CHAPTER XXIII
THE LETTER FROM JUANITA
"You'd better speak up pronto!" exclaimed the girl from Rose
Ranch in an unshaken tone. "I'm going to fire if you don't."
"Oh, Rhoda!" shrieked Bess.
"It isn't Walter!" exclaimed Grace.
"Speak! What do you want? Who are you?" demanded the courageous
Rhoda.
"No shoot, Thenorita!" gasped a frightened voice from the looming figure. "I go!"
In a moment he was gone. He had disappeared around the corner of the boulder.
"For mercy's sake!" gasped Bess, "what does that mean?"
"Who was it?" asked Nan again.
"A Mexican. But he wasn't one of our boys," said Rhoda. "I never heard his voice before. Besides, if he had been from the ranch he would not have acted so queerly. I don't like it."
"Do you think he means us harm?" queried Nan.
"I don't know what he means; but I mean him harm if he comes fooling around us again," declared Rhoda. "I never heard of such actions. Why! nine times out of ten he would have been shot first and the matter of who he was decided afterward."
"Why, Rhoda! how awfully wicked that sounds. You surely would not shoot a man!" Bess Harley's tone showed her horror.
"I don't know what I would do if I had to. There was something wrong with that fellow. Let me tell you, people do not creep up on you in the dark as he did—not out here in the open country—unless they mean mischief. If a man approaches a campfire or a cabin, he hails. And that Mexican—"
She did not finish the sentence; but her earnestness served to take Grace's mind off the disappearance of Walter. She had something else to be frightened about!
Rhoda was not trying to frighten her friends, however. That would be both needless and wicked. But she remembered the fact that there were supposedly strangers in the neighborhood, and she did not know who this Mexican lurking about the mouth of the bears' den might be.
The girls went back into the cave and sat down again. Rhoda held the rifle across her lap, and they all listened for sounds from the entrance to the cave. But all they heard was the stamping of the horses and now and then the shrill and eerie cry from the depths of the cavern.
When they made another trip to the mouth of the tunnel, it seemed to be lighter outside, late in the evening as it was, and the torrent in the gulch had receded greatly.
"I believe we can get out now," said Rhoda. "You take the rifle,
Grace. You are the best shot. And I will go after our ponies."
"Oh, no! I would be afraid," gasped the girl. "Give the gun to
Nan."
So Nan took Rhoda's weapon while the ranch girl went to unhobble the ponies and lead her own to the cave's mouth. The other three followed docilely enough.
Nan did not expect to fire the rifle if the Mexican—or anybody else—should appear. But she thought she could frighten the intruder just as much as Rhoda had.
When the latter and the ponies arrived, Bess uttered a sigh of relief.
"I certainly am glad to get out of that old hole in the ground. It's haunted," she declared. "And I want to get away from this place and keep away from it as long as we are at Rose Ranch. This has been one experience!"
"And you wouldn't have missed it for a farm," Nan said to her. "I know how you'll talk when we get back to Lakeview Hall."
"Oh! won't I?" and Bess really could chuckle. "Won't Laura turn green with envy?"
They mounted their ponies after pulling up the cinches a little, and Rhoda again went ahead. The ponies splashed down into the running stream; but they were sure-footed and did not seem to be much frightened by the river that had so suddenly risen in the bottom of the gulch.
They were only a few minutes in wading out of the gully. When the party came out on the plain the ponies were still hock deep in water. The whole land seemed to have become saturated and overflowed by the cloudburst.
"When we do get a rain here it is usually what the boys call a humdinger," said Rhoda. "Now, let's hurry home."
Just as she spoke there sounded a shout behind them. The girls, startled, drew in their horses. The latter began to whinny, and Rhoda said, with satisfaction:
"I reckon that's Walter now. The ponies know that horse, anyway."
The splash of approaching hoofs was heard after the girls had shouted in unison. Then they recognized the voice of the missing boy:
"Hi! Grace! Nan! Are you there?"
"Oh, Walter!" shrieked his sister, starting her pony in his direction. "Are you hurt?"
"I'm mighty wet," declared Walter, riding up. "Are you all here?"
"Most of us. What hasn't been scared off us," said Bess. "And, of course, we are starved."
"Well, I hung on to the antelope. Want some, raw?" laughed the boy.
"Cracky! what a storm this was."
"It was pretty bad," said Nan.
"What happened to you?" asked Rhoda.
"I missed you, somehow. I don't know how it was," said the boy.
"You must have tried to guide your pony," Rhoda said.
"Yes."
"That is where you were wrong. He would probably have found us if you had let him have his head."
"Well, I got under the shelter of a rock out of the wind," the boy said. "But when it began to rain—blooey!"
"Well, thank goodness," said Nan, "it is all over and nobody is hurt."
"But, oh, Walter!" cried his sister, "we got into a haunted cave, and Mexicans came to shoot us, and Rhoda threatened to shoot them, so they went away, and—"
"Whew! what's all this?" he demanded. "You are crazy, Sis."
"Not altogether," laughed Nan. "We did have some adventure, didn't we, girls?"
And when Walter heard the particulars he agreed that the experience must have been exciting. He rode along beside Nan in the rear of the others, as they cantered toward the ranch house, and he put a number of questions to her regarding the mysterious sound in the cavern.
"It must have been the wind," said Nan. "Though it didn't sound like it."
"What did it sound like?" asked her friend.
"I don't know that I can tell you, Walter. It seemed so strange—shrill, and sort of stifled. Why! it was as uncanny as the neigh of that big horse we saw calling to the herd the other morning."
"The outlaw?" asked Walter.
"Yes."
"Maybe it was another horse," he said doubtfully.
"How could that be? In that cave? Why didn't it come nearer, then?
Oh, it couldn't have been another horse."
"I don't know," ruminated Walter. "You saw that Mexican, too. There may have been some connection between him and that sound."
"How could that be possible?" asked Nan, in wonder.
"Well, if he had a horse, say? And he had hidden it deeper in the cave? And had hitched it so it could not run away? How does that sound?"
"Awfully ingenious, Walter," admitted Nan, with a laugh. "But, somehow, it is not convincing."
"Oh, all right, my lady. Then we will accept Grace's statement that the cave is haunted," and he laughed likewise.
They arrived at the ranch house within the next two hours. They found everything about headquarters quite intact, for the tornado had swept past this spot without doing any damage. Mrs. Hammond met them in a manner that showed she had not become very anxious, and Rhoda had warned her friends to say little in her mother's hearing about their strange experience.
Nor was anything said to Mrs. Hammond regarding the raid by the Mexican horse thieves. She supposed her husband was absent from the house because of the tornado. That, of course, had scattered the cattle tremendously.
The girls themselves did not think much just then of the stolen horses and the posse that had started on the trail of the thieves. But another incident held their keen interest, and that connected with renegade Mexicans.
There was a letter waiting for Rhoda when she arrived—a letter addressed in a cramped and unfamiliar hand. But when she opened it she called her friends about her with:
"Do see here! What do you suppose this is? It's from that funny girl, Juanita O'Harra."
"From Juanita?" asked Nan. "More about the treasure?"
"Oh! The treasure!" added Bess, in delight. "I had almost forgotten about that."
"Listen!" exclaimed the ranch girl. "She writes better English than she speaks. I should not wonder if there were an English school down in Honoragas."
"Is she home again, then?" demanded Nan.
"So it seems. Listen, I say," and Rhoda began to read:
"'Miss R. HAMMOND,
"'ROSE RANCH.
"'Dear Miss:—
"'I have arrived to my mother at Honoragas, and I take this pen in hand to let you know that Juan Sivello, Lobarto's nephew, who has come from the South—he is one of those who lisp—'"
"What does she mean by that?" interrupted Bess, in curiosity.
"The Mexicans of the southern provinces—many of the—do not pronounce the letter 's' clearly. They lisp," explained Rhoda. "Now let me read her letter." Then she pursued:
"'—one of those who lisp—and it is said of him that he has of his uncle's hand a map, or the like, which shows where the treasure lies buried at Rose Ranch. This news comes to my mother's ears by round-about. We do not know for sure. But Juan Sivello is one bad man like his uncle, Lobarto. It is the truth I write with this pen. Juan has collected together, it is said round-about, some men who once rode the ranges with Lobarto, and they go up into your country. For what? It is too easy, Miss. It is—'"
"Oh! Oh!" giggled Bess. "What delicious slang!"
"I guess foreigners learn American slang before they learn the grammar," laughed Rhoda.
"What else, Rhoda?" cried Grace.
"It is to search out the treasure buried so long ago by Lobarto. If the map Juan has is true, he will find it. Then my mother will lose forever what Lobarto stole from our hacienda. Is it not possible that the Senor Hammond, thy father, should get soldiers of the Americano army, and round up those bad Mexicanos and Juan Sivello, take from him the map and find the treasure? My mother will pay much dinero for reward.
"'Believe me, Senorita R. Hammond, your much good friend,
"'JUANITA O'HARRA.'
"She doesn't sound at all as she talked that day she caught me in the woods, Nan," added Rhoda with a laugh.
"The poor girl!" commented Nan. "I wish we could find her mother's money."
"Say! I wish we could find all that treasure for ourselves," cried
Bess. "No use giving it all to your Juanita."
"Do you suppose, girls," said Rhoda thoughtfully, "that those men we saw coming through the gap in the Blue Buttes were this Sivello and his gang?"
"Are they horse thieves?" cried Bess.
"Why not?"
"And how about that fellow you were going to shoot over at the bears' den?" asked Grace suddenly. "Why, Rhoda, that fellow lisped. He said 'Theniorita.' I heard him."
The other girls all acclaimed Grace Mason's good memory. Spurred by her words they all recalled now that the strange man who had so frightened them at the mouth of the bears' den had used in his speech "th" for "s."