Part 1 (1/2)
The Round-up.
by John Murray and Mills Miller.
CHAPTER I
The Cactus Cross
Down an old trail in the Ghost Range in northwestern Mexico, just across the Arizona border, a mounted prospector wound his way, his horse carefully picking its steps among the broken granite blocks which had tumbled upon the ancient path from the mountain wall above. A burro followed, laden heavily with pack, bed-roll, pick, frying-pan, and battered coffee-pot, yet stepping along sure-footedly as the mountain-sheep that first formed the trail ages ago, and whose petrified hoof-prints still remain to afford footing for the scarcely larger hoofs of the pack-animal.
An awful stillness hung over the scene, that was broken only by the click of hoofs of horse and burro upon the rocks, and the clatter of the loose stones they dislodged that rolled and skipped down the side.
Not a breath of air was stirring, and the sun blazed down from the zenith with such fierce and direct radiation that the wayfarer needed not to observe the shadows to note its exact position in the heavens.
Singly among the broken blocks, and in banks along the ledges, the cactus had burst under the heat, as it were, into the spontaneous combustion of flowery flame. To the traveler pa.s.sing beside them their red blooms blazed with the irritating superfluity of a torch-light procession at noonday.
The trail leads down to a flat ledge which overlooks the desert, and which is the observatory whither countless generations of mountain-sheep have been wont to resort to survey the strange world beneath them--with what purpose and what feelings, it remains for some imaginative writer of animal-stories to inform us. From the ledge to the valley below the trail is free from obstructions, and broader, more beaten, and less devious than above, indicating that it has been formed by the generations of men toiling up from the valley to the natural watch-tower on the heights. Reaching the ledge, the prospector found that what seemed from the angle above to be an irregular pile of large boulders was an artificial fortification, the highest wall being toward the mountains. Entering the enclosure the prospector dismounted, relieved his horse of its saddle and his burro of its pack, and proceeded to prepare his midday meal. Looking for the best place where he might light a fire, he observed, in the most protected corner, a flat stone, marked by fire, and near it, in the rocky ground, a pot-hole, evidently formed for grinding maize. The ashes of ancient fires were scattered about, and in cleaning them off his new-found hearth the man discovered a potsherd, apparently of a native olla or water-jar, and a chipped fragment of flint, too small to indicate whether it had formed part of an Indian arrowhead or had dropped from an old flintlock musket.
”Lucky strike!” observed the prospector. ”I was down to my last match.” And, gathering some mesquit brush for fuel, and rubbing a dead branch into tinder, he drew out a knife and, rapidly and repeatedly striking the back of its blade with the flint, produced a stream of sparks, which fell on the tinder. Blowing the while, he started a flame. When the fire was ready the man shook his canteen. ”Precious little drink left,” he said. ”I wish that potsherd carried water as the flint-chip does fire. However, there's lots of cactus around here, and they're natural water-jars. My knife may get me a drink out of the desert's thorns, as well as kindle a fire from its stones. And right here's my watermelon, the bisnaga, the first one I've found in months,”
he exclaimed, going over to the edge of the cliff, above the level of which peered the fat head of a cactus covered with spines that were barbed like a fish-hook. Its short tap-root was fixed in a crevice a few feet below the parapet. Lying on the edge of the cliff, the man sliced off the top of the cactus, and began jabbing into its interior, breaking down the fibrous walls of the water-cells, of which the top-heavy plant is almost entirely composed. In a few moments he arose.
”Now I can empty my canteen in the coffee-pot, sure of a fresh supply of water by the time I am ready to mosey along.”
He filled the pot, set it on the fire, and then pressed the uncorked and empty canteen down into the macerated interior of the bisnaga.
While his coffee was boiling, the prospector continued his examination of the fortification, beginning, in the manner of his kind, with the more minute ”signs,” and ending with what, to a tourist, would have been the first and only subject of observation--the view. On the inner side of the large boulder in the wall he discerned, the faint outline of a cross, painted with red ochre.
Sc.r.a.ping with his pick beneath the rock, to see if the emblem was the sign of hidden treasure or relic, he unearthed a rattlesnake.
Before it could strike, with a quick fling of his tool he sent the reptile whirling high in the air toward the precipice. But from the clump of cactus growth along the parapet arose a sahuaro, with branching arms, and against this the snake was flung. Wrapped around the th.o.r.n.y top by the momentum of the cast, it hung, hissing and rattling with pain and hatred.
The prospector looked up at the impaled rattlesnake with a smile.
Reminiscences of Sunday-school flashed across his mind.
”Gee, I'm a regular Moses,” he e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed. ”First I bring water from the face of the rock, and then I lift up the serpent in the wilderness.
The year I've spent in the mountains and desert seem like forty to me, and now, at last, I have a sight of the Promised Land. G.o.d, what a magnificent view!”
Dropping his pick, he stretched out his arms with instinctive symbolization of the wide prospect, and expression of an exile's yearning for his native land.
”Over there is G.o.d's country, sure enough,” he continued, giving the trite phrase a reverential tone, which he had not used in his first expression of the name of Deity. ”Thank Him, the parallel with old Moses stops right here. Many a time I thought I would never get out of the mountains alive, and that my grave would be unmarked by so much as a boulder with a red cross upon it. But now, before night, I'll be back in the States, and in three more days at home on the ranch. I promised to return in a year, and I'll make good to the hour. I sure did hate to leave that strike, though, after all the hard luck I had been having. Sixty dollars a day, and growing richer. But the last horn was blowing. No tobacco, six matches, and nothing left of the bacon but rinds. Well, the gold is there and the claim'll bring whatever I choose to ask for it. And Echo shall have a home as good as Allen Hacienda, and a ranch as fine as Bar One--yes, by G.o.d, it'll be Bar None, my ranch!”
Out of the sea of molten air that stretched before him, that nebulous chaos of quivering bars and belts of heated atmosphere which remains above the desert as a memorial of the first stage of the entire planet's existence, the imagination of the prospector created a paradise of his own. There took shape before his eyes a Mexican hacienda, larger and more beautiful even than that of Echo's father, the beau-ideal of a home to his limited fancy. And on the piazza in front, covered with flowering vines, there stood awaiting him the slender figure of a woman, with outstretched arms and dark eyes, tender with yearning love.
”Echo--Echo Allen!” he murmured, fondly repeating the name. ”No, not Echo Allen, but Echo Lane, for d.i.c.k Lane has redeemed his promise, and returns to claim you as his own.”
As he gazed upon the s.h.i.+mmering heat waves which distorted and displaced the objects within and beneath them, a group of hors.e.m.e.n suddenly appeared to him in the distance, and as suddenly vanished in thin air.
”Rurales!” e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed Lane. ”I wonder if they are chasing Apaches?
That infernal mirage gives you no idea of distance or direction. If the red devils have got away from Crook and slipped by these Greaser rangers over the border, they'll sure be making straight for the Ghost Range, and by this very trail. If so, I'm at the best place on it to meet them, and here I stay till the coast is clear.” Turning to the red cross on the rock, he reflected: ”Perhaps, after all, it's a case of 'Nebo's lonely mountain.'”
Lane had hardly reached this conclusion before he found it justified by the sight of a mounted Apache in the regalia of war emerging from a hidden dip in the trail below the fortification. Lane dropped behind the parapet, evidently before he was observed, as the steadily increasing number and loudness of the hoof-beats on the rocky trail indicated to the listener.
Crawling back to his horse and burro, he made them lie down against the upper wall, and picketed them with short lengths of rope to the ground, for he foresaw that danger could come only from the mountainside.
Taking his Winchester, he returned to the parapet, and, half-seated, half-reclining behind it, opened fire on the unsuspecting Apaches. The leader, shot through the head, fell from his horse, which reared and backed wildly down the trail. Other bullets must have found their billets also, but, because of the confusion which ensued among the Indians, the prospector was unable to tell how many of them he had put out of action. In a flash every rider had leaped off his horse, and, protecting himself by its body, was scrambling with his mount to the protecting declivity in the rear. The prospector was sorely tempted to pump his cartridges into the group as it poured back over the rim of the hollow, but he desisted from the useless slaughter of horses alone, knowing that he could be attacked only on foot, and that every one of his slender store of cartridges must find a human mark if he would return to the States alive. ”They've got to put me out of business before they can go on,” he ruminated. ”An Apache is a good deal of a coward when he's fighting for pleasure, but just corner him, and, great snakes and spittin' wildcats, what a game he does put up! I must save my cartridges; for one thing's sure, they won't waste any of theirs.