The answer came sooner than they expected.
CHAPTER VI
THE INCENDIARIES
The red glow of the sun on the snow-clad peaks of the main ridge had begun glinting through the smoke gloom when voices seemed to echo from within the very rock against which they were leaning. The boys crept to look behind it. Then their eyes rounded in astonishment. As Ted would have spoken, Pedro clapped his hand over his mouth with a look that bade silence. Crouched motionless at the side of the cave mouth,—for a deep cave it now disclosed itself,—the two boys peered at the spectacle that greeted their eyes.
Three Mexicans, aglitter with the silver buttons of their native costume, appeared suddenly from some black depth, carrying torches.
With these one of their number kindled a bon-fire, whose flame revealed a couple of burros standing patiently under their packs, tied to a mammoth stalagmite. For the red flare behind the three figures of the Mexicans, showed a cave roofed with amber-tinted icicles of smoke-stained rock, beneath which up-rose for each a pyramid of the same formation.
The Mexicans might have been father and son and old servant, from their general appearance and from the fact that most of the work of supper-getting was performed by the shabby, white-haired one, while the fat middle-aged one struck the younger a blow that was not reciprocated. They were talking in a tongue that Ted could not translate, though from the peppery tone of it, he judged they were quarreling. Pedro assured him later they were not. (He knew Mexican.) They were merely regretting that their horse had been burned.
The fat one, evidently too fagged to move, was demanding that one of the others go see for sure, while they argued that it was no use, the animal could not have survived. They must have been exhausted, lame, besides, to judge from the creaky way they moved. The fat one poured some verbal vitriol on their heads for not having brought the horse inside, while the white haired one deprecated that they had not intended to be gone so long.
“It’s the fat one’s, and now he’ll have to hoof it like the others; he’d sure break the back of a burro,” translated Pedro in huge enjoyment, to his mystified companion. “Wonder if they’re the fire bugs Rosa saw?”