The Heritage of the Sioux

THE HERITAGE OF THE SIOUX

By B.M. Bower

I WHEN GREEN GRASS COMES

II THE DAUGHTER OF A CHIEF

III TO THE VICTORS THE SPOILS

IV LOVE WORDS FOR ANNIE

V FOR THE GOOD OF THE COMPANY

VI “I GO WHERE WAGALEXA CONKA SAY”

VII ADVENTURE COMES SMILING

VIII THE SONG OF THE OMAHA

IX RIDERS IN THE BACKGROUND

X DEPUTIES ALL

XI ALL THIS WAR-TALK ABOUT INJUNS

XII THE WILD-GOOSE CHASE

XIII SET AFOOT

XIV ONE PUT OVER ON THE BUNCH

XV “NOW, DANG IT, RIDE!”

XVI ANNIE-MANY-PONIES WAITS

XVII APPLEHEAD SHOWS THE STUFF HE IS MADE OF

XVIII IN THE DEVIL'S FRYING-PAN

XIX PEACE TALK

XX LUIS ROJAS TALKS

XXI “WAGALEXA CONKA--COLA!”

THE HERITAGE OF THE SIOUX

CHAPTER I. WHEN GREEN GRASS COMES

Old Applehead Furrman, jogging home across the mesa from Albuquerque,

sniffed the soft breeze that came from opal-tinted distances and felt

poignantly that spring was indeed here. The grass, thick and green

in the sheltered places, was fast painting all the higher ridges

and foot-hill slopes, and with the green grass came the lank-bodied,

big-kneed calves; which meant that roundup time was at hand. Applehead

did not own more than a thousand head of cattle, counting every hoof

that walked under his brand. And with the incipient lethargy of old

age creeping into his habits of life, roundup time was not with him the

important season it once had been; for several years he had been content

to hire a couple of men to represent him in the roundups of the larger

outfits--men whom he could trust to watch fairly well his interests. By

that method he avoided much trouble and hurry and hard work--and escaped

also the cares which come with wealth.

But this spring was not as other springs had been. Something--whether an

awakened ambition or an access of sentiment regarding range matters, he

did not know--was stirring the blood in Applehead's veins. Never, since

the days when he had been a cowpuncher, had the wide spaces called to

him so alluringly; never had his mind dwelt so insistently upon the

approach of spring roundup. Perhaps it was because he heard so

much range talk at the ranch, where the boys of the Flying U were

foregathered in uneasy idleness, their fingers itching for the feel

of lariat ropes and branding irons while they gazed out over the wide

spaces of the mesa.

So much good rangeland unharnessed by wire fencing the Flying U boys had

not seen for many a day. During the winter they had been content to ride

over it merely for the purpose of helping to make a motion picture of

the range, but with the coming of green grass, and with the reaction

that followed the completion of the picture that in the making had

filled all their thoughts, they were not so content. To the inevitable

reaction had been added a nerve racking period of idleness and

uncertainty while Luck Lindsay, their director, strove with the Great

Western Film Company in Los Angeles for terms and prices that would make

for the prosperity of himself and his company.

In his heart Applehead knew, just as the Happy Family knew, that Luck

had good and sufficient reasons for over-staying the time-limit he had

given himself for the trip. But knowing that Luck was not to be blamed

for his long absence did not lessen their impatience, nor did it stifle

the call of the wide spaces nor the subtle influence of the winds that

blew softly over the uplands.

By the time he reached the ranch Applehead had persuaded himself that

the immediate gathering of his cattle was an imperative duty and that he

himself must perform it. He could not, he told himself, afford to wait

around any longer for luck. Maybe when he came Luck would have nothing

but disappointment for them, Maybe--Luck was so consarned stubborn when

he got an idea in his head--maybe be wouldn't come to any agreement with

the Great Western. Maybe they wouldn't offer him enough money, or leave

him enough freedom in his work; maybe he would “fly back on the rope”

at the last minute, and come back with nothing accomplished. Applehead,

with the experience gleaned from the stress of seeing luck produce one

feature picture without any financial backing whatever and without half

enough capital, was not looking forward with any enthusiasm to another

such ordeal. He did not believe, when all was said and done, that the

Flying U boys would be so terribly eager to repeat the performance.

He did believe--or he made himself think he believed--that the only

sensible thing to do right then was to take the boys and go out and

start a roundup of his own. It wouldn't take long--his cattle weren't so

badly scattered this year.

“Where's Andy at?” he asked Pink, who happened to be leaning boredly

over the gate when he rode up to the corral. Andy Green, having been

left in nominal charge of the outfit when Luck left, must be consulted,

Applehead supposed.

“Andy? I dunno. He saddled up and rode off somewhere, a while ago,” Pink

answered glumly. “That's more than he'll let any of us fellows do; the

way he's close-herding us makes me tired! Any news?”

“Ain't ary word from Luck--no word of NO kind. I've about made up my

mind to take the chuck-wagon to town and stock it with grub, and hit

out on roundup t'morrer or next day. I don't see as there's any sense

in setting around here waitin' on Luck and lettin' my own work slide.

Chavez boys, they started out yest'day, I heard in town. And if I don't

git right out close onto their heels, I'll likely find myself with

a purty light crop uh calves, now I'm tellin' yuh!” Applehead, so

completely had he come under the spell of the soft spring air and the

lure of the mesa, actually forgot that he had long been in the habit of

attending to his calf crop by proxy.

Pink's face brightened briefly. Then he remembered why they were being

kept so close to the ranch, and he grew bored again.

“What if Luck pulled in before we got back, and wanted us to start work

on another picture?” he asked, discouraging the idea reluctantly. Pink

had himself been listening to the call of the wide spaces, and the mere

mention of roundup had a thrill for him.

“Well, now, I calc'late my prope'ty is might' nigh as important as

Luck's pitcher-making,” Applehead contended with a selfishness born of

his newly awakened hunger for the far distances. “And he ain't sent ary

word that he's coming, or will need you boys immediate. The chances is

we could go and git back agin before Luck shows up. And if we don't,” he

argued speciously, “he can't blame nobody for not wantin' to set around

on their haunches all spring waiting for 'im. I'd do a lot fer luck;

I've DONE a lot fer 'im. But it ain't to be expected I'd set around

waitin' on him and let them danged Mexicans rustle my calves. They'll do

it if they git half a show--now I'm tellin' yuh!”

Pink did not say anything at all, either in assent or argument; but old

Applehead, now that he had established a plausible reason for his sudden

impulse, went on arguing the case while he unsaddled his horse. By the

time he turned the animal loose he had thought of two or three other

reasons why he should take the boys and start out as soon as possible to

round up his cattle. He was still dilating upon these reasons when Andy

Green rode slowly down the slope to the corral.

“Annie-Many-Ponies come back yet?” he asked of Pink, as he swung down

off his horse. “Annie? No; ain't seen anything of her. Shunky's been

sitting out there on the hill for the last hour, looking for her.”

“Fer half a cent,” threatened old Applehead, in a bad humor because

his arguments had not quite convinced him that he was not meditating a

disloyalty, “I'd kill that danged dawg. And if I was runnin' this bunch,

I'd send that squaw back where she come from, and I'd send her quick.

Take the two of 'em together and they don't set good with me, now I'm

tellin' yuh! If I was to say what I think, I'd say yuh can't never

trust an Injun--and shiny hair and eyes and slim build don't make 'em no

trustier. They's something scaley goin' on around here, and I'd gamble

on it. And that there squaw's at the bottom of it. What fur's she ridin'

off every day, 'n' nobody knowin' where she goes to? If Luck's got the

sense he used to have, he'll git some white girl to act in his pitchers,

and send that there squaw home 'fore she double-crosses him some way or

other.”

“Oh, hold on, Applehead!” Pink felt constrained to defend the girl.

“You've got it in for her 'cause her dog don't like your cat. Annie's

all right; I never saw anything outa the way with her yet.”

“Well, now, time you're old as I be, you'll have some sense, mebby,”

Applehead quelled. “Course you think Annie's all right. She's purty, 'n'

purtyness in a woman shore does cover up a pile uh cussedness--to a

feller under forty. You're boss here, Andy. When she comes back, you ask

'er where she's been, and see if you kin git a straight answer. She'll

lie to yuh--I'll bet all I got, she'll lie to yuh. And when a woman lies

about where she's been to and what she's been doin', you can bet there's

something scaley goin' on. Yuh can't fool ME!”

He turned and went up to the small adobe house where he had lived in

solitary contentment with his cat Compadre until Luck Lindsay, seeking a

cheap headquarters for his free-lance company while he produced the big

Western picture which filled all his mind, had taken calm and unheralded

possession of the ranch. Applehead did not resent the invasion; on

the contrary, he welcomed it as a pleasant change in his monotonous

existence. What he did resent was the coming, first, of the little black

dog that was no more than a tramp and had no right on the ranch, and

that broke all the laws of decency and gratitude by making the life of

the big blue cat miserable. Also he resented the uninvited arrival of

Annie-Many-Ponies from the Sioux reservation in North Dakota.

Annie-Many-Ponies had not only come uninvited--she had remained in

defiance of Luck's perturbed insistence that she should go back home.

The Flying U boys might overlook that fact because of her beauty, but

Applehead was not so easily beguiled--especially when she proceeded

to form a violent attachment to the little black dog, which she called

Shunka Chistala in what Applehead considered a brazen flaunting of her

Indian blood and language, Between the mistress of Shunka Chistala and

the master of the cat there could never be anything more cordial than

an armed truce. She had championed that ornery cur in a way to make

Applehead's blood boil. She had kept the dog in the house at night,

which forced the cat to seek cold comfort elsewhere. She had pilfered

the choicest table scraps for the dog--and Compadre was a cat of

fastidious palate and grew thin on what coarse bits were condescendingly

left for him.

Applehead had not approved of Luck's final consent that

Annie-Many-Ponies should stay and play the Indian girl in his big

picture. In the mind of Applehead there lurked a grudge that found all

the more room to grow because of the natural bigness and generosity of

his nature. It irked him to see her going her calm way with that proud

uptilt to her shapely head and that little, inscrutable smile when she

caught the meaning of his grumbling hints.

Applehead was easy-going to a fault in most things, but his dislike

had grown in Luck's absence to the point where he considered himself

aggrieved whenever Annie-Many-Ponies saddled the horse which had been

tacitly set aside for her use, and rode off into the mesa without a word

of explanation or excuse. Applehead reminded the boys that she had not

acted like that when luck was home. She had stayed on the ranch where

she belonged, except once or twice, on particularly fine days, when she

had meekly asked “Wagalexa Conka,” as she persisted in calling Luck, for

permission to go for a ride.

Applehead itched to tell her a few things about the social, moral,

intellectual and economic status of an “Injun squaw”--but there was

something in her eye, something in the quiver of her finely shaped

nostrils, in the straight black brows, that held his tongue quiet when

he met her face to face. You couldn't tell about these squaws. Even

luck, who knew Indians better than most--and was, in a heathenish tribal

way, the adopted son of Old Chief Big Turkey, and therefore Annie's

brother by adoption--even Luck maintained that Annie-Many-Ponies

undoubtedly carried a knife concealed in her clothes and would use it if

ever the need arose. Applehead was not afraid of Annie's knife. It was

something else, something he could not put into words, that held him

back from open upbraidings.

He gave Andy's wife, Rosemary, the mail and stopped to sympathize with

her because Annie-Many-Ponies had gone away and left the hardest part of

the ironing undone. Luck had told Annie to help Rosemary with the work;

but Annie's help, when Luck was not around the place, was, Rosemary

asserted, purely theoretical.

“And from all you read about Indians,” Rosemary complained with a pretty

wrinkling of her brows, “you'd think the women just LIVE for the sake

of working. I've lost all faith in history, Mr. Furrman. I don't believe

squaws ever do anything if they can help it. Before she went off riding

today, for instance, that girl spent a whole HOUR brushing her hair and

braiding it. And I do believe she GREASES it to make it shine the way

it does! And the powder she piles on her face--just to ride out on

the mesa!” Rosemary Green was naturally sweet-tempered and exceedingly

charitable in her judgements; but here, too, the cat-and-dog feud had

its influence. Rosemary Green was a loyal champion of the cat Compadre;

besides, there was a succession of little irritations, in the way of

dishes left unwashed and inconspicuous corners left unswept, to warp her

opinion of Annie-Many-Ponies.

When he left Rosemary he went straight down to where the chuck-wagon

stood, and began to tap the tires with a small rock to see if they would

need resetting before he started out. He decided that the brake-blocks

would have to be replaced with new ones--or at least reshod with old

boot-soles. The tongue was cracked, too; that had been done last winter

when Luck was producing The Phantom Herd and had sent old Dave Wiswell

down a rocky hillside with half-broken bronks harnessed to the wagon, in

a particularly dramatic scene. Applehead went grumblingly in search of

some baling wire to wrap the tongue. He had been terribly excited and

full of enthusiasm for the picture at the time the tongue was cracked,

but now he looked upon it merely as a vital weakness in his roundup

outfit. A new tongue would mean delay; and delay, in his present mood,

was tragedy.

He couldn't find any old baling wire, though he had long been accustomed

to tangling his feet in snarled bunches of it when he went forth in

the dark after a high wind. Until now he had not observed its unwonted

absence from the yard. For a long while he had not needed any wire to

mend things, because Luck had attended to everything about the ranch,

and if anything needed mending he had set one of the Happy Family at the

task.

His search led him out beyond the corrals in the little dry wash that

sometimes caught and held what the high winds brought rolling that way.

The wash was half filled with tumble-weed, so that Applehead was forced

to get down into it and kick the weeds aside to see if there was

any wire lodged beneath. His temper did not sweeten over the task,

especially since he found nothing that he wanted.

Annie-Many-Ponies, riding surreptitiously up the dry wash--meaning to

come out in a farther gully and so approach the corral from the west

instead of from the east--came upon Applehead quite unexpectedly. She

stopped and eyed him aslant from under her level, finely marked brows,

and her eyes lightened with relief when she saw that Applehead looked

more startled than she had felt. Indeed, Applehead had been calling Luck

uncomplimentary names for cleaning the place of everything a man might

need in a hurry, and he was ashamed of himself.

“Can't find a foot of danged wire on the danged place!” Applehead kicked

a large, tangled bunch of weeds under the very nose of the horse which

jumped sidewise. “Never seen such a maniac for puttin' things where a

feller can't find 'em, as what Luck is.” He was not actually speak

ing to Annie-Many-Ponies--or if he was he did not choose to point his

remarks by glancing at her.

“Wagalexa Conka, he heap careful for things belong when they stay,”

Annie-Many-Ponies observed in her musical contralto voice which always

irritated Applehead with its very melody. “I think plenty wire all fold

up neat in prop-room. Wagalexa Conka, he all time clean this studio from

trash lie around everywhere.”

“He does, hey?” Applehead's sunburnt mustache bristled like the whiskers

of Compadre when he was snarling defiance at the little black dog.

The feud was asserting itself. “Well, this here danged place ain't no

studio! It's a ranch, and it b'longs to ME, Nip Furrman. And any balin'

wire on this ranch is my balin' wire, and it's got a right to lay around

wherever I want it t' lay. And I don't need no danged squaw givin' me

hints about 'how my place oughta be kept--now I'm tellin' yuh!”

Annie-Many-Ponies did not reply in words. She sat on her horse, straight

as any young warchief that ever led her kinsmen to battle, and looked

down at Applehead with that maddening half smile of hers, inscrutable as

the Sphinx her features sometimes resembled. Shunka Chistala (which

is Sioux for Little Dog) came bounding over the low ridge that hid the

ranch buildings from sight, and wagged himself dislocatingly up to her.

Annie-Many-Ponies frowned at his approach until she saw that Applehead

was aiming a clod at the dog, whereupon she touched her heels to the

horse and sent him between Applehead and her pet, and gave Shunka

Chistala a sharp command in Sioux that sent him back to the house with

his tail dropped.

For a full half minute she and old Applehead looked at each other

in open antagonism. For a squaw, Annie-Many-Ponies was remarkably

unsubmissive in her bearing. Her big eyes were frankly hostile; her half

smile was, in the opinion of Applehead, almost as frankly scornful.

He could not match her in the subtleties of feminine warfare. He took

refuge behind the masculine bulwark of authority.

“Where yuh bin with that horse uh mine?” he demanded harshly. “Purty

note when I don't git no say about my own stock. Got him all het up and

heavin' like he'd been runnin' cattle; I ain't goin' to stand for havin'

my horses ran to death, now I'm tellin' yuh! Fer a squaw, I must say

you're gittin' too danged uppish in your ways around here. Next time

you want to go traipsin' around the mesa, you kin go afoot. I'm goin' to

need my horses fer roundup.”

A white girl would have made some angry retort; but Annie-Many-Ponies,

without looking in the least abashed, held her peace and kept that

little inscrutable smile upon her lips. Her eyes, however, narrowed in

their gaze.

“Yuh hear me?” Poor old Applehead had never before attempted to browbeat

a woman, and her unsubmissive silence seemed to his bachelor mind

uncanny.

“I hear what Wagalexa Conka tell me.” She turned her horse and rode

composedly away from him over the ridge.

“You'll hear a danged sight more'n that, now I'm tellin' yuh!” raved

Applehead impotently. “I ain't sayin' nothin' agin Luck, but they's

goin' to be some danged plain speakin' done on some subjects when

he comes back, and given' squaws a free rein and lettin' 'em ride

rough-shod over everybody and everything is one of 'era. Things is

gittin' mighty funny when a danged squaw kin straddle my horses and ride

'em to death, and sass me when I say a word agin it--now I'm tellin'

yuh!”

He went mumbling rebellion that was merely the effervescing of a

mood which would pass with the words it bred, to the store-room which

Annie-Many-Ponies had called the prop-room. He found there, piled upon

a crude shelf, many little bundles of wire folded neatly and with the

outer end wound twice around to keep each bundle separate from the

others. Applehead snorted at what he chose to consider a finicky streak

in his secret idol, Luck Lindsay; but he took two of the little bundles

and went and wired the wagon tongue. And in the work he found a salve of

anticipatory pleasure, so that he ended the task to the humming of the

tune he had heard a movie theatre playing in town as he rode by on his

way home.

CHAPTER II. THE DAUGHTER OF A CHIEF

In spite of Andy Green's plea for delay until they knew what Luck meant

to do, Applehead went on with his energetic preparations for a spring

roundup of his own. Some perverse spirit seemed to possess him and drive

him out of his easy-going shiftlessness. He offered to hire the Happy

Family by the day, since none of them would promise any permanent

service until they heard from Luck. He put them to work gathering up

the saddle-horses that had been turned loose when Luck's picture was

finished, and repairing harness and attending to the numberless details

of reorganizing a ranch long left to slipshod make-shifts.

The boys of the Flying U argued while they worked, but in spite of

themselves the lure of the mesa quickened their movements. They were

supposed to wait for Luck before they did anything; an they all knew

that. But, on the other hand, Luck was supposed to keep them informed as

to his movements; which he had not done. They did not voice one single

doubt of Lucks loyalty to them, but human nature is more prone to

suspicion than to faith, as every one knows. And Luck had the power and

the incentive to “double-cross” them if he was the kind to do such a

thing. He was manager for their little free-lance picture company which

did not even have a name to call itself by. They had produced one big

feature film, and it was supposed to be a cooperative affair from

start to finish. If Luck failed to make good, they would all be broke

together. If Luck cleared up the few thousands that had been their hope,

why--they would all profit by the success, if Luck--

I maintain that they showed themselves of pretty good metal, in that

not even Happy Tack, confirmed pessimist that he was, ever put the least

suspicion of Luck's honesty into words. They were not the kind to

decry a comrade when his back was turned. And they had worked with Luck

Lindsay and had worked for him. They had slept under the same roof

with him, had shared his worries, his hopes, and his fears. They did not

believe that Luck had appropriated the proceeds of The Phantom Herd

and had deliberately left them there to cool their heels and feel the

emptiness of their pockets in New Mexico, while he disported himself in

Los Angeles; they did--not believe that--they would have resented the

implication that they harbored any doubt of him. But for all that, as

the days passed and he neither came nor sent them any word, they yielded

more and more to the determination of Applehead to start out upon his

own business, and they said less and less about Luck's probable plans

for the future.

And then, just when they were making ready for an early start the next

morning; just when Applehead had the corral full of horses and his

chuckwagon of grub; just when the Happy Family had packed their war-bags

with absolute necessities and were justifying themselves in final

arguments with Andy Green, who refused point-blank to leave the;

ranch--then, at the time a dramatist would have chosen for his entrance

for an effective “curtain,” here came Luck, smiling and driving a huge

seven-passenger machine crowded to the last folding seat and with the

chauffeur riding on the running board where Luck had calmly banished him

when he skidded on a sharp turn and came near upsetting them.

Applehead, stowing a coil of new rope in the chuck-wagon, took off his

hat and rubbed his shiny, pink pate in dismay. He was, for the moment,

a culprit caught in the act of committing a grave misdemeanor if not

an actual felony. He dropped the rope and went forward with dragging

feet--ashamed, for the first time in his life, to face a friend.

Luck gave the wheel a twist, cut a fine curve around the windmill and

stopped before the house with as near a flourish as a seven-passenger

automobile loaded from tail-lamp to windshield can possibly approach.

“There. That's the way I've been used to seeing cars behave,” Luck

observed pointedly to the deposed chauffeur as he slammed the door open

and climbed out. “You don't have to act like you're a catepillar on a

rail fence, to play safe. I believe in keeping all four wheels on the

ground--but I like to see 'em turn once in awhile. You get me?” He

peeled a five-dollar banknote off a roll the size of his wrist, handed

it to the impressed chauffeur and dismissed the transaction with a

wave of his gloved hand. “You're all right, brother,” he tempered his

criticism, “but I'm some nervous about automobiles.”

“I noticed that myself,” drawled a soft, humorous voice from the rear.

“This is the nearest I ever came to traveling by telegraph.”

Luck grinned, waved his hand in friendly greeting to the Happy Family

who were taking long steps up from the corral, and turned his attention

to the unloading of the machine. “Howdy, folks!--guess yuh thought I'd

plumb lost the trail back,” he called to them over his shoulder while he

dove after suitcases, packages of various sizes and shapes, a box or

two which the Happy Family recognized as containing “raw stock,” and a

camera tripod that looked perfectly new.

From the congested tonneau a tall, slim young woman managed to descend

without stepping on anything that could not bear being stepped upon. She

gave her skirts a little shake, pushed back a flying strand of hair and

turned her back to the machine that she might the better inspect her

immediate surroundings.

Old Dave Wiswell, the dried little man who never had much to say, peered

at her sharply, hesitated and then came forward with his bony hand

outstretched and trembling with eagerness. “Why, my gorry! If it ain't

Jean Douglas, my eyes are lyin' to me,” he cried.

“It isn't Jean Douglas--but don't blame your eyes for that,” said the

girl, taking his hand and shaking it frankly. “Jean Douglas Avery,

thanks to the law that makes a girl trade her name for a husband. You

know Lite, of course--dad, too.”

“Well, well--my gorry I I should say I do! Howdy, Aleck?” He shook the

hand of the old man Jean called dad, and his lips trembled uncertainly,

seeking speech that would not hurt a very, very sore spot in the heart

of big Aleck Douglas. “I'm shore glad to meet yuh again,” he stuttered

finally, and let it go at that “And how are yuh, Lite? Just as long and

lanky as ever--marriage shore ain't fattened you up none. My gorry! I

shore never expected to see you folks away down here!”

“Thought you heard me say when I left that the Great Western had offered

to get me Jean Douglas for leading lady,” Luck put in, looking around

distractedly for a place to deposit his armload of packages. “That's

one thing that kept me--waiting for her to show up. Of course a man

naturally expects a woman to take her own time about starting--”

“I like that!” Jean drawled. “We broke up housekeeping and wound up a

ranch and traveled a couple of thousand miles in just a week's time.

We--we ALMOST hit the same gait you did from town out here today!”

Rosemary Green came out then, and Luck turned to greet her and to

present Jean to her, and was pleased when he saw from their eyes that

they liked each other at first sight. He introduced the Happy Family

and Applehead to her and to her husband, Lite Avery, and her father.

He pulled a skinny individual forward and announced that this was Pete

Lowry, one of the Great Western's crack cameramen; and another chubby,

smooth-cheeked young man he presented as Tommy Johnson, scenic artist

and stage carpenter. And he added with a smile for the whole bunch,

“We're going to produce some real stuff from now on believe me, folks!”

In the confusion and the mild clamor of the absence-bridging questions

and hasty answers, two persons had no part. Old Applehead, hard-ridden

by the uneasy consciousness of his treason to Luck, leaned against a

porch post and sucked hard at the stem of an empty pipe. And just beyond

the corner out of sight but well within hearing, Annie-Many-Ponies stood

flattened against the wall and listened with fast-beating pulse for the

sound of her name, spoken in the loved voice of Wagalexa Conka. She, the

daughter of a chief and Luck's sister by tribal adoption--would he

not miss her: from among those others who welcomed him? Would he not

presently ask: “Where is Annie-Many-Ponies?” She knew just how he would

turn and search for her with his eyes.

She knew just how his voice would sound when he asked for her. Then,

after a minute--when he had missed her and had asked for her--she would

come and stand before him. And he would take her hand and say to that

white woman; “This is my Indian sister, Annie-Many-Ponies, who played

the part of the beautiful Indian girl who died so grandly in The Phantom

Herd. This is the girl who plays my character leads.” Then the white

girl, who was to be his leading woman, would not feel that she was the

only woman in the company who could do good work for Luck.

Annie-Many-Ponies had worked in pictures since she was fifteen and did

only “atmosphere stuff” in the Indian camps of Luck's arranging. She was

wise in the ways of picture jealousies. Already she was jealous of this

slim woman with the dark hair and eyes and the slow smile that always

caught one's attention and held it. She waited. She wanted Wagalexa

Conka to call her in that kindly, imperious voice of his--the voice of

the master. This leading woman would see, then, that here was a girl

more beautiful for whom Luck Lindsay felt the affection of family ties.

She waited, flattened against the wall, listening to every word that

was spoken in that buzzing group. She saw the last bundle taken from

the machine, and she saw Luck's head and shoulders disappear within the

tonneau, making sure that it was the last bundle and that nothing had

been overlooked. She saw the driver climb in, slam the fore-door shut

after him and bend above the starter. She saw the machine slide out of

the group and away in a wide circle to regain the trail. She saw the

group break and start off in various directions as duty or a passing

interest led. But Wagalexa Conka never once seemed to remember that she

was not there. Never once did he speak her name.

Instead, just as Rosemary was leading the way into the house, this slim

young woman they called Jean glanced around inquiringly. “I thought you

had a squaw working for you,” she said in that soft, humorous voice of

hers. “The one who did the Indian girl in The Phantom Herd. Isn't she

here any more?”

“Oh, yes!” Luck stopped with one foot on the porch. “Sure! Where is

Annie? Anybody know?”

“She was around here just before you came,” said Rosemary carelessly. “I

don't know where she went.”

“Hid out, I reckon,” Luck commented. “Injuns are heap shy of meeting

strangers. She'll show up after a little.”

Annie-Many-Ponies stooped and slid safely past the window that might

betray her, and then slipped away behind the house. She waited, and she

listened; for though the adobe walls were thick, there were open windows

and her hearing was keen. Within was animated babel and much laughter.

But not once again did Annie-Many-Ponies hear her name spoken. Not once

again did Wagalexa Conka remember her. Save when she, that slim woman

who bad come to play his leads, asked to see her, she had been wholly

forgotten. Even then she had been named a squaw. It was as though they

had been speaking of a horse. They did not count her worthy of a place

in their company, they did not miss her voice and her smile.

“Hid out,” Wagalexa Conka had said. Well, she would hide out, then--she,

the daughter of a chief of the Sioux; she, whom Wagalexa Conka had been

glad to have in his picture when he was poor and had no money to pay

white leading women. But now he had much money; now he could come in a

big automobile, with a slim, white leading woman and a camera man and

scenic artist and much money in his pocket; and she--she was just

a squaw who had hid out, and who would show up after a while and be

grateful if he took her by the hand and said, “How!”

With so many persons moving eagerly here and there, none but an Indian

could have slipped away from that house and from the ranch without being

seen. But though the place was bald and open to the four winds save for

a few detached outbuildings, Annie-Many-Ponies went away upon the mesa

and no one saw her go.

She did not dare go to the corral for her horse. The corral was in plain

sight of the house, and the eyes of Wagalexa Conka were keen as the

eye of the Sioux, his foster brothers. He would see her there. He would

call: “Annie, come here!” and she would go, and would stand submissive

before him, and would be glad that he noticed her; for she was born of

the tribe where women obey their masters, and the heritage of centuries

may not be lightly lain aside like an outgrown garment. She felt that

this was so; that although her heart might burn with resentment because

he had forgotten and must be reminded by a strange white woman that the

“squaw” was not present, still, if he called her she must go, because

Wagalexa Conka was master there and the master must be obeyed.

Down the dry wash where Applehead had hunted for baling wire she went

swiftly, with the straight-backed, free stride of the plainswoman who

knows not the muscle-bondage of boned girdle. In moccasins she walked;

for a certain pride of race, a certain sense of the picture-value of

beaded buckskin and bright cloth, held her fast to the gala dress of her

people, modified and touched here and there with the gay ornaments

of civilization. So much had her work in the silent drama taught her.

Bareheaded, her hair in two glossy braids each tied with a big red bow,

she strode on and on in the clear sunlight of spring.

Not until she was more than two miles from the ranch did she show

herself upon one of the numberless small ridges which, blended together

in the distance, give that deceptive look of flatness to the mesa. Even

two miles away, in that clear air that dwarfs distance so amazingly,

Wagalexa Conka might recognize her if he looked at her with sufficient

attention. But Wagalexa Conka, she told herself with a flash of her

black eyes, would not look. Wagalexa Conka was too busy looking at that

slim woman he had brought with him.

That ridge she crossed, and two others. On the last one she stopped

and stood, straight and still, and stared away towards the mountains,

shading her eyes with one spread palm. On a distant slope a small herd

of cattle fed, scattered and at peace. Nearer, a great hawk circled

slowly on widespread wings, his neck craned downward as if he

were watching his own shadow move ghostlike over the grass.

Annie-Many-Ponies, turning her eyes disappointedly from the empty mesa,

envied the hawk his swift-winged freedom.

When she looked again toward the far slopes next the mountains, a black

speck rolled into view, the nucleus of a little dust cloud. Her face

brightened a little; she turned abruptly and sought easy footing down

that ridge, and climbed hurriedly the longer rise beyond. Once or twice,

when she was on high ground, she glanced behind her uneasily, as does

one whose mind holds a certain consciousness of wrongdoing. She did not

pause, even then, but hurried on toward the dust cloud.

On the rim of a shallow, saucer-like basin that lay cunningly concealed

until one stood upon the very edge of it, Annie-Many-Ponies stopped

again and stood looking out from under her spread palm. Presently the

dust cloud moved over the crest of a ridge, and now that it was so

much closer she saw clearly the horseman loping abreast of the

dust. Annie-Many-Ponies stood for another moment watching, with that

inscrutable half smile on her lips. She untied the cerise silk kerchief

which she wore knotted loosely around her slim neck, waited until the

horseman showed plainly in the distance and then, raising her right hand

high above her head, waved the scarf three times in slow, sweeping half

circles from right to left. She waited, her eyes fixed expectantly upon

the horseman. Like a startled rabbit he darted to the left, pulled in

his horse, turned and rode for three or four jumps sharply to the right;

stopped short for ten seconds and then came straight on, spurring his

horse to a swifter pace.

Annie-Many-Ponies smiled and went down into the shallow basin and seated

herself upon the wide, adobe curbing of an old well that marked, with

the nearby ruins of an adobe house, the site, of an old habitation of

tragic history. She waited with the absolute patience of her race for

the horseman had yet a good two miles to cover. While she waited she

smiled dreamily to herself and with dainty little pats and pulls she

widened the flaring red bows on her hair and retied the cerise scarf in

its picturesque, loose knot about her throat. As a final tribute to

that feminine instinct which knows no race she drew from some cunningly

devised hiding place a small, cheap “vanity box,” and proceeded very

gravely to powder her nose.

CHAPTER III. TO THE VICTORS THE SPOILS

“Hey, boys!” Luck Lindsay shouted to Applehead and one or two of

the Happy Family who were down at the chuck--wagon engaged in uneasy

discussion as to what Luck would say when he found out about their

intention to leave. “Come on up here--this is going to be a wiping out

of old scores and I want to get it over with!”

“Well, now, I calc'late the fur's about to fly,” Applehead made dismal

prophecy, as they started to obey the summons. “All 't su'prises me is

't he's held off this long. Two hours is a dang long time fer Luck to

git in action, now I'm tellin' yuh!” He took off his hat and polished

his shiny pate, as was his habit when perturbed. “I'm shore glad we

had t' wait and set them wagon-tires,” he added. “We'd bin started this

mornin' only fer that.”

“Aw, we ain't done nothing,” Happy Jack protested in premature self

defense. “We ain't left the ranch yet. I guess a feller's got a right to

THINK!”

“He has, if he's got anything to do it with,” Pink could not forbear to

remark pointedly.

“Well, if a feller didn't have, he'd have a fat chance borrying from

YOU,” Happy Jack retorted.

“Well, by cripes, I ain't perpared to bet very high that there's a

teacupful uh brains in this hull outfit,” Big Medicine asserted. “We

might a knowed Luck'd come back loaded fer bear; we WOULD a knowed it if

we had any brains in our heads. I'm plumb sore at myself. By cripes, I

need kickin'!”

“You'll get it, chances are,” Pink assured him grimly.

Luck was in the living room, sitting at a table on which were scattered

many papers Scribbled with figures. He had a cigarette in his lips, his

hat on the back of his head and a twinkle in his eyes. He looked up and

grinned as they came reluctantly into the room.

“Time's money from now on, so this is going to be cut short as

possible,” he began with his usual dynamic energy showing in his tone

and in the movements of his hands as he gathered up the papers and

evened their edges on the table top. “You fellows know how much you put

into the game when we started out to come here and produce The Phantom

Herd, don't you? If you don't, I've got the figures here. I guess

the returns are all in on that picture--and so far She's brought us

twenty-three thousand and four hundred dollars. She went big, believe

me! I sold thirty states. Well, cost of production is-what we put in the

pool, plus the cost of making the prints I got in Los. We pull out the

profits according to what we put in--sabe? I guess that suits everybody,

doesn't it?”

“Sure,” one astonished voice gulped faintly. The others were dumb.

“Well, I've figured it out that way--and to make sure I had it right I

got Billy Wilders, a pal of mine that works in a bank there, to figure

it himself and check up after me. We all put in our services--one man's

work against every other man's work, mine same as any of you. Bill

Holmes, here, didn't have any money up, and he was an apprentice--but

I'm giving him twenty a week besides his board. That suit you, Bill?”

“I guess it's all right,” Bill answered in his colorless tone.

Luck, being extremely sensitive to tones, cocked an eye up at Bill

before he deliberately peeled, from the roll he drew from his pocket,

enough twenty dollar notes to equal the number of weeks Bill had worked

for him. “And that's paying you darned good money for apprentice work,”

he informed him drily, a little hurt by Bill's lack of appreciation. For

when you take a man from the streets because he is broke and hungry and

homeless, and feed him and give him work and clothes and three meals a

day and a warm bed to sleep in, if you are a normal human being you are

going to expect a little gratitude from that man; Luck had a flash of

disappointment when he saw how indifferently Bill Holmes took those

twenties and counted them before shoving them into his pocket. His own

voice was more crisply businesslike when he spoke again.

“Annie-Many-Ponies back yet? She's not in on the split either. I'm

paying her ten a week besides her board. That's good money for a squaw.”

He counted out the amount in ten dollar bills and snapped a rubber band

around them.

“Now here is the profit, boys, on your winter's work. Applehead comes

in with the use of his ranch and stock and wagons and so on. Here,

pard--how does this look to you?” His own pleasure in what he was doing

warmed from Luck's voice all the chill that Bill Holmes had sent into

it. He smiled his contagious smile and peeled off fifty dollar banknotes

until Applehead's eyes popped.

“Oh, don't give me so dang much!” he gulped nervously when Luck had

counted out for him the amount he had jotted down opposite his name.

“That there's moren the hul dang ranch is worth if I was t' deed it over

to yuh, Luck! I ain't goin' to take--”

“You shut up,” Luck commanded him affectionately. “That's yours--now,

close your face and let me get this thing wound up. Now--WILL you quit

your arguing, or shall I throw you out the window?”

“Well, now, I calc'late you'd have a right busy time throwin' ME out

the window,” Applehead boasted, and backed into a corner to digest this

astonishing turn of events.

One by one, as their names stood upon his list, Luck called the boys

forward and with exaggerated deliberation peeled off fifty-dollar notes

and one-hundred-dollar notes to take their breath and speech from them.

With Billy Wilders, his friend in the bank, to help him, he had boyishly

built that roll for just this heart-warming little ceremony. He might

have written checks to square the account of each, but he wanted to make

their eyes stand out, just as he was doing. He had looked forward to

this half hour more eagerly than any of them guessed; he had, with his

eyes closed, visualized this scene over more than one cigarette, his

memory picturing vividly another scene wherein these same young men

had cheerfully emptied their pockets and planned many small personal

sacrifices that he, Luck Lindsay, might have money enough to come here

to New Mexico and make his one Big Picture. Luck felt that nothing less

than a display of the profits in real money could ever quite balance

that other scene when all the Happy Family had in the world went in the

pot and they mourned because it was so little.

“Aw, I betche Luck robbed a bank er something!” Happy Jack stuttered

with an awkward attempt to conceal his delight when his name was

called, his investment was read and the little sheaf of currency that

represented his profit was laid in his outstretched palm.

“It's me for the movies if this is the way they pan out,” Weary declared

gleefully. “Mamma! I didn't know there was so much money in the world!”

“I'll bet he milked Los Angeles dry of paper money,” Andy Green asserted

facetiously, thumbing his small fortune gloatingly. “Holding out

anything for yourself, Luck? We don't want to be hogs.”

“I'm taking care of my interests--don't you worry about that a minute,”

Luck stated complacently. “I held mine out first. That wipes the

slate--and cleans up the bank-roll. I maintain The Phantom Herd

was so-o-ome picture, boys. They'll be getting it here in 'Querque

soon--we'll all go in and see it.”

“Now we're all set for a fresh start. And while you're all here I'll

just put you up to date on what kind of a deal I made with Dewitt. We

come in under the wing of Excelsior, and our brand name will be Flying

U Feature Film--how does that hit you? You boys are all on a straight

board-and-salary basis--thirty dollars a week, and it's up to me to

make you earn it!” He grinned and beckoned to Jean Douglas Avery and her

companions in the next room.

“Mrs. Avery, here, is our leading woman--keeping the name of Jean

Douglas, since she made it valuable in that Lazy A serial she did a

year or so ago. Lite is on the same footing as the rest of you boys.

Her father will be my assistant in choosing locations and so on. Tommy

Johnson, as I said, is another assistant in another capacity, that of

scenic artist and stage carpenter. Pete Lowry, here, is camera man and

Bill Holmes will be his assistant. The rest of you work wherever I need

you--a good deal the way we did last winter. Annie-Many-Ponies stays

with us as character lead and is in general stock. Rosemary--” he

stopped and smiled at her understandingly--“Rosemary draws fifteen a

week--oh, don't get scared! I won't give you any foreground stuff!

just atmosphere when I need it, and general comforter and mascot of the

company!”

Luck may have stretched a point there, but if he did it was merely a

technical one. Rosemary Green was hopelessly camera-shy, but he could

use her in background atmosphere, and when it came to looking after the

physical and mental welfare of the bunch she was worth her weight in any

precious metal you may choose to name.

“You better put me down as camp cook and dishwasher, Luck Lindsay,”

Rosemary protested, blushing.

“No--thank the Lord you won't have to cook for this hungry bunch any

longer. I've got a Mexican hired and headed this way. There'll be no

more of that kind of thing for you, lady--not while you're with us.

“Now, boys, let's get organized for action. Weather's perfect--Lowry's

been raving over the light, all the way out from town. I've got a range

picture all blocked out--did it while I was waiting in Los for Jean to

show up. Done anything about roundup yet, Applehead?”--

Poor old Applehead, with his guilty conscience and his soft-hearted

affection for Luck so deeply stirred by the money laid in his

big-knuckled hand, shuffled his feet and cleared his throat and did not

get one intelligible word past his dry tongue.

“If you haven't,” Luck hurried on, spurred by his inpatient energy,

“I want to organize and get out right away with a regular roundup

outfitchuck-wagon, remuda and all--see what I mean I While I'm getting

the picture of the stuff I want, we can gather and brand your calves.

That way, all my range scenes will be of the real thing. I may want to

throw the Chavez outfit in with ours, too, so as to get bigger stuff.

I'll try and locate Ramon Chavez and see what I can do. But anyway,

I want the roundup outfit ready to start just as soon as

possible--tomorrow, if we could get it together in time. How about that

cracked tongue on the chuck-wagon? Anybody fixed that?”

“We-ell, I wired it up so'st it's as solid as the rest uh the runnin'

gear,” Applehead confessed shamefacedly, rolling his eyes apprehensively

at the flushed faces of his fellow traitors.

“Yuh did? Good! Tires need setting, if I recollect--”

“Er--I had the boys set the tires, 'n'--”

“Fine! I might have known you fellows would put things in shape while

I was gone! How about the horses? I thought I saw a bunch in the big

corral--”

“I rustled enough saddle horses to give us all two apiece,” Applehead

admitted, perspiring coldly. “'Tain't much of a string, but--”

“You did? Sounds like you've been reading my mind, Applehead. Now we'll

grubstake the outfit--”

“Er--well, I took the chuck-wagon in yest'day and loaded 'er up with

grub fer two weeks,” blurted Applehead heroically. “I was figurin'--”

“Good! Couldn't ask better. Applehead, you sure are there when it comes

to backing a man's play. If I haven't said much about how I stand toward

you fellows it isn't because I don't appreciate every durned one of

you.”

The Happy Family squirmed guiltily and made way for Applehead, who was

sidling toward the open door, his face showing alarming symptoms of

apoplexy. Their confusion Luck set down to a becoming modesty. He went

on planning and perfecting details. Standing as he did on the threshold

of a career to which his one big success had opened the door, he was

wholly absorbed in making good.

There was nothing now to balk his progress, he told himself. He had his

company, he had the location for his big range stuff, he had all the

financial backing any reasonable man could want. He had a salary that

in itself gauged the prestige he had gained among producers, and as an

added incentive to do the biggest work of his life he had a contract

giving him a royalty on all prints of his pictures in excess of a fixed

number. Better than all this, he had big ideals and an enthusiasm for

the work that knew no limitations.

Perhaps he was inclined to dream too big; per-haps he assumed too great

an enthusiasm on the part of those who worked with him--I don't know

just where he did place the boundary line. I do know that he never once

suspected the Happy Family of any meditated truancy from the ranch and

his parting instructions to “sit tight.” I also know that the Happy

Family was not at all likely to volunteer information of their lapse.

And as for Applehead, the money burned his soul deep with remorse; so

deep that he went around with an abject eagerness to serve Luck that

touched that young man as a rare example of a bone-deep loyalty that

knows no deceit. Which proves once more how fortunate it is that we

cannot always see too deeply into the thoughts and motives of our

friends.

CHAPTER IV. LOVE WORDS FOR ANNIE

In Tijeras Arroyo the moon made black shadows where stood the tiny

knolls here and there, marking frequently the windings of dry washes

where bushes grew in ragged patches and where tall weeds of mid-May

tangled in the wind. The roundup tents of the Flying U Feature Film

Company stood white as new snow in the moonlight, though daylight showed

them an odd, light-blue tint for photographic purposes. On a farther

slope cunningly placed by the scenic artist to catch the full sunlight

of midday, the camp of the Chavez brothers gleamed softly in the magic

light.

So far had spring roundup progressed that Luck was holding the camp in

Tijeras Arroyo for picture-making only. Applehead's calves were branded,

to the youngest pair of knock-kneed twins which Happy Jack found curled

up together cunningly hidden in a thicket. They had been honored with a

“close-up” scene, those two spotted calves, and were destined to further

honors which they did not suspect and could not appreciate.

They slept now, as slept the two camps upon the two slopes that lay

moon-bathed at midnight. Back where the moon was making the barren

mountains a wonderland of deep purple and black and silvery gray and

brown, a coyote yapped a falsetto message and was answered by one nearer

at hand--his mate, it might be. In a bush under the bank that made of

it a black blot in the unearthly whiteness of the sand, a little

bird fluttered uneasily and sent a small, inquiring chirp into the

stillness. From somewhere farther up the arroyo drifted a faint,

aromatic odor of cigarette smoke.

Had you been there by the bush you could not have told when

Annie-Many-Ponies passed by; you would not have seen her--certainly you

could not have heard the soft tread of her slim, moccasined feet. Yet

she passed the bush and the bank and went away up the arroyo, silent as

the shadows themselves, swift as the coyote that trotted over a nearby

ridge to meet her mate nearer the mountains. Sol following much the same

instinct in much the same way, Annie-Many-Ponies stole out to meet the

man her heart timidly yearned for a possible mate.

She reached the rock-ledge where the smoke odor was strongest, and she

stopped. She saw Ramon Chavez, younger of the Chavez brothers who were

ten-mile-off neighbors of Applehead, and who owned many cattle and much

land by right of an old Spanish grant. He was standing in the shadow of

the ledge, leaning against it as they of sun-saturated New Mexico always

lean against anything perpendicular and solid near which they happen to

stand. He was watching the white-lighted arroyo while he smoked, waiting

for her, unconscious of her near presence.

Annie-Many-Ponies stood almost within reach of him, but she did not make

her presence known. With the infinite wariness of her race she waited to

see what he would do; to read, if she might, what were his thoughts--his

attitude toward her in his unguarded moments. That little, inscrutable

smile which so exasperated Applehead was on her lips while she watched

him.

Ramon finished that cigarette, threw away the stab and rolled and

lighted another. Still Annie-Many-Ponies gave no little sign of her

presence. He watched the arroyo, and once he leaned to one side and

stared back at his own quiet camp on the slope that had the biggest and

the wildest mountain of that locality for its background. He settled

himself anew with his other shoulder against the rock, and muttered

something in Spanish--that strange, musical talk which Annie-Many-Ponies

could not understand. And still she watched him, and exulted in his

impatience for her coming, and wondered if it would always be lovelight

which she would see in his eyes.

He was not of her race, though in her pride she thought him favored when

she named him akin to the Sioux. He was not of her race, but he was tall

and he was straight, he was dark as she, he was strong and brave and he

bad many cattle and much broad acreage. Annie-Many-Ponies smiled upon

him in the dark and was glad that she, the daughter of a chief of the

Sioux, had been found good in his sight.

Five minutes, ten minutes. The coyote, yap-yap-yapping in the broken

land beyond them, found his mate and was silent. Ramon Chavez, waiting

in the shadow of the ledge, muttered a Mexican oath and stepped out into

the moonlight and stood there, tempted to return to his camp--for he,

also, had pride that would not bear much bruising.

Annie-Many-Ponies waited. When he muttered again and threw his cigarette

from him as though it had been something venomous; when he turned his

face toward his own tents and took a step forward, she laughed softly, a

mere whisper of amusement that might have been a sleepy breeze stirring

the bushes somewhere near. Ramon started and turned his face her way;

in the moonlight his eyes shone with a certain love-hunger which

Annie-Many-Ponies exulted to see--because she did not understand.

“You not let moon look on you,” she chided in an undertone, her

sentences clipped of superfluous words as is the Indian way, her voice

that pure, throaty melody that is a gift which nature gives lavishly to

the women of savage people. “Moon see, men see.”

Ramon swung back into the shadow, reached out his two arms to fold her

close and got nothing more substantial than another whispery laugh.

“Where are yoh,sweetheart?” He peered into the shadow where she had

been, and saw the place empty. He laughed, chagrined by her elusiveness,

yet hungering for her the more.

“You not touch,” she warned. “Till priest say marriage prayers, no man

touch.”

He called her a devil in Spanish, and she thought it a love-word and

laughed and came nearer. He did not attempt to touch her, and so,

reassured, she stood close so that he could see the pure, Indian profile

of her face when she raised it to the sky in a mute invocation, it might

be, of her gods.

“When yoh come?” he asked swiftly, his race betrayed in tone and accent.

“I look and look--I no see yoh.”

“I come,” she stated with a quiet meaning. “I not like cow, for make

plenty noise. I stand here, you smoke two times, I look.”

“You mus' be moonbeam,” he told her, reaching out again, only to lay

hold upon nothing. “Come back, sweetheart. I be good.”

“I not like you touch,” she repeated. “I good girl. I mind priest, I

read prayers, I mind Wagalexa Conka--” There she faltered, for the last

boast was no longer the truth.

Ramon was quick to seize upon the one weak point of her armor. “So? He

send yoh then to talk with Ramon at midnight? Yoh come to please yoh

boss?”

Annie-Many-Ponies turned her troubled face his way. “Wagalexa Conka

sleep plenty. I not ask,” she confessed. “You tell me come here you tell

me must talk when no one hear. I come. I no ask Wagalexa Conka--him say

good girl stay by camp. Him say not walk in night-time, say me not talk

you. I no ask; I just come.”

“Yoh lov' him, perhaps? More as yoh lov' me? Always I see yoh look at

him--always watch, watch. Always I see yoh jomp when he snap the finger;

always yoh run like train dog. Yoh lov' him, perhaps? Bah! Yoh dirt

onder his feet.” Ramon did not seriously consider that any woman whom

he favored could sanely love another man more than himself, but to

his nature jealousy was a necessary adjunct of lovemaking; not to

have displayed jealousy would have been to betray indifference, as he

interpreted the tender passion.

Annie-Many-Ponies, woman-wily though she was by nature, had little

learning in the devious ways of lovemaking. Eyes might speak, smiles

might half reveal, half hide her thoughts; but the tongue, as her tribe

had taught her sternly, must speak the truth or keep silent. Now she

bent her head, puzzling how best to put her feelings toward Luck Lindsay

into honest words which Ramon would understand.

“Yoh lov' him, perhaps--since yoh all time afraid he be mad.” Ramon

persisted, beating against the wall of her Indian taciturnity which

always acted as a spur upon his impetuosity. Besides, it was important

to him that he should know just what was the tie between these two. He

had heard Luck Lindsay speak to the girl in the Sioux tongue. He had

seen her eyes lighten as she made swift answer. He had seen her always

eager to do Luck's bidding--had seen her anticipate his wants and

minister to them as though it was her duty and her pleasure to do so.

It was vital that he should know, and it was certain that he could not

question Luck upon the subject--for Ramon Chavez was no fool.

“Long time ago--when I was papoose with no shoes,” she began with

seeming irrelevance, her eyes turning instinctively toward the white

tents of the Flying U camp gleaming in the distance, “my people go for

work in Buffalo Bill show. My father go, my mother go, I go. All time we

dance for show, make Indian fight with cowboys--all them act for Buffalo

Bill-Pawnee Bill show. That time Wagalexa Conka boss of Indians. He

Indian Agent. He take care whole bunch. He make peace when fights, he

give med'cine when somebody sick. He awful good to them Indians. He give

me candy, always stop to talk me. I like him. My father like him. All

them Indians like him plenty much. My father awful sick one time, he no

let doctor come. Leg broke all in pieces. He say die plenty if Wagalexa

Conka no make well. I go ticket wagon, tell Wagalexa Conka, he come

quick, fix up leg all right.

“All them Indians like to make him--” She stopped, searching her mind

for the elusive, little-used word which she had learned in the mission

school. “Make him sdop',” she finished triumphantly. “Indians make much

dance, plenty music, lots speeches make him Indian man. My father big

chief, he make Wagalexa Conka him son. Make him my brother. Give him

Indian name Wagalexa Conka. All Indians call that name for him.

“Pretty soon show stop, all them Indians go home by reservation. long

time we don't see Wagalexa Conka no more. I get big girl, go school

little bit. Pretty soon Wagalexa Conka come back, for wants them Indians

for work in pictures. My father go, my mother go, all us go. We work

long time. I,” she added with naive pride in her comeliness, “awful good

looking. I do lots of foreground stuff. Pretty soon hard times come.

Indians go home by reservation. I go--I don't like them reservations no

more. Too lonesome. I like for work all time in pictures. I come, tell

Wagalexa Conka I be Indian girl for pictures. He write letter for agent,

write letter for my father. They writes letter for say yes, I stay. I

stay and do plenty more foreground stuff.”

“I don't see you do moch foreground work since that white girl come,”

Ramon observed, hitting what he instinctively knew was a tender point.

Had he seen her face, he must have been satisfied that the chance shot

struck home. But in the shadow hate blazed unseen from her eyes. She did

not speak, and so he went back to his first charge.

“All this don't tell me moch,” he complained. “Yoh lov' him, maybe?

That's what I ask.”

“Wagalexa Conka my brother, my father, my friend,” she replied calmly,

and let him interpret it as he would.

“He treats yoh like a dog. He crazee 'bout that Jean. He gives her all

smiles, all what yoh call foreground stuff. I know--I got eyes. Me, it

makes me mad for see how he treat yoh--and yoh so trying hard always

to Please. He got no heart for yoh--me, I see that.” He moved a step

closer, hesitating, wanting yet not quite daring to touch her. “Me, I

lov' yoh, little Annie,” he murmured. “Yoh lov' me little bit, eh? Jus'

little bit! Jus' for say, 'Ramon, I go weeth yoh, I be yoh woman--'”

Annie-Many-Ponies widened the distance between them. “Why you not say

wife?” she queried suspiciously.

“Woman, wife, sweetheart--all same,” he assured her with his voice like

a caress. “All words mean I lov' yoh jus' same. Now yoh say yoh lov' me,

say yoh go weeth me, I be one happy man. I go back on camp and my heart

she's singing lov' song. My girl weeth eyes that shine so bright, she

lov' me moch as I lov' her. That what my heart she sing. Yoh not be so

cruel like stone--yoh say, 'Ramon, I lov' yoh.' Jus' like that! So easy

to say!”

“Not easy,” she denied, moved to save her freedom yet a while longer.

“I say them words, then I--then I not be same girl like now. Maybe much

troubles come. Maybe much happy--I dunno. Lots time I see plenty trouble

come for girl that say them words for man. Some time plenty happy--I

think trouble comes most many times. I think Wagalexa Conka he be awful

mad. I not like for hims be mad.”

“Now you make ME mad--Ramon what loves yoh! Yoh like for Ramon be mad,

perhaps? Always yoh 'fraid Luck Lindsay this, 'fraid Luck that other.

Me, I gets damn' sick hear that talk all time. Bimeby he marree som'

girl, then what for you? He don' maree yoh, eh? He don' lov' yoh; he

think too good for maree Indian girl. Me, I not think like that. I,

Ramon Chavez, I think proud to lov, yoh. Ramon--”

“I not think Wagalexa Conka marry me.” The girl was turning stubborn

under his importunities. “Wagalexa Conka my brother--my friend. I tell

you plenty time. Now I tell no more.”

“Ramon loves yoh so moch,” he pleaded, and smiled to himself when he saw

her turn toward toward him again. The love-talk--that was what a woman

likes best to hear! “Yoh say yoh lov' Ramon jus' little bit!”

“I not say now. When I say I be sure I say truth.”

“All right, then I be sad till yoh lov' me. Yoh maybe be happy, yoh know

Ramon's got heavy heart for yoh.”

“I plenty sorry, you be sad for me,” she confessed demurely. “I lov' yoh

so moch! I think nothing but how beautiful my sweetheart is. I not tease

yoh no more. Tell me, how long Luck says he stay out here? Maybe yoh

hear sometimes he's going for taking pictures in town?”

“I not hear.”

“Going home, maybe? You mus' hear little bit. Yoh tell me, sweetheart;

what's he gone do when roundup's all finish? Me, I know she's finish

las' week. Looks like he's taking pictures out here all summer! You hear

him say something, maybe?”

“I not hear.”

“Them vaqueros--bah! They don't bear nothings either. What's matter over

there, nobody hear nothing? Luck, he got no tongue when camera's shut

up, perhaps?”

“Nah--I dunno.”

Ramon looked at her for a minute in mute rage. It was not the first time

he had found himself hard against the immutable reticence of the Indian

in her nature.

“Why you snapping teeth like a wolf?” she asked him slyly.

“Me? I don' snap my teeth, sweetheart.” It cost Ramon some effort to

keep his voice softened to the love key.

“Why you not ask Wagalexa Conka what he do?”

“I don' care, that's why I don' ask. Me, it's' no matter.”

He hesitated a moment, evidently weighing a matter of more importance

to him than he would have Annie-Many-Ponies suspect. “Sweetheart, yoh do

one thing for Ramon?” His voice might almost be called wheedling. “Me,

I'm awful busy tomorrow. I got long ride away off--to my rancho. I got

to see my brother Tomas. I be back here not before night. Yoh tell Bill

Holmes he come here by this rock--yoh say midnight that's good time--I

sure be here that time. Yoh say I got something I wan' tell him. Yoh do

that for Ramon, sweetheart?”

He waited, trying to hide the fact that he was anxious.

“I not like Bill Holmes.” Annie-Many-Ponies spoke with an air of

finality. “Bill Holmes comes close, I feel snakes. Him not friend to

Wagalexa Conka--say nothing--always go around still, like fox watching

for rabbit. You not friend to Bill Holmes?”

“Me? No--I not friend, querida mia. I got business. I sell Bill Holmes

one silver bridle, perhaps. I don' know--mus' talk about it. Yoh tell

him come here by big rock, sweetheart?”

Annie-Many-Ponies took a minute for deliberation--which is the Indian

way. Ramon, having learned patience, said no more but watched her

slant-eyed.

“I tell,” she promised at last, and added, “I go now.” Then she slipped

away. And Ramon, though he stood for several minutes by the rock smiling

queerly and staring down the arroyo, caught not the slightest glimpse

of her after she left him. He knew that she would deliver faithfully

his message to Bill Holmes, she had given her word. That was one

great advantage, considered Ramon, in dealing with those direct,

uncompromising natures. She might torment him with her aloofness and her

reticence, but once he had won her to a full confidence and submission

he need not trouble himself further about her loyalty. She would tell

Bill Holmes--and, what was vastly more important, she would do it

secretly; he had not dared to speak of that, but he thought he might

safely trust to her natural wariness. So Ramon, after a little, stole

away to his own camp quite satisfied.

The next night, when he stood in the shadow of the rock ledge and

waited, he was not startled by the unexpected presence of the person he

wanted to see. For although Bill Holmes came as cautiously as he knew

how, and avoided the wide, bright-lighted stretches of arroyo where he

would have been plainly visible, Ramon both saw and heard him before he

reached the ledge. What Ramon did not see or hear was Annie-Many-Ponies,

who did not quite believe that those two wished merely to talk about a

silver bridle, and who meant to listen and find out why it was that they

could not talk openly before all the boys.

Annie-Many-Ponies had ways of her own. She did not tell Ramon that she

doubted his word, nor did she refuse to deliver the message. She waited

calmly until Bill Holmes left camp stealthily that night, and she

followed him. It was perfectly simple and sensible and the right thing

to do; if you wanted to know for sure whether a person lied to you, you

had but to watch and listen and let your own eyes and ears prove guilt

or innocence.

So Annie-Many-Ponies stood by the rock and listened and watched. She

did not see any silver bridle. She heard many words, but the two were

speaking in that strange Spanish talk which she did not know at all,

save “Querida mia,” which Ramon had told her meant sweetheart.

The two talked, low-voiced and earnest, Bill was telling all that he

knew of Luck Lindsay's plans--and that was not much.

“He don't talk,” Bill complained. “He just tells the bunch a day

ahead--just far enough to get their makeup and costumes on, generally.

But he won't stay around here much longer; he's taken enough spring

roundup stuff now for half a dozen pictures. He'll be moving in to the

ranch again pretty quick. And I know this picture calls for a lot of

town business that he'll have to take. I saw the script the other day.”

This, of course, being a free translation of the meaningless jumble of

strange words which Annie heard.

“What town business is that? Where will he work?” Ramon was plainly

impatient of so much vagueness.

“Well, there's a bank robbery--I paid particular attention, Ramon, so I

know for certain. But when he'll do it, or what bank he'll use, I don't

know any more than you do. And there's a running fight down the street

and through the Mexican quarter. The rest is just street stuff--that

and a fiesta that I think he'll probably me the old plaza for location.

He'll need a lot of Mexicans for that stuff. He'll want you, of course.”

“That bank--who will do that?” Ramon's fingers trembled so that he could

scarcely roll a cigarette. “Andy, perhaps?”

“No--that's the Mexican bunch. I--why, I guess that will maybe be

you, Ramon. I wasn't paying much attention to the parts--I was after

locations, and I only had about two minutes at the script. But he's been

giving you some good bits right along where he needed a Mexican type;

and those scenes in the rocks the other day was bandit stuff with you

for lead. It'll be you or Miguel--the Native Son, as they call him--and

so far he's cast for another part. That's the worst of Luck. He won't

talk about what he's going to do till he's all ready to do it.”

There was a little further discussion. Ramon muttered a few

sentences--rapid instructions, Annie-Many-Ponies believed from the tone

he used.

“All right, I'll keep you posted,” Bill Holmes replied in English. And

he added as he started off, “You can send word by the squaw.”

He went carefully back down the arroyo, keeping as much as possible in

the shade. Behind him stole Annie-Many-Ponies, noiseless as the shadow

of a cloud. Bill Holmes, she reflected angrily, had seen the day, not so

far in the past, when he was happy if the “squaw” but smiled upon him.

It was because she had repelled his sly lovemaking that he had come to

speak of her slightingly like that; she knew it. She could have named

the very day when his manner toward her had changed. Mingled with her

hate and dread of him was a new contempt and a new little anxiety over

this clandestine intimacy between Ramon and him. Why should Bill Holmes

keep Ramon posted? Surely not about a silver bridle!

Shunka Chistala was whining in her little tent when she came into the

camp. She heard Bill Holmes stumble over the end of the chuck-wagon

tongue and mutter the customary profanity with which the average man

meets an incident of that kind. She whispered a fierce command to the

little black dog and stood very still for a minute, listening. She

did not hear anything further, either from Bill Holmes or the dog, and

finally reassured by the silence, she crept into her tent and tied the

flaps together on the inside, and lay down in her blankets with the

little black dog contentedly curled at her feet with his nose between

his front paws.

CHAPTER V. FOR THE GOOD OF THE COMPANY

All through breakfast Applehead seemed to have something weighty on his

mind. He kept pulling at his streaked, reddish-gray mustache when his

fingers should have been wholly occupied with his food, and he stared

abstractedly at the ground after he had finished his first cup of coffee

and before he took his second. Once Bill Holmes caught him glaring with

an intensity which circumstances in no wise justified--and it was Bill

Holmes who first shifted his gaze in vague uneasiness when he tried to

stare Applehead down. Annie-Many-Ponies did not glance at him at all, so

far as one could discover; yet she was the first to sense trouble in

the air, and withdrew herself from the company and sat apart, wrapped

closely in her crimson shawl that matched well the crimson bows on her

two shiny braids.

Luck, keenly alive to the moods of his people, looked at her

inquiringly. “Come on up by the fire, Annie,” he commanded gently. “What

you sitting away off there for? Come and eat--I want you to work today.”

Annie-Many-Ponies did not reply, but she rose obediently and came

forward in the silent way she had, stepping lightly, straight and slim

and darkly beautiful. Applehead glanced at her sourly, and her lashes

drooped to hide the venom in her eyes as she passed him to stand before

Luck.

“I not hungry,” she told Luck tranquilly, yet with a hardness in her

voice which did not escape him, who knew her so well. “I go put on

makeup.”

“Wear that striped blanket you used last Saturday when we worked up

there in Tijeras Canon. Same young squaw makeup you wore then, Annie.”

He eyed her sharply as she turned away to her own tent, and he observed

that when she passed Applehead she took two steps to one side, widening

the distance between them. He watched her until she lifted her tent

flap, stooped and disappeared within. Then he looked at Applehead.

“What's wrong between you two?” he asked the old man quizzically. “Her

dog been licking your cat again, or what?”

“You're danged right he ain't!” Applehead testified boastfully.

“Compadre's got that there dawg's goat, now I'm tellin' yuh! He don't

take nothin' off him ner her neither.”

“What you been doing to her, then?” Luck set his empty plate on the

ground beside him and began feeling for the makings of a cigarette. “Way

she side-stepped you, I know there must be SOMETHING.”

“Well, now, I ain't done a danged thing to that there squaw! She ain't

got any call to go around givin' me the bad eye.” He looked at the

breakfasting company and then again at Luck, and gave an almost

imperceptible backward jerk of his head as he got awkwardly to his feet

and strolled away toward the milling horses in the remuda.

So when Luck had lighted his fresh-rolled cigarette he followed

Applehead unobtrusively. “Well, what's on your mind?” he wanted to know

when he came up with him.

“Well, now, I don't want you to think I'm buttin' in on your affairs,

Luck,” Applehead began after a minute, “but seein' as you ast me what's

wrong, I'm goin' to tell yuh straight out. We got a couple of danged

fine women in this here bunch, and I shore do hate to see things goin'

on around here that'd shame 'em if they was to find it out. And fur's

I can see they will find it out, sooner or later. Murder ain't the only

kinda wickedness that's hard to cover up. I know you feel about as I do

on some subjects; you never did like dirt around you, no better'n--”

“Get to the point, man. What's wrong?”

So Applehead, turning a darker shade of red than was his usual hue,

cleared his throat and blurted out what he had to say. He had heard

Shunka Chistala whinnying at midnight in the tent of Annie-Many-Ponies,

and had gone outside to see what was the matter. He didn't know, he

explained, but what his cat Compadre was somehow involved. He had stood

in the shadow of his tent for a few minutes, and had seen Bill Holmes

sneak into camp, coming from up the arroyo somewhere.

For some reason he waited a little longer, and he had seen a woman's

shadow move stealthily up to the front of Annie's tent, and had seen

Annie slip inside and had heard her whisper a command of some sort

to the dog, which had immediately hushed its whining. He hated to

be telling tales on anybody, but he knew how keenly Luck felt his

responsibility toward the Indian girl, and he thought he ought to know.

This night-prowling, he declared, had shore got to be stopped, or he'd

be danged if he didn't run 'em both outa camp himself.

“Bill Holmes might have been out of camp,” Luck said calmly, “but you

sure must be mistaken about Annie. She's straight.”

“You think she is,” Applehead corrected him. “But you don't know a

danged thing about it. A girl that's behavin' herself don't go chasin'

all over the mesa alone, the way she's been doin' all spring. I never

said nothin' 'cause it wa'n't none of my put-in. But that Injun had a

heap of business off away from the ranch whilst you was in Los Angeles,

Luck. Sneaked off every day, just about--and 'd be gone fer hours at a

time. You kin ast any of the boys, if yuh don't want to take my word. Or

you kin ast Mis' Green; she kin tell ye, if she's a mind to.”

“Did Bill Holmes go with her?” Luck's eyes were growing hard and gray.

“As to that I won't say, fer I don't know and I'm tellin' yuh what I

seen myself. Bill Holmes done a lot uh walkin' in to town, fur as that

goes; and he didn't always git back the same day neither. He never went

off with Annie, and he never came back with her, fur as I ever seen.

But,” he added grimly, “they didn't come back together las' night,

neither. They come about three or four minutes apart.”

Luck thought a minute, scowling off across the arroyo. Not even to

Applehead, bound to him by closer ties than anyone there, did he ever

reveal his thoughts completely.

“All right--I'll attend to them,” he said finally. “Don't say anything

to the bunch; these things aren't helped by talk. Get into your old

cowman costume and use that big gray you rode in that drive we made the

other day. I'm going to pick up the action where we left off when it

turned cloudy. Tomorrow or next day I want to move the outfit back to

the ranch. There's quite a lot of town stuff I want to get for this

picture.”

Applehead looked at him uncertainly, tempted to impress further upon him

the importance of safeguarding the morals of his company. But he knew

Luck pretty well--having lived with him for months at a time when Luck

was younger and even more peppery than now. So he wisely condensed his

reply to a nod, and went back to the breakfast fire polishing his bald

bead with the flat of his palm. He met Annie-Many-Ponies coming to ask

Luck which of the two pairs of beaded moccasins she carried in her hands

he would like to have her wear. She did not look at Applehead at all as

she passed, but he nevertheless became keenly aware of her animosity and

turned half around to glare after her resentfully. You'd think, he told

himself aggrievedly, that he was the one that had been acting up! Let

her go to Luck--she'd danged soon be made to know her place in camp.

Annie-Many-Ponies went confidently on her way, carrying the two pairs of

beaded moccasins in her hands. Her face was more inscrutable than ever.

She was pondering deeply the problem of Bill Holmes' business with

Ramon, and she was half tempted to tell Wagalexa Conka of that secret

intimacy which must carry on its converse under cover of night. She did

not trust Bill Holmes. Why must he keep Ramon posted? She glanced

ahead to where Luck stood thinking deeply about something, and her eyes

softened in a shy sympathy with his trouble. Wagalexa Conka worked hard

and thought much and worried more than was good for him. Bill Holmes,

she decided fiercely, should not add to those worries. She would warn

Ramon when next she talked with him. She would tell Ramon that he must

not be friends with Bill Holmes; in the meantime, she would watch.

Ten feet from Luck she stopped short, sensing trouble in the hardness

that was in his eyes. She stood there and waited in meek subjection.

“Annie, come here!” Luck's voice was no less stern because it was

lowered so that a couple of the boys fussing with the horses inside the

rope corral could not overhear what he had to say.

Annie-Many-Ponies, pulling one of the shiny black braids into the

correct position over her shoulder and breast, stepped soft-footedly up

to him and stopped. She did not ask him what he wanted. She waited until

it was his pleasure to speak.

“Annie, I want you to keep away from Bill Holmes.” Luck was not one to

mince his words when he had occasion to speak of disagreeable things.

“It isn't right for you to let him make love to you on the sly. You know

that. You know you must not leave camp with him after dark. You make me

ashamed of you when you do those things. You keep away from Bill Holmes

and stay in camp nights. If you're a bad girl, I'll have to send you

back to the reservation--and I'll have to tell the agent and Chief

Big Turkey why I send you back. I can't have anybody in my company who

doesn't act right. Now remember--don't make me speak to you again about

it.”

Annie-Many-Ponies stood there, and the veiled, look was in her eyes.

Her face was a smooth, brown mask--beautiful to look upon but as

expressionless as the dead. She did not protest her innocence, she did

not explain that she hated and distrusted Bill Holmes and that she

had, months ago, repelled his surreptitious advances. Luck would have

believed, for he had known Annie-Many-Ponies since she was a barefooted

papoose, and he had never known her to tell him an untruth.

“You go now and get ready for work. Wear the moccasins with the birds on

the toes.” He pointed to them and turned away.

Annie-Many-Ponies also turned and went her way and said nothing. What,

indeed, could she say? She did not doubt that Luck had seen her the

night before, and had seen also Bill Holmes when he left camp or

returned--perhaps both. She could not tell him that Bill Holmes had gone

out to meet Ramon, for that, she felt instinctively, was a secret which

Ramon trusted her not to betray. She could not tell Wagalexa Conka,

either, that she met Ramon often when the camp was asleep. He would

think that as bad as meeting Bill Holmes. She knew that he did not

like Ramon, but merely used him and his men and horses and cattle for

a price, to better his pictures. Save in a purely business way she had

never seen him talking with Ramon. Never as he talked with the boys of

the Flying U--his Happy Family, he called them.

She said nothing. She dressed for the part she was to play. She

twined flowers in her hair and smoothed out the red bows and laid them

carefully away--since Wagalexa Conka did not wish her to wear ribbon

bows in this picture. She murmured caresses to Shunka Chistala, the

little black dog that was always at her heels. She rode with the company

to the rocky gorge which was “location” for today. When Wagalexa Conka

called to her she went and climbed upon a high rock and stood just where

he told her to stand, and looked just as he told her to look, and stole

away through the rocks and out of the scene exactly as he wished her to

do.

But when Wagalexa Conka--sorry for the harshness he had felt it his

duty to show that morning--smiled and told her she had done fine, and

that he was pleased with her, Annie-Many-Ponies did not smile back with

that slow, sweet, heart-twisting smile which was at once her sharpest

weapon and her most endearing trait.

Bill Holmes who had also had his sharp word of warning, and had been

told very plainly to cut out this flirting with Annie if he wanted to

remain on Luck's payroll, eyed her strangely. Once he tried to have a

secret word with her, but she moved away and would not look at him.

For Annie-Many-Ponies, hurt and bitter as she felt toward her beloved

Wagalexa Conka, hated Bill Holmes fourfold for being the cause of her

humiliation. That she did not also hate Ramon Chavez as being equally

guilty with Bill Holmes, went far toward proving how strong a hold he

had gained upon her heart.

CHAPTER VI. “I GO WHERE WAGALEXA CONKA SAY”

That afternoon Ramon joined them, suave as ever and seeming very much at

peace with the world and his fellow-beings. He watched the new leading

woman make a perilous ride down a steep, rocky point and dash up to

camera and on past it where she set her horse back upon, its haunches

with a fine disregard for her bones and a still finer instinct for

putting just the right dash of the spectacular into her work without

overdoing it.

“That senora, she's all right, you bet!” he praised the feat to those

who stood near him; “me, I not be stuck on ron my caballo down that

place. You bet she's fine rider. My sombrero, he's come off to that

lady!”

Jean, hearing, glanced at him with that little quirk of the lips which

was the beginning of a smile, and rode off to join her father and Lite

Avery. “He made that sound terribly sincere, didn't he?” she commented.

“It takes a Mexican to lift flattery up among the fine arts.” Then she

thought no more about it.

Annie-Many-Ponies was sitting apart, on a rock where her gay blanket

made a picturesque splotch of color against the gray barrenness of the

hill behind her. She, too, heard what Ramon said, and she, too, thought

that he had made the praise sound terribly sincere. He had not spoken to

her at all after the first careless nod of recognition when he rode

up. And although her reason had approved of his caution, her sore heart

ached for a little kindness from him. She turned her eyes toward him

now with a certain wistfulness; but though Ramon chanced to be looking

toward her she got no answering light in his eyes, no careful little

signal that his heart was yearning for her. He seemed remote, as

indifferent to her as were any of the others dulled by accustomedness

to her constant presence among them. A premonitory chill, as from

some great sorrow yet before her in the future, shook the heart of

Annie-Many-Ponies.

“Me, I fine out how moch more yoh want me campa here for pictures,”

Ramon was saying now to Luck who was standing by Pete Lowry, scribbling

something on his script. “My brother Tomas, he liking for us at ranch

now, s'pose yoh finish poco tiempo.”

Luck wrote another line before he gave any sign that he heard.

Annie-Many-Ponies, watching from under her drooping lids, saw that Bill

Holmes had edged closer to Ramon, while he made pretense of being much

occupied with his own affairs.

“I don't need your camp at all after today.” Luck shoved the script into

his coat pocket and looked at his watch.

“This afternoon when the sun is just right I want to get one or two

cut-back scenes and a dissolve out. After that you can break camp any

time. But I want you, Ramon--you and Estancio Lopez and Luis Rojas. I'll

need you for two or three days in town--want you to play the heavy in a

bank-robbery and street fight. The makeup is the same as when you worked

up there in the rocks the other day. You three fellows come over and

go in to the ranch tomorrow if you like. Then I'll have you when I want

you. You'll get five dollars a day while you work.” Having made himself

sufficiently clear, he turned away to set and rehearse the next scene,

and did not see the careful glance which passed between Ramon and Bill

Holmes.

“Annie,” Luck said abruptly, swinging toward her, “can you come down

off that point where Jean Douglas came? You'll have to ride horseback,

remember, and I don't want you to do it unless you're sure of yourself.

How about it?”

For the first time since breakfast her somber eyes lightened with a

gleam of interest. She did not look at Ramon--Ramon who had told her

many times how much he loved her, and yet could praise Jean Douglas for

her riding. Ramon had declared that he would not care to come riding

down that point as Jean had come; very well, then she would show Ramon

something.

“It isn't necessary, exactly,” Luck explained further. “I can show you

at the top, looking down at the way Jean came; and then I can pick

you up on an easier trail. But if you want to do it, it will save some

cut-backs and put another little punch in here. Either way it's up to

you.”

The voice of Annie-Many-Ponies did not rise to a higher key when she

spoke, but it had in it a clear incisiveness that carried her answer to

Ramon and made him understand that she was speaking for his ears.

“I come down with big punch,” she said.

“Where Jean came? You're riding bareback, remember.”

“No matter. I come down jus' same.” And she added with a haughty tilt of

her chin, “That's easy place for me.”

Luck eyed her steadfastly, a smile of approval on his face. “All right.

I know you've got plenty of nerve, Annie. You mount and ride up that

draw till you get to the ridge. Come up to where you can see camp over

the brow of the hill--sabe?--and then wait till I whistle. One whistle,

get ready to come down. Two whistles, you, come. Ride past camera, just

the way Jean did. You know you're following the white girl and trying to

catch up with her. You're a friend and you have a message for her, but

she's scared and is running away--sabe? You want to come down slow first

and pick your trail?”

“No.” Annie-Many-Ponies started toward the pinto pony which was her

mount in this picture. “I come down hill. I make big punch for you. Pete

turn camera.”

“You've got more nerve than I have, Annie,” Jean told her good-naturedly

as she went by. “I'd hate to run a horse down there bareback.”

“I go where Wagalexa Conka say.” From the corner of her eye she saw the

quick frown of jealousy upon the face of Ramon, and her pulse gave an

extra beat of triumph.

With an easy spring she mounted the pinto pony, took the reins of her

squaw bridle that was her only riding gear, folded her gay blanket

snugly around her uncorseted body and touched the pinto with her

moccasined heels. She was ready--ready to the least little tensed nerve

that tingled with eagerness under the calm surface.

She rode slowly past luck, got her few final instructions and a warning

to be careful and to take no chances of an accident--which brought that

inscrutable smile to her face; for Wagalexa Conka knew, and she knew

also, that in the mere act of riding down that slope faster than a walk

she was taking a chance of an accident. It was that risk that lightened

her heart which had been so heavy all day. The greater the risk, the

more eager was she to take it. She would show Ramon that she, too, could

ride.

“Oh, do be careful, Annie!” Jean called anxiously when she was riding

into the mouth of the draw. “Turn to the right, when you come to that

big flat rock, and don't come down where I did. It's too steep. Really,”

she drawled to Rosemary and Lite, “my heart was in my mouth when I came

straight down by that rock. It's a lot steeper than it looks from here.”

“She won't go round it,” Rosemary predicted pessimistically. “She's in

one of her contrary moods today. She'll come down the worst way she can

find just to scare the life out of us.”

Up the steep draw that led to the top, Annie-Many-Ponies rode

exultantly. She would show Ramon that she could ride wherever the white

girl dared ride. She would shame Wagalexa Conka, too, for his injustice

to her. She would put the too, for big punch in that scene or--she would

ride no more, unless it were upon a white cloud, drifting across the

moon at night and looking, down at this world and upon Ramon.

At the top of the ridge she rode out to the edge and made the peace-sign

to Luck as a signal that she was ready to do his bidding. Incidentally,

while she held her hand high over her head, her eyes swept keenly the

bowlder-strewn bluff beneath her. A little to one side was a narrow

backbone of smoother soil than the rest, and here were printed deep the

marks of Jean's horse. Even there it was steep, and there was a

bank, down there by the big flat rock which Jean had mentioned.

Annie-Many-Ponies looked daringly to the left, where one would say the

bluff was impassable. There she would come down, and no other place. She

would show Ramon what she could do--he who had praised boldly another

when she was by!

“All right, Annie!” Luck called to her through his megaphone. “Go back

now and wait for whistle. Ride along the edge when you come, from bushes

to where you stand. I want silhouette, you coming. You sabe?”

Annie-Many-Ponies raised her hand even with her breast, and swept it

out and upward in the Indian sign-talk which meant “yes.” Luck's eyes

flashed appreciation of the gesture; he loved the sign-talk of the old

plains tribes.

“Be careful, Annie,” he cried impulsively. “I don't want you to be

hurt.” He dropped the megaphone as she swung her horse back from the

edge and disappeared. “I'd cut the whole scene out if I didn't know what

a rider she is,” he added to the others, more uneasy than he cared to

own. “But it would hurt her a heap more if I wouldn't let her ride where

Jean rode. She's proud; awfully proud and sensitive.”

“I'm glad you're letting her do it,” Jean said sympathetically. “She'd

hate me if you hadn't. But I'm going to watch her with my eyes shut,

just the same. It's an awfully mean place in spots.”

“She'll make it, all right,” Luck declared. But his tone was not so

confident as his words, and he was manifestly reluctant to place the

whistle to his lips. He fussed with his script, and he squinted into

the viewfinder, and he made certain for the second time just where the

side-lines came, and thrust half an inch deeper in the sandy soil the

slender stakes which would tell Annie-Many-Ponies where she must guide

the pinto when she came tearing down to foreground. But he could delay

the signal only so long, unless he cut out the scene altogether.

“Get back, over on that side, Bill,” he commanded harshly. “Leave her

plenty of room to pass that side of the camera. All ready, Pete?” Then,

as if he wanted to have it over with as soon as possible, he whistled

once, waited while he might have counted twenty, perhaps, and sent

shrilling through the sunshine the signal that would bring her.

They watched, holding their breaths in fearful expectancy. Then they saw

her flash into view and come galloping down along the edge of the ridge

where the hill fell away so steeply that it might be called a cliff.

Indian fashion, she was whipping the pinto down both sides with the end

of her reins. Her slim legs hung straight, her moccasined toes pointing

downward. One corner of her red-and-green striped blanket flapped out

behind her. Haste--the haste of the pursuer--showed in every movement,

every line of her figure.

She came to the descent, and the pinto, having no desire for applause

but a very great hankering for whole bones in his body, planted his

forefeet and slid to a stop upon the brink. His snort came clearly down

to those below who watched.

“He won't tackle it,” Pete Lowry predicted philosophically while he

turned the camera crank steadily round and round and held himself ready

to “panoram” the scene if the pinto bolted.

But the pinto, having Annie-Many-Ponies to reckon with, did not bolt.

The braided rein-end of her squaw bridle lashed him stingingly; the

moccasined heels dug without mercy into the tender part of his flanks.

He came lunging down over the first rim of the bluff; then since he

must, he gathered himself for the ordeal and came leaping down and down

and down, gaining momentum with every jump. He could not have stopped

then if he had tried--and Annie-Many-Ponies, still the incarnation of

eager pursuit, would not let him try.

At the big flat rock of which Jean had warned her, the pinto would have

swerved. But she yanked him into the straighter descent, down over the

bank. He leaped, and he fell and slid twice his own length, his nose

rooting the soil. Annie-Many-Ponies lurched, came hard against a boulder

and somehow flung herself into place again on the horse. She lifted

his head and called to him in short, harsh, Indian words. The pinto

scrambled to his knees, got to his feet and felt again the sting of the

rein-end in his flanks. Like a rabbit he came bounding down, down

where the way was steepest and most treacherous. And at every jump the

rein-end fell, first on one side and then along the other, as a skilled

canoeman shifts the paddle to force his slight craft forward in a

treacherous current.

Down the last slope he came thundering. On his back Annie-Many-Ponies

lashed him steadily, straining her eyes in the direction which Jean had

taken past the camera. She knew that they were watching her--she knew

also that the camera crank in Pete Lowry's hands was turning, turning,

recording every move of hers, every little changing expression. She

swept down upon them so close that Pete grabbed the tripod with one

hand, ready to lift it and dodge away from the coming collision. Still

leaning, still lashing and straining every nerve in pursuit, she dashed

past, pivoted the pinto upon his hind feet, darted back toward the

staring group and jumped off while he was yet running.

Now that she had done it; now that she had proven that she also had

nerve and much skill in riding, black loneliness settled upon her again.

She came slowly back, and as she came she heard them praise the ride she

had made. She heard them saying how frightened they had been when the

pinto fell, and she heard Wagalexa Conka call to her that she had made

a strong scene for him. She did not answer. She sat down upon a rock, a

little apart from them, and looking as remote as the Sandias Mountains,

miles away to the north, folded her blanket around her and spoke no word

to anyone.

Soon Ramon mounted his horse to return to his camp. He came riding down

to her--for his trail lay that way--and as he rode he called to the

others a good natured “Hasta luego!” which is the Mexican equivalent of

“See you later.” He did not seem to notice Annie-Many-Ponies at all as

he rode past her. He was gazing off down the arroyo and riding with all

his weight on one stirrup and the other foot swinging free, as is the

nonchalant way of accustomed riders who would ease their muscles now

and then. But as he passed the rock where she was sitting he murmured,

“Tonight by the rock I wait for you, querida mia.” Though she gave no

sign that she had heard, the heart of Annie-Many-Ponies gave a throb of

gladness that was almost pain.

CHAPTER VII. ADVENTURE COMES SMILING

Luck, in the course of his enthusiastic picture making, reached the

point where he must find a bank that was willing to be robbed--in broad

daylight and for screen purposes only. If you know anything at all about

our financial storehouses, you know that they are sensitive about being

robbed, or even having it appear that they are being subjected to so

humiliating a procedure. What Luck needed was a bank that was not only

willing, but one that faced the sun as well. He was lucky, as usual. The

Bernalillo County Bank stands on a corner facing east and south. It is

an unpretentious little bank of the older style of architecture, and

might well be located in the centre of any small range town and hold the

shipping receipts of a cattleman who was growing rich as he grew old.

Luck stopped across the street and looked the bank over, and saw how the

sun would shine in at the door and through the wide windows during the

greater part of the afternoon, and hoped that the cashier was a human

being and would not object to a fake robbery. Not liking suspense,

he stepped off the pavement and dodged a jitney, and hurried over to

interview the cashier.

You never know what secret ambitions hide behind the impassive courtesy

of the average business man. This cashier, for instance, wore a green

eyeshade whenever his hat was not on his, head. His hair was thin and

his complexion pasty and his shoulders were too stooped for a man of

his age. You never would have suspected, just to look at him through the

fancy grating of his window, how he thirsted for that kind of adventure

which fiction writers call red-blooded. He had never had an adventure

in his life; but at night, after he had gone to bed and adjusted the

electric light at his head, and his green eyeshade, and had put two

pillows under the back of his neck, he read--you will scarcely believe

it, but it is true--he read about the James boys and Kit. Carson and

Pawnee Bill, and he could tell you--only he wouldn't mention it, of

course--just how many Texans were killed in the Alamo. He loved gun

catalogues, and he frequently went out of his way to pass a store that

displayed real, business-looking stock-saddles and quirts and spurs and

things. He longed to be down in Mexico in the thick of the scrap there,

and he knew every prominent Federal leader and every revolutionist that

got into the papers; knew them by spelling at least, even if he couldn't

pronounce the names correctly.

He had come to Albuquerque for his lungs' sake a few years ago, and he

still thrilled at the sight of bright-shawled Pueblo Indians padding

along the pavements in their moccasins and queer leggings that looked

like joints of whitewashed stove-pipe; while to ride in an automobile

out to Isleta, which is a terribly realistic Indian village of adobe

huts, made the blood beat in his temples and his fingers tremble upon

his knees. Even Martinez Town with its squatty houses and narrow streets

held for him a peculiar fascination.

You can imagine, maybe, how his weak eyes snapped with excitement under

that misleading green shade when Luck Lindsay walked in and smiled at

him through the wicket, and explained who he was and what was the favor

he had come to ask of the bank. You can, perhaps, imagine how he stood

and made little marks on a blotter with his pencil while Luck explained

just what he would want; and how he clung to the noncommittal manner

which is a cashier's professional shield, while Luck smiled his smile

to cover his own feeling of doubt and stated that he merely wanted two

Mexicans to enter, presumably overpower the cashier, and depart with a

bag or two of gold.

The cashier made a few more pencil marks and said that it might be

arranged, if Luck could find it convenient to make the picture just

after the bank's closing time. Obviously the cashier could not permit

the bank's patrons to be disturbed in any way--but what he really wanted

was to have the thrill of the adventure all to himself.

With the two of them anxious to have the pictured robbery take place,

of course they arranged it after a polite sparring on the part of the

cashier, whose craving for adventure was carefully guarded as a guilty

secret.

At three o'clock the next day, then--although Luck would have greatly

preferred an earlier hour--the cashier had the bank cleared of patrons

and superfluous clerks, and was watching, with his nerves all atingle

and the sun shining in upon him through a side window, while Pete Lowry

and Bill Holmes fussed outside with the camera, getting ready for the

arrival of those realistic bandits, Ramon Chavez and Luis Rojas. On

the street corner opposite, the Happy Family foregathered clannishly,

waiting until they were called into the street-fight scene which Luck

meant to make later.

The cashier's cheeks were quite pink with excitement when finally Ramon

and the Rojas villain walked past the window and looked in at him before

going on to the door. He was disappointed because they were not masked,

and because they did not wear bright sashes with fringe and striped

serapes draped across their shoulders, and the hilts of wicked knives

showing somewhere. They did not look like bandits at all--thanks to

Luck's sure knowledge and fine sense of realism. Still, they answered

the purpose, and when they opened the door and came in the cashier got

quite a start from the greedy look in their eyes when they saw the gold

he had stacked in profusion on the counter before him.

They made the scene twice--the walking past the window and coming in at

the door; and the second time Luck swore at them because they stopped

too abruptly at the window and lingered too long there, looking in at

the cashier and his gold, and exchanging meaning glances before they

went to the door.

Later, there was an interior scene with reflectors almost blinding the

cashier while he struggled self-consciously and ineffectually with Ramon

Chavez. The gold that Ramon scraped from the cashier's keeping into his

own was not, of course, the real gold which the bandits had seen through

the window. Luck, careful of his responsibilities, had waited while the

cashier locked the bank's money in the vault, and had replaced it with

brass coins that looked real--to the camera.

The cashier lived then the biggest moments of his life. He was forced

upon his back across a desk that had been carefully cleared of the

bank's papers and as carefully strewn with worthless ones which Luck

had brought. A realistically uncomfortable gag had been forced into the

mouth of the cashier--where it brought twinges from some fresh dental

work, by the way--and the bandits had taken everything in sight that

they fancied.

Ramon and Luis Rojas had proven themselves artists in this particular

line of work, and the cashier, when it was all over and the camera and

company were busily at work elsewhere, lived it in his imagination

and felt that he was at least tasting the full flavor of red-blooded

adventure without having to pay the usual price of bitterness and bodily

suffering. He was mistaken, of course--as I am going to explain. What

the cashier had taken part in was not the adventure itself but merely a

rehearsal and general preparation for the real performance.

This had been on Wednesday, just after three o'clock in the afternoon.

On Saturday forenoon the cashier was called upon the phone and asked

if a part of that robbery stuff could be retaken that day. The cashier

thrilled instantly at the thought of it. Certainly, they could retake as

much as they pleased. Lucks voice--or a voice very like Luck's--thanked

him and said that they would not need to retake the interior stuff. What

he wanted was to get the approach to the bank the entrance and going

back to the cashier. That part of the negative was under-timed, said the

voice. And would the cashier make a display of gold behind the wicket,

so that the camera could register it through the window? The cashier

thought that he could. “Just stack it up good and high,” directed the

voice. “The more the better. And clear the bank--have the clerks out,

and every thing as near as possible to what it was the other day. And

you take up the same position. The scene ends where Ramon comes back and

grabs you.”

“And listen! You did so well the other day that I'm going to leave this

to you, to see that they get it the same. I can't be there myself--I've

got to catch some atmosphere stuff down here in Old Town. I'm just

sending my assistant camera man and the two heavies and my scenic

artist for this retake. It won't be much--but be sure you have the bank

cleared, old man--because it would ruin the following scenes to have

extra people registered in this; see? You did such dandy work in that

struggle that I want it to stand. Boy, your work's sure going to stand

out on the screen!”

Can you blame the cashier for drinking in every word of that, and for

emptying the vault of gold and stacking it up in beautiful, high piles

where the sun shone on it through the window--and where it would be

within easy reach, by the way!--so that the camera could “register” it?

At ten minutes past twelve he had gotten rid of patrons and clerks, and

he had the gold out and his green eyeshade adjusted as becomingly as a

green eyeshade may be adjusted. He looked out and saw that the street

was practically empty, because of the hour and the heat that was almost

intolerable where the sun shone full. He saw a big red machine drive up

to the corner and stop, and he saw a man climb out with camera already

screwed, to the tripod. He saw the bandits throw away their cigarettes

and follow the camera man, and then he hurried back and took up his

station beside the stacks of gold, and waited in a twitter of excitement

for this unhoped-for encore of last Wednesday's glorious performance.

Through the window he watched the camera being set up, and he watched

also, from under his eyeshade, the approach of the two bandits.

From there on a gap occurs in the cashier's memory of that day.

Ramon and Luis went into the bank, and in a few minutes they came out

again burdened with bags of specie and pulled the door shut with the

spring lock set and the blinds down that proclaimed the bank was closed.

They climbed into the red automobile, the camera and its operator

followed, and the machine went away down the street to the post-office,

turned and went purring into the Mexican quarter which spreads itself

out toward the lower bridge that spans the Rio Grande. This much a dozen

persons could tell you. Beyond that no man seemed to know what became of

the outfit.

In the bank, the cashier lay back across a desk with a gag in his mouth

and his hands and feet tied, and with a welt on the side of his head

that swelled and bled sluggishly for a while and then stopped and became

an angry purple. Where the gold had been stacked high in the sunshine

the marble glistened whitely, with not so much as a five-dollar piece

to give it a touch of color. The window blinds were drawn down--the bank

was closed. And people passed the windows and never guessed that within

there lay a sickly young man who had craved adventure and found it, and

would presently awake to taste its bitter flavor.

Away off across the mesa, sweltering among the rocks in Bear Canon,

Luck Lindsay panted and sweated and cussed the heat and painstakingly

directed his scenes, and never dreamed that a likeness of his voice had

beguiled the cashier of the Bernalillo County Bank into consenting to be

robbed and beaten into oblivion of his betrayal.

And--although some heartless teller of tales might keep you in the

dark about this--the red automobile, having dodged hurriedly into a

high-boarded enclosure behind a Mexican saloon, emerged presently and

went boldly off across the bridge and up through Atrisco to the sand

hills which is the beginning of the desert off that way. But another

automobile, bigger and more powerful and black, slipped out of this same

enclosure upon another street, and turned eastward instead of west. This

machine made for the mesa by a somewhat roundabout course, and emerged,

by way of a rough trail up a certain draw in the edge of the tableland,

to the main road where it turns the corner of the cemetery. From there

the driver drove as fast as he dared until he reached the hill that

borders Tijeras Arroyo. There being no sign of pursuit to this point, he

crossed the Arroyo at a more leisurely pace. Then he went speeding away

into the edge of the mountains until they reached one of those deep,

deserted dry washes that cut the foothills here and there near Coyote

Springs. There his passengers left him and disappeared up the dry wash.

Before the wound on the cashier's head had stopped bleeding, the black

automobile was returning innocently to town and no man guessed what

business had called it out upon the mesa.

CHAPTER VIII. THE SONG OF THE OMAHA

“Me, I theenk yoh not lov' me so moch as a pin,” Ramon complained in

soft reproach, down in the dry wash where Applehead had looked in vain

for baling wire. “Sometimes I show yoh what is like the Spanish lov'.

Like stars, like fire--sometimes I seeng the jota for you that tell

how moch I lov' yoh. 'Te quiero, Baturra, te quiero,'” he began

humming softly while he looked at her with eyes that shone soft in the

starlight. “Sometimes me, I learn yoh dat song--and moch more I learn

yoh--”

Annie-Many-Ponies stood before him, straight and slim and with that air

of aloofness which so fired Ramon's desire for her. She lifted a hand to

check him, and Ramon stopped instantly and waited. So far had her power

over him grown.

“All time you tell me you heap love,” she said in her crooning soft

voice. “Why you not talk of priest to make us marry? You say words for

love--you say no word for wife. Why you no say--”

“Esposa!” Ramon's teeth gleamed white as a wolf's in the dusk. “When

the padre marry us I maybe teach you many ways to say wife!” He laughed

under his breath. “How I calls yoh wife when I not gets one kees, me?

Now I calls yoh la sweetheart--good enough when I no gets so moch as

touches hand weeth yoh.”

“I go way with you, you gets priest for make us marry?”

Annie-Many-Ponies edged closer so that she might read what was in his

face.

“Why yoh no trus' Ramon? Sure, I gets padre! W'at yoh theenk for speak

lies, me? Sure, I gets padre, foolish one! Me, I not like for yoh no

trus' Ramon. Looks like not moch yoh lov' Ramon.”

“I good girl,” Annie-Many-Ponies stated simply. “I love my husband when

priest says that's right thing to do. You no gets priest, I no go with

you. I think mens not much cares for marry all time. Womens not care,

they go to hell. That's what priest tells. Girls got to care. That's

truth.” Simple as two-plus-two was the rule of life as Annie-Many-Ponies

laid it down in words before him. No fine distinctions between virtue

and superwomanhood there, if you please! No slurring of wrong so that

it may look like an exalted right. “Womens got to care,” said

Annie-Many-Ponies with a calm certainty that would brook no argument.

“Sure theeng,” Ramon agreed easily. “Yoh theenk I lov' yoh so moch if

yoh not good?”

“You gets priest?” Annie-Many-Ponies persisted.

“Sure, I gets padre. You theenk Ramon lies for soch theeng?”

“You swear, then, all same white mans in picture makes oath.” There was

a new quality of inflexibility under the soft music of her voice. “You

lift up hand and says, 'Help me by God I makes you for-sure my wife!'”

She had pondered long upon this oath, and she spoke it now with an easy

certainty that it was absolutely binding, and that no man would dare

break it. “You makes that swear now,” she urged gently.

“Foolish one! Yoh theenk I mus' swear I do what my hearts she's want?

I tell yoh many times we go on one ranch my brother Tomas says she's be

mine. We lives there in fine house weeth mooch flowers, yoh not so moch

as lif' one finger for work, querida mia. Yoh theenk I not be trus', me,

Ramon what loves yoh?”

“No hurt for swears what I tells,” Annie-Many-Ponies stepped back from

him a pace, distrust creeping into her voice.

“All right.” Ramon moved nearer. “So I make oath, perhaps you make oath

also! Me, I theenk yoh perhaps not like for leave Luck Leensay--I theenk

perhaps yoh loves heem, yoh so all time watch for ways to please! So I

swear, then yoh mus' swear also that yoh come for-sure. That square deal

for both--si?”

Annie-Many-Ponies hesitated, a dull ache in her breast when Ramon spoke

of Luck. But if her heart was sore at thought of him, it was because he

no longer looked upon her with the smile in his eyes. It was because he

was not so kind; because he believed that she had secret meetings with

Bill Holmes whom she hated. And in spite of the fact that Bill Holmes

had left the company the other day and was going away, Wagalexa Conka

still looked upon her with cold eyes and listened to the things that

Applehead said against her. The heart of Wagalexa Conka, she told

herself miserably, was like a stone for her. And so her own heart must

be hard. She would swear to Ramon, and she would keep the oath--and

Wagalexa Conka would not even miss her or be sorry that she had gone.

“First you make swears like I tells you,” she said. “Then I make

swears.”

“Muy bueno!” smiled Ramon then. “So I make oath I take you queek to one

good friend me, the Padre Dominguez. Then yoh be my wife for sure. That

good enough for yoh, perhaps? Queeck yoh make oath yoh leave these place

Manana--tomorra. Yoh go by ol' rancho where we talk so many time.

I leave horse for yoh. Yoh ride pas' that mountain, yoh come for

Bernalillo. Yoh wait. I come queeck as can when she's dark. Yoh do that,

sweetheart?”

Annie-Many-Ponies stilled the ache in her heart with the thought of her

proud place beside Ramon who had much land and many cattle and who loved

her so much. She lifted her hand and swore she would go with him.

She slipped away then and crept into her tent in the little cluster

beside the house--for the company 'had forsaken Applehead's adobe and

slept under canvas as a matter of choice. With Indian cunning she bided

her time and gave no sign of what was hidden in her heart. She rose with

the others and brushed her glossy hair until it shone in the sunlight

like the hair of a high-caste Chinese woman. She tied upon it the new

bows of red ribbon which she had bought in the secret hope that they

would be a part of her wedding finery. She put on her Indian gala dress

of beaded buckskin with the colored porcupine quills--and then she

smiled cunningly and drew a dress of red-and-blue striped calico over

her head and settled the folds of it about her with little, smoothing

pats, so that the two white women, Rosemary and Jean, should not notice

any unusual bulkiness of her figure.

She did not know how she would manage to escape the keen eyes of

Wagalexa Conka and to steal away from the ranch, especially if she had

to work in the picture that day. But Luck unconsciously opened wide the

trail for her. He announced at breakfast that they would work up in Bear

Canon that day, and that he would not need Jean or Annie either; and

that, as it would be hotter than the hinges of Gehenna up in that canon,

they had better stay at home and enjoy themselves.

Annie-Many-Ponies did not betray by so much as a flicker of the lashes

that she heard him much less that it was the best of good news to her.

She went into her tent and packed all of her clothes into a bundle which

she wrapped in her plaid shawl, and was proud because the bundle was so

big, and because she had much fine beadwork and so many red ribbons, and

a waist of bright blue silk which she would wear when she stood before

the priest, if Ramon did not like the dress of beaded buckskin.

A ring with an immense red stone in it which Ramon had given her, she

slipped upon her finger with her little, inscrutable smile. She was

engaged to be married, now, just like white girls; and tomorrow she

would have a wide ring of shiny gold for that finger, and should be the

wife of Ramon.

Just then Shunka Chistala, lying outside her tent, flapped his tail on

the ground and gave a little, eager whine. Annie-Many-Ponies thrust

her head through the opening and looked out, and then stepped over the

little black dog and stood before her tent to watch the Happy Family

mount and ride away with Wagalexa Conka in their midst and with the

mountain wagon rattling after them loaded with “props” and the camera

and the noonday lunch and Pete Lowry and Tommy Johnson, the scenic

artist. Applehead was going to drive the wagon, and she scowled when he

yanked off the brake and cracked the whip over the team.

Luck, feeling perchance the intensity of her gaze, turned in the saddle

and looked back. The eyes of Annie-Many-Ponies softened and saddened,

because this was the last time she would see Wagalexa Conka riding away

to make pictures--the last time she would see him. She lifted her hand,

and made the Indian sign of farewell--the peace-go-with-you sign that is

used for solemn occasions of parting.

Luck pulled up short and stared. What did she mean by that? He reined

his horse around, half minded to ride back and ask her why she gave him

that peace-sign. She had never done it before, except once or twice in

scenes that he directed. But after all he did not go. They were late

in getting started that morning, which irked his energetic soul; and

women's whims never did impress Luck Lindsay very deeply. Besides, just

as he was turning to ride back, Annie stooped and went into her tent as

though her gesture had carried no especial meaning.

Then in her tent he heard her singing the high, weird chant of the

Omaha mourning song and again he was half-minded to go back, though the

wailing minor notes, long drawn and mournful, might mean much or they

might mean merely a fit of the blues. The others rode on talking and

laughing together, and Luck rode with them; but the chant of the

Omaha was in his ears and tingling his nerves. And the vision of

Annie-Many-Ponies standing straight before her tent and making the sign

of peace and farewell haunted him that day.

Rosemary and Jean, standing in the porch, waved good-bye to their men

folk until the last bobbing hatcrown had gone down out of sight in the

long, low swale that creased the mesa in that direction. Whereupon they

went into the house.

“What in the world is the matter with Annie?” Jean exploded, with a

little shiver. “I'd rather hear a band of gray wolves tune up when

you're caught out in the breaks and have to ride in the dark. What is

that caterwaul? Do you suppose she's on the warpath or anything?”

“Oh, that's just the squaw coming out in her!” Rosemary slammed the door

shut so they could not hear so plainly. “She's getting more Injuny every

day of her life. I used to try and treat her like a white girl--but you

just can't do it, Jean.”

“Hiu-hiu-hi-i-ah-h! Hiu-hiu-hi-i-ah-h-h--hiaaa-h-h!”

Jean stood in the middle of the room and listened. “Br-r-r!” she

shivered--and one could not blame her. “I wonder if she'd be mad,”

she drawled, “if I went out and told her to shut up. It sounds as if

somebody was dead, or going to die or something. Like Lite says your dog

will howl if anything--”

“Oh, for pity sake!” Rosemary pushed her into the living room with

make-believe savageness. “I've heard her and Luck sing that last winter.

And there's a kind of a teetery dance that goes with it. It's supposed

to be a mourning song, as Luck explains it. But don't pay any attention

to her at all. She just does it to get on our nerves. It'd tickle her to

death if she thought it made us nervous.”

“And now the dog is joining in on the chorus! I must say they're a

cheerful pair to have around the house. And I know one thing--if they

keep that up much longer, I'll either get out there with a gun, or

saddle up and follow the boys.”

“They'd tease us to death, Jean, if we let Annie run us out.”

“It's run or be run,” Jean retorted irritatedly. “I wanted to write

poetry today--I thought of an awfully striking sentence about the--for

heaven's sake, where's a shotgun?”

“Jean, you wouldn't!” Rosemary, I may here explain, was very femininely

afraid of guns. “She'd--why, there's no telling WHAT she might do! Luck

says she carries a knife.”

“What if she does? She ought to carry a few bird-shot, too. She's got

nothing to mourn about--nobody's died, has there?

“Hiu-hiu-hia-a-a,ah! Hia-a-a-a-ah!” wailed Annie-Many-Ponies in her

tent, because she would never again look upon the face of Wagalexa

Conka--or if she did it would be to see his anger blaze and burn her

heart to ashes. To her it was as though death sat beside her; the death

of Wagalexa Conka's friendship for her. She forgot his harshness because

he thought her disobedient and wicked. She forgot that she loved Ramon

Chavez, and that he was rich and would give her a fine home and much

love. She forgot everything but that she had sworn an oath and that she

must keep it though it killed faith and kindness and friendship as with

a knife.

So she wailed, in high-keyed, minor chanting unearthly in its primitive

inarticulateness of sorrow, the chant of the Omaha mourning song. So

had her tribe wailed in the olden days when warriors returned to the

villages and told of their dead. So had her mother wailed when the Great

Spirit took away her first man-child. So had the squaws wailed in their

tepees since the land was young. And the little black dog, sitting on

his haunches before her door, pointed his moist nose into the sunlight

and howled in mournful sympathy.

“Oh, my gracious!” Jean, usually so calm, flung a magazine against the

wall. “This is just about as pleasant as a hanging! let's saddle up and

ride in after the mail, Rosemary. Maybe the squaw in her will be howled

out by the time we get back.” And she added with a venomous sincerity

that would have warmed the heart of old Applehead, “I'd shoot that dog,

for half a cent! How do you suppose an animal of his size can produce

all that noise?”

“Oh, I don't know!” Rosemary spoke with the patience of utter weariness.

“I've stood her and the dog for about eight months and I'm getting kind

of hardened to it. But I never did hear them go on like that before.

You'd think all her relations were being murdered, wouldn't you?”

Jean was busy getting into her riding clothes and did not say what she

thought; but you may be sure that it was antipathetic to the grief of

Annie-Many-Ponies, and that Jean's attitude was caused by a complete

lack of understanding. Which, if you will stop to think, is true of

half the unsympathetic attitudes in the world. Because they did not

understand, the two dressed hastily and tucked their purses safely

inside their shirtwaists and saddled and rode away to town. And the last

they heard as they put the ranch behind them was the wailing chant of

Annie-Many-Ponies and the prodigious, long-drawn howling of the little

black dog.

Annie-Many-Ponies, hearing the beat of hoofs ceased her chanting and

looked out in time to see the girls just disappearing over the low brow

of the hill. She stood for a moment and stared after them with frowning

brows. Rosemary she did not like and never would like, after their

hidden feud of months over such small matters as the cat and the dog,

and unswept floors, and the like. A mountain of unwashed dishes stood

between these two, as it were, and forbade anything like friendship.

But the parting that was at hand had brushed aside her jealousy of Jean

as leading woman. Intuitively she knew that with any encouragement Jean

would have been her friend. Oddly, she remembered now that Jean had been

the first to ask for her when she came to the ranch. So, although

Jean would never know, Annie-Many-Ponies raised her hand and gave the

peace-and-farewell sign of the plains Indians.

The way was open now, and she must go. She had sworn that she would meet

Ramon--but oh, the heart of her was heavier than the bundle which she

bound with her bright red sash and lifted to her shoulders with the

sash drawn across her chest and shoulders. So had the women of her

tribe borne burdens since the land was young; but none had ever borne a

heavier load than did Annie-Many-Ponies when she went soft footed across

the open space to the dry wash and down that to another, and so on and

on until she crossed the low ridge and came down to the deserted old

rancho with its crumbling adobe cabins and the well where she had waited

so often for Ramon.

She was tired when she reached the well, for her back was not used

to burden-bearing as had been her mother's, and her steps had lagged

because of the heaviness that was in her chest. It seemed to her

that some bad spirit was driving her forth an exile. She could not

understand, last night she had been glad at the thought of going, and if

the thought of leaving Wagalexa Conka so treacherously had hurt like a

knife-thrust, still, she had sworn willingly enough that she would go.

The horse was there, saddled and tied in a tumble-down shed just as

Ramon had promised that it would be. Annie-Many-Ponies did not mount and

ride on immediately, however. It was still early in the forenoon, and

she was not so eager in reality as she had been in anticipation. She

sat down beside the well and stared somberly away to the mountains, and

wondered why she was go sad when she should be happy. She twisted the

ring with the big red stone round and round her finger, but she got no

pleasure from the crimson glow of it. The stone looked to her now like a

great, frozen drop of blood. She wondered grimly whose blood it was, and

stared at it strangely before her eyes went again worshipfully to the

mountains which she loved and which she must leave and perhaps never see

again as they looked from there, and from the ranch.

She must ride and ride until she was around on the other side of that

last one that had the funny, pointed cone top like a big stone tepee.

On the other side was Ramon, and the priest, and the strange new life of

which she was beginning to feel afraid. There would be no more riding up

to camera, laughing or sighing or frowning as Wagalexa Conka commanded

her to do. There would be no more shy greetings of the slim young woman

in riding skirt--the friendship scenes and the black-browed anger, while

Pete Lowry turned the camera and Luck stood beside him telling her just

what she must do, and smiling at her when she did it well.

There would be Ramon, and the priest and the wide ring of shiny

gold--what more? The mountains, all pink and violet and smiling green

and soft gray--the mountains hid the new life from her. And she must

ride around that last, sharp-pointed one, and come into the new life

that was on the other side--and what if it should be bitter? What if

Ramon's love did not live beyond the wide ring of shiny gold? She had

seen it so, with other men and other maids.

No matter. She had sworn the oath that she would go. But first, there

at the old well where Ramon had taught her the Spanish love words, there

where she had listened shyly and happily to his voice that was so soft

and so steeped in love, Annie-Many-Ponies stood up with her face to the

mountains and sorrow in her eyes, and chanted again the wailing, Omaha

mourning-song. And just behind her the little black dog, that had

followed close to her heels all the way, sat upon his haunches and

pointed his nose to the sky and howled.

For a long time she wailed. Then to the mountains that she loved she

made the sign of peace-and-farewell, and turned herself stoically to the

keeping of her oath. Her bundle that was so big and heavy she placed

in the saddle and fastened with the saddle-string and with the red sash

that had bound it across her chest and shoulders. Then, as her great

grandmother had plodded across the bleak plains of the Dakotas at her

master's behest, Annie-Many-Ponies took the bridle reins and led the

horse out of the ruin, and started upon her plodding, patient journey

to what lay beyond the mountains. Behind her the black horse walked with

drooping head, half asleep in the warm sunlight. At the heels of the

horse followed the little black dog.

CHAPTER IX. RIDERS IN THE BACKGROUND

Luck, as explained elsewhere, was sweating and swearing at the heat

in Bear Canon. The sun had crept around so that it shone full into a

certain bowlder-strewn defile, and up this sunbaked gash old Applehead

was toiling, leading the scrawniest burro which Luck had been able to

find in the country. The burro was packed with a prospector's outfit

startlingly real in its pathetic meagerness. Old Applehead was picking

his way among rocks so hot that he could hardly bear to lay his bare

hand upon them, tough as that hand was with years of exposure to heat

and cold alike. Beads of perspiration were standing on his face, which

was a deep, apoplectic crimson, and little trickles of sweat were

dropping off his lower jaw.

He was muttering as he climbed, but the camera fortunately failed to

record the language that he used. Now and then he turned and yanked

savagely at the lead rope; whereupon the burro would sit down upon its

haunches and allow Applehead to stretch its neck as far as bone and

tough hide and tougher sinew would permit Someone among the group

roosting in the shade across the defile and well out of camera range

would laugh, and Luck, standing on a ledge just behind and above the

camera, would shout directions or criticism of the “business.”

“Come on back, Applehead,” Luck yelled when the “prospectorp” had turned

a corner of rock and disappeared from sight of the camera. “We'll do

that scene over once more before the sun gets too far around.”

“Do it over, will ye?” Applehead snarled as he came toiling obediently

back down the gulch. “Well, now, I ain't so danged shore about that

there doin' over--'nless yuh want to wait and do it after sundown. Ain't

nobody but a danged fool It would go trailin' up that there gulch this

kinda' day. Them rocks up there is hot enough to brile a lizard--now,

I'm tellin' ye!”

Luck covered a smile with his moist palm. He could not afford to be

merciful at the expense of good “picture-stuff,” however, so he called

down grimly:

“Now you're just about fagged enough for that close-up I want of you,

Applehead. You went up that gulch a shade too brisk for a fellow that's

all in from traveling, and starved into the bargain. Come back down here

by this sand bank, and start up towards camera. Back up a little, Pete,

so you can 'pam' his approach. I want to get him pulling his burro

up past that bank--sabe? And the close-up of his face with all those

sweat-streaks will prove how far he's come--and then I want the detail

of that burro and his pack which you'll get as they go by. You see what

I mean. Let's see. Will it swing you too far into the sun, Pete, if you

pick him up down there in that dry channel?”

“Not if you let me make it right away,” Pete replied after a squint or

two through the viewfinder. “Sun's getting pretty far over--”

“Ought to leave a feller time to git his wind,” Applehead complained,

looking up at Luck with eyes bloodshot from the heat. “I calc'late mebby

you think it's FUN to drag that there burro up over them rocks?”

“Sure, it isn't fun. We didn't come out here for fun. Go down and wait

behind that bank, and come out into the channel when I give the word.

I want you coming up all-in, just as you look right now. Sorry, but I

can't let you wait to cool off, Applehead.”

“Well now,” Applehead began with shortwinded sarcasm, “I'm s'posed to be

outa grub. Why didn't yuh up In' starve me fer a week or two, so'st I'd

be gaunted up realistic? Why didn't yuh break a laig fer me, sos't I kin

show some five-cent bunch in a pitcher-show how bad I'm off? Danged if

I ain't jest about gettin' my hide full uh this here danged fool REELISM

you're hollerin' fur all the time. 'F you send me down there to come

haulin' that there burro back up here so's the camery kin watch me sweat

'n' puff my danged daylights out--before I git a drink uh water, I'll

murder ye in cold blood, now I'm tellin' ye!”

“You go on down there and shut up!” Luck yelled inexorably. “You can

drink a barrel when I'm through with this scene--and not before. Get

that? My Lord! If you can't lead a burro a hundred yards without setting

down and fanning yourself to sleep, you must be losing your grip for

fair. I'll stake you to a rocking-chair and let you do old grandpa

parts, if you aren't able to--”

“Dang you, Luck, if you wasn't such a little runt I'd come up there and

jest about lick the pants off you! Talk that way to ME, will ye? I'll

have ye know I kin lead burros with you or any other dang man, heat er

no heat Ef yuh ain't got no more heart'n to AST it of me, I'll haul this

here burro up 'n' down this dang gulch till there ain't nothin' left of

'im but the lead-rope, and the rocks is all wore down to cobble-stone!

Ole grandpa parts, hey? You'll swaller them words when I git to ye,

young feller--and you'll swaller 'em mighty dang quick, now I'm tellin'

ye!”

He went off down the gulch to the sand bank. The Happy Family, sprawled

at ease in the shade, took cigarettes from their lips that they might

chortle their amusement at the two. Like father and son were Applehead

and Luck, but their bickerings certainly would never lead one to suspect

their affection.

“Get that darned burro outa sight, will you?” Luck bawled impatiently

when Applehead paused to send a murderous glance back toward camera.

“What's the matter--yuh PARALYZED down there? Haul him in behind that

bank! The moon'll be up before you get turned around, at that rate!”

“You shet yore haid!” Applehead retorted at the full capacity of his

lungs and with an absolute disregard for Luck's position as director of

the company. “Who's leadin' this here burro--you er me? Fer two cents

I'd come back and knock the tar outa you, Luck! Stand up there on a

rock and flop your wings and crow like a danged banty rooster--'n' I was

leadin' burros 'fore you was born! I'd like to know who yuh think you

BE?”

Pete Lowry, standing feet-apart and imperturbably focussing the camera

while the two yelled insults at each other, looked up at Luck.

“Riders in the background,” he announced laconically, and returned

to his squinting and fussing. “Maybe you can make 'em hear with the

megaphone,” he hinted, looking again at Luck. “They're riding straight

up the canon, in the middle distance. They'll register in the scene, if

you can't turn 'em.”

“Applehead!” Luck called through the megaphone to his irritated

prospector. “Get those riders outa the canon--they're in the scene!”

Applehead promptly appeared, glaring up at luck. “Well, now, if I've got

to haul this here dang jackass up this dang gulch, I cal'clate that'll

be about job enough for one man,” he yelled. “How yuh expect me t' go

two ways 't once? Hey? Yuh figured that out yit?” He turned then for a

look at the interrupting strangers, and immediately they saw his manner

change. He straightened up, and his right hand crept back significantly

toward his hip. Applehead, I may here explain, was an ex-sheriff, and

what range men call a “go-getter.” He had notches on the ivory handle of

his gun--three of them. In fair fights and in upholding the law he had

killed, and he would kill again if the need ever arose, as those who

knew him never doubted.

Luck, seeing that backward movement of the hand, unconsciously hitched

his own gun into position on his hip and came down off his rock ledge

with one leap. Just as instinctively the Happy Family scrambled out

of the shade and followed luck down the gulch to where Applehead stood

facing down the canon, watchfulness in every tense line of his lank

figure. Tommy Johnson, who never seemed to be greatly interested in

anything save his work, got up from where he lay close beside the camera

tripod and went over to the other side of the gulch where he could see

plainer.

Like a hunter poising his shotgun and making ready when his trained

bird-dog points, Luck walked guardedly down the gulch to where Applehead

stood watching the horsemen who had for the moment passed out of sight

of those above.

“Now, what's that danged shurf want, prowlin' up HERE with a couple uh

depittys?” Applehead grumbled when he heard Luck's footsteps crunching

behind him. “Uh course,” he added grimly, “he MIGHT be viewin' the

scenery--but it's dang pore weather fur pleasure-ridin', now I'm tellin'

ye! Them a comin' up here don't look good to ME, Luck--'n' if they

ain't--”

“How do you know it's the sheriff?” Luck for no reason whatever felt a

sudden heaviness of spirit.

“Hey? Think my eyes is failin' me?” Applehead gave him a sidelong glance

of hasty indignation. “I'd know ole Hank Miller a mile off with m' eyes

shet.”

By then the three riders rode out into plain view. Perhaps the sight of

Luck and Applehead standing there awaiting their arrival, with the

whole Happy Family and Big Aleck Douglas and Lite Avery moving down in

a close-bunched, expectant group behind the two, was construed as

hostility rather than curiosity. At any rate the sheriff and his

deputies shifted meaningly in their saddles and came up sour-faced and

grim, and with their guns out and pointing at the group.

“Don't go making any foolish play, boys,” the sheriff warned. “We

don't want trouble--we aren't looking for any. But we ain't taking any

chances.”

“Well now, you're takin' a dang long chance, Hank Miller, when yuh come

ridin' up on us fellers like yuh was cornerin' a bunch uh outlaws,”

Applehead exploded. But Luck pushed him aside and stepped to the front.

“Nobody's making any foolish play but you,” he answered the sheriff

calmly. “You may not know it, but you're blocking my scene and the

light's going. If you've got any business with me or my company, get it

over and then get out so we aim make this scene. What d'yuh want?”

“You,” snapped the sheriff. “You and your bunch.”

“Me?” Luck took a step forward. “What for?”

“For pulling off that robbery at the bank today.” The sheriff could be

pretty blunt, and he shot the charge straight, without any quibbling.

Luck looked a little blank; and old Applehead, shaking with a very real

anger now, shoved Luck away and stepped up where he could shake his fist

under the sheriff's nose.

“We don't know, and we don't give a cuss, what you're aimin' at,” he

thundered. “We been out here workin' in this brilin' sun sense nine

o'clock this mornin'. Luck ain't robbed no bank, ner he ain't the kind

that DOES rob banks, and I'm here to see you swaller them words 'fore I

haul ye off'n that horse and plumb wear ye out! Yuh wanta think twicet

'fore ye come ridin' up where I kin hear yuh call Luck Lindsay a thief,

now I'm tellin' ye! If a bank was robbed, ye better be gittin' out after

them that done it, and git outa the way uh that camery sos't we can git

t' work! Git!”

The sheriff did not “git” exactly, but he did look considerably

embarrassed. His eyes went to Luck apologetically.

“Cashier come to and said you'd called him up on the phone about eleven,

claimin' you wanted to make a movin' pitcher of the bank being robbed,”

he explained--though he was careful not to lower his gun. “He swore it

was your men that done the work and took the gold you told him to pile

out on the--”

“_I_ told him?” Luck's voice had the sharpened quality that caused

laggard actors to jump. “Be a little more exact in the words you use.”

“Well-l--somebody on the phone 't he THOUGHT was you,” the sheriff

amended obediently. “Your men--and they sure WAS your men, because

three or four fellers besides the cashier seen 'em goin' in and comin'

out--they gagged the cashier and took his keys away from him and cleaned

the safe, besides taking what gold he'd piled on the counter for y--for

'em.

“So,” he finished vigorously, “I an' my men hit the trail fer the ranch

and was told by the women that you was out here. And here we are, and

you might just as well come along peaceable as to make a fuss--”

“That thar is shore enough outa YOU, Hank Miller!” Applehead exploded

again. “I calc'late you kin count ME in, when you go mixin' up with

Luck, here. I'm one of his men--and if he was to pull off a bank robbery

I calc'late I'd be in on that there performance too, I'm tellin' you!

Luck don't go no whars ner do nothin' that I AIN'T in on.

“I've had some considerable experience as shurf myself, if you'll take

the trouble to recolleck; and I calc'late my word'll go about as fur as

the next. When I tell ye thar ain't goin' to be no arrest made in Bear

Canon, and that you ain't goin' to take luck in fer no bank robbery, you

kin be dang shore I mean every word uh that thar!” He moved a step or

two nearer the sheriff, and the sheriff backed his horse away from him.

“Ef you kin cut out this here accusin' Luck, and talk like a white man,”

Applehead continued heatedly, “we'd like to hear the straight uh this

here robbery. I would, 'n' I know Luck would, seein' they've gone t'

work and mixed him into it. His bunch is all here, as you kin see fer

yourself. Now we're listenin' 's long's you talk polite--'n' you kin

tell us what men them was that was seen goin' in and comin' out--and all

about the hull dang business.”

The sheriff had not ridden to Bear Canon expecting to be bullied into

civil speech and lengthy explanations; but he knew Applehead Furrman,

and he had sufficient intelligence to read correctly the character of

the group of men that stood behind Applehead. Honest men or thieves,

they were to, be reckoned with if any attempt were made to place Luck

under arrest; any fool could see that--and Hank Miller was not a fool.

He proceeded therefore to explain his errand and the robbery as the

cashier had described it to the clerks who returned after lunch to

finish their Saturday's work at the bank.

“Fifteen thousand they claim is what the fellers got. And one of your

men that runs the camera was keeping up a bluff of taking a pitcher of

it all the time--that's why they got away with it. Nobody suspicioned

it was anything more'n moving-pitcher acting till they found the cashier

and brought him toy along about one o'clock. It was that Chavez feller

that you had working for yuh, and Luis Rojas that done it--them and a

couple fellers stalling outside with the camera.”

“I wonder,” hazarded Pete Lowry, who had come down and joined the group,

“if that wasn't Bill Holmes with the camera? He was a lot more friendly

with Ramon than he tried to let on.”

“The point is,” Luck broke in, “that they took advantage of my holdup

scene to pull off the robbery. I can see how the cashier would fall

for a retake like that, especially since he don't know much about

picture-making. Gather up the props, boys, and let's go home. I'm going

to get the rights of this thing.”

“You've got it now,” the sheriff informed him huffily. “Think I been

loading you up with hot air? I was sent out to round you up--”

“Forget all that!” snapped luck. “I don't know as I enjoy having you

fellows jump at the notion I'm a bank-robber--or that if I had robbed a

bank I would have come right back here and gone to work. What kind of

a simp do you think I am, for gosh sake? Can you see where anyone but a

lunatic would go like that in broad daylight and pull off a robbery

as raw as that one must have been, and not even make an attempt at a

gateway? I'll gamble Applehead, here, wouldn't have fallen for a play as

coarse as that was if he was sheriff yet. He'd have seen right away that

the camera part was just the coarsest kind of a blind.

“My Lord! Think of grown men--officers of the law at that--being

simple-minded enough to come fogging out here to me, instead of getting

on the trail of the men that were seen on the spot! You say they came in

a machine to the bank and you never so much as tried to trace it, or to

get the license number even, I'll bet a month's salary you didn't! It

was a moving-picture stall, and so you come blundering out here to the

only picture company in the country, thinking, by gravy, that it was

all straight goods--oh, can you beat that for a boob?” He shook back his

heavy mane of gray hair and turned to his boys disgustedly.

“Pete and Tommy, you can drive the wagon back all right, can't you?

We'll go on ahead and see what there is at the bottom of this yarn.”

CHAPTER X. DEPUTIES ALL

At the ranch, whither they rode in haste, Luck meant to leave his boys

and go on with the sheriff to town. But the Happy Family flatly refused

to be left behind. Even old Aleck Douglas--whom years and trouble

had enfeebled until his very presence here with Jean and Lite was a

health-seeking mission in the wonderful air of New Mexico--even old

Aleck Douglas stamped his foot at Jean and declared that he was going,

along to see that “the boy” got a square deal. There wouldn't be any

railroading Luck to the pew for something he didn't do, he asserted with

a tragic meaning that wrung the heart of Jean. It took Lite's arguments

and Luck's optimism and, finally, the assurance of the sheriff that Luck

was not under arrest and was in no danger of it, to keep the old man at

the ranch. Also, they promised to return with all speed and not to keep

supper waiting, before the two women were satisfied to let them go.

“Oh, Luck Lindsay,” Rosemary bethought her to announce just as they were

leaving, “you better keep an eye out for Annie, while you're in town.

She's gone--and the dog and all her clothes and everything. Maybe she

took the train back to the reservation. I just wanted you to know, so if

you feel you ought to bother--”

“Annie gone?” Even in his preoccupation the mews came with a stab. “When

did she go?”

“We don't know. She set up an awful yowling when you boys went to work.

And the dog commenced howling, till it was simply awful. So we rode

in to town after the mail, and when we came back she was gone, bag and

baggage. We didn't see anything of her on the trail, but she could dodge

us if she wanted to--she's Injun enough for that.”

So Luck carried a double load of anxiety with him to town, and the first

thing he did when he reached it was to seek, not the beaten cashier

who had accused him, but the ticket agent at the depot, and the baggage

men--anyone who would be apt to remember Annie-Many-Ponies if she took a

train out of town.

You might think that, with so many Indians coming and going at the

depot, selling their wares and making picturesque setting for the

curios which are purveyed there, that Luck stood a very slight chance of

gaining any information whatever. But a Sioux squaw in Albuquerque would

be as noticeable as a Hindoo. Pueblos, Navajos--they may come and go

unnoticed because of their numbers. But an Indian of another tribe and

style of dress would be conspicuous enough to be remembered. So, when no

one remembered seeing Annie-Many-Ponies, Luck dismissed the conjecture

that she had taken the train, and turned his attention to picking up the

trail of the bank-robbers.

Here the Happy Family, with Applehead and Lite Avery, had managed

to accomplish a good deal in a very short time. The Native Son, for

instance, had ridden straight out from the bank into the Mexican

quarter, as soon as he learned that the red automobile had gone up

Silver Street and turned south on Fourth. By the time Luck reached the

bank Miguel came loping back with the news that the red machine had

crossed the lower bridge and had turned up toward Atrisco, that little

Mexican hamlet which lies between the river and the bluffs where the

white sand of the desert spills over into the nearest corrals and little

pastures.

The others had learned definitely that Bill Holmes had manipulated the

fake camera while the bank was being robbed, and that the man with him,

who bad also driven the machine, was a certain chauffeur of colorless

personality and an unsavory reputation among other drivers; and that

the number of the automobile was a matter of conjecture, since three

different men who were positive they remembered it gave three different

numbers.

In company with the sheriff they called upon the cashier, who was in bed

with his head bandaged and his nerves very much unstrung. He was much

calmer, however, than when he had hysterically accused Luck of betraying

him into putting the money out to be stolen. He admitted now that he

was not at all sure of the voice which talked with him over the phone;

indeed, now when he heard luck speak, he felt extremely doubtful of the

similarity of that other voice. He protested against being blamed for

being too confiding. He had never dreamed, he said, that anyone could be

so bold as to plan a thing like that. It all sounded straight, about the

spoiled negative and so forth. He was very sorry that he had caused

Luck Lindsay any inconvenience or annoyance, and he begged Luck's pardon

several times in the course of his explanation of the details.

They left him still protesting and apologizing and explaining and

touching his bandaged head with self-pitying tenderness. In the street

Luck turned to the sheriff as though his mind was made up to something

which argument could not alter in the slightest degree.

“I realize that in a way I'm partly responsible for this,” he said

crisply. “The scenes I took the other day made this play possible

for Ramon and his bunch. What you'd better do right now is to swear

Applehead and me in as deputies--and any of the boys that want to come

along and help round up that bunch. We'll do it, if it's to be done at

all. I feel I kind of owe it to that poor simp in there to get the money

back--sabe? And I owe it to myself to bring in Ramon and Bill Holmes,

and whoever else is with 'em on this; young Rojas we know is for one.”

“Where do you aim to look for 'em, if you don't mind telling?” Hank

Miller was staring doubtfully down at Luck.

“Where? Miguel here says they went toward Atrisco. That means they're

hitting for the Navajo reservation. There's three hundred miles of

country straight west, and not so much as a telegraph pole! Mighty few

service stations for the machine, too, when you think of it--and rough

country to travel over. If they try to go by automobile, we'll overhaul

them, most likely, before they get far. Also, we can trace 'em easy

enough.”

The sheriff pulled at his stubby mustache and looked the bunch over.

“You know that country?” he asked, still doubtfully. “Them Navvies are

plumb snaky, lemme tell yuh. Ain't like the Pueblos--you're taking a

risk when yuh ride into the Navvy country. They'll get yuh if they get

a chancet; run off your horses, head yuh away from water--they're plumb

MEAN!”

“Well, now, I calc'late I know them Navvies putty tol'ble well,”

Applehead cut in. “I've fit 'em comin' and goin'. Why, my shucks! Ef I

notched my gun for the Navvies I've got off an' on in the course uh my

travels, she'd shore look like a saw-blade, now I'm tellin' yuh!”

“Yes, an' yuh got a couple too many fer to go monkeyin' around on their

groun' agin,” the sheriff informed him bluntly. “They ain't forgot the

trip you made over there after Jose Martinez. Best fer you to keep off'n

that reservation, Applehead--and I'm speakin' as a friend.”

“As a friend you kin shet up,” Applehead retorted pettishly. “Ef

Luck hits fer the Navvy country after them skunks, I calc'late ole

Applehead'll be somers close handy by--”

“Hurry up and swear us in,” Luck interrupted. “We've got to get to the

ranch and back with an outfit, yet tonight, so we can hit the trail as

soon as possible. No use for you to take the oath, Andy--what you better

do is to stay at the ranch with the women folks.”

“Aleck will be there, and Pete and Tommy and the cook,” Andy rebelled

instantly. His hand went up to take the oath with the others.

There on the corner of the street where the shadows lay under a gently

whispering box-elder tree, Hank Miller faced the group that stood with

right hands uplifted and swore them as he had sworn--with the oath that

made deputy sheriffs of them all. He told them that while he did not

believe the thieves had gone to the reservation, and would look for them

elsewhere, the idea was worth acting upon--seeing they wanted to do it

anyway; and that the sheriff's office stood ready to assist them in

any way possible. He wished them luck and hurried away, evidently much

relieved to get away and out of an uncomfortable position.

In the next two hours Luck managed to accomplish a good deal, which

was one of the reasons why he was manager and director of the Flying

U Feature Films. Just for example, he went to a friend who was

also something of a detective, and put him on the job of find

Annie-Many-Ponies--a bigger task than it looked to Luck, as we have

occasion to know. He sent some of the boys back to the ranch in a

machine, and told them just what to bring back with them in the way

of rifles, bedding rolls, extra horses and so on. The horses they had

ridden into town he had housed in a livery stable. He took the Native

Son and a Mexican driver and went over to Atrisco, routed perfectly

polite and terribly sleepy individuals out of their beds and learned

beyond all question that a red automobile with several men in it had

passed through the dusty lanes and had labored up the hill to the desert

mesa beyond and that no one had seen it return.

He sent a hundred-and-fifty-word message to Dewitt of the Great Western

Company in Los Angeles, explaining with perfect frankness the situation

and his determination to get out after the robbers, and made it plain

also that he would not expect salary for the time he spent in the chase.

He ended by saying tersely, “My reputation and standing of company here

at stake,” and signed his name in a hasty scrawl that made the operator

scratch his ear reflectively with his pencil when he had counted the

words down to the signature. After that, Luck gave every ounce of his

energy and every bit of his brain to the outfitting of the expedition.

So well did he accomplish the task that by one O'clock that night a

low-voiced company of men rode away from a livery stable in the heart of

the town, leading four pack-horses and heading as straight as might be

for the bridge. They met no one; they saw scarcely a light in any of the

windows that they passed. A chill wind crept up the river so that they

buttoned their coats when the hoofbeats of the horses sounded hollow on

the bridge. Out through the lane that leads to Atrisco, which slept

in the stolid blackness of low adobe houses with flat roofs and tiny

windows, they rode at a trot. Dogs barked, ran but to the road and

barked again, ran back to the adobe huts and kept on barking. In one

field some loose horses, seeing so many of their kind in the lane,

galloped up to the fence and stood there snorting. These were still in

their colthood, however, and the saddle-horses merely flicked ears in

their direction and gave them no more heed.

“I'm glad you're sure of the country, up here on top,” Luck said to

Applehead when they had climbed, by the twisting, sandy trail, to the

sand dunes that lay on the edge of the mesa and stretched vaguely away

under the stars. To the rim-rook line that separated this first mesa

from the higher one beyond, Luck himself knew the sand-hills well.

But beyond the broken line of hills off to the northwest he had never

gone--and there lay the territory that belongs to the Navajos, who are

a tricky tribe and do not love the white people who buy their rugs and

blankets and, so claim the Navajos, steal their cattle and their horses

as well.

At the rim of lava rock they made a dry camp and lay down in what

comfort they could achieve, to doze and wait for daylight so that they

could pick up the trail of the red automobile.

CHAPTER XI. ALL THIS WAR-TALK ABOUT INJUNS

Over his second cup of coffee the pale eyes of Big Medicine goggled

thoughtfully at the forbidding wall of lava rock that stretched before

them as far as he could see to left or right. There were places here and

there where he believed that a man could climb to the top with the aid

of his hands as well as his feet, but for the horses he was extremely

skeptical; and as for a certain big red automobile.... His eyes swung

from the brown rampart and rested grievedly upon the impassive face of

Luck, who was just then reaching forward to spear another slice of bacon

from the frying pan.

“Kinda looks to me, by cripes, as if we'd come to the end uh the trail,”

he observed in his usual full-lunged bellow, as though he had all his

life been accustomed to pitching his voice above some unending clamor.

“Yuh got any idee of how an autyMObile clumb that there rim-rock?”

Old Applehead, squatting on his heels across the little camp-fire,

leaned and picked a coal out of the ashes for his pipe and afterwards

cocked his eyes toward Big Medicine.

“What yuh calc'late yuh tryin' to do?” he inquired pettishly. “Start

up an argyment uh some kind? Cause if ye air, lemme tell yuh I got the

yer-ache from listenin' to you las' night.”

Big Medicine looked at him as though he was going to spring upon him in

deadly combat--but that was only a peculiar facial trick of his. What

he did do was to pour that last swallow of hot, black coffee down his

throat and then laugh his big haw-haw-haw that could be heard half a

mile off.

“Y' oughta kep Applehead to home with the wimmin folks, Luck,” he bawled

unabashed. “Night air's bad fer 'im, and the trail ain't goin' to be

smooth goin',--not if we gotta ride our hawses straight up, by cripes!”

“We haven't got to.” Luck balanced his slice of bacon upon the

unscorched side of a bannock and glanced indifferently at the rim of

rock that was worrying the other. “I swung down here to make camp off

the trail But it's only a half mile or so over this rise that looks

level to you, to where the lava ledge peters out so we can ride over it

easier than we rode up off the river-flat in that loose sand. That ease

your mind any?”

“Helps some,” Big Medicine admitted, his eyes going speculatively to the

rise that looked perfectly level. “I'm willin' to take your word fer

it, boss. But what's gittin' to worry me, by cripes, is all this here

war-talk about Injuns. Honest to grandma, I feel like as if I'd been

readin'--”

“Aw, it's jest a josh, Bud!” Happy Jack asserted boredly. “I betche

there ain't been a Injun on the fight here sence hell was a tradin'

post!”

“You think there hasn't?” Luck looked up quickly to ask. But old

Applehead rose up and shook an indignant finger at Happy Jack.

“There ain't, hey? Well, I calc'late that fer a josh, them thar Navvies

has got a right keen sense uh humor, and I've knowed men to laff

theirselves to death on their danged resavation--now I'm tellin' yuh I

It was all a josh mebby, when they riz up a year or two back 'cause one

uh their tribe was goin' t' be arrested er some darn thing! Ole General

Scott, he didn't call it no joke when he, went in thar to settle 'em

down, did he? I calc'late, mebby it was jest fer a josh them troops

waited on the aidge, ready to go in if he didn't git back a certain

time! 'N' that wasn't so fur back, shorely,--only two years. Why dang

your fool heart, I've laid out there in them hills myself and fit

off the Navvies--'n' _I_ didn't see nothin' much to laugh at, now I'm

tellin' yuh! Time I went there after Jose Martinez--”

“Better get under way, boys,” Luck interrupted, having heard many times

the details of that fight and capture. “We'll throw out a circle and

pick up the trail of that machine, or whatever they made their getaway

in. My idea is that they must have stached some horses out here

somewhere. I don't believe they'd take the risk of trying to get away

in a machine; that would hold them to the main trails, mostly. I know it

wouldn't be my way of getting outa reach. I'd want horses so I could get

into rough country, and I've doped it out that Ramon is too trail-wise

to bank very high on an automobile once he got out away from town.

Applehead, you and Lite and Pink and Weary form one party if it comes

to where we want to divide forces. Pack a complete camp outfit on the

sorrel and the black--you notice that's the way I had 'em packed first.

Keep their packs just as we started out, then you'll be ready to strike

out by yourselves whenever it seems best. Get me?”

“We get you, boss,” Weary sang out cheerfully, and went to work

gathering up the breakfast things and putting them into two little piles

for the packs. Pink led up the black and the sorrel, and helped to pack

them with bedding and supplies for four, as Luck had ordered, while Lite

and Applehead saddled their horses and then came up to help throw the

diamond hitches on the packs.

A couple of rods nearer the rock wall Happy Jack was grumbling, across

the canvas pack of a little bay, at Big Medicine, who was warning

him against leaving his hair so long as a direct temptation to

scalp-lifting. Luck bad already mounted and ridden out a little way,

where he could view the country behind them with his field glasses,

to make sure that in the darkness they had not passed by anything that

deserved a closer inspection. He came back at a lope and motioned to

Andy and the Native Son.

“That red automobile is standing back about half a mile,” he announced

hurriedly. “Empty and deserted, looks like. We'll go back and take a

look at it. The rest of you can finish packing and wait here till we

come back. No use making extra travel for your horses. They'll get all

they need, the chances are.”

The red automobile was empty of everything but the upholstering and a

jack in the toolbox. The state license number was gone, and the serial

number on the engine had been hammered into illegibility. What tracks

there were had been blown nearly full of the white sand of that

particular locality There was nothing to be learned there, except the

very patent fact that the machine bad been abandoned for some reason.

Luck took a look at the engine and saw nothing wrong with it. There was

oil and there was “gas”--a whole tank full. Andy and Miguel, riding

an ever-widening circle around the machine while Luck was looking for

evidence of a breakdown, ran across a lot of hoofprints that seemed to

head straight away past the rim-rock and on to the hills.

They picked up the trail of the hoofprints and followed it. When they

returned to the others they found the boys all mounted and waiting

impatiently like hounds on the leash eager to get away on the chase. Six

horses there were, and even old Applehead, who was in a bad humor that

morning and seemed to hate agreeing with anyone, admitted that probably

the four who had committed the robbery and left town in the machine had

been met out here by a man who brought horses for them and one extra

pack horse. This explained the number in the most plausible manner, and

satisfied everyone that they were on the right trail.

Riding together--since they were on a plain trail and there was nothing

to be gained by separating--they climbed to the higher mesa, crossed the

ridge of the three barren hills that none of them but Applehead had ever

passed, and went on and on and on as the hoofprints led them, straight

toward the reservation.

They discussed the robbery from every angle--they could think of, and

once or twice someone hazarded a guess at Annie-Many-Ponies' reason

for leaving and her probable destination. They wondered how old Dave

Wiswell, the dried little cattleman of The Phantom Herd, was making out

in Denver, where he had gone to consult a specialist about some kidney

trouble that had interfered with his riding all spring. Weary suggested

that maybe Annie-Many-Ponies had taken a notion to go and visit old

Dave, since the two were old friends.

It was here that Applehead unwittingly put into words the vague

suspicion which Luck had been trying to stifle and had not yet faced as

a definite idea.

“I calc'late we'll likely find that thar squaw putty tol'ble close to

whar we find Bill Holmes,” Applehead remarked sourly. “Her goin'

off same, day they stuck up that bank don't look to me like no

happenstance--now I'm tellin' yuh! 'N' if I was shurf, and was ast to

locate that squaw, I'd keep right on the trail uh Bill Holmes, jest as

we're doin' now.”

“That isn't like Annie,” Luck said sharply to, still the conviction in

his own mind. “Whatever faults she may have, she's been loyal to me, and

honest. Look how she stuck last winter, when she didn't have anything at

stake, wasn't getting any salary, and yet worked like a dog to help

make the picture a success. Look how she got up in the night when the

blizzard struck, and fed our horses and cooked breakfast of her own

accord, just so I could get out early and get my scenes. I've known

her since she was a dirty-faced papoose, and I never knew her to lie

or steal. She wasn't in on that robbery--I'll bank on that, and she

wouldn't go off with a thief. It isn't like Annie.”

“Well,” said Big Medicine, thinking of his own past, “the best uh women

goes wrong when some knot-headed man gits to lovemakin'. They'll do

things fer the wrong kinda man, by cripes, that they wouldn't do fer no

other human on earth. I've knowed a good woman to lie and steal--fer

a man that wasn't fit, by cripes, to tip his hat to 'er in the street!

Women,” he added pessimistically, “is something yuh can't bank on, as

safe as yuh can on a locoed horse!” He kicked his mount unnecessarily

by way of easing the resentment which one woman had managed to instil

against the sex in general.

“That's where you're darned right, Bud,” Pink attested with a sudden

bitterness which memory brought. “I wouldn't trust the best woman that

ever lived outa my sight, when you come right down to cases.”

“Aw, here!” Andy Green, thinking loyally of his Rosemary, swung his

horse indignantly toward the two. “Cut that out, both of you! Just

because you two got stung, is no reason why you've got to run down all

the rest of the women. I happen to know one--”

“Aw, nobody was talking about Rosemary,” Big Medicine apologized

gruffly. “She's different; any fool knows that.”

“Well, I've got a six-gun here that'll talk for another one,” silent

Lite Avery spoke up suddenly. “One that would tip the scales on the

woman's side for goodness if the rest of the whole sex was bad.”

“Oh, thunder!” Pink cried, somewhat redder than the climbing sun alone

would warrant. “I'll take it back. I didn't mean THEM--you know darned

well I didn't mean them--nor lots of other women I know. What I meant

was--”

“What you meant was Annie,” Luck broke in uncompromisingly. “And I'm not

condemning her just because things look black. You don't know Indians

the way I know them. There's some things an Indian will do, and then

again there's some things they won't do. You boys don't know it--but

yesterday morning when we left the ranch, Annie-Many-Ponies made me the

peace-sign. And after that she went into her tent and began to sing the

Omaha. It didn't mean anything to you--Old Dave is the only one that

would have sabed, and he wasn't there. But it meant enough to me that

I came pretty near riding back to have a pow-wow with Annie, even if we

were late. I wish I had. I'd have less on my conscience right now.”

“Fur's I kin see,” Applehead dissented impatiently, “you ain't got

no call to have nothin' on your conscience where that thar squaw is

concerned. You treated her a hull lot whiter'n what she deserved--now

I'm tellin' ye! 'N' her traipsin' around at nights 'n'--”

“I tell you, you don't know Indians!” Luck swung round in the saddle

so that he could face Applehead. “You don't know the Sioux, anyway. She

wouldn't have made me that peace-sign if she'd been double-crossing me,

I tell you. And she wouldn't have sung the Omaha if she was going to

throw in with a thief that was trying to lay me wide open to suspicion.

I've been studying things over in my mind, and there's something in this

affair I can't sabe. And until you've got some proof, the less you say

about Annie-Many-Ponies the better I'll be pleased.”

That, coming from Luck in just that tone and with just that look in his

eyes, was tantamount to an ultimatum, and it was received as one. Old

Applehead grunted and chewed upon a wisp of his sunburned mustache that

looked like dried cornsilk after a frost. The Happy Family exchanged

careful glances and rode meekly along in silence. There was not a man

of them but believed that Applehead was nearer right than Luck, but they

were not so foolish as to express that belief.

After a while Big Medicine began bellowing tunelessly that old ditty,

once popular but now half forgotten:

“Nava, Nava, My Navaho-o

I have a love for you that will grow-ow!”

Which stirred old Applehead to an irritated monologue upon the theme of

certain persons whose ignorance is not blissful, but trouble-inviting.

Applehead, it would seem from his speech upon the subject, would be a

much surprised ex-sheriff--now a deputy--if they were not all captured

and scalped, if not worse, the minute their feet touched the forbidden

soil of these demons in human form, the Navajo Indians.

“If they were not too busy weaving blankets for Fred Harvey,” Luck

qualified with his soft Texan drawl and the smile that went with it.

“You talk as if these boys were tourists.”

“Yes,” added Andy Green maliciously, “here comes a war-party now, boys.

Duck behind a rock, Applehead, they're liable to charge yuh fer them

blankets!”

The Happy Family laughed uproariously, to the evident bewilderment of

the two Indians who, swathed in blankets and with their hair knotted and

tied with a green ribbon and a yellow, drove leisurely toward the group

in an old wagon that had a bright new seat and was drawn by a weazened

span of mangy-looking bay ponies. In the back of the wagon sat a young

squaw and two papooses, and beside them were stacked three or four

of the gay, handwoven rugs for which the white people will pay many

dollars.

“Buenas dias,” said the driver of the wagon, who was an oldish Indian

with a true picture-postal face. And: “Hello,” said the other, who was

young and wore a bright blue coat, such as young Mexicans affect.

“Hello, folks,” cried the Happy Family genially, and lifted their

hats to the good-looking young squaw in the wagon-bed, who tittered in

bashful appreciation of the attention.

“Mama! They sure are wild and warlike,” Weary commented drily as he

turned to stare after the wagon.

“Us little deputies had better run home,” Pink added with mock alarm.

“By cripes, I know now what went with Applehead's hair!” bawled Big

Medicine. “Chances is, it's weaved into that red blanket the old buck is

wearin'--Haw-haw-haw!”

“Laff, dang ye, laff!” Applehead cried furiously. “But do your laffing

where I can't hear ye, fer I'm tellin' ye right now I've had enough of

yore dang foolishness. And the next feller that makes a crack is goin'

to wisht he hadn't now I'm tellin' ye!”

This was not so much an ultimatum as a declaration of war--and the Happy

Family suddenly found themselves all out of the notion of laughing at

anything at all.

CHAPTER XII. THE WILD-GOOSE CHASE

Because they had no human means of knowing anything about the black

automobile that bad whirled across the mesa to the southeast and left

its mysterious passengers in one of the arroyos that leads into the

Sandias Mountains near Coyote Springs, nine cowpuncher deputy-sheriffs

bored their way steadily through sun and wind and thirst, traveling due

northwest, keeping always on the trail of the six horses that traveled

steadily before them Always a day's march behind, always watching

hopefully for some sign of delay--for an encouraging freshness in the

tracks that would show a lessening distance between the two parties,

Luck and his Happy Family rode--from dawn till dusk, from another dawn

to another dusk. Their horses, full of little exuberant outbursts of

horse-foolishness when they had left town, settled clown to a dogged,

plodding half walk, half trot which is variously described upon the

range; Luck, for instance, calling it poco-poco; while the Happy Family

termed it running-walk, trail-trot, fox-trot--whatever came easiest to

their tongues at the time. Call it what they pleased, the horses came to

a point where they took the gait mechanically whenever the country was

decently level. They forgot to shy at strange objects, and they never

danced away from a foot lifted to the stirrup when the sky was flaunting

gorgeous bantiers to herald the coming of the sun. More than once they

were thankful to have the dust washed from their nostrils and to let

that pass for a drink. For water holes were few and far between when

they struck that wide, barren land ridged here and there with hills of

rock.

Twice the trail of the six horses was lost, because herds of cattle had

passed between those who rode in baste before, and those who followed in

haste a day's ride behind. They saw riders in the distance nearly

every day, but only occasionally did any Indians come within speaking

distance. These were mostly headed townward in wagons and rickety old

buggies, with the men riding dignifiedly on the spring seat and the

squaws and papooses sitting flat in the bottom behind. These family

parties became more and more inclined to turn and stare after the Happy

Family, as if they were puzzling over the errand that would take nine

men riding close-grouped across the desert, with four pack-horses to

proclaim the journey a long one.

When the trail swung sharply away from the dim wagon road and into the

northwest where the land lay parched and pitiless under the hot sun, the

Happy Family hitched their gun-belts into place, saw to it that their

canteens were brimming with the water that was so precious, and turned

doggedly that way, following the lead of Applehead, who knew the country

fairly well, and of Luck, who did not know the country, but who knew

that he meant to overhaul Ramon Chavez and Bill Holmes, go where they

would, and take them back to jail. If they could ride across this barren

stretch, said Luck to Applehead, he and his bunch could certainly follow

them.

“Well, this is kinda takin' chances,” Applehead observed soberly,

“unless Ramon, he knows whar's the water-holes. If he does hit water

regular, I calc'late we kin purty nigh foller his lead. They's things

I don't like about the way this here trail is leading out this way, now

I'm tellin' yuh! Way we're goin', we'll be in the Seven Lakes country

'fore we know it. Looks to me like them greasers must stand in purty

well with the Navvies--'n' if they do, it'll be dang hard pullin' to git

'em away 'n! outa here. 'N' if they don't stand in, they'd oughta bore

more west than what they're doin'. Looks dang queer to me, now I'm

tellin' ye!”

“Well, all I want is to overtake them. We'll do it, too. The little

grain these horses get is showing its worth right now,” Luck cheered

him. “They're keeping up better than I was afraid they would. We've

got that advantage--a Mexican don't as a rule grain his horses, and the

chances are that Ramon thought more about the gold than he did about

carrying horse-feed. We can hold on longer than he can, Applehead.”

“We can't either,” Applehead disputed, “because if Ramon takes a notion

he'll steal fresh horses from the Injuns.”

“I thought you said he stood in with the Injuns,” Weary spoke up from

the ambling group, behind. “You're kinda talkin' in circles, ain't you,

Applehead?”

“Well, I calc'late yuh jest about got to talk in circles to git

anywheres near Ramon,” Applehead retorted, looking back at the others.

“They's so, dang many things he MIGHT be aimin' to do, that I ain't been

right easy in my mind the last day or two, and I'm tellin' ye so. 'S

like a storm--I kin smell trouble two days off; that's mebby why I'm

still alive an' able to fork a boss. An' I'm tellin' you right now, I

kin smell trouble stronger'n a polecat under the chicken-house!”

“Well, by cripes, let 'er come!” Big Medicine roared cheerfully,

inspecting a battered plug of “chewin'” to see where was the most

inviting corner in which to set his teeth. “Me'n' trouble has locked

horns more'n once, 'n' I'd feel right lonesome if I thought our trails'd

never cross agin. Why, down in Coconino County--” He went off into a

long recital of certain extremely bloody chapters in the history of

that famed county as chronicled by one Bud Welch, otherwise known as Big

Medicine--and not because of his modesty, you may be sure.

Noon of that day found them plodding across a high, barren mesa under a

burning sun. Since red dawn they had been riding, and the horses showed

their need of water. They lagged often into a heavy-footed walk and

their ears drooped dispiritedly. Even Big Medicine found nothing

cheerful to say. Luck went out of his way to gain the top of every

little rise, and to scan the surrounding country through his field

glasses. The last time he came sliding down to the others his face

was not so heavy with anxiety and his voice when he spoke had a new

briskness.

“There's a ranch of some kind straight ahead about two miles,” he

announced. “I could see a green patch, so there must be water around

there somewhere. We'll make noon camp there, and maybe we can dig up a

little information. Ramon must have stopped there for water, and we'll

find out just how far we are behind.”

The ranch, when they finally neared it, proved to be a huddle of

low, octagon-shaped huts (called hogans) made of short cedar logs and

plastered over with adobe, with a hole in the center of the lid-like

roof to let the smoke out and a little light in; and dogs, that ran out

and barked and yelped and trailed into mourning rumbles and then barked

again; and half-naked papooses that scurried like rabbits for shelter

when they rode up; and two dingy, shapeless squaws that disappeared

within a hogan and peered out at one side of the blanket door.

Luck started to dismount and make some attempt at a polite request for

water, and for information as well, but Applehead objected and finally

had his way.

If the squaws could speak English, he argued, they would lie unless they

refused to talk at all. As to the water, if there was any around the

place the bunch could find it and help themselves. “These yer Navvies

ain't yore Buffalo-Bill Sioux,” he pointed out to Luck. “Yuh can't treat

'em the same. The best we kin look fer is to be left alone--an' I'm

tellin' ye straight.”

Luck gave the squalid huts a long stare and turned away toward the

corral and a low shed that served as a stable. A rusty old mower and a

toothless rake and a rickety buckboard stood baking in the sun, and a

few stunted hens fluttered away from their approach. In the corral a

mangy pony blinked in dejected slumber; and all the while, the three

dogs followed them and barked and yapped and growled, until Pink turned

in the saddle with the plain intention of stopping the clamor with a

bullet or two.

“Ye better let 'em alone!” Applehead warned sharply, and Pink put up his

gun unfired and took down his rope.

“The darned things are getting on my nerves!” he complained, and wheeled

suddenly in pursuit of the meanest-looking dog of the three. “I can

stand a decent dog barking at me, but so help me Josephine, I draw the

line at Injun curs!”

The dog ran yelping toward the hogans with Pink hard at its heels

swinging his loop menacingly. When the dog, with a last hysterical yelp,

suddenly flattened its body and wriggled under a corner of the shed,

Pink turned and rode after the others, who had passed the corral and

were heading for the upper and of a small patch of green stuff that

looked like a half-hearted attempt at a vegetable garden. As he passed

the shed an Indian in dirty overalls and gingham shirt craned his neck

around the doorway and watched him malevolently; but Pink, sighting the

green patch and remembering their dire need of water, was kicking

his horse into a trot and never once thought to cast an eye over his

shoulder.

In that arid land, where was green vegetation you may be sure there was

water also. And presently the nine were distributed along a rod or

two of irrigating ditch, thankfully watching the swallows of water go

sliding hurriedly down the outstretched gullets of their horses that

leaned forward with half-bent, trembling knees, fetlock deep in the wet

sand of the ditch-banks.

“Drink, you sons-uh-guns, drink!” Weary exclaimed jubilantly, “you've

sure got it coming--and mama, how I do hate to see a good horse

suffering for a feed or water, or shelter from a storm!”

They pulled them away before they were satisfied, and led them back to

where green grass was growing. There they pulled the saddles off and let

the poor brutes feed while they unpacked food for themselves.

“It'll pay in the long run,” said Luck, “to give them an hour here. I'll

pay the Injuns for what grass they eat. Ramon must have stopped here

yesterday. I'm going up and see if I can't pry a little information

loose from those squaws and papooses. Come on, Applehead--you can talk a

little Navvy; you come and tell 'em what I want.”

Applehead hesitated, and with a very good reason. He might, for all he

knew, be trespassing upon the allotment of a friend or relative of

some of the Indians he had been compelled to “get” in the course of his

duties as sheriff. And at any rate they all knew him--or at least knew

of him.

“Aw, gwan, Applehead,” Happy Jack urged facetiously, sure that Applehead

had tried to scare him with tales of Indians whose pastoral pursuits

proclaimed aloud their purity of souls. “Gwan! You ain't afraid of a

couple of squaws, are yuh? Go on and talk to the ladies. Mebby yuh might

win a wife if yuh just had a little nerve!”

Applehead turned and glowered. But Luck was already walking slowly

toward the hogans and looking back frequently, so Applehead contented

himself by saying, “You wait till this yere trip's over, 'fore ye git so

dang funny in yore remarks, young man!” and stalked after Luck, hitching

his six-shooter forward as he went.

At the shed, the Indian who had peered after Pink stood in the doorway

and stared unwinkingly as they came up. Applehead glanced at him sharply

from under his sorrel eyebrows and grunted. He knew him by sight well

enough, and he took it for granted that the recognition was mutual. But

he gave no sign of remembrance. Instead, he asked how much the Indian

wanted for the grass the horses would eat in an hour.

The Indian looked at the two impassively and did not say anything at

all; so Applehead flipped him a dollar.

“Now, what time did them fellows pass here yesterday?” Applehead asked,

in the half Indian, half Mexican jargon which nearly all New Mexico

Indians speak.

The Indian looked at the dollar and moved his head of bobbed hair

vaguely from left to right.

“All right, dang ye, don't talk if ye don't feel like it,” Applehead

commented in wasted sarcasm, and looked at Luck for some hint of what

was wanted next. Luck seemed uncertain, so Applehead turned toward the

ditch, and the food his empty stomach craved.

“No use tryin' to make 'em talk if they ain't in the notion,” he told

Luck impatiently. “He's got his dollar, and we'll take what grass

our hosses kin pack away in their bellies. That kinda winds up the

transaction, fur's I kin see.”

“I wonder if another dollar--”

But Applehead interrupted him. “Another dollar might git him warmed up

so's he'd shake his danged head twicet instid uh once't,” he asserted

pessimistically, “but that's all you'd git outa him. That thar buck

ain't TALKIN' today. Yuh better come an' eat 'n' rest yer laigs. If he

talked, he'd lie. We're a heap better off jest doin' our own trailin'

same as we been doin. That bunch come by here; the tracks show that. If

they went on, the tracks'll show where they headed fur. 'N' my idee is

that they'll take their time from now on. They don't know we're trailin'

'em up. I'll bet they never throwed back any scout t' watch the back

trail, In' they're in Navvy country now--whar they're purty tol'ble safe

if they stand in with the Injuns. 'N' I'm tellin' yuh right now, Luck,

I wisht I could say as much fer us!” Applehead lifted his hat and rubbed

his palm over his bald pate that was covered thickly with beads of

perspiration, as if his head were a stone jar filled with cold water.

“If we have to sep'rate, Luck, you take a fool's advice and keep yore

dang eyes open. The boys, they think I been stringin' 'em along. Mebby

you think so too, but I kin tell ye right now 't we gotta keep our dang

eyes in our haids!”

“I'm taking your word for it, Applehead,” Luck told him, lowering his

voice a little because they were nearing the others. “Besides, I've

heard a lot about these tricky boys with the Dutch-cut on their hair.

I'm keeping it all in mind don't worry. But I sure am going to overhaul

Ramon, if we have to follow him to salt water.”

“Well, now, I ain't never turned back on a trail yit, fer want uh nerve

to foller it,” Applehead stated offendedly. “When I was shurf--”

The enlivened jumble of voices, each proclaiming the owner's hopes or

desires or disbelief to ears that were not listening, quite submerged

Applehead's remarks upon the subject of his wellknown prowess when he

was “shurf.” The Happy Family were sprawled in unwonted luxury on the

shady side of an outcropping of rock from under which a little spring

seeped and made a small oasis in the general barrenness. They had shade,

they Had water and food, and through the thin aromatic smoke of their

cigarettes they could watch their horses cropping avidly the green grass

that meant so much to them. The knowledge that an hour later they would

be traveling again in the blazing heat of midday but emphasized their

present comfort. They were enjoying every minute to its full sixty

seconds. Laughter came easily and the hardships of the trail were pushed

into the background of their minds.

They were not particularly anxious over the success or failure of

Luck's trip to the hogans. They were on Ramon's trail (or so they firmly

believed) and sooner or later they would overhaul him and Bill Holmes.

When that happened they believed that they would be fully equal to the

occasion, and that Ramon and Bill and those who were with him would

learn what it means to turn traitor to the hand that has fed them, and

to fling upon that hand the mud of public suspicion. But just now they

were not talking about these things; they were arguing very earnestly

over a very trivial matter indeed, and they got as much satisfaction out

of the contention as though it really amounted to something.

When Luck had eaten and smoked and had ground his cigarette stub under

his heel in the moist earth beside the spring, and had looked at his

watch and got upon his feet with a sigh to say: “Well, boys, let's go,”

the Happy Family (who by the way must now be understood as including

Lite Avery) sighed also and pulled their reluctant feet toward them and

got up also, with sundry hitchings-into-place as to gun-belts and sundry

resettlings as to hats. They pulled their horses more reluctant even

than their riders--away from the green grass; resaddled, recinched the

packs on the four animals that carried the camp supplies, gave them a

last drink at the little irrigating ditch and mounted and straggled out

again upon the trail of the six whom they seemed never able to overtake.

They did not know that the silent Indian with the dingy overalls and the

bobbed hair had watched every movement they made. Through all that hour

of rest not even a papoose had been visible around the hogans--which,

while there was nothing warlike in their keeping under cover, was not

exactly a friendly attitude. Applehead had kept turning his keen, bright

blue eyes that way while he ate and afterwards smoked an after-dinner

pipe, but when they were actually started again upon the trail he

appeared to lay aside his misgivings.

Not even Applehead suspected that the Indian had led a pony carefully

down into a draw, keeping the buildings always between himself and

the party of white men; nor that he watched them while they spread out

beyond the cultivated patch of irrigated ground until they picked up

the trail of the six horses, when they closed the gaps between them and

followed the trail straight away into the parched mesa that was lined

with deep washes and canons and crossed with stony ridges where the heat

radiated up from the bare rocks as from a Heating stove when the fire is

blazing within. When they rode away together, the Indian ran back into

the draw, mounted his pony and lashed it into a heavy, sure-footed

gallop.

CHAPTER XIII. SET AFOOT

The tracks of the six horses led down into a rock-bottomed arroyo so

deep in most places that all view of the surrounding mesa was shut off

completely, save where the ragged tops of a distant line of hills pushed

up into the dazzling blue of the sky. The heat, down here among the

rocks, was all but unbearable; and when they discovered that no tracks

led out of the arroyo on the farther side, the Happy Family dismounted

and walked to save their horses while they divided into two parties and

hunted up and down the arroyo for the best trail.

It was just such vexatious delays as this which had kept them always a

day's ride or more behind their quarry, and Luck's hand trembled with

nervous irritability when he turned back and banded Applehead one of

those small, shrill police whistles whose sound carries so far, and

which are much used by motion-picture producers for the long-distance

direction of scenes.

“I happened to have a couple in my pocket,” he explained hurriedly. “You

know the signals, don't you? One long, two short will mean you've picked

up the trail. Three or more short, quick ones is an emergency call, for

all hands to come running.”

“Well, they's one thing you want to keep in mind, Luck,” Applehead urged

from his superior trail craft. “They might be sharp enough to ride in

here a ways and come out the same side they rode in at. Yuh want to hunt

both sides as yuh go up.”

“Sure,” said Luck, and hurried away up the arroyo with Pink, Big

Medicine, Andy and the Native Son at his heels, leading the two

pack-horses that belonged to their party. In the opposite direction went

Applehead and the others, their eyes upon the ground watching for the

faintest sign of hoofprints.

That blazing ball of torment, the sun, slid farther and farther down to

the skyline, tempering its heat with the cool promise of dusk. Away up

the arroyo, Luck stopped for breath after a sharp climb up through a

narrow gash in the sheer wall of what was now a small canon, and saw

that to search any farther in that direction would be useless. Across

the arroyo--that had narrowed and deepened until it was a canon--Andy

Green was mopping his face with his handkerchief and studying a bold

hump of jumbled bowlders and ledges, evidently considering whether it

was worth while toiling up to the top. A little below him, the Native

Son was flinging rocks at a rattlesnake with the vicious precision of

frank abhorrence. Down in the canon bottom Big Medicine and Pink were

holding the horses on the shady side of the gorge, and the smoke of

their cigarettes floated lazily upward with the jumbled monotone of

their voices.

Andy, glancing across at Luck, waved his hand and sat down on a

rock that was shaded by a high bowlder; reached mechanically for his

“makings” and with his feet far apart and his elbows on his thighs,

wearily rolled a cigarette.

“How about it, boss?” he asked, scarcely raising his voice above the

ordinary conversational tone, though a hard fifteen-minutes' climb up

and down separated the two; “they never came up the arroyo, if you ask

ME. My side don't show a hoof track from where we left the boys down

below.”

“Mine either,” Luck replied, by the power of suggestion seating himself

and reaching for his own tobacco and papers. “We might as well work back

down and connect with Applehead. Wish there was some sign of water in

this darn gulch. By the time we get down where we started from, it'll be

sundown.” He glanced down at Bud and Pink. “Hey! You can start back any,

time,” he called. “Nothing up this way.”

“Here's the grandfather of all rattlers,” Miguel called across to Luck,

and held up by the tail a great snake that had not ceased its muscular

writhings. “Twelve rattles and a button. Have I got time to skin him? He

tried to bite me on the leg--but I beard him and got outa reach.”

“We've got to be moving,” Luck answered. “It's a long ways back where

we started from, and we've got to locate water, if we can.” He rose with

the deliberateness that indicated tired muscles, and started back; and

to himself he muttered exasperatedly: “A good three hours all shot to

pieces--and not a mile gained on that bunch!”

The Native Son, calmly pinching the rattles of the snake he had not time

to skin, climbed down into the Canon and took his horse by the bridle

reins. Behind him Andy Green came scrambling; but Luck, still faintly

hoping for a clue, kept to the upper rim of the arroyo, scanning every

bit of soft ground where it seemed possible for a horse to climb up from

below. He had always recognized the native cunning of Ramon, but he had

never dreamed him as cunning as this latest ruse would seem to prove

him.

As for Bill Holmes, Luck dismissed him with a shrug of contempt. Bill

Holmes had been stranded in Albuquerque when the cold weather was coming

on; he had been hungry and shelterless and ill-clad--one of those bits

of flotsam which drift into our towns and stand dejectedly upon our

street-corners when they do not prowl down alleys to the back doors of

our restaurants in the hope of being permitted to wash the soiled dishes

of more fortunate men for the food which diners have left beside their

plates. Luck had fed Bill Holmes, and he had given him work to do and

the best food and shelter he could afford; and for thanks, Bill had--as

Luck believed--made sly, dishonest love to Annie-Many-Ponies, for whose

physical and moral welfare Luck would be held responsible. Bill had

deliberately chosen to steal rather than work for honest wages, and had

preferred the unstable friendship of Ramon Chavez to the cleaner life

in Luck's company. He did not credit Bill Holmes with anything stronger

than a weak-souled treachery. Ramon, he told himself while he made his

way down the arroyo side, was at least working out a clever scheme of

his own, and it rested with Luck and his posse to see that Ramon was

cheated of success.

So deeply was he engrossed that before he realized it he was down where

they had left Applehead's party. There was no sign of them anywhere, so

Luck went down and mounted his horse and led the way down the arroyo.

Already the heat was lessening and the land was taking on those

translucent opal tints which make of New Mexico a land of enchantment.

The far hills enveloped themselves in a faint, purplish haze through

which they seemed to blush unwittingly. The mesa, no longer showing

itself an and waste of heat and untracked wilderness, lay soft under a

thin veil of many ethereal tints. Away off to the northeast they heard

the thin, vague clamor of a band of sheep and the staccato barking of a

dog.

Luck rode for some distance, his uneasiness growing as the shadows

deepened with the setting of the sun. They had gone too far to hear

any whistled signal, but it seemed to him reasonable to suppose that

Applehead would return to their starting point, whether he found the

trail or not; or at least send a man back. Luck began to think more

seriously of Applehead's numerous warnings about the Indians--and yet,

there had been no sound of shooting, which is the first sign of trouble

in this country. Rifle shots can be heard a long way in this clear air;

so Luck presently dismissed that worry and gave his mind to the very

real one which assailed them all; which was water for their horses.

The boys were riding along in silence, sitting over to one side with a

foot dangling free of its stirrup; except Andy, who had hooked one

leg over the saddle-horn and was riding sidewise, smoking a meditative

cigarette and staring out between the ears of his horse. They were

tired; horses and men, they were tired to the middle of their bones.

But they went ahead without making any complaints whatever or rasping

oneanother's tempers with ill-chosen remarks; and for that Luck's eyes

brightened with appreciation.

Presently, when they had ridden at least a mile down the arroyo, a gray

hat-crown came bobbing into sight over a low tongue of rocky ground

that cut the channel almost in two. The horses threw up their heads and

perked cars forward inquiringly, and in a moment Happy Tack came into

view, his gloomy, sunburned face wearing a reluctant grin.

“Well, we got on the trail,” he announced as soon as he was close

enough. “And we follered it to water. Applehead says fer you to come on

and make camp. Tracks are fresher around that' water-hole'n what they

have been, an' Applehead, he's all enthused. I betche we land them

fellers t'morrow.”

Out of the arroyo in a place where the scant grassland lapped down over

the edge, Happy Jack led the way and the rest followed eagerly. Too

often had they made dry camp not to feel jubilant over the prospect even

of a brackish water-hole. Even the horses seemed to know and to step out

more briskly. Straight across the mesa with its deceptive lights that

concealed distance behind a glamor of intimate nearness, they rode into

the deepening dusk that had a glow all through it. After a while they

dipped into a grassy draw so shallow that they hardly realized the

descent until they dismounted at the bottom, where Applehead was already

starting a fire and the others were laying out their beds and doing the

hundred little things that make for comfort in camp.

A few bushes and a stunted tree or two marked the spring that seeped

down and fed a shallow water-hole where the horses drank thirstily.

Applehead grinned and pointed to the now familiar hoofprints which they

had followed so far.

“I calc'late Ramon done a heap uh millin' around back there in that

rocky arroyo,” he observed, “'fore he struck off over here. Er else they

was held up fer some reason, 'cause them tracks is fresher a hull lot

than what them was that passed the Injun ranch. Musta laid over here

las' night, by the looks. But I figgered that we'd best camp whilst we

had water, 'n' take up the trail agin at daybreak. Ain't that about the

way you see it, Luck?”

“Why, certainly,” Luck assured him with as much heartiness as his utter

weariness would permit. “Men and horses, we're about all in. If Ramon

was just over the next ridge, I don't know but it would pay to take our

rest before we overhaul them.”

“They's grass here, yuh notice,” Applehead pointed out. “I'll put the

bell on Johnny, and if Pink'll bobble that buckskin that's allus wantin'

to wander off by hisself, I calc'late we kin settle down an' rest our

bones quite awhile b'fore anybody needs to go on guard. Them ponies

ain't goin' to stray fur off if they don't have to, after the groun'

they covered t'day--now I'm tellin' yuh! They'll save their steps.”

There is a superstition about prophesying too boastfully that a certain

thing will or will not happen; you will remember that there is also a

provision that the rash prophet may avert disaster by knocking wood.

Applehead should, if there is any grain of sense in the rite, have

knocked wood with his fingers crossed as an extra precaution, against

evil fortune.

For after they had eaten and methodically packed away the food, and

while they were lying around the cheerful glow of their little campfire,

misfortune stole up out of the darkness unaware. They talked desultorily

as tired men will, their alertness dulled by the contented tinkle-tinkle

of the little bell strapped around the neck of big, bay Johnny,

Applehead's companion of many a desert wandering. That brilliant

constellation which seems to hang just over one's head in the high

altitude of our sagebrush states, held hypnotically the sleepy gaze of

Pink, whose duty it was to go on guard when the others turned in for the

night. He lay with his locked fingers under his head, staring up at one

particularly bright group of stars, and listened to the droning voice

of Applehead telling of a trip he had made out into this country five or

six years before; and soaking in the peace and the comfort which was all

the more precious because he knew that soon he must drag his weary body

into the saddle and ride out to stand guard over the horses. Once he

half rose, every movement showing his reluctance.

Whereupon Weary, who sprawled next to him, reached out a languid foot

and gave him a poke. “Aw, lay down,” he advised. “They're all right out

there for another hour. Don't yuh hear the bell?”

They all listened for a minute. The intermittent tinkle of the cheap

little sheep bell came plainly to them from farther down the draw as

though Johnny was eating contentedly with his mates, thankful for the

leisure and the short, sweet grass that was better than hay. Pink lay

back with a sigh of relief, and Luck told him to sleep a little if he

wanted to, because everything was all right and he would call him if the

horses got to straying too far off.

Down the draw--where there were no horses feeding--an Indian in dirty

overalls and gingham shirt and moccasins, and with his hair bobbed to

his collar, stood up and peered toward the vague figures grouped in the

fire-glow. He lifted his hand and moved it slightly, so that the bell he

was holding tinkled exactly as it had done when it was strapped around

Johnny's neck; Johnny, who was at that moment trailing disgustedly over

a ridge half a mile away with his mates, driven by two horsemen who rode

very carefully, so as to make no noise.

The figures settled back reassured, and the Indian grinned sourly and

tinkled the little bell painstakingly, with the matchless patience of

the Indian. It was an hour before he dimly saw Pink get up from the

dying coals and mount his horse. Then, still tinkling the bell as a

feeding horse would have made it ring, he moved slowly down the draw;

slowly, so that Pink did not at first suspect that the bell sounded

farther off than before; slowly yet surely, leading Pink farther and

farther in the hope of speedily overtaking the horses that he cursed for

their wandering.

Pink wondered, after a little, what was the matter with the darned

things, wandering off like that by themselves, and with no possible

excuse that he could see. For some time he was not uneasy; he expected

to overtake them within the next five or ten minutes. They would stop to

feed, surely, or to look back and listen--in a strange country like this

it was against horse-nature that they should wander far away at night

unless they were thirsty and on the scent of water. These horses had

drunk their fill at the little pool below the spring. They should

be feeding now, or they should lie down and sleep, or stand up and

sleep--anything but travel like this, deliberately away from camp.

Pink tried loping, but the ground was too treacherous and his horse too

leg-weary to handle its feet properly in the dark. It stumbled several

times, so he pulled down again to a fast walk. For a few minutes he

did not hear the bell at all, and when he did it was not where he had

expected to hear it, but away off to one side. So he had gained nothing

save in anger and uneasiness.

There was no use going back to camp and rousing the boys, for he was now

a mile or so away; and they would be afoot, since their custom was to

keep but one horse saddled. When he went in to call the next guard he

would be expected to bring that man's horse back with him, and would

turn his own loose before he went to sleep. Certainly there was nothing

to be gained by rousing the camp.

He did not suspect the trick being played upon him, though he did wonder

if someone was leading the horses away. Still, in that case whoever

did it would surely have sense enough to muffle the bell. Besides, it

sounded exactly like a horse feeding and moving away at random--which,

to those familiar with the sound, can never be mistaken for the tinkle

of an animal traveling steadily to some definite point.

It was an extremely puzzled young man who rode and rode that night in

pursuit of that evasive, nagging, altogether maddening tinkle. Always

just over the next little rise he would hear it, or down in the next

little draw; never close enough for him to discover the trick; never far

enough away for him to give up the chase. The stars he had been watching

in camp swam through the purple immensity above him and slid behind

the skyline. Other stars as brilliant appeared and began their slow,

swimming journey. Pink rode, and stopped to listen, and rode on again

until it seemed to him that he must be dreaming some terribly realistic

nightmare.

He was sitting on his horse on a lava-crusted ridge, straining bloodshot

eyes into the mesa that stretched dimly before him, when dawn came

streaking the sky with blood orange and purple and crimson. The stars

were quenched in that flood of light; and Pink, looking now with clearer

vision, saw that there was no living thing in sight save a coyote

trotting home from his night's hunting. He turned short around and,

getting his bearings from his memory of certain stars and from the sun

that was peering at him from the top of a bare peak, and from that sense

of direction which becomes second nature to a man who had lived long on

the range, started for camp with his ill news.

CHAPTER XIV. ONE PUT OVER ON THE BUNCH

“Sounds to me,” volunteered the irrepressible Big Medicine after a heavy

silence, “like as if you'd gone to sleep on your hawse, Little One, and

dreamed that there tinkle-tinkle stuff. By cripes, I'd like to see the

bell-hawse that could walk away from ME 'nless I was asleep an' dreamin'

about it. Sounds like--”

“Sounds like Navvy work,” Applehead put in, eyeing the surrounding rim

of sun-gilded mesa, where little brown birds fluttered in short, swift

flights and chirped with exasperating cheerfulness.

“If it was anybody, it was Ramon Chavez,” Luck declared with the

positiveness of his firm conviction. “By the tracks here, we're crowding

up on him. And no man that's guilty of a crime, Applehead, is going to

ride day after day without wanting to take a look over his shoulder

to see if be's followed. He's probably seen us from some of these

ridges--yesterday, most likely. And do you think he wouldn't know this

bunch as far as he could see us, even without glasses? The chances are

he has them, though. He'd be a fool if he didn't stake himself to a

pair.”

“Say, by gracious,” Andy observed somewhat irrelevantly, his eyes going

over the group, “this would sure make great picture dope, wouldn't it?

Why didn't we bring Pete along, darn it? Us all standing around here,

plumb helpless because we're afoot--”

“Aw, shut up!” snapped Pink, upon whom the burden of responsibility

lay heavy. “I oughta be hung for laying around the fire here instead of

being out there on guard! I oughta--”

“It ain't your fault,” Weary championed him warmly. “We all heard the

bell--”

“Yes--and damn it,_I_ heard the bell from then on till daylight!” Pink's

lips quivered perceptibly with the mortification that burned within him.

“If I'd been on guard--”

“Well, I calc'late you'd a been laid out now with a knife-cut in yuh

som'ers,” Applehead stopped twisting his sunburnt mustache to say

bluntly. “'S a dang lucky thing fer you, young man, 't you WASN'T on

guard, 'n' the only thing't looks queer to me is that you wasn't potted

las' night when yuh got out away from here. Musta been only one of 'em

stayed behind, an' he had t' keep out in front uh yuh t' tinkle that

dang bell. Figgered on wearin' out yer hoss, I reckon, 'n' didn't

skurcely dare t' take the risk uh killin' you off 'nless they was a

bunch around t' handle us.” His bright blue eyes with their range squint

went from one to another with a certain speculative pride in the glance.

“'N' they shore want t' bring a crowd along when they tie into this yere

outfit, now I'm tellin' yuh!”

Lite Avery, who had gone prowling down the draw by himself, came back

to camp, tilting stiff-leggedly along in his high-heeled boots and

betraying, in every step he took, just how handicapped a cowpuncher is

when set afoot upon the range and forced to walk where he has always

been accustomed to ride. He stopped to give Pink's exhausted horse a

sympathetic pat on the shoulder, and came on, grinning a little with the

comers of his mouth tipped down.

“Here's what's left of the hobbles the buckskin wore,” he said, holding

up the cut loops of a figure-eight rope hobble. “Kinda speaks for

itself, don't it?”

They crowded around to inspect this plain evidence of stealing.

Afterwards they stood hard-eyed and with a flush on their cheek-bones,

considering what was the best and wisest way to meet this emergency. As

to hunting afoot for their horses, the chance of success was almost

too small to be considered at all, Pink's horse was not fit for further

travel until he had rested. There was one pair of field glasses--and

there were nine irate men to whom inaction was intolerable.

“One thing we can do, if we have to,” Luck said at last, with the

fighting look in his face which moving-picture people had cause to

remember. “We can help ourselves to any horses we run across. Applehead,

how's the best way to go about it?”

Applehead, thus pushed into leadership, chewed his mustache and eyed the

mesa sourly. “Well, seein' they've set us afoot, I calc'late we're

jest about entitled to any dang thing we run across that's ridable,” he

acceded. “'N' the way I'd do, would be to git on high groun' with them

glasses 'n' look fer hosses. 'N' then head fer 'em 'n' round 'em up

afoot 'n' rope out what we want. They's enough of us t' mebby git a

mount apiece, but it shore ain't goin' t' be no snap, now I'm tellin'

ye. 'N' if yuh do that,” he added, “yuh want t' leave a man er two in

camp--'n' they want to keep their dang eyes peeled, lemme tell yuh! Ef

we was t' find ourselves afoot an' our grub 'n' outfit stole--”

“We won't give them that chance at us.” Luck was searching with his eyes

for the nearest high point that was yet not too far from camp. “I think

I'll just take Andy up on that pinnacle there, and camp down by that

pile of boulders. The rest of you stay around camp and rest yourselves

while you've got the chance. In a couple of hours, Applehead, you and

Lite come up and take our place; then Miguel and Bud, and after that

Weary and Happy. Pink, you go and bed down in the shade somewhere and go

to sleep--and quit worrying over last night. Nobody could have done

any better than you did. It was just one put over on the bunch, and you

happened to be the particular goat, that's all.

“Now, if one of us waves his hat over his head, all of you but Happy and

Bud and Pink come up with your rifles and your ropes, because we'll have

some horses sighted. If we wave from side to side, like this, about even

with our belts, you boys want to look out for trouble. So one of you

keep an eye on us all the time we're up there. We'll be up outa reach

of any trouble ourselves, if I remember that little pinnacle right.”

He hung the strap that held the leather case of the glasses over one

shoulder, picked up his rifle and his rope and started off, with Andy

similarly equipped coming close behind him.

The mesa, when they reached the pinnacle and looked down over the wide

expanse of it, glimmered like clear, running water with the heat waves

that rose from the sand. Away to the southward a scattered band of sheep

showed in a mirage that made them look long-legged as camels and half

convinced them both that they were seeing the lost horses, until the

vision changed and shrunk the moving objects to mere dots upon the mesa.

Often before they had watched the fantastic air-pictures of the desert

mirage, and they knew well enough that what they saw might be one mile

away or twenty. But unless the atmospheric conditions happened to be

just right, what was pictured in the air could not be depended upon

to portray truthfully what was reflected. They sat there and saw the

animals suddenly grow clearly defined and very close, and discovered at

last that they were sheep, and that a man was walking beside the flock;

and even while they watched it and wondered if the sheep were really

as close as they seemed, the vision slowly faded into blank, wavery

distance and the mesa lay empty and quivering under the sun.

“Fine chance we've got of locating anything,” Andy grumbled, “if it's

going to be miragy all day. We could run our fool heads off trying to

get up to a bunch that would puff out into nothing. Makes a fellow think

of the stories they tell about old prospectors going crazy trying to

find mirage water-holes. I'm glad we didn't get hung up at a dry camp,

Luck. Yuh realize what that would be like?”

“Oh, I may have some faint idea,” Luck drawled whimsically. “Look over

there, Andy over toward Albuquerque. Is that a mirage again, or do you

see something moving?”

Andy, having the glasses, swung them slowly to the southeast. After a

minute or two he shook his head and gave the glasses to Luck. “There

was one square look I got, and I'd been willing to swear it was our

saddle-bunch,” he said. “And then they got to wobbling and I couldn't

make out what they are. They might be field mice, or they might be

giraffes--I'm darned if I know which.”

Luck focussed the glasses, but whatever the objects had been, they were

no longer to be seen. So the two hours passed and they saw Applehead and

Lite come slowly up the hill from camp bearing their rifles and their

ropes and a canteen of fresh water, as the three things they might find

most use for.

These two settled themselves to watch for horses--their own range

horses. When they were relieved they reported nothing save a continued

inclination on the part of the atmosphere to be what Andy called miragy.

So, the day passed, chafing their spirits worse than any amount of

active trouble would have done. Pink slept and brooded by turns, still

blaming himself for the misfortune. The others moped, or took their

turns on the pinnacle to strain their eyes unavailingly into the four

corners of the earth--or as much as they could in those directions.

With the going of the sun Applehead and Lite, sitting out their second

guard on the pinnacle, discussed seriously the desperate idea of going

in the night to the nearest Navajo ranch and helping themselves to what

horses they could find about the place. The biggest obstacle was their

absolute ignorance of where the nearest ranch lay. Not, surely, that

half-day's ride back towards Albuquerque, where they had seen but one

pony and that a poor specimen of horseflesh. Another obstacle would be

the dogs, which could be quieted only with bullets.

“We might git hold of something to ride,” Applehead stated glumly, “an'

then agin the chances is we wouldn't git nothin' more'n a scrap on our

hands. 'N' I'm tellin' yuh right now, Lite, I ain't hankerin' fer no

fuss till I git a hoss under me.”

“Me either,” Lite testified succinctly. “Say, is that something coming,

away up that draw the camp's in? Seems to me I saw something pass that

line of lava, about half a mile over.”

Applehead stood up and peered into the half darkness. In a couple of

minutes he said: “Ye better git down an' tell the boys t' be on the

watch, Lite. They can't see no hat-wavin' this time uh day. They's

somethin' movin' up to-wards camp, but what er who they be I can't make

out in the dark. Tell Luck--”

“What's the matter with us both going?” Lite asked, cupping his hands

around his eyes that he might see better. “It's getting too dark to do

any good up here--”

“Well, I calc'late mebby yore right,” Applehead admitted, and began to

pick his way down over the rocks. “Ef them's Injuns, the bigger we stack

up in camp the better. If it's Ramon 'n' his bunch, I want t' git m'

hands on 'im.”

He must have turned the matter over pretty thoroughly in his mind,

for when the two reached camp he had his ideas fixed and his plans all

perfected. He told Luck that somebody was working down the draw in the

dark, and that it looked like a Navvy trick; and that they had better

be ready for them, because they weren't coming just to pass the time of

day--“now I'm tellin' ye!”

The nerves of the Happy Family were raw enough by now to welcome

anything that promised action; even an Indian fight would not be so much

a disaster as a novel way of breaking the monotony. Applehead, with the

experience gathered in the old days when he was a young fellow with a

freighting outfit and old Geronimo was terrorizing all this country,

sent them back in compact half circle just within the shelter of the

trees and several rods away from their campfire and the waterhole.

There, lying crouched behind their saddles with their rifles across the

seat-sides and with ammunition belts full of cartridges, they waited for

whatever might be coming in the dark.

“It's horses,” Pink exclaimed under his breath, as faint sounds came

down the draw. “Maybe--”

“Horses--and an Injun laying along the back of every one, most likely,”

Applehead returned grimly. “An old Navvy trick, that is--don't let

'em fool ye, boys! You jest wait, 'n' I'll tell ye 'when t' shoot, er

whether t' shoot at all. They can't fool ME--now I'm tellin' yuh!”

After that they were silent, listening strainedly to the growing sounds

of approach. There was the dull, unmistakable click of a hoof striking

against a rock, the softer sound of treading on yielding soil. Then a

blur of dark objects became visible, moving slowly and steadily toward

the camp.

“Aw, it's just horses,” Happy Jack muttered disgustedly.

Applehead stretched a lean leg in his direction and gave Happy Jack a

kick. “They're cunnin',” he hissed warningly. “Don't yuh be fooled--”

“That's Johnny in the lead,” Pink whispered excitedly. “I'd know the way

he walks--”

“'N' you THOUGHT yuh knowed how he jingled his dang bell,” Applehead

retorted unkindly. “Sh-sh-sh--”

Reminded by the taunt of the clever trick that had been played upon

them the night before, the Happy Family stiffened again into strained,

waiting silence, their rifles aimed straight at the advancing objects.

These, still vague in the first real darkness of early night, moved

steadily in a scattered group behind a leader that was undoubtedly

Johnny of the erstwhile tinkling bell. He circled the campfire just

without its radius of light, so that they could not tell whether an

Indian lay along his back, and beaded straight for the water-hole. The

others followed him, and not one came into the firelight--a detail which

sharpened the suspicions of the men crouched there in the edge of the

bushes, and tingled their nerves with the sense of something sinister in

the very unconcernedness of the animals.

They splashed into the water-hole and drank thirstily and long. They

stood there as though they were luxuriating in the feel of more water

than they could drink, and one horse blew the moisture from his nostrils

with a sound that made Happy Jack jump.

After a few minutes that seemed an hour to those who waited with fingers

crooked upon gun-triggers, the horse that looked vaguely like Johnny

turned away from the water-hole and sneezed while he appeared to be

wondering what to do next. He moved slowly toward the packs that were

thrown down just where they had been taken from the horses, and began

nosing tentatively about.

The others loitered still at the water-hole, save one--the buckskin, by

his lighter look in the dark--that came over to Johnny. The two horses

nosed the packs. A dull sound of clashing metal came to the ears of the

Happy Family.

“Hey! Get outa that grain, doggone your fool hide,” Pink called out

impulsively, crawling over his saddle and catching his foot in the

stirrup leather so that he came near going headlong.

Applehead yelled something, but Pink had recovered his balance and

was running to save the precious horsefeed from waste, and Johnny from

foundering. There might have been two Indiana on every horse in sight,

but Pink was not thinking of that possibility just then.

Johnny whirled guiltily away from the grain bag, licking his lips and

blowing dust from his nostrils. Pink went up to him and slipped a rope

around his neck. “Where's that bell?” he called out in his soft treble.

“Or do you think we better tie the old son-of-a-gun up and be sure of

him?”

“Aw,” said Happy Jack disgustedly a few minutes later, when the Happy

Family had crawled out of their ambush and were feeling particularly

foolish. “Nex' time old granny Furrman says Injuns t' this bunch,

somebody oughta gag him.”

“I notice you waited till he'd gone outa hearing before you said that,”

Luck told him drily. “We're going to put out extra guards tonight, just

the same. And I guess you can stand the first shift, Happy, up there on

the ridge--you're so sure of things!”

CHAPTER XV. “NOW, DANG IT, RIDE!”

Indians are Indians, though they wear the green sweater and overalls of

civilization and set upon their black hair the hat made famous by John

B. Stetson. You may meet them in town and think them tamed to stupidity.

You may travel out upon their reservations and find them shearing sheep

or hoeing corn or plodding along the furrow, plowing their fields; or

you may watch them dancing grotesquely in their festivals, and still

think that civilization is fast erasing the savage instincts from their

natures. You will be partly right--but you will also be partly mistaken.

An Indian is always an Indian, and a Navajo Indian carries a thinner

crust of civilization than do some others; as I am going to illustrate.

As you have suspected, the Happy Family was not following the trail of

Ramon Chavez and his band. Ramon was a good many miles away in another

direction; unwittingly the Happy Family was keeping doggedly upon the

trail of a party of renegade Navajos who had been out on a thieving

expedition among those Mexicans who live upon the Rio Grande bottomland.

Having plenty of reasons for hurrying back to their stronghold, and

having plenty of lawlessness to account for, when they realized that

they were being followed by nine white men who had four packed horses

with them to provide for their needs on a long journey, it was no more

than natural that the Indians should take it for granted that they were

being pursued, and that if they were caught they would be taken back

to town and shut up in that evil place which the white men called their

jail.

When it was known that the nine men who followed had twice recovered the

trail after sheep and cattle had trampled it out, the renegades became

sufficiently alarmed to call upon their tribesmen for help. And that was

perfectly natural and sensible from their point of view.

Now, the Navajos are peaceable enough if you leave them strictly

alone and do not come snooping upon their reservation trying to arrest

somebody. But they don't like jails, and if you persist in trailing

their lawbreakers you are going to have trouble on your hands. The Happy

Family, with Luck and Applehead, had no intention whatever of molesting

the Navajos; but the Navajos did not know that, and they acted according

to their lights and their ideas of honorable warfare.

Roused to resistance in behalf of their fellows, they straightway

forsook their looms, where they wove rugs for tourists, and the silver

which they fashioned into odd bracelets and rings; and the flocks of

sheep whose wool they used in the rugs and they went upon a quiet,

crafty warpath against these persistent white men.

They stole their horses and started them well on the trail back to

Albuquerque--since it is just as well to keep within the white men's

law, if it may be done without suffering any great inconvenience. They

would have preferred to keep the horses, but they decided to start them

home and let them go. You could not call that stealing, and no one need

go to jail for it. They failed to realize that these horses might be so

thoroughly broken to camp ways that they would prefer the camp of the

Happy Family to a long trail that held only a memory of discomfort;

they did not know that every night these horses were given grain by the

camp-fire, and that they would remember it when feeding time came again.

So the horses, led by wise old Johnny, swung in a large circle when

their Indian drivers left them, and went back to their men.

Then the Navajos, finding that simple maneuver a failure--and too late

to prevent its failing without risk of being discovered and forced into

an open fight--got together and tried something else; something more

characteristically Indian and therefore more actively hostile. They rode

in haste that night to a point well out upon the fresh trail of their

fleeing tribesmen, where the tracks came out of a barren, lava-encrusted

hollow to softer soil beyond. They summoned their squaws and their

half-grown papooses armed with branches that had stiff twigs and

answered the purpose of brooms. With great care about leaving any

betraying tracks of their own until they were quite ready to leave a

trail, a party was formed to represent the six whom the Happy Family

bad been following. These divided and made off in different directions,

leaving a plain trail behind them to lure the white men into the traps

which would be prepared for them farther on.

When dawn made it possible to do so effectively, the squaws began

to whip out the trail of the six renegade Indians, and the chance

footprints of those who bad gone ahead to leave the false trail for the

white men to follow. Very painstakingly the squaws worked, and the young

ones who could be trusted. Brushing the sand smoothly across a hoofprint

here, and another one there; walking backward, their bodies bent, their

sharp eyes scanning every little depression, every faint trace of the

passing of their tribesmen; brushing, replacing pebbles kicked aside

by a hoof, wiping out completely that trail which the Happy Family bad

followed with such persistence, the squaws did their part, while their

men went on to prepare the trap.

Years ago--yet not so many after all--the mothers of these squaws, and

their grandmothers, had walked backward and stooped with little branches

in their hands to wipe out the trail of their warriors and themselves to

circumvent the cunning of the enemy who pursued. So had they brushed

out the trail when their men had raided the ranchos of the first

daring settlers, and had driven off horses and cattle into the remoter

wilderness.

And these, mind you, were the squaws and bucks whom you might meet

any day on the streets in Albuquerque, padding along the pavement and

staring in at the shop windows, admiring silken gowns with marked-down

price tags, and exclaiming over flaxen-haired dolls and bright ribbon

streamers; squaws and bucks who brought rugs and blankets to sell,

and who would bargain with you in broken English and smile and nod

in friendly fashion if you spoke to them in Spanish or paid without

bickering the price they asked for a rug. You might see them in the

fifteen-cent store, buying cheap candy and staring in mute admiration at

all the gay things piled high on the tables. Remember that, when I tell

you what more they did out here in the wilderness. Remember that and do

not imagine that I am trying to take you back into the untamed days of

the pioneers.

Luck and the Happy Family--so well had the squaws done their

work--passed unsuspectingly over the wiped-out trail, circled at fault

on the far side of the rocky gulch for an hour or so and then found the

false trail just as the Indian decoys had intended that they should

do. And from a farther flat topped ridge a group of Indians with Dutch

hair-cuts and Stetson hats and moccasins (the two hall-marks of two

races) watched them take the false trail, and looked at one another and

grinned sourly.

The false trail forked, showing that the six had separated into two

parties of three riders, each aiming to pass--so the hoofprints would

lead one to believe--around the two ends of a lone hill that sat

squarely down on the mesa like a stone treasure chest dropped there by

the gods when the world was young.

The Happy Family drew rein and eyed the parting of the ways dubiously.

“Wonder what they did that for?” Andy Green grumbled, mopping his red

face irritatedly. “We've got trouble enough without having them split up

on us.”

“From the looks, I should say we're overhauling the bunch,” Luck

hazarded. “They maybe met on the other side of this butte somewhere.

And the tracks were made early this morning, I should say. How about it,

Applehead?”

“Well, they look fresher 'n what we bin follerin' before,” Applehead

admitted. “But I don't like this here move uh theirn, and I'm tellin'

yuh so. The way--”

“I don't like anything about 'em,” snapped Luck, standing in his

stirrups as though that extra three inches would let him see over the

hill. “And I don't like this tagging along behind, either. You take your

boys and follow those tracks to the right, Applehead. I and my bunch

will go this other way. And RIDE! We can't be so awfully much behind.

If they meet, we'll meet where they do. If they scatter, we'll have to

scatter too, I reckon. But get'em is the word, boys!”

“And where,” asked Applehead with heavy irony, while he pulled at his

mustache, “do yuh calc'late we'll git t'gether agin if we go scatterin'

out?”

Luck looked at him and smiled his smile. “We aren't any of us

tenderfeet, exactly,” he said calmly. “We'll meet at the jail when we

bring in our men, if we don't meet anywhere else this side. But if you

land your men, come back to that camp where we lost the horses. That's

one, place we KNOW has got grass and water both. If you come and don't

see any sign of us, wait a day before you start back to town. We'll do

the same. And leave a note anchored in the crack of that big bowlder by

the spring, telling the news. We'll do the same if we get there first

and don't wait for you.” He hesitated, betraying that even in his

eagerness he too dreaded the parting of the ways. “Well, so long,

boys--take care of yourselves.”

“Well, now, I ain't so dang shore--” Applehead began querulously.

But Luck only grinned and waved his hand as he led the way to the south

on the trail that obviously had skirted the side of the square butte.

The four who went with him looked back and waved non-committal adieu;

and Big Medicine, once he was fairly away, shouted back to them to look

out for Navvies, and then laughed with a mirthless uproar that deceived

no one into thinking he was amused. Pink and Weary raised their voices

sufficiently to tell him where he could go, and settled themselves

dejectedly in their saddles again.

“Well, I ain't so darned sure, either,” Lite Avery tardily echoed

Applehead's vague statement, in the dry way he had of speaking detached

sentiments from the mental activities that went on behind his calm,

mask-like face and his quiet eyes. “Something feels snaky around here

today.”

Applehead looked at him with a glimmer of relief in his eyes, but he did

not reply to the foreboding directly. “Boys, git yore rifles where you

kin use 'em quick,” he advised them grimly. “I kin smell shootin' along

this dang trail.”

Pink's dimples showed languidly for a moment, and he looked a question

at Weary. Weary grinned answer and pulled his rifle from the “boot”

where it was slung under his right leg, and jerked the lever forward

until a cartridge slid with a click up into the chamber; let the hammer

gently down with his thumb and laid the gun across his thighs.

“She's ready for bear,” he observed placidly.

“Well, now, you boys show some kinda sense,” Applehead told them when

Pink had followed Weary's example. “Fellers like Happy and Bud, they

shore do show their ign'rance uh this here, dang country, when they up

'n' laff at the idee uh trouble--now I'm tellin' yuh!”

From the ridge which was no more than a high claw of the square butte,

four Indians in greasy, gray Stetsons with flat crowns nodded with grim

satisfaction, and then made baste to point the toes of their moccasins

down to where their unkempt ponies stood waiting. They were too far away

to, see the shifting of rifles to the laps of the riders, or perhaps

they would not have felt quite so satisfied with the steady advance of

the four who had taken the right-hand fork of the trail. They could not

even tell just which four men made up the party. They did not greatly

care, so long as the force of the white men was divided. They galloped

away upon urgent business of their own, elated because their ruse had

worked out as they had planned and hoped.

Applehead took a restrained pull at the canteen, cocked his eyes back at

the butte they had just passed, squinted ahead over the flat waste that

shimmered with heat to the very skyline that was notched and

gashed crudely with more barren hills, and then, screwing the top

absent-mindedly on the canteen-mouth, leaned and peered long at the

hoofprints they were following. Beside him Lite Avery, tall and lean to

the point of being skinny, followed his movements with quiet attention

and himself took to studying more closely the hoofprints in the sandy

soil.

Applehead looked up, gauged the probable direction the trail was taking,

and gave a grunt.

“You kin call me a fool,” he said with a certain challenge in his tone,

“but this yere trail don't look good to me, somehow. These yere tracks,

they don't size up the same as they done all the way out here. 'N'

another thing, they ain't aimed t' meet up with the bunch that Luck's

trailin'. We're headed straight out away from whar Luck's headed. 'N'

any way yuh look at it, we're headed into country whar there ain't no

more water'n what the rich man got in hell. What would any uh Ramon's

outfit want to come away off in here fur? They ain't nothin' up in here

to call 'em.”

“These,” said Lite suddenly, “are different horse-tracks. They're

smaller, for one thing. The bunch we followed out from the red machine

rode bigger horses.”

“And carried honey on one side and fresh meat on the other; and

one horse was blind in the right eye,” enlarged Pink banteringly,

remembering the story of the Careful Observer in an old schoolreader of

his childhood days.

“Yes, how do you make that out, Lite? I never noticed any difference in

the tracks.”

“The stride is a little shorter today for one thing.” Lite looked around

and grinned at Pink, as though he too remembered the dromedary loaded

with honey and meat. “Ain't it, Applehead?”

“It shore is,” Applehead testified, his face bent toward the hot ground.

“Ain't ary one uh the three that travels like they bin a travelin'--'n'

that shore means something, now I'm tellin' yuh!” He straightened and

stared worriedly ahead of them again. “Uh course, they might a picked up

fresh horses,” he admitted. “I calc'late they needed 'em bad enough, if

they ain't been grainin' their own on the trip.”

“We didn't see any signs of their horses being turned loose anywhere

along,” Lite pointed out with a calm confidence that he was right.

Still, they followed the footprints even though they were beginning

to admit with perfect frankness their uneasiness. They were swinging

gradually toward one of those isolated bumps of red rockridges which you

will find scattered at random through certain parts of the southwest.

Perhaps they held some faint hope that what lay on the other side of the

ridge would be more promising, just as we all find ourselves building

air-castles upon what lies just over the horizon which divides present

facts from future possibilities. Besides, these flat-faced ledges

frequently formed a sharp dividing line between barren land and fertile,

and the hoofprints led that way; so it was with a tacit understanding

that they would see what lay beyond the ridge that they rode forward.

Suddenly Applehead, eyeing the rocks speculatively, turned his head

suddenly to look behind and to either side like one who seeks a way of

escape from sudden peril.

“Don't make no quick moves, boys,” he said, waving one gloved band

nonchalantly toward the flat land from which they were turning, “but

foller my lead 'n' angle down into that draw off here. Mebbe it's deep

enough to put us outa sight, 'n' mebbe it ain't. But we'll try it.”

“What's up? What did yuh see?” Pink and Weary spoke in a duet, urging

their horses a little closer.

“You fellers keep back thar 'n' don't act excited!” Applehead eyed them

sternly over his shoulder. “I calc'late we're just about t' walk into

a trap.” He bent--on the side away from the ridge--low over his horse's

shoulder and spoke while he appeared to be scanning the ground. “I seen

gun-shine up among them rocks, er I'm a goat. 'N' if it's Navvies, you

kin bet they got guns as good as ours, and kin shoot mighty nigh as

straight as the best of us--except Lite, uh course, that's a expert.” He

pointed aimlessly at the ground and edged toward the draw.

“Ef they think we're jest follerin' a stray track, they'll likely

hold off till we git back in the trail 'n' start comin' on agin,” he

explained craftily, still pointing at the ground ahead of him and still

urging his horse to the draw. “Ef they suspicion 't we're shyin' off

from the ridge, they'll draw a fine bead 'n' cut loose. I knowed it,”

he added with a lugubrious complacency. “I told ye all day that I could

smell trouble a-comin'; I knowed dang well 't we'd stir up a mess uh

fightin' over here. I never come onto this dang res'vation yit, that I

didn't have t' kill off a mess uh Navvies before I got offen it agin.

“Now,” he said when they reached the edge of the sandy depression that

had been gouged deeper by freshets and offered some shelter in case of

attack, “you boys jest fool around here on the aidge 'n' foller me down

here like you was jest curiouslike over what I'm locatin'. That'll

keep them babies up there guessin' till we're all outa sight MEBBY!” He

pulled down the corners of his mouth till his mustache-ends dropped a

full inch, and lifted himself off his horse with a bored deliberation

that was masterly in its convincingness. He stood looking at the ground

for a moment and then began to descend leisurely into the draw, leading

his horse behind him.

“You go next, Pink,” Weary said shortly, and with his horse began

edging him closer to the bank until Pink, unless he made some unwise

demonstration of unwillingness, was almost forced to ride down the steep

little slope.

“Don't look towards the ridge, boys,” Applehead warned from below.

“Weary, you come on down here next. Lite kin might' nigh shoot the dang

triggers offen their guns 'fore they kin pull, if they go t' work 'n'

start anything.”

So Weary, leaving Lite up there grinning sheepishly over the compliment,

rode down because he was told to do so by the man in command. “You seem

to forget that Lite's got a wife on his hands,” he reproved as he went.

“Lite's a-comin' right now,” Applehead retorted, peering at the ridge

a couple of hundred yards distant. “Git back down the draw 's fur's

yuh kin b'fore yuh take out into the open agin. I'll wait a minute 'n'

see--”

“Ping-NG-NG!” a bullet, striking a rock on the edge of the draw fifty

feet short of the mark, glanced and went humming over the hot waste.

“Well, now, that shows they got a lookout up high, 't seen me watchin'

that way. But it's hard t' git the range shootin' down, like that,”

Applehead remarked, pulling his horse behind a higher part of the bank.

Close beside him Lite's rifle spoke, its little steelshod message flying

straight as a homing honeybee for the spitting flash he had glimpsed up

there among the rocks. Whether he did any damage or not, a dozen rifles

answered venomously and flicked up tiny spurts of sand in the close

neighborhood of the four.

“If they keep on trying,” Lite commented drily, “they might make a

killing, soon as they learn how to shoot straight.”

“'S jest like them dang Injuns!” Applehead grumbled, shooing the three

before him down the draw. “Four t' our one--it takes jest about that big

a majority 'fore they feel comftable about buildin' up a fight. Lead

yore bosses down till we're outa easy shootin' distance, boys, 'n' then

we'll head out fer where Luck ought t' be. If they fixed a trap fer us,

they've fixed another fer him, chances is, 'n! the sooner us fellers git

t'gether the better show we'll all of us have. You kin see, the way they

worked it to split the bunch, that they ain't so dang anxious t' tie

into us when we're t'gether--'n' that's why we can't git t' Luck a dang

bit too soon, now I'm tellin' yuh!”

Weary and Pink were finding things to say, also, but old Applehead went

on with his monologue just as though they were listening. Lite showed

a disposition to stop and take issue with the shooters who kept up a

spiteful firing from the ridge. But Applehead stopped him as he was

leveling his rifle.

“If yuh shoot,” he pointed out, “they'll know jest where we air and how

fast we're gittin' outa here. If yuh don't, unless their lookout kin

see us movin' out, they got t' do a heap uh guessin' in the next few

minutes. They only got one chancet in three uh guessin' right, 'cause

we might be camped in one spot, 'n' then agin we might be crawlin' up

closer, fer all they kin tell.”

If they were guessing, they must have guessed right; for presently the

four heard faint yells from behind them, and Applehead crawled up the

bank to where he could look out across the level. What he saw made him

slide hastily to the bottom again.

“They've clumb down and straddled their ponies,” he announced grimly.

“An' about a dozen is comin' down this way, keepin' under cover all they

kin. I calc'late mebby we better crawl our bosses 'n' do some ridin'

ourselves, boys.” And he added grimly, “They ain't in good shootin'

distance yit, 'n' they dassent show theirselves neither. We'll keep in

this draw long as we kin. They're bound t' come careful till they git us

located.”

The footing was none the best, but the horses they rode had been running

over untracked mesa-land since they were bandy-legged colts. They loped

along easily, picking automatically the safest places whereon to set

their feet, and leaving their riders free to attend to other important

matters which proved their true value as horses that knew their

business.

Soon the draw shallowed until they found themselves out in the open,

with the square-topped mountain five miles or so ahead and a little to

the left; a high, untraversable sandstone ledge to their right, and what

looked like plain sailing straight ahead past the mountain.

Applehead twisted his body in the saddle and gave a grunt. “Throw some

lead back at them hombres, Lite,” he snapped. “And make a killin' if yuh

kin. It'll make 'em mad, but it'll hold 'em back fer a spell.”

Lite, the crack rifle-shot of Luck's company and the man who had taught

Jean Douglas to shoot with such wonderful precision, wheeled his horse

short around and pulled him to a stand, lined up his rifle sights and

crooked his finger on the trigger. And away back there among the Indians

a pony reared, and then pitched forward.

“I sure do bate to shoot down a horse,” Lite explained shamefacedly,

“but I never did kill a man--”

“We-ell, I calc'late mebby yuh will, 'fore you're let out from this yere

meetin',” Applehead prophesied drily. “Now, dang it, RIDE!”

CHAPTER XVI. ANNIE-MANY-PONIES WAITS

In the magic light of many unnamable soft shades which the sun leaves

in New Mexico as a love token for his dark mistress night,

Annie-Many-Ponies sat with her back against a high, flat rock at the

place where Ramon had said she must wait for him, and stared somber-eyed

at what she could see of the new land that bad held her future behind

the Sandias; waiting for Ramon; and she wondered if Wagalexa Conka had

come home from his picture-making in Bear Canon and was angry because

she had gone; and shrank from the thought, and tried to picture what

life with Ramon would be like, and whether his love would last beyond

the wide ring of shiny gold that was to make her a wife.

At her feet the little black dog lay licking his sore paws that had

padded patiently after her all day. Beside the rock the black horse

stood nibbling at some weeds awkwardly, because of the Spanish bit in

his mouth. The horse was hungry, and the little black dog was hungry;

Annie-Many-Ponies was hungry also, but she did not feel her, hunger so

much, because of the heaviness that was in her heart.

When Ramon came he would bring food, or he would tell her where she

might buy. The horse, too, would be fed--when Ramon came. And he would

take her to the priest who was his friend, and together they would kneel

before the priest. But first, if Ramon would wait, she wanted to confess

her sins, so that she need not go into the new life bearing the sins of

the old. The priest could pray away the ache that was in her heart; and

then, with her heart light as air, she would be married with Ramon.

It was long since she had confessed--not since the priest came to the

agency when she was there, before she ran away to work in pictures for

Wagalexa Conka.

Before her the glow deepened and darkened. A rabbit hopped out of a

thick clump of stunted bushes, sniffed the air that blew the wrong way

to warn him, and began feeding. Shunka Chistala gathered his soft paws

under him, scratched softly for a firm foothold in the ground, and when

the rabbit, his back turned and the evening wind blowing full in his

face, fed unsuspectingly upon some young bark that he liked, the little

black dog launched himself suddenly across the space that divided them.

There was a squeak and a thin, whimpering crying--and the little black

dog, at least, was sure of his supper.

Annie-Many-Ponies, roused from her brooding, shivered a little when the

rabbit cried. She started forward to save it--she who had taught the

little black dog to hunt gophers and prairie-dogs!--and when she was

too late she scolded the dog in the language of the Sioux. She tore the

rabbit away from him while he eyed her reproachfully; but when she saw

that it was quite dead, she flung the warm body back to him and went and

sat down again with her back to the rock.

A train whistled for the little station of Bernalillo, and soon she saw

its headlight paint the squat houses that had before been hidden behind

the creeping dusk. Ramon was late in coming and for one breath she

caught herself hoping that he would not come at all. But immediately she

remembered the love words he had taught her, and smiled her inscrutable

little smile that had now a tinge of sadness. Perhaps, she thought

wishfully, Ramon had come on the train from Albuquerque. Perhaps he had

a horse in the town, and would ride out and meet her here where he had

told her to wait.

The train shrieked and painted swiftly hill and embankment and little

adobe huts and a corral full of huddled sheep, and went churning away to

the northeast. Annie-Many-Ponies followed its course absently with her

eyes until the last winking light from its windows and the last wisp of

smoke was hidden behind hills and trees. The little black dog finished

the rabbit, nosed its tracks back to where it had hopped out of the

brush, and came back and curled up at the feet of his mistress, licking

his lips and again his travel-sore paws. In a moment, feeling in his

dumb way her loneliness, perhaps, he reached up and laid his pink tongue

caressingly upon her brown hand.

Dark came softly and with it a noisy wind that whistled and murmured and

at last, growing more boisterous as the night deepened, whooped over her

bead and tossed wildly the branches of a clump of trees that grew

near. Annie-Many-Ponies listened to the wind and thought it a brother,

perhaps, of the night wind that came to the Dakota prairies and caroused

there until dawn bade it be still. Too red the blood of her people ran

in her veins for her to be afraid of the night, even though she peopled

it with dim shapes of her fancy.

After a long while the wind grew chill. Annie-Many-Ponies shivered, and

then rose and went to the horse and, reaching into the bundle which was

still bound to the saddle, she worked a plaid shawl loose from the other

things and pulled it out and wrapped it close around her and pulled it

over her head like a cowl. Then she went back and sat down against the

bowlder, waiting, with the sublime patience of her kind, for Ramon.

Until the wind hushed, listening for the dawn, she sat there and waited.

At her feet the little black dog slept with his nose folded between his

front paws over which he whimpered sometimes in his dreams. At every

little sound all through--the night Annie-Many-Ponies had listened,

thinking that at last here came Ramon to take her to the priest, but for

the first time since she had stolen out on the mesa to meet him, Ramon

did not keep the tryst--and this was to be their marriage meeting!

Annie-Many-Ponies grew very still and voiceless in her heart, as if her

very soul waited. She did not even speculate upon what the future would

be like if Ramon never came. She was waiting.

Then, just before the sky lightened, someone stepped cautiously along

a little path that led through rocks and bushes back into the hills.

Annie-Many Ponies turned her face that way and listened. But the steps

were not the steps of Ramon; Annie-Many-Ponies had too much of the

Indian keenness to be fooled by the hasty footsteps of this man. And

since it was not Ramon--her slim fingers closed upon the keen-edged

knife she carried always in its sinew-sewed buckskin sheath near her

heart.

The little black dog lifted his head suddenly and growled, and the

footsteps came to a sudden stop quite near the rock.

“It is you?” asked a cautious voice with the unmistakable Mexican tone

and soft, slurring accent, “speak me what yoh name.”

“Ramon comes?” Annie asked him quietly, and the footsteps came swiftly

nearer until his form was silhouetted by the rock.

“Sh-sh--yoh not spik dat name,” he whispered. “Luis Rojas me. I come for

breeng yoh. No can come, yoh man. No spik name--som'bodys maybe hears.”

Annie-Many-Ponies rose and stood peering at him through the dark.

“What's wrong?” she asked abruptly, borrowing the curt phrase from Luck

Lindsay. “Why I not speak name? Why--some body--?” she laid ironical

stress upon the word--“not come? What business you got, Luis Rojas?”

“No--don' spik names, me!” The figure was seen to throw out an imploring

hand. “Moch troubles, yoh bet! Yoh come now--somebodys she wait in

dam-hurry!”

Annie-Many-Ponies, with her fingers still closed upon the bone handle of

her sharp-edged knife, thought swiftly. Wariness had been born into her

blood--therefore she could understand and meet halfway the wariness of

another. Perhaps Wagalexa Conka had suspected that she was going

with Ramon; Wagalexa Conka was very keen, and his anger blazed hot as

pitch-pine flame. Perhaps Ramon feared Wagalexa Conka--as she, too,

feared him. She was not afraid--she would go to Ramon.

She stepped away from the rock and took the black horse by its dropped

bridle-reins and followed Luis Rojas up the dim path that wound through

trees and rocks until it dropped into a little ravine that was chocked

with brush, so that Annie-Many-Ponies had to put the stiff branches

aside with her hand lest they scratch her face as she passed.

Luis went swiftly along the path, as though his haste was great; but he

went stealthily as well, and she knew that he had some unknown cause for

secrecy. She wondered a little at this. Had Wagalexa Conka discovered

where she and Ramon were to meet? But how could he discover that which

had been spoken but once, and then in the quiet loneliness of that place

far back on the mesa? Wagalexa Conka bad not been within three miles of

that place, as Annie-Many-Ponies knew well. How then did he know? For he

must have followed, since Ramon dared not come to the place he had named

for their meeting.

Dawn came while they were still following the little, brush-choked

ravine with its faint pathway up the middle of it, made by cattle or

sheep or goats, perhaps all three. Luis hurried along, stopping now and

then and holding up a hand for silence so that he might listen. Fast as

he went, Annie-Many-Ponies kept within two long steps of his heels, her

plaid shawl drawn smoothly over her black head and folded together under

her chin. Her mouth was set in a straight line, and her chin had the

square firmness of the Indian. Luis, looking back at her curiously,

could not even guess at her thoughts, but he thought her too calm and

cold for his effervescent nature--though he would have liked to tell her

that she was beautiful. He did not, because he was afraid of Ramon.

“Poco tiempo, come to his camp, Ramon,” he said when the sun was peering

over the high shoulder of a ridge; and he spoke in a hushed tone, as if

he feared that someone might overhear him.

“You 'fraid Wagalexa Conka, he come?” Annie-Many-Ponies asked abruptly,

looking at him full.

Luis did not understand her, so he lifted his shoulders in the Mexican

gesture which may mean much or nothing. “Quien sabe?” he muttered

vaguely and went on. Annie-Many-Ponies did not know what he meant, but

she guessed that he did not want to be questioned upon the subject;

so she readjusted the shawl that had slipped from her head and went on

silently, two long steps behind him.

In a little he turned from the ravine, which was becoming more open and

not quite so deep. They scrambled over boulders which the horse must

negotiate carefully to avoid a broken leg, and then they were in another

little ravine, walled round with rocks and high, brushy slopes. Luis

went a little way, stopped beside a huge, jutting boulder and gave a

little exclamation of dismay.

“No more here, Ramon,” he said, staring down at the faintly smoking

embers of a little fire. “She's go som' place, I don't know, me.”

The slim right hand of Annie-Many-Ponies went instinctively to her bosom

and to what lay hidden there. But she waited, looking from the little

campfire that was now almost dead, to Luis whom she suspected of

treachery. Luis glanced up at her apologetically, caught something of

menace in that unwinking, glittering stare, and began hastily searching

here and there for some sign that would enlighten him further.

“She's here when I go, Ramon,” he explained deprecatingly. “I don'

un'stan', me. She's tell me go breeng yoh thees place. She's say I mus'

huree w'ile dark she's las'. I'm sure s'prised, me!” Luis was a slender

young man with a thin, patrician face that had certain picture values

for Luck, but which greatly belied his lawless nature. Until he stood

by the rock where she had waited for Ramon, Annie-Many-Ponies had

never spoken to him. She did not know him, therefore she did not trust

him--and she looked her distrust.

Luis turned from her after another hasty glance, and began searching

for some sign of Ramon. Presently, in a tiny cleft near the top of the

boulder, his black eyes spied a folded paper--two folded papers, as he

discovered when he reached up eagerly and pulled them out.

“She's write letter, Ramon,” he cried with a certain furtive excitement.

“Thees for yoh.” And he smiled while he gave her a folded note with

“Ana” scrawled hastily across the face of it.

Annie-Many-Ponies extended her left hand for it, and backed the few

steps away from him which would insure her safety against a sudden

attack, before she opened the paper and read:

“Querida mia, you go with Luis. Hes all rite you trus him. He bring you

where i am. i lov you. Ramon”

She read it twice and placed the note in her bosom--next the knife--and

looked at Luis, the glitter gone from her eyes. She smiled a little.

“I awful hongry,” she said in her soft voice, and it was the second

sentence she had spoken since they left the rock where she had waited.

Luis smiled back, relief showing in the uplift of his lips and the

lightening of his eyes. “She's cache grob, Ramon,” he said. “She's go

som' place and we go also. She's wait for us. Dam-long way--tree days, I

theenk me.”

“You find that grub,” said Annie-Many-Ponies, letting her hand drop away

from the knife. “I awful hongry. We eat, then we go.”

“No--no go till dark comes! We walk in night--so somebody don' see!”

Annie-Many-Ponies looked at him sharply, saw that he was very much in

earnest, and turned away to gather some dry twigs for the fire. Up the

canon a horse whinnied inquiringly, and Luis, hastening furtively that

way, found the horse he had ridden into this place with Ramon. With

the problem of finding provender for the two animals, he had enough to

occupy him until Annie-Many-Ponies, from the coarse food he brought her,

cooked a crude breakfast.

Truly, this was not what she had dreamed the morning would be like--she

who had been worried over the question of whether Ramon would let her

confess to the priest before they were married! Here was no priest and

no Ramon, even; but a keen-eyed young Mexican whom she scarcely knew at

all; and a mysterious hiding-out in closed-in canons until dark before

they might follow Ramon who loved her. Annie-Many-Ponies did not

understand why all this stealthiness should be necessary, for she knew

that proof of her honorable marriage would end Luck's pursuit--supposing

he did pursue--even though his anger might live always for her. She did

not understand; and when an Indian confronts a situation which puzzles

him, you may be very sure that same Indian is going to be very, very

cautious. Annie-Many-Ponies was Indian to the middle of her bone.

CHAPTER XVII. APPLEHEAD SHOWS THE STUFF HE IS MADE OF

Lite Avery, turning to look back as they galloped up a long slope so

gradual in its rise that it seemed almost level, counted just fourteen

Indians spreading out fanwise in pursuit. He turned to Applehead with

the quiet deference in his manner that had won the old man's firm

friendship.

“What's this new move signify, boss?” he asked, tilting his head

backward. “What they spreading out like that for, when they're outa easy

rifle range?”

Applehead looked behind him, studied the new formation of their enemy,

and scowled in puzzlement. He looked ahead, where he knew the land lay

practically level before them, all sand and rabbit weed, with a little

grass here and there; to the left, where the square butte stood up

bold-faced and grim; to the right where a ragged sandstone ledge blocked

the way.

“'S some dang new trap uh theirn,” he decided, his voice signifying

disgust for such methods. “Take an Injun 'n' he don't calc'late he's

fightin' 'nless he's figgurin' on gittin' yuh cornered. Mebby they got

some more cached ahead som'ers. Keep yer eye peeled, boys, 'n' shoot at

any dang thing yuh see that yuh ain't dead sure 's a rabbit weed. Don't

go bankin' on rocks bein' harmless--'cause every dang one's liable to

have an Injun layin' on his belly behind it. Must be another bunch ahead

som'ers, 'cause I know it's smooth goin' fer five miles yit. After that

they's a drop down into a rocky kinda pocket that's hard t' git out

of except the way yuh go in, account of there bein' one uh them dang

rim-rocks runnin' clean 'round it. Some calls it the Devil's Fryin'-pan.

No water ner grass ner nothin' else 'ceptin' snakes. 'N' Navvies kinda

ownin' rattlers as bein' their breed uh cats, they don't kill 'em off,

so they's a heap 'n' plenty of 'em in that basin.

“But I ain't aimin' t' git caught down in there, now I'm tellin' yuh! I

aim t' keep along clost t' that there butte, 'n' out on the other side

where we kin pick up luck's trail. I shore would do some rarin' around

if that boy rode off into a mess uh trouble, 'n' I'm tellin' yuh

straight!”

“He's got some good boy at his back,” Weary reminded him, loyal to his

Flying U comrade.

“You're dang right he has! I ain't sayin' he ain't, am I? Throw some

more lead back at them skunks behind us, will ye, Lite? 'N' the rest

of yuh save yore shells fer close-ups!” He grinned a little at the

incongruity of a motion-picture phrase in such a situation as this. “'N'

don't be so dang skeered uh hurtin' somebody!” he adjured Lite, drawing

rein a little so as not to forge ahead of the other. “You'll have to

kill off a few anyway 'fore you're through with 'em.”

Lite aimed at the man riding in the center of the half-circle, and the

bullet he sent that way created excitement of some sort; but whether the

Indian was badly hit, or only missed by a narrow margin, the four did

not wait to discover. They had held their horses down to a pace that

merely kept them well ahead of the Indians; and though the horses were

sweating, they were holding their own easily enough--with a reserve fund

of speed if their riders needed to call upon it.

Applehead, glancing often behind him, scowled over the puzzle of that

fanlike formation of riders. They would hardly begin so soon to herd him

and his men into that evil little rock basin with the sinister name, and

there was no other reason he could think of which would justify those

tactics, unless another party waited ahead of them. He squinted ahead

uneasily, but the mesa lay parched and empty under the sky--

And then, peering straight into the glare of the sun, he saw, down the

slope which they had climbed without realizing that it would have a

crest, it was so low--Applehead saw the answer to the puzzle; saw and

gave his funny little grunt of astonishment and dismay. Straight as

a chalk line from the sandstone ledge on their right to the

straight-walled butte on their left stretched that boundary line between

the untamed wilderness and the tamed--a barbed wire fence; a four-wire

fence at that, with stout cedar posts whereon the wire was stretched

taut and true. From the look of the posts, it was not new--four or five

years old, perhaps; not six years, certainly, for Applehead had ridden

this way six years before and there had been not so much as a post-hole

to herald the harnessing of the mesa.

Here, then, was the explanation of the fanlike spreading out of the line

of Indians. They knew that the white men would be trapped by the fence,

and they were cutting off the retreat--and keeping out of the hottest

danger-zone of the white men's guns. Even while the four were grasping

the full significance of the trap that they had ridden into unaware, the

Indians topped the ridge behind them, yip-yip-yipping gleefully their

coyotelike yells of triumph. The sound so stirred the slow wrath of Lite

Avery that, without waiting for the word from Applehead he twisted

half around in his saddle, glanced at the nearest Indian along his

rifle-sights, bent his forefinger with swift deliberation upon the

trigger, and emptied the saddle of one yelling renegade, who made haste

to crawl behind a clump of rabbit weed.

“They howl like a mess uh coyotes,” Lite observed in justification of

the shot, “and I'm getting sick of hearing 'em.”

“Mama!” Weary, exclaimed annoyedly, “that darn fence is on an up-slope,

so it's going to be next to impossible to jump it! I guess here's where

we do about an eight-hundred-foot scene of Indian Warfare, or Fighting

For Their Lives. How yuh feel, Cadwalloper?”

“Me?” Pink's eyes were purple with sheer, fighting rage. “I feel like

cleaning out that bunch back there. They'll have something to howl about

when I get through!”

“Stay back uh me, boys!” Applehead's voice had a masterful sharpness

that made the three tighten reins involuntarily. “You foller me and

don't crowd up on me, neither. Send back a shot or two if them Injuns

gits too ambitious.”

The three fell in behind him without cavil or question. He was in charge

of the outfit, and that settled it. Pink, released from irksome inaction

by the permission to shoot, turned and fired back at the first Indian

his sights rested upon. He saw a spurt of sand ten jumps in advance of

his target, and he swore and fired again without waiting to steady his

aim. The sorrel pack-horse, loping along fifty yards or so behind with

a rhythmic clump-clump of frying-pan against coffee-pot at every leap he

took, swerved sharply, shook his head as though a bee had stung him,

and came on with a few stiff-legged “crow hops” to register his violent

objection to being shot through the ear.

Pink, with an increased respect for the shooting skill of Lite Avery,

glanced guiltily at the others to see if they had observed where his

second bullet hit. But the others were eyeing Applehead uneasily and

paid no attention to Pink or his attempts to hit an Indian on the run.

And presently Pink forgot it also while he watched Applehead, who was

apparently determined to commit suicide in a violently original form.

“You fellers keep behind, now---and hold the Injuns back fer a minute

er two,” Applehead yelled while he set himself squarely in the saddle,

gathered up his reins as though he were about to “top a bronk” and

jabbed the spurs with a sudden savageness into Johnny's flanks.

“GIT outa here!” he yelled, and Johnny with an astonished lunge, “got.”

Straight toward the fence they raced, Johnny with his ears laid back

tight against his skull and his nose pointed straight out before him,

with old Applehead leaning forward and yelling to Johnny with a cracked

hoarseness that alone betrayed how far youth was behind him.

They thought at first that he meant to jump the fence, and they knew he

could not make it. When they saw that he meant to ride through it, Weary

and Pink groaned involuntarily at the certainty of a fall and sickening

entanglement in the wires. Only Lite, cool as though he were rounding up

milch cows, rode half-turned in the saddle and sent shot after shot

back at the line of Navajos, with such swift precision that the Indians

swerved and fell back a little, leaving another pony wallowing in the

sand and taking with them one fellow who limped until he had climbed up

behind one who waited for him.

“Go it, Johnny--dang yore measly hide, go to it! We'll show 'm we ain't

so old 'n' tender we cain't turn a trick t'bug their dang eyes out?

Bust into it! WE'LL show 'em!--” And Applehead shrilled a raucous range

“HOO-EEE-EE!” as Johnny lunged against the taut wires.

It was a long chance he took--a “dang long chance” as Applehead admitted

afterward. But, as he had hoped, it happened that Johnny's stride

brought him with a forward leap against the wires, so that the full

impact of his eleven-hundred pounds plus the momentum of his speed, plus

the weight of Applehead and the saddle, hit the wires fair and full.

They popped like cut wires on a bale of hay--and it was lucky that they

were tight strung so that there was no slack to take some of the force

away. It was not luck, but plain shrewdness on Applehead's part, that

Johnny came straight on, so that there was no tearing see-saw of the

strands as they broke. Two inch-long cuts on his chest and a deeper,

longer one on his foreleg was the price Johnny paid, and that was all.

The lower wire he never touched, since it was a leap that landed him

against the fence. He lurched and recovered himself, and went on at a

slower gallop while Applehead beckoned the three to come on.

“I kain't say I'd want to git in the habit uh bustin' fences that way,”

he grinned over his shoulder as the three jumped through the gap he had

made and forged up to him. “But I calc'late if they's another one Johnny

n' me kin make it, mebby.”

“Well, I was brought up in a barbed wire country,” Pink exploded, “but

I'll be darned if I ever saw a stunt like that pulled off before!”

“We-ell, I hed a bronk go hog-wild 'n' pop three wires on a fence one

time,” Applehead explained modestly, “'n' he didn't cut hisself a-tall,

skurcely. It's all accordin' t' how yuh hit it, I reckon. Anyway, I

calc'lated it was wuth tryin', 'cause we shore woulda had our hands

full if we'd a stopped at that fence, now I'm tellin' yuh! 'N' another

thing,” he added bodefully, “I figgured we'd better be gittin' to Luck

In' his bunch. I calc'late they need us, mebby.”

No one made any reply to that statement, but even Lite, who never had

been inclined to laugh at him, looked at Applehead with a new respect.

The Indians, having scurried back out of range of Lite's uncomfortably

close shooting, yelled a bedlam of yips and howls and came on again in a

closer group than before, shooting as they rode--at the four men first,

and then at the hindmost pack-horse that gave a hop over the wire

left across the gap, and came galloping heavily after the others. They

succeeded in burying a bullet in the packed bedding, but that was all.

Three hundred yards or so in the lead, the four raced down the long,

gentle slope. A mile or two, perhaps three, they could run before their

horses gave out. But then, when they could run no longer, they would

have to stop and fight; and the question that harped continually through

their minds was: Could they run until they reached Luck and the boys

with him? Could they? They did not even know where Luck was, or

what particular angle of direction would carry them to him quickest.

Applehead and Johnny were pointing the way, keeping a length ahead of

the others. But even old Applehead was riding, as he would have put it,

“by-guess and by-gosh” until they crossed a shallow draw, labored up the

hill beyond, and heard, straight away before them, the faint pop-pop of

rifle shots. Old Applehead turned and sent them a blazing blue glance

over his shoulders.

“RIDE, dang ye!” he barked. “They've got Luck cornered in the Devil's

Fryin'-pan!”

CHAPTER XVIII. IN THE DEVIL'S FRYING-PAN

Luck, riding confidently on the trail of the three horsemen who had

taken to the south along the front of the square butte, believed that

the turn of the trail around the southern end meant simply that the

three who came this way would meet their companions on the other side,

and that he, following after, would be certain to meet Applehead. He had

hopes of the speedy capture of Ramon Chavez and his men, and the

hope spread to the four who went with him, so that their spirits rose

considerably. Big Medicine and Happy Jack even found a good deal of

amusement in their exchange of opinions regarding old granny Applehead

and his constant fear of the Navvies. Now and then the Native Son joined

in the laugh, though his attention was chiefly given to the discussion

Andy and Luck were having about Ramon and his manner of using Luck's

work as an opportunity to rob the bank, and the probable effect it would

have on the general standing of Luck and his company unless they managed

to land the thieves in jail. Being half Mexican himself, the Native Son

was sensitive upon the subject of Ramon, and almost as anxious to see

Ramon in jail as was Luck himself.

So while Applehead and his boys were scenting danger and then finding

themselves in the middle of it, Luck and his party rode along absorbed

in themselves and in the ultimate goal, which was Ramon. They saw

nothing queer about the trail they followed, and they saw no evidence

of treachery anywhere. They rode with the rifles slung under their

right thighs and their six-shooters at their hips, and their eyes roving

casually over their immediate surroundings while their minds roved

elsewhere--not because they were growing careless, but because there was

absolutely nothing to rouse their suspicions, now that they no longer

bad Applehead along to preach danger and keep them keyed up to expect

it.

They followed the tracks through a scattered grove of stunted pinons,

circled at fault for a few minutes in the rocks beyond, and then picked

up the trail. They were then in the narrow neck which was called

the handle of the Devil's Frying-pan--and they would have ridden

unsuspectingly into the very Pan itself, had not the Native Son's quick

eyes caught a movement on the rim-rock across the bare, rock-bottomed

basin. He spoke to luck about it, and luck levelled his field glasses

and glimpsed a skulking form up there.

“Hunt yourselves some shelter, boys!” he cried in the sharp tone of

warning. “We'll make sure who's ahead before we go any farther.”

They ducked behind rocks or trees and piled off their horses in a burry.

And a scattered fusillade from the rim-rock ahead of them proved how

urgent was their need.

For the first fifteen minutes or so they thought that they were fighting

Ramon and his party, and their keenest emotions were built largely of

resentment, which showed in the booming voice of Big Medicine when he

said grimly:

“Well, I'd jest about as soon pack Ramon in dead, as lead 'im in alive

'n' kickin', by cripes! Which is him, d'yuh reckon?”

From behind a rock shield luck was studying the ledge. “They're

Injuns--or there are Injuns in the bunch, at least,” he told them after

a moment. “See that sharp point sticking up straight ahead? I saw an

Injun peeking around the edge--to the south. You watch for him, Andy,

and let him have it where he lives next time be sticks his head out.” He

swung the glasses slowly, taking every inch of the rim in his field of

vision. As he moved them be named the man he wanted to watch each place

where he had reason to suspect that someone was hiding.

The disheartening part of it was that he needed about a dozen more

men than he had; for the rock wall which was the rim of the Frying-pan

seemed alive with shooters who waited only for a fair target. Then the

Native Son, crouched down between a rock and a clump of brush, turned

his head to see what his horse was looking at, back whence they had

come.

“Look behind you, Luck,” he advised with more calmness than one would

expect of a man in his straits. “They're back in the pines, too.”

“Fight 'em off--and take care that your backs don't show to those babies

on the rim-rocks,” he ordered instantly, thrusting his glasses into

their case and snatching his rifle from its boot on the saddle. “They

won't tackle coming across that bare hollow, even if they can get down

into it without breaking their necks. Happy, lead your horse in

here between these rocks where mine is. Bud, see if you can get the

pack-horses over there outa sight among those bushes and rocks. We'll

hold 'em off while you fix the horses--can't let ourselves be set afoot

out here!”

“I-should-say--NOT!” Andy Green punctuated the sentence with a shot or

two. “Say, I wish they'd quit sneaking around in those trees that way,

so a fellow could see where to shoot!”

A half hour dragged by. From the rim-rock came occasional shots,

to which the besieged could not afford to reply, they were so fully

occupied with holding back those who skulked among the trees. The

horses, fancying perhaps that this was a motion-picture scene, dozed

behind their rock-and-brush shelters and switched apathetically at

buzzing flies and whining bullets alike. Their masters crouched behind

their bowlders and watched catlike for some open demonstration, and

fired when they had the slightest reason to believe that they would hit

something besides scenery.

“Miguel must have upset their plans a little,” Luck deduced after a

lull. “They set the stage for us down in that hollow, I guess. You can

see what we'd have been up against if we had ridden ten rods farther,

out away from these rocks and bushes.”

“Aw, they wouldn't dast kill a bunch uh white men!” Happy Jack

protested, perhaps for his own comfort.

“You think they wouldn't? Luck's voice was surcharged with sarcasm. What

do you think they're trying to do, then?”

“Aw, the gov'ment wouldn't STAND fer no such actions!”

“Well, by cripes, I hain't aimin' to give the gov'ment no job uh

setting on my remains, investigatin' why I was killed off!” Big Medicine

asserted, and took a shot at a distant grimy Stetson to prove he meant

what he said.

“Say, they'd have had a SNAP if we'd gone on, and let these fellows back

here in the trees close up behind us!” Andy Green exclaimed suddenly,

with a vividness of gesture that made Happy Jack try to swallow his

Adam's apple. “By gracious, it would have been a regular rabbit-drive

business. They could set in the shade and pick us off just as they

darned pleased.”

“Aw, is that there the cheerfullest thing you can think of to say?”

Happy Jack was sweating, with something more than desert heat.

“Why, no. The cheerfullest thing I can think of right now is that

Mig, here, don't ride with his eyes shut.” He cast a hasty glance of

gratitude toward the Native Son, who flushed under the smooth brown of

his cheeks while he fired at a moving bush a hundred yards back in the

grove.

For another half hour nothing was gained or lost. The Indians fired

desultorily, spatting bit& of lead here and there among the rocks

but hitting nobody. The Happy Family took a shot at every symptom of

movement in the grove, and toward the rim-rock they sent a bullet

now and then, just to assure the watchers up there that they were not

forgotten, and as a hint that caution spelled safety.

For themselves, the boys were amply protected there on the side of the

Frying-pan where the handle stretched out into the open land toward the

mountain. Perhaps here was once a torrent flowing from the basin-like

hollow walled round with rock; at any rate, great bowlders were

scattered all along the rim as though spewed from the basin by some

mighty force of the bygone ages. The soil, as so often happens in the

West, was fertile to the very edge of the Frying-pan and young pinons

and bushes had taken root there and managed to keep themselves alive

with the snow-moisture of winter, in spite of the scanty rainfall the

rest of the year.

The boys were amply protected, yes; but there was not a drop of water

save what they had in their canteens, and there was no feed for their

horses unless they chose to nibble tender twigs off the bushes near them

and call that food. There was, of course, the grain in the packs, but

there was neither time nor opportunity to get it out. If it came to a

siege, luck and his boys were in a bad way, and they knew it. They were

penned as well as protected there in that rocky, brushy neck. The most

that they could do was to discourage any rush from those back in the

grove; as to getting through that grove themselves, and out in the open,

there was not one chance in a hundred that they could do it.

From the outside in to where they were entrenched was just a trifle

easier. The Indiana in the grove were all absorbed in watching the edge

of the Frying-pan and had their backs to the open, never thinking that

white men would be coming that way; for had not the other party been

decoyed around the farther end of the big butte, and did not several

miles and a barbed-wire fence lie between?

So when Applehead and his three, coming in from the north, approached

the grove, they did it under cover of a draw that hid them from sight.

From the shots that were fired, Applehead guessed the truth; that

Luck's bunch had sensed danger before they had actually ridden into the

Frying-pan itself, and that the Navajos were trying to drive them out of

the rocks, and were not making much of a success of it.

“Now,” Applehead instructed the three when they were as close as they

could get to the grove without being seen, “I calc'late about the best

thing we kin do, boys, is t' spur up our hosses and ride in amongst 'em

shooting and a-hollerin'. Mebby we kin jest natcherlay stampede 'em--but

we've sure got t' git through In' git under cover mighty dang suddent,

er they'll come to theirselves an' wipe us clean off'n the map--if

they's enough of 'em. These here that's comin' along after us, they'll

help t' swell the party, oncet they git here. I calc'late they figger

't we're runnin' head-on into a mess uh trouble, 'n' they don't want t'

colleck any stray bullets--'n' that's why they've dropped back in the

last half mile er so. Haze them pack bosses up this way, Pink, so'st

they won't git caught up 'fore they git t' what the rest air. Best use

yore six-guns fer this, boys--that'll leave ye one hand t' guide yore

bosses with, and they're handier all around in close--work. Air ye

ready? Then come on--foller me 'n' come a-whoopin'!”

A-whooping they came, up out of the draw and in among the trees as

though they had a regiment behind them. Certain crouching figures

jumped, sent startled glances behind them and ran like partridges

for cover farther on. Only one or two paused to send a shot at these

charging fiends who seemed bent on riding them down and who yelled like

devils turned loose from the pit. And before they had found safe

covert on the farther fringes of the grove and were ready to meet the

onslaught, the clamor had ceased and the white men had joined those

others among the rocks.

So now there were nine men cornered here on the edge of the Frying-pan,

with no water for their horses and not much hope of getting out of

there.

“Darn you, Applehead, why didn't you keep out of this mess?” Luck

demanded with his mouth drawn down viciously at the corners and his eyes

warm with affection and gratitude. “What possessed your fool heart to

ride into this trap?”

“We-ell, dang it, we had t' ride som'ers, didn't we?” Applehead, safe

behind a bowlder, pulled off his greasy, gray Stetson and polished his

bald head disconcertedly. “Had a bunch uh Navvies hangin' t' our heels

like tumbleweed--'n' we been doin' some RIDIN', now, I'm a tellin' ye!

'F Lite, here, hadn't kep' droppin' one now an' then fur the rest t'

devour, I calc'late we'd bin et up, a mile er two back!”

Lite looked up from shoving more cartridges into his rifle-magazine. “If

we hadn't had a real, simon-pure go-getter to boss the job,” he drawled,

“I reckon all the shooting I did wouldn't have cut any ice. Ain't that

right, boys?”

Pink, resting his rifle in a niche of the boulder and moving it here and

there trying to fix his sights on a certain green sweater back in the

woods that he had glimpsed a minute before, nodded assent. “You're durn

tootin' it's right!” he testified.

Weary looked shining-eyed at Applehead's purple face. “Sure, that's

right!” he emphasized. “And I don't care how much of a trap you call

this, it isn't a patching to the one Applehead busted us out of. He's

what I call a Real One, boys.”

“Aw, shet yore dang head 'n' git yore rifles workin'!” Applehead

blurted. “This yere ain't no time fer kiddin', 'n' I'm tellin' yuh

straight. What's them fellers acrost the Fryin'-pan think they're tryin'

t' do? luck le's you'n me make a few remarks over that way, 'n' leave

the boys t' do some gun-talk with these here babies behind us. Dang it,

if I knowed of a better place 'n' what this is fer holdin' 'em off, I'd

say make a run fer it. But I don't 'n' that's fact. Yuh musta sprung the

trap 'fore yuh got inside, 'cause they shore aimed t' occupy this nest

uh rocks theirselves, with you fellers down there in the Fryin'-pan

where they could git at yuh.

“Thar's one of 'em up on the rim-rock--see 'im?--standin' thar, by

granny, like he was darin' somebody t' cut loose! Here, Lite, you spill

some lead up thar. We'll learn 'im t' act up smart--”

“Hey, hold on!” Luck grabbed Lite's arm as he was raising his rifle

for a close shot at the fellow. “Don't shoot! Don't you see? Thaf's the

peace-sign he's making!”

“Well, now, dang it, he better be makin' peace-signs!” growled Applehead

querulously, and sat down heavily on a shelf of the rock. “'Cause Lite,

here, shore woulda tuk an ear off'n him in another minute, now I'm

tellin' ye!”

CHAPTER XIX. PEACE TALK

Across the Frying-pan an Indian stood boldly out upon a jutting point of

rock and raised a hand in the sweeping upward motion of the peace-sign.

The questing bullets that came seeking for bone and flesh among the

rocks and bushes came no more when the signal was passed from those

who saw to those farther back who could not see the figure silhouetted

against the brilliant blue of the sky. A moment he stood, made the sign

again, and waited.

“That's peace-sign, sure as you're born!” Luck cried breathlessly, and

went scrambling through the bushes to where he might stand in the open,

on the very rim of the basin. Applehead yelled to him to come back and

not make a dang fool of himself, but luck gave no heed to the warning.

He stood out in the blazing sunshine and gave the peace-sign in reply.

On the-rim rock the Indian stood motionless while he might have taken

three or four breaths. Then with his hand he gave the sign for “pow-wow”

and waited again.

Luck, his pulse thrilling at the once familiar gesture which his tribal

“father,” old chief Big Turkey, used to give when he came stalking up

for his daily confab with his adopted son, gave back the sign with a

hand that trembled noticeably. Whereupon the Indian on the farther rim

turned and began dignifiedly to climb through a rift in the ledge down

into the Frying-pan.

“He wants a pow-wow,” Luck called back to the bunch. “You fellows stay

where you're at I'm going out there in the middle and talk to him.”

“Now, Luck, don't let 'em make a dang monkey outa ye,” Applehead

protested anxiously. “Injuns is tricky--”

“That's all right. You can keep a couple of rifles sighted on that old

chief--that's what he is, I take it, from his actions and his talking

'sign' and then if they pot me, you can pot him. But they won't. I

know Injuns better than you do, Applehead. He just wants to talk things

over--and I'm certainly willing that he should!”

“Well, Lite, you keep your sights lined up on that Injun, then. 'N' if

they's a crooked move made towards Luck, you cut loose--'n' say!

You shoot to kill, this time!” He shook his finger in Lite's face

admonishingly. “'S all right t' nip “em here 'n' take a hunk out there

jest t' kinda take their minds off'n us---'s all right enough so fur,

'n' I ain't kickin' none 'cause yuh ain't killed off yuh hit. But if

this here's a trick t' git Luck, you KILL that Injun. 'N' if you don't

do it I'll go out there m'self 'n' choke the dang skunk t' death!”

“I'll kill him--don't worry about that,” Lite promised--and the look

in his eyes told them that the Indian was doomed at the first sign of

treachery.

“You fellers wanta keep an eye peeled fer them in the grove,” Applehead

warned. “We ain't goin' t' give 'em no chanst t' sneak up 'n' skulp us

whilst we're watchin' Luck 'n' his dang-fool pow-wowin' out there in the

middle.”

“Aw, gwan! They wouldn't DAST skelp white folks!” There was a wail in

the voice of Happy Jack.

“They dast if they git the chanst,” Applehead retorted fretfully. “'N'

if you don't wanta loose that there red mop uh yourn ye better keep yer

eyes open, now I'm tellin' yuh!” He refilled his rifle magazine and took

up his station beside Lite Avery where he could watch the Frying-pan

through the bushes without exposing himself to a treacherous shot from

the rim-rock.

At the foot of the sandstone ledge the Indian stood with his bright red

blanket wrapped around him watching Luck. On his own side Luck stood

just clear of the rock huddle and watched the Indian. Presently he of

the red blanket lifted his hand in the gesture of peace, and started

deliberately out across the bare little basin. From his own side, Luck,

returning again the gesture, went out to meet him. In the center they

met, and eyed each other frankly. Still eyeing Luck, the old Indian put

out his hand Indian fashion, and Luck grave it one downward shake and

let go.

“How?” he grunted; and in the Indian custom of preparing for a leisurely

pow-wow as he had been taught by the Sioux, he squatted upon his boot

heels and reached for his cigarette papers and tobacco.

“How?” replied the Navajo, a flicker of interest in his eyes at

these little Indian touches in Luck's manner, and sat himself down

cross-legged on the hot sand. Luck rolled a cigarette and passed the

“makings” to the other, who received it gravely and proceeded to help

himself. Luck scratched a match on a stone that lay beside him, lighted

the Indian's cigarette and then his own, took four puffs and blew the

smoke upward, watching it spread and drift away, and made the gesture

that meant “Our pow-wow will be good,” as he had seen the Sioux medicine

men do before a council. Afterwards he began placidly to smoke and

meditate.

From his manner you would never have guessed that his life and the lives

of the Happy Family hung upon the outcome of this meeting. You would not

have surmised that his stomach was gnawing at his nerves, sending out

insistently the call for food; or that his thirst tormented him; or that

the combination of hunger, heat, thirst and mental strain had bred a

jumping headache that was knotting the veins in his temples. All these

nagging miseries beset him--but he knew the ways of the Indians and

he meant to impress this old man first of all with his plains-Indian

training; so he schooled himself to patience.

The Indian eyed him furtively from under heavy eyebrows while he smoked.

And the sun beat savagely down upon the sand of that basin, and Luck's

vision blurred with the pain that throbbed behind his eyes. But the

facial discipline of the actor was his to command, and he permitted his

face to give no sign of what he felt or thought.

The Indian leaned slowly, lifted a brown hand, made a studied gesture

or two and waited, his eyes fixed unwinkingly upon Luck. It was as if

he were saying to himself: “We'll see if this white man can speak in the

sign-talk of the Indians.”

Luck lifted his two hands, drew them slowly apart to say that he had

come a long way. Then, using only his hands--sometimes his fingers

only--he began to talk; to tell the old Navajo that he and eight other

white men were sheriffs and that they were chasing four white men (since

he had no sign that meant Mexican) who had stolen money; that they had

come from Albuquerque--and there he began to draw in the sand between

them a crude but thoroughly understandable sketch of the trail they had

taken and the camps they had made, and the distance they believed the

four thieves had travelled ahead of them.

He marked the camp where their horses had been stolen from them and

told how long they had waited there until the horses of their own accord

returned to camp; thirteen horses, he explained to the old Navajo. He

drew a rough square to indicate the square butte, sketched the fork of

the trail there and told how four men had turned to the north on a false

trail, while he and four others had gone around the southern end of the

hill. He calmly made plain that at the end of both false trails a trap

had been laid, that Indians had fired upon white men and for no just

cause. Why was this go? Why had Indians surrounded them back there in

the grove and tried to kill them? Why were Indians shooting at them from

the ledge of rocks that circled this little basin? They had no quarrel

with the Navajos. They were chasing thieves, to take them to jail.

Folded swelteringly in his red blanket the old Indian sat humped forward

a little, smoking slowly his cigarette and studying the sketch Luck had

drawn for him. With aching head and parched throat and hungry stomach,

Luck sat cross-legged on the hot sand and waited, and would not let his

face betray any emotion at all. Up on the Tim-rock brown faces peered

down steadfastly at the pow-wow. And back among the rocks and bushes

the Happy Family waited restively with eyes turning in all directions

guarding against treachery; and Lite, whose bullets always went straight

to the spot where they were aimed, stood and stared fixedly over his

rifle sights at the red-blanketed figure squatted in the sand and kept

his finger crooked upon the trigger. Beside him Applehead fidgeted and

grumbled and called Luck names for being so dang slow, and wondered if

those two out there meant to sit and chew the rag all day.

The Indian leaned and traced Luck's trail slowly with his finger. Did

the four white men come that way? he asked in sign. And then, had Luck

seen them? Was he sure that he was following the four who had stolen

money in Albuquerque?

Come to think of it, Luck was not sure to the point of being able to

take oath that it was so. He traced again where the hoofprints had been

discovered near the stalled automobile, and signed that the six horses

they believed to have belonged to the four who had taken two horses

packed with food and blankets--and the stolen money.

Then suddenly Luck remembered that, for proof of his story, he had a

page of the Evening Herald in his pocket, torn from a copy he had bought

on the streets the evening after the robbery. He pulled the folded paper

out, spread it before the other and pointed to the article that told

of the robbery. “Call some young man of your tribe who can read,” he

signed. “Let him read and tell you if I have spoken the truth.”

The Indian took the paper and looked at it curiously.

Now, unless Applehead or some other hot-head spoiled things, Luck

believed that things would smooth down beautifully. There had been

some misunderstanding, evidently--else the Indiana would never have

manifested all this old-fashioned hostility.

The blanketed one showed himself a true diplomat. “Call one of your

white men, that there may be two and two,” he gestured. And he added,

with the first words he had spoken since they met, “Hablo espanol?”

Well, if he spoke Spanish, thought Luck, why the deuce hadn't he done

it at first? But there is no fathoming the reticence of an Indian--and

Luck, by a sudden impulse, hid his own knowledge of the language. He

stood up and turned toward the rocks, cupped his hands around his lips

and called for the Native Son. “And leave your rifle at home,” he added

as an afterthought and in the interests of peace.

The Indian turned to the rim-rock, held up the fragment of newspaper and

called for one whom he called Juan. Presently Juan's Stetson appeared

above the ledge, and Juan himself scrambled hastily down the rift and

came to them, grinning with his lips and showing a row of beautifully

even teeth, and asking suspicious questions with his black eyes that

shone through narrowed lids.

Miguel, arriving just then from the opposite direction, sized him up

with one heavy-lashed glance and nodded negligently. He had left his

rifle behind him as he had been told, but his six-shooter hung inside

the waistband of his trousers where he could grip it with a single

drop of his hand. The Native Son, lazy as he looked, was not taking any

chances.

The old Indian explained in Navajo to the young man who eyed the two

white men while he listened. Of the blanket-vending, depot-haunting type

was this young man, with a ready smile and a quick eye for a bargain and

a smattering of English learned in his youth at a mission, and a larger

vocabulary of Mexican that lent him fluency of speech when the mood to

talk was on him. Half of his hair was cut so that it hung even with his

ear-lobes. At the back it was long and looped up in the way a horse's

tail is looped in muddy weather, and tied with a grimy red ribbon wound

round and round it. He wore a green-and-white roughneck sweater

broadly striped, and the blue overalls that inevitably follow American

civilization into the wild places.

“'S hot day,” he announced unemotionally, and took the paper which the

red-blanketed one held out to him. His air of condescension could not

hide the fact that behind his pride at being able to read print he was

unhappily aware also of his limitations in the accomplishment. Along the

scare-head Luck had indicated, his dirty forefinger moved slowly while

he spelled out the words. “A-a-bank rob!” he read triumphantly, and

repeated the statement in Spanish. After that he mumbled a good deal

of it, the longer words arresting his finger while he struggled with the

syllables. But he got the sense of it nevertheless, as Luck and Miguel

knew by the version he gave in Spanish to the old Indian, with now and

then a Navajo word to help out.

When he came to the place where Ramon Chavez and Luis Rojas were named

as the thieves, he gave a grunt and looked up at Luck and Miguel, read

in, their faces that these were the men they sought, and grinned.

“Me, I know them feller,” he declared unexpectedly. “Dat day I seen them

feller. They go--”

The old Indian touched him on the shoulder, and Juan turned and

repeated the statement in Spanish. The old man's eyes went to luck

understandingly, while he asked Juan a question in the Navajo tongue,

and afterwards gave a command. He turned his eyes upon the Native Son

and spoke in Spanish. “The men you want did not come this way,” he said

gravely. “Juan will tell.”

“Yes, I know dat Ramon Chavez. I seen him dat day. I'm start for home,

an' I seen Ramon Chavez an' dat Luis Rojas an' one white feller I'm

don't know dat feller. They don't got red car. They got big, black car.

They come outa corral--scare my horse. They go 'cross railroad. I go

'cross rio. One red car pass me. I go along, bimeby I pass red car in

sand. Ramon Chavez, he don't go in dat car. I don't know them feller.

Ramon Chavez he go 'cross railroad in big black car.”

“Then who was it we've been trailing out this way?” Luck asked the

question in Spanish and glanced from one brown face to the other.

The older Indian shifted his moccasined feet in the sand and looked

away. “Indians,” he said in Mexican. “You follow, Indians think you

maybe take them away--put 'm in jail. All friends of them Indians pretty

mad. They come fight you. I hear, I come to find out what's fighting

about.”

Luck gazed at him stupidly for a moment until the full meaning of the

statement seeped through the ache into his brain. He heaved a great

sigh of relief, looked at the Native Son and laughed.

“The joke's on us, I guess,” he said. “Go, back and tell that to the

boys. I'll be along in a minute.”

Juan, grinning broadly at what he considered a very good joke on the

nine white men who had traveled all this way for nothing, went back to

explain the mistake to his fellows on the ledge. The old Indian took it

upon himself to disperse the Navajos in the grove, and just as suddenly

as the trouble started it was stopped--and the Happy Family, if they had

been at all inclined to belittle the danger of their position, were

made to realize it when thirty or more Navajos came flocking in from all

quarters. Many of them could--and did--talk English understandably, and

most of them seemed inclined to appreciate the joke. All save those whom

Lite had “nipped and nicked” in the course of their flight from the rock

ridge to the Frying-Pan. These were inclined to be peevish over

their hurts and to nurse them in sullen silence while Luck, having a

rudimentary knowledge of medicine and surgery, gave them what firstaid

treatment was possible.

Applehead, having plenty of reasons for avoiding publicity, had gone

into retirement in the shade of a clump of brush, with Lite to keep him

company while he smoked a meditative pipe or two and studied the puzzle

of Ramon's probable whereabouts.

“Can't trust a Navvy,” he muttered in a discreet undertone to Lite.

“I've fit 'em b'fore now, 'n' I KNOW. 'N' you kin be dang sure they

ain't fergot the times I've fit 'em, neither! There's bucks millin'

around here that's jes' achin' fer a chanst at me, t' pay up fer some

I've killed off when I was shurf 'n' b'fore. So you keep 'n' eye peeled,

Lite, whilst I think out this yere dang move uh Ramon's. 'N' if you see

anybody sneakin' up on me, you GIT him. I cain't watch Navvyies 'n' mill

things over in m' haid at the same time.”

Lite grinned and wriggled over so that his back was against a rock.

He laid his six-shooter Ostentatiously across his lap and got out

his tobacco and papers. “Go ahead and think, Applehead,” he consented

placidly. “I'll guard your scalp-lock.”

Speaking literally, Applehead had no scalplock to guard. But he did have

a shrewd understanding of the mole-like workings of the criminal mind;

and with his own mind free to work on the problem, he presently declared

that he would bet he could land Ramon Chavez in jail within a week, and

sent Lite after Luck.

“I've got it figgered out,” he announced when Luck came over to his

retreat. “If Ramon crossed the railroad he was aimin' t' hit out across

the mesa to the mountains 'n' beyond. He wouldn't go south, 'cause he

could be traced among the Injun pueblos--they's a thousand eyes down,

that way b'fore he'd git t' wild country. He'd keep away from the valley

country--er I would, if I was him. I know dang well whar I'D hit fer if

I was makin' a gitaway 'n' didn't come off over here--'n' I shore would

keep outa Navvy country, now I'm tellin' yuh! No, sir, I'd take out

t'other way, through Hell Canon er Tijeras, 'n' I'd make fer the Jemes

country. That thar's plenty wild 'n' rough--'n' come t' think of it, the

Chavez boys owns quite a big grant, up in there som'ers, 'n' have got

men in their pay up thar, runnin' their cattle. Ramon could lay low fer

a dang long while up thar 'n' be safer'n what he would be out amongst

strangers.

“'N' another thing, I'd plan t' have some hosses stached out in one uh

them canons, 'n' I'd mebby use a autymobile t' git to 'em, 'n' send the

car back t' town--I could trust the feller that drove it--outa my sight.

'N', Luck, if you'll take my advice, you'll hit out t'wards the Jemes

country. I know every foot uh the way, 'n' we kin make it in a coupla

days by pushin' the hosses. 'N' I'll bet every dang hoof I own 't we

round up that bunch over thar som'ers.”

“You lead out, then,” Luck told him promptly. “I'm willing to admit

you're better qualified to take charge of the outfit than I am. You know

the country--and you've fit Indians.”

“We-ell, now, you're dang right I have! 'N' if some them bucks don't go

off 'n' mind their own business, I'll likely fight a few morel You shoo

'em outa camp, Luck, 'n' start 'em about their own dang business. 'N'

we'll eat a bite 'n' git on about our own. If we show up any grub whilst

this bunch is hangin' around we'll have t' feed 'em--'n' you know dang

well we ain't got enough skurcely fer the Jemes trip as it is.”

“I've been handing out money as it is till I'm about broke,” Luck

confessed, “making presents to those fellows that came in with bullets

in their legs and arms. Funny nobody got hit in the body--except one

poor devil that got shot in the shoulder.”

“We-ell, now, you kin blame Lite's dang tender heart fer that there,”

Applehead accused, pulling at his sunbrowned mustache. “We was all

comin' on the jump, 'n' so was the Injuns; 'n' it was purty long range

'n' nobody but lite could hit 'n Injun t' save his soul. 'N' Lite,

he wouldn't shoot t' kill--he jes' kep' on nippin' an' nickin', 'n'

shootin' a boss now an' then. I wisht I was the expert shot Lite is--I'd

shore a got me a few Navvies back there, now I'm tellin' yuh!”

“Bud's got a bullet in his arm,” Luck said, “but the bone wasn't hit, so

he'll make out, and one of the pack-horses was shot in the ear. We got

off mighty lucky, and I'm certainly glad Lite didn't get careless. Cost

me about fifty dollars to square us as it is. You stay where you are,

Applehead, till I get rid of the Indians. The old fellow acts like he

feels he ought to stick along till we're outa here. He's kind of taken a

notion to me because I can talk sign, and he seems to want to make sure

we don't mix it again with the tribe. Some of them are kinda peeved,

all right. You've got no quarrel with this old fellow, have you? He's

a big-league medicine man in the tribe, and his Spanish name is Mariano

Pablo Montoya. Know him?”

“No I don't, 'n' I don't keer to neither,” Applehead retorted crossly.

“Shoo 'em off, Luck, so's we kin eat. My belly's shore a floppin' agin

m' backbone, 'n' I'm tellin' yuh right!”

CHAPTER XX. LUIS ROJAS TALKS

Three days of hiding by day in sequestered little groves or deep, hidden

canons, with only Luis Rojas to bear her company--Luis Rojas whom she

did not trust and therefore watched always from under her long straight

lashes, with oblique glances when she seemed to be gazing straight

before her; three nights of tramping through rough places where often

the horses must pause and feel carefully for space to set their feet.

Roads there were, but Luis avoided roads as though they carried the

plague. When he must cross one he invariably turned back and brushed out

their footprints--until he discovered that Annie-Many-Ponies was much

cleverer at this than he was; often he smoked a cigarette while Annie

covered their trail. Three days and three nights, and Ramon was not

there where they stopped for the third day.

“We go slow,” Luis explained nervously because of the look in the

black, unreadable eyes of this straight, slim Indian girl who was

so beautiful--and so silent. “They go muy fas', Ramon an' Beel. Poco

tiempo--sure, we fin' dem little soon.”

Annie-Many-Ponies did not betray by so much as a quiver of an eyelash

that Luis had mentioned Bill unwittingly. But she hid the name away in

her memory, and all that day she sat and pondered over the meager facts

that had come her way, and with the needle of her suspicion she wove

them together patiently until the pattern was almost complete.

Ramon and Bill--what Bill, save Bill Holmes, would be with Ramon?

Ramon and Bill Holmes--memory pictured them again by the rock in the

moonlight, muttering in Spanish mostly, muttering mystery always. Ramon

and Bill Holmes she remembered the sly, knowing glances between these

two at “location” though they scarcely seemed on speaking terms. Ramon

and Bill and this mysterious night-travelling, when there should be no

trouble and no mystery at all beyond the house of the priest! So much

trouble over the marriage of an Indian girl and a young Mexican cattle

king? Annie-Many-Ponies was not so stupid as to believe that; she had

seen too much of civilization in her wanderings with the show, and her

work in pictures. She had seen man and maid “make marriage,” in pictures

and in reality. There should be no trouble, no mysterious following of

Ramon by night.

Something evil there was, since Bill Holmes was with Ramon.

Annie-Many-Ponies knew that it was so. Perhaps--perhaps the evil was

against Wagalexa Conka! Perhaps--her heart forgot to beat when the

thought stabbed her brain--perhaps they had killed Wagalexa Conka! It

might be so, if he had suspected her flight and had followed Ramon, and

they had fought.

In the thick shade of a pinon Luis slept with his face to the ground,

his forehead pressed upon his folded arms. Annie-Many-Ponies got up

silently and went and stood beside him, looking down at him as though

she meant to wrest the truth from his brain. And Luis, feeling in his

sleep the intensity of her gaze, stirred uneasily, yawned and sat up,

looking about him bewilderedly. His glance rested on the girl, and he

sprang to his feet and faced her.

Annie-Many-Ponies smiled her little, tantalizing, wistfully inviting

smile--the smile which luck bad whimsically called heart-twisting.

“I awful lonesome,” she murmured, and sat down with her back nestling

comfortably against a grassy bank. “You talk. I not lets you sleep all

time. You think I not good for talk to?”

“Me, I not tell w'at I'm theenk,” Luis retorted with a crooning note,

and sat down facing her. “Ramon be mad me.”

Annie-Many-Ponies looked at him, her eyes soft and heavy with that

languorous look which will quickest befuddle the sense of a man. “You

tell; Ramon not hear,” she hinted. “Ramon, he got plenty trobles for

thinking about.” She smiled again. “Ramon plenty long ways off. He got

Bill Holmes for talking to. You talk to me.”

How he did it, why he did it, Luis Rojas could never explain afterwards.

Something there was in her smile, in her voice, that bewitched him.

Something there was that made him think she knew and approved of

the thing Ramon had planned. He made swift, Spanish love to

Annie-Many-Ponies, who smiled upon him but would not let him touch her

hand--and so bewitched him the more. He made love--but also he talked.

He told Annie-Many-Ponies all that she wished him to tell; and some

things that she had never dreamed and that she shrank from hearing.

For he told her of the gold they had stolen, and how they had made it

look as though Luck Lindsay had planned the theft. He told her that

he loved her--which did not interest her greatly--and he told her that

Ramon would never marry her--which was like a knife thrust to her soul.

Ramon had many loves, said Luis, and he was true to none; never would he

marry a woman to rule his life and make him trouble--it were easier to

make love and then laugh and ride away. Luis was “muy s'prised”

that Annie-Many-Ponies had ever believed that Ramon would marry

her, beautiful though she was, charming though she was, altogether

irresistible though she was--Luis became slightly incoherent here and

lapsed into swift rolling Spanish words which she did not understand.

Luis, before the sun went down and it was time to eat supper and go on,

became so thoroughly bewitched that he professed himself eager to let

his share of the gold go, and to take Annie-Many-Ponies to a priest and

marry her--if she wished very much to be married by a priest. In the

middle of his exaltation, Annie-Many-Ponies chilled him with the look

she gave him.

“You big fool,” she told him bluntly. “I not so fool like that. I go to

Ramon--and plenty gold! I think you awful fool. You make me tired!”

Luis was furious enough for a minute to do her violence--but

Annie-Many-Ponies killed that impulse also with the cold contempt in her

eyes. She was not afraid of him, and like an animal he dared not strike

where he could not inspire fear. He muttered a Mexican oath or two and

went mortifiedly away to lead the horses down to the little stream where

they might drink. The girl was right--he was a fool, he told himself

angrily; and sulked for hours.

Fool or not, he had told Annie-Many-Ponies what she wanted to know. He

had given food to her brooding thoughts--food that revived swiftly and

nourished certain traits lying dormant in her nature, buried alive under

the veneer of white man's civilization--as we are proud to call it.

The two ate in silence, and in silence they saddled the horses and

fared forth again in their quest of Ramon--who had the gold which

Annie-Many-Ponies boldly asserted was an added lure. “The monee--always

the man wins that has muchos monee.” Luis muttered often to himself as

he rode into the dusk. Behind him Annie-Many-Ponies walked and led the

black horse that bore all her worldly possessions bound to the saddle.

The little black dog padded patiently along at his heels.

CHAPTER XXI. “WAGALEXA CONKA--COLA!”

“So good little girl yoh are to true' Ramon! Now I knows for sure yoh

lov' me moch as I lov' yoh! Now we go little ride more to my house high

up in the pinons--then we be so happy like two birds in nes'. Firs' we

rest ourselves, querida mia. This good place for res', my sweetheart

that comes so far to be with Ramon. To-morrow we go to my house--to

nes' of my loved one. Thees cabin, she's very good little nes' ontil

tomorrow--yoh theenk so?”

Annie-Many-Ponies, sitting beside the doorway of the primitive little

log cabin where the night-journeys with Luis had ended, looked up into

Ramon's flushed face with her slow smile. But her eyes were two deep,

black wells whose depths he could not fathom.

“Where them priest you promise?” she asked, her voice lowered to its

softest Indian tone. “Now I think we make plenty marriage; then we go

for live in your house.”

Ramon turned and caught her unexpectedly in his arms. “Ah, now you spik

foolish talk. Yoh not trus' Ramon! Why yoh talk pries', pries' all time?

Lov', she's plenty pries' for us. Pries' she don' make us more lov'

each other--pries' don' make us happy--we like birds that make nes'

in tree-tops. Yoh think they mus' have pries' for help them be happy?

Lov'--that's plenty for me.”

Annie-Many-Ponies drew herself away from his embrace, but she did it

gently. Bill Holmes, coming up from the spring, furnished excuse enough,

and Ramon let her go.

“You promise me priest for making us marriage,” she persisted in her

soft voice.

Ramon twisted the points of his black mustache and regarded her askance,

smiling crookedly. “Yoh 'fraid for trus' me, that's why I promise,”

he said at last. “Me, I don' need padre to mumble-mumble foolish

words before I can be happy. Yoh 'fraid of Luck Leen'sey, that's why I

promise. Now yoh come way up here, so luck don' matter no more. Yoh be

happy weeth me.”

“You promise,” Annie-Many-Ponies repeated, a sullen note creeping into

her voice.

Bill Holmes, lounging up to the doorway, glanced from one to the other

and laughed. “What's the matter, Ramon?” he bantered. “Can't you square

it with your squaw? Go after her with a club, why don't you? That's what

they're used to.”

Ramon did not make any reply whatever, and Bill gave another chuckling

laugh and joined Luis, who was going to take the gaunt horses to a tiny

meadow beyond the hill. As he went he said something that made Luis look

back over his shoulder and laugh.

Annie-Many-Ponies lifted her head and stared straight at Ramon. He

did not meet her eyes, nor did he show any resentment of Bill Holmes'

speech; yet he had sworn that he loved her, that he would be proud to

have her for his wife. She, the daughter of a chief, had been insulted

in his presence, and he had made no protest, shown no indignation.

“You promise priest for making us marriage,” she reiterated coldly, as

if she meant to force his real self into the open. “You promise you put

ring of gold for wedding on my finger, like white woman's got.”

Ramon's laugh was not pleasant. “Yoh theenk marry squaw?” he sneered.

“Luck Leen'sey, he don't marry yoh. Why yoh theenk I marry yoh? You be

good, Ramon lov' yoh. Buy yoh lots pretty theengs, me treat yoh fine.

Yoh lucky girl, yoh bet. Yoh don't be foolish no more. Yoh run away, be

my womans. W'at yoh theenk? Go back, perhaps? Yoh theenk Luck Leen'sey

take yoh back? You gone off with Ramon Chavez, he say; yoh stay weeth

Ramon then. Yoh Ramon's woman now. Yoh not be foolish like yoh too good

for be kees. Luck, be kees yoh many times, I bet! Yoh don' play

good girl no more for Ramon--oh-h, no! That joke she's w'at yoh call

ches'nut. We don' want no more soch foolish talk, or else maybe I do

w'at Bill Holmes says she's good for squaw!”

“You awful big liar,” Annie-Many-Ponies stated with a calm, terrific

frankness. “You plenty big thief. You fool me plenty--now I don't be

fool no more. You so mean yoh think all mens like you. You think all

girls bad girls. You awful big fool, you think I stay for you. I go.”

Ramon twisted his mustache and laughed at her. “Now yoh so pretty,

when yoh mad,” he teased. “How yoh go? All yoh theengs in cabin--monee,

clothes, grob--how yoh go? Yoh mad now--pretty soon Ramon he makes yoh

glad! Shame for soch cross words--soch cross looks! Now I don't talk

till yoh be good girl, and says yoh lov' Ramon. I don't let yoh go,

neither. Yoh don't get far way--I promise yoh for true. I breeng yoh

back, sweetheart, I promise I breeng yoh back I Yoh don't want to go no

more w'en I'm through weeth yoh--I promise yoh! Yoh theenk I let yoh go?

O-oh-h, no! Ramon not let yoh get far away!”

In her heart she knew that he spoke at last the truth; that this was

the real Ramon whom she had never before seen. To every woman must come

sometime the bitter awakening from her dreamworld to the real world in

all its sordidness and selfishness. Annie-Many-Ponies, standing there

looking at Ramon--Ramon who laughed at her goodness--knew now what the

future that had lain behind the mountains held in store for her. Not

happiness, surely; not the wide ring of gold that would say she was

Ramon's wife. Luis was right. He had spoken the truth, though she had

believed that he lied when he said Ramon would never marry a woman. He

would love and laugh and ride away, Luis had told her. Well, then--

“Shunka Chistala!” she called softly to the little black dog, that came

eagerly, wagging his burr-matted tail. She laid her hand on its head

when the dog jumped up to greet her. She smiled faintly while she

fondled its silky, flapping ears.

“Why you all time pat that dam-dog?” Ramon flashed out jealously. “You

don't pet yoh man what lov' yoh!”

“Dogs don't lie,” said Annie-Many-Ponies coldly, and walked away. She

did not look back, she did not hurry, though she must have known that

Ramon in one bound could have stopped her with his man's strength. Her

head was high, her shoulders were straight, her eyes were so black the

pupils did not show at all, and a film of inscrutability veiled what

bitter thoughts were behind them.

As it had been with Luis so it was now with Ramon. Her utter disregard

of him held him back from touching her. He stood with wrath in his eyes

and let her go--and to hide his weakness from her strength he sent after

her a sneering laugh and words that were like a whip.

“All right--jus' for now I let you ron,” he jeered. “Bimeby she's

different. Bimeby I show yoh who's boss. I make yoh cry for Ramon be

good to yoh!”

Annie-Many-Ponies did not betray by so much as a glance that she beard

him. But had he seen her face he would have been startled at the look

his words brought there. He would have been startled and perhaps

he would have been warned. For never bad she carried so clearly the

fighting look of her forefathers who went out to battle. With the little

black dog at her heels she climbed a small, round-topped hill that had a

single pine like a cockade growing from the top.

For ten minutes she stood there on the top and stared away to the

southeast, whence she had come to keep her promise to Ramon. Never, it

seemed to her, had a girl been so alone. In all the world there could

not be a soul so bitter. Liar--thief--betrayer of women--and she had

left the clean, steadfast friendship of her brother Wagalexa Conka

for such human vermin as Ramon Chavez! She sat down, and with her face

hidden in her shawl and her slim body rocking back and forth in weird

rhythm to her wailing, she crooned the mourning song of the Omaha.

Death of her past, death of her place among good people, death of her

friendship, death of hope--she sat there with her face turned toward the

far-away, smiling mesa where she had been happy, and wailed softly to

herself as the women of her tribe had wailed when sorrow came to them in

the days that were gone.

All through the afternoon she sat there with her back to the lone pine

tree and her face turned toward the southeast, while the little black

dog lay at her feet and slept. From the cabin Ramon watched her,

stubbornly waiting until she would come down to him of her own accord.

She would come--of that he was sure. She would come if he convinced her

that he would not go up and coax her to come. Ramon had known many

girls who were given to sulking over what he considered their imaginary

wrongs, and he was very sure that he knew women better than they knew

themselves. She would come, give her time enough, and she could not

fling at him then any taunt that he had been over-eager. Certainly she

would come--she was a woman!

But the shadow of the pines lengthened until they lay like long fingers

across the earth; and still she did not come. Bill Holmes and Luis,

secure in the knowledge that Ramon was on guard against any unlooked-for

visitors, slept heavily on the crude bunks in the cabin. Birds began

twittering animatedly as the beat of the day cooled and they came forth

from their shady retreats--and still Annie-Many-Ponies sat on the little

hilltop, within easy calling distance of the cabin, and never once

looked down that way. Still the little black dog curled at her feet

and slept. For all the movement these two made, they might have been of

stone; the pine above was more unquiet than they.

Ramon, watching her while he smoked many cigarettes, became filled with

a vague uneasiness What was she thinking? What did she mean to do? He

began to have faint doubts of her coming down to him. He began to be

aware of something in her nature that was unlike those other women;

something more inflexible, more silent, something that troubled him even

while he told himself that she was like all the rest and he would be her

master.

“Bah! She thinks to play with me, Ramon! Then I will go up and I will

show her--she will follow weeping at my heels--like that dog of hers

that some day I shall kill!”

He got up and threw away his cigarette, glanced within and saw that Bill

and Luis still slept, and started up the hill to where that motionless

figure sat beneath the pine and kept her face turned from him. It would

be better, thought Ramon, to come upon her unawares, and so he went

softly and very slowly, placing each foot as carefully as though he were

stalking a wild thing of the woods.

Annie-Many-Ponies did not hear him coming. All her heart was yearning

toward that far away mesa. “Wagalexa Conka--cola!” she whispered, for

“cola” is the Sioux word for friend. Aloud she dared not speak the

word, lest some tricksy breeze carry it to him and fill him with; anger

because she had betrayed his friendship. “Wagalexa Conka--cola! cola!”

Friendship that was dead--but she yearned for it the more. And it seemed

to her as she whispered, that Wagalexa Conka was very, very near. Her

heart felt his nearness, and her eyes softened. The Indian look--the

look of her fighting forefathers--drifted slowly from her face as fog,

drifts away before the sun. He was near--perhaps he was dead and

his spirit had come to take her spirit by the hand and call her

cola--friend. If that were so, then she wished that her spirit might go

with his spirit, up through all that limitless blue, away and away

and away, and never stop, and never tire and never feel anything but

friendship like warm, bright sunshine!

Down at the cabin a sound--a cry, a shout--startled her. She brushed her

hand across her eyes and looked down. There, surrounding the cabin, were

the Happy Family, and old Applehead whom she hated because he hated her.

And in their midst stood Bill Holmes and Luis, and the setting sun shone

on something bright--like great silver rings--that clasped their wrists.

Coming up the hill toward her was Wagalexa Conka, climbing swiftly,

looking up as he came. Annie-Many-Ponies sprang to her feet, startling

the little black dog that gave a yelp of astonishment. Came he in peace?

She hesitated, watching him unwinkingly. Something swelled in her chest

until she could hardly breathe, and then fluttered there like a prisoned

bird. “COLA!” she gasped, just under her breath, and raised her hand in

the outward, sweeping gesture that spoke peace.

“You theenk to fix trap, you--!”

She whirled and faced Ramon, whose eyes blazed bate and murder and whose

tongue spoke the foulness of his soul. He flung out his arm fiercely and

thrust her aside. “Me, I kill that dam--”

He did not say any more, and the six-shooter he had levelled at Luck

dropped from his nerveless hand like a coiled adder, Annie-Many-Ponies

had struck. Like an avenging spirit she pulled the knife free and held

it high over her head, facing Luck who stared up at her from below.

He thought the look in her eyes was fear of him and of the law, and he

lifted his hand and gave back the peace-sign. It was for him she had

killed and she should not be punished if he could save her. But Luck

failed to read her look aright; it was not fear he saw, but farewell.

For with her free hand she made the sign of peace and farewell--and then

the knife descended straight as a plummet to her heart. But even as

she fell she spurned the dead Ramon with her feet, so that he rolled a

little way while the black dog growled at him with bared teeth; even in

death she would not touch him who had been so foul.

Luck ran the last few, steep steps, and took her in his arms. His eyes

were blurred so that he could not see her face, and his voice shook so

that he could scarcely form the words that brushed back death from her

soul and brought a smile to her eyes.

“Annie--little sister!”

Annie-Many-Ponies raised one creeping hand, groping until her fingers

touched his face.

“Wagalexa Conka--cola!”

He took her fingers and for an instant, while she yet could feel, he

laid them against his lips.