“He may worry,” she admitted at last. “But, then, he brought it all on himself. The idea of his forcing you with a six to be tied up! I don’t know what’s getting to be the matter with pa here of late—ever since I’ve been eighteen. If it hadn’t been for me—oh, well, let’s not worry. I’ve been thinking up all sorts of plans. If the wind gets up we’ll communicate with pa or somebody before very long. We’ll enter into negotiations with our enemies. If they’ll do so and so, we’ll do so and so—and they’ll have to agree, ’cause we’ll have the cinch on ’em from the start.
“Now, let’s stir our stumps and fix up our camp over there in the rocks beside the water. Then we’d better get some sleep if we can.”
They went into the outcropping of huge, gray stones, some of them as high as twenty feet above their heads, a grotesque assemblage that formed an admirable shelter. From under one of them water bubbled up, but seemed not to spread far over the surface of the ground before the loose, gravelly soil soaked it down again.
“Artesian,” observed The Falcon.
“I suppose so. It’s a freak outbreak, way up here. Outlaws could hide here and defy a posse for months, if their grub didn’t give out.”
With the small fencing hatchet that the girl carried in a scabbard on her saddle The Falcon cut chaparral limbs for their beds. On one side of a large, pyramidlike rock in the center of the group he made a bed for his companion, and laid down his own on the other side. Then she “went into her room,” as she expressed it, and stretched her tired body on the boughs and a blanket.
Falcon the Flunky did likewise on his side. He was far more tired than the girl, for, though a fairly good rider, he was not hardened to the saddle as was she.
To state that he was worried would be putting it lightly. What a chimerical idea it seemed; and, still, when he reviewed the situation, he was obliged to compliment Manzanita on her swift decision and the practicality of her strategy. He did not worry about his own predicament, but was thinking of the wretched state of mind into which their flight must have plunged Squawtooth Canby.
If he thought Falcon the Flunky to be a scoundrel—and he could think little else from his viewpoint—what tortures he must be suffering, when he knew that his beloved daughter had escaped into the mountains with such a man and was now at that man’s mercy somewhere up there in the illimitable fastness.
He could not sleep. Morning came fast now. The sun was casting its dazzling rays on the tips of the gaunt rocks above his head. Then came a plaintive voice from the other side of the thick partition.