In the midst of these musings Manzanita suddenly straightened apprehensively. A familiar figure had ridden in on a magnificent black horse. Over near the stable tent a half-smoked cigar dropped in the sand and was stealthily covered by a booted foot.
“Goodness!” breathed the girl. “There’s pa. I—I guess I’d better be going.”
Youth plans and plans, but youth’s actualities are ofttimes disconcerting—nay, appalling!
CHAPTER VI
PREACHMENTS
A MONTH passed, and where had been only yucca palms, sand, and cactus, now stood many tent cities, and hundreds of toilers worked incessantly. For a hundred miles on the other side of the chain of calico buttes one might walk and pass through several camps a day. On the inner side of the buttes the situation was the same. There were four rather large camps on Squawtooth Ranch, including that of the Mangan-Hatton Company; but the piece of work allotted to Jeddo the Crow was still without its camp.
Just beyond the buttes a mushroom town had sprung into being, where were bars and restaurants and dance halls and gambling devices. Such towns usually are named as are the Indian boys—on the spur of the moment. The first settler in this one was a saloonman from San Francisco. As he and his workmen were setting up the tent saloon, which was to become the nucleus for the town, a desert twister came along, grabbed the tent by its four corners, and whirled it round and round at lightning speed, flattening the men or enveloping them in numerous whipping folds of canvas and snarls of guy ropes. One man looked up from the bed of cactus into which he had been sent sprawling, and shouted in pidgin: “Whassa malla? Stling bloke?” So the town became “Stlingbloke.”
From Stlingbloke’s single street late one afternoon rode two on horseback, and set their horses’ faces toward the desert.
“Manzanita,” said Hunt Mangan, “I asked Mart to ride on ahead of us because I wanted to have a few words with you. I don’t want you to feel offended, now. I am quite a little older than you, and think more of you than perhaps you understand. For these reasons I am going to risk presumptuousness and try to show you where you’re wrong. Girl, you have no business in Stlingbloke.”
“Why not? Mart was with me.”
“A mere slip of a boy,” expostulated Hunt. “You don’t understand at all, and I consider it my duty to tell you. That’s a wretched hole. Nothing but saloons and gambling dens.”