Manzanita had been silent, watching Falcon the Flunky out of the corners of her eyes. He was chuckling audibly, apparently enjoying hugely the coup of Mr. Daisy. It occurred to the girl that he had refrained from speaking to her or to any one because he did not wish to trespass upon what seemed to be his partner’s great moment. Now he looked straight at Manzanita and smiled at her as he threw a set of creaking new harness from the back of a mule. He looked like anything but a man who knew himself to be guilty of highway robbery. Wing o’ the Crow had turned to Manzanita, and her look was one of significance.
“He—he’s tryin’ to horn in here with them teams and tools,” she whispered. “That’s what he’s had up his sleeve—what he was hintin’ at all along. They’re—they’re dandy, ain’t they? My, we could move dirt! But if he thinks he c’n win me with mules and new harness he’s off his nut. And he bought ’em with money, he said. Didja hear ’im? Where’d he get money to buy that bunch? There’s six thousan’ dollars’ worth o’ prop’ty there, if it’s worth a cent. And—lissen!” She placed her red lips closer to Manzanita’s ear. “Half o’ the gold that was swiped would be worth somewhere between six and seven thousan’, they said.”
Manzanita closed her eyes and nodded, her cheeks a little whiter.
Mr. Daisy was walking toward them, leading a bunch of mules, his big hand filled with tie ropes.
“Ladies,” he said with a sweeping bow, “let me interdoose you to these here tassel tails. Miss Canby, an’ Miss Wing o’ the Crow, this first bunch here is the children o’ Amram—Aaron an’ Moses an’ Miriam. The sons also of Aaron; Nadab and Abihu, Eleazar and Ithamar. They wasn’t named when me ’n’ The Falcon bought ’em.”
CHAPTER XIV
ESCAPE
AT seven o’clock in the evening on the day of Mr. Daisy’s triumphal return, Manzanita sat on the broad veranda of the old adobe at Squawtooth Ranch. She and Mrs. Ehrhart were alone. Supper was over, and the housekeeper had gone to her own room. Manzanita’s father had been at Little Woman Butte all day, and she did not expect him home for the night. The patient had been taken in the stage to a hospital on the other side of the range—“the inside,” as the desert dwellers called the peopled district between the mountains and the coast.
Falcon the Flunky was coming to see her soon. Any moment she expected to see his figure loom up at the whitewashed gate that separated green Squawtooth from the burning, barren desert beyond. He had spoken to her a few moments that day in the Jeddo borrow pit, after Mr. Daisy had inveigled Wing o’ the Crow into a whispered conference. He had asked to come. She was tense as she waited, starting at every little night sound of the creatures that inhabited the ranch.
The gate creaked suddenly. Some one was walking along the path toward the house. She rose and stepped to the edge of the veranda, and the new arrival saw the gleam of her white dress.
“That you, Nita?” came the question.