with torn garments and bare feet. Forty prisoners in all Kit counted of those within range, ere the trail curved around the bend of a hill.

“But that scream?” muttered Kit. “All those women are silent as death, but that scream?” Then he saw.

One girl was in the rear, apart from the rest of the group. A blond-bearded man spurred his horse against her, and a guard lashed at her to keep her behind. Her scream of terror was lest she be separated from that most woeful group of miserables. The horse was across the road, blocking it, as the man with the light beard slid from the saddle and caught her.

Kit’s gun was thrown into position as Pike caught his hand.

“No!” he said. “Look at her!”

For the Indian girl was quicker far. From the belt of her assailant she grasped a knife and lunged at his face as he held her. His one hand went to his cheek where the blood streamed, and his other to his revolver.

But even there she was before him, for she held the knife in both hands against her breast, and threw herself forward in the haze of dust.

The other guard dismounted and stared at the still figure on the trail, then kicked her over until he could see her face. One look was enough. He jerked the knife from the dead body, wiped it on her manta, and turned to tie a handkerchief over the cheek of the wounded horseman.

Kit muttered an oath of horror, and hastily drew the field glass from its case to stare at the man whose beard, a false one, had been torn off in the struggle. It was not easy to re-adjust it so that it would not interfere with the bandage, and thus he had a very fair view of the man’s features, and his thoughts were of Billie’s words to Conrad concerning slave raids in Sonora. Had Billie really suspected, or had she merely connected his Mexican friends with reports of raids for girls in the little Indian pueblos?

Pike reached for the glass, but by the time he could focus it to fit his eyes, the man had re-mounted, riding south, and there was only the dead girl left there where she fell, an Indian girl they both knew, Anita, daughter of Miguel, the major-domo of Mesa Blanca, whose own little rancheria was with the Pimans at Palomitas.

“Look above, Cap,” said Kit.

Above two pair of black wings swept in graceful curves against the saffron sky–waiting!

Rhodes went back to the outfit for pick and shovel, and when twilight fell they made a grave there in the dusky cañon of the desert.