“There were many beautiful girls in my tribe,” Johnny Buffalo retorted drily. “What name did he call her?”
“Anita. It’s a pretty name, and it proves the Spanish, I should say.”
The old man stared at the opposite slope. His mouth grew thin-lipped and stern.
“My uncle, the chief, was betrayed in his old age. His youngest squaw loved a Spanish man with noble look. I have the tale from my older brothers, who told me. The child she bore was the child of the Spanish gentleman. My uncle’s youngest squaw—died.” Johnny Buffalo paused significantly. “The child was given to my mother to keep. Her name was Anita. She was very beautiful. I remember. Many visits Anita made with friends near this place. I think she is the same. It was not good for my sergeant to look upon her with love. I have heard my brothers whisper that Anita looked with soft eyes upon the white soldiers.”
Rawley’s young sympathies suffered a definite revulsion. If his grandfather’s dulce corazon were a coquette, her fruitless waiting for his return was not so beautifully tragic after all. There were other white soldiers stationed along the river, Rawley remembered, with a curl of the lip. His romantic imagination had not balked at the savage blood in her veins, since she was a beauty of fifty years ago. But he was a sturdy-souled youth with very old-fashioned notions concerning virtue. He finished his smoke and went on, feeling cheated by the cold facts he had almost forced from Johnny Buffalo.
They reached the head of that gulch, climbed a steep, high ridge where they must use hands as well as feet in the climbing, and dug heels into the earth in a descent even steeper. Rawley told himself once that he would just as soon start out to follow a crow through this country as to follow Johnny Buffalo. One word had evidently been omitted from the Indian’s English education by Grandfather King,—the word “detour.” Rawley thought of the straight-forward march of locusts he had once read about and wondered if Johnny Buffalo had taken lessons from them in his youth.
However, he consoled himself with the thought that a straight line to the mountain would undoubtedly shorten the distance. If the Indian could climb sneer walls of rock like a lizard, Rawley would attempt to follow. And they would ultimately arrive at their destination, though the glimpse he had obtained of the mountain from the ridge they had just crossed failed to confirm Johnny Buffalo’s assertion that it was one day’s travel. They had been walking three hours by Rawley’s watch, and the mountain looked even farther away than from El Dorado. But Johnny Buffalo was so evidently enjoying every minute of the hike through his native hills that Rawley could not bear to spoil his pleasure by even hinting that he was blazing a mighty rough trail.
They were working up another tortuous ravine where not even Johnny Buffalo could always keep a straight line by the sun. In places the walls overhung the gulch in shelving, weather-worn cliffs of soft limestone. Bowlders washed down from the heights made slow going, because they were half the time climbing over or around some huge obstruction; and because of the rattlesnakes they must look well where a hand or a foot was laid. Johnny Buffalo was still in the lead; and Rawley, for all his youth and splendid stamina was not finding the Indian too slow a pacemaker. Indeed, he was perfectly satisfied when the dozen feet between them did not lengthen to fifteen or twenty.
The mounting sun made the heat in that gully a terrific thing to endure. But the Indian did not lift the canteen to his mouth; nor did Rawley. Both had learned the foolishness of drinking too freely at the beginning of a journey. So, when Johnny Buffalo stopped suddenly in the act of passing around a jutting ledge, Rawley halted in his tracks and waited to see what was the reason.
The Indian glanced back at him and crooked a forefinger. Rawley set one foot carefully between two rocks, planted the other as circumspectly, and so, without a sound, stole up to Johnny Buffalo’s side. Johnny waited until their shoulders touched then leaned forward and pointed.