“The scion of chiefs,” Johnny Buffalo had declaimed bitterly, “should not be forced to become a companion of the squaws. Anita knows the etiquette of our tribe. Yet she would humiliate me by forcing me to listen to her chatter. Bah! I am not a squaw, nor a lover of squaws. Take me to our camp, my son. There I need not submit to the indignity of their presence.”
So the next morning, when Peter stopped by the porch for a minute on his way to work, Rawley told him honestly what it was that he and Johnny Buffalo had burned a light so late the night before to discuss. Peter seemed to understand and offered the burros and Nevada for his service. Rawley grinned over the manner in which Peter had made the offer, but he made no comment. The burros and Nevada would be very acceptable, he said.
“I had a talk with Nevada last night,” Peter added. “You’ll find she’s all over her temper. And she knows all the good camping places between here and El Dorado. You couldn’t stay down there in the canyon; it’s too hot. There are places, like this basin, where the breeze strikes most of the day. I want you close. I’ll have Nevada show you a place down the river, on one of my claims. I don’t suppose you’ll object to camping on my land, will you?”
Rawley would not, and he said so. And after breakfast he started out with Nevada, following the two burros which went nipping down the river under empty packsaddles. There seemed to be certain advantages in becoming a cousin of Nevada, Rawley discovered. Their chaperonage had been practically abandoned; they were accompanied by the burros and only one dog. The trailing cloud of young Cramers were sharply called off by Aunt Gladys, and Nevada drove the other dogs back with rather accurately aimed stones. Anita, for some reason which Rawley was not sufficiently acute to fathom, failed altogether to put in an appearance. It was the first time since Rawley came into the basin that Nevada prepared to set off without her grandmother.
Nevada, in her high-laced boots, khaki breeches and white shirt open at the throat, walked with her easy stride down the faint trail behind the burros. Rawley followed her, wondering man-fashion what thoughts she was thinking, how she felt about him, whether she was glad to be setting out like this with him for trail partner instead of her grandmother, and what she thought of him as a cousin.
He was not a particularly shy young man; there was too much of his grandfather in his make-up not to have had certain little romantic adventures of his own. He would have told you, with a bit of cynicism in his tone, that he knew girls and that they were all alike. But he was beginning to discover that he did not know Nevada Macalister. Now that he seemed to have become irrevocably her cousin by diplomacy and tribal belief, he was disposed to make what use he could of the relationship. But after half a mile of traveling with no more than an occasional monosyllable for Nevada’s contribution to the conversation, Rawley was compelled to admit to himself that the cousin business was not working as he would like to have it.
In view of her emotional outbreak last night, Rawley could not quite bring himself to the point of asking her outright how she liked her new cousin. But the question kept tickling his tongue, nevertheless. Then he reflected that Nevada was rather generously supplied with cousins, none of them definitely desirable. From that thought it was only a short jump to the next inevitable conclusion. Nevada, he decided, had placed him mentally alongside those other pestiferous cousins, the offspring of Gladys and Young Jess. Or if she had not, she was surely according him the same treatment.
As a romantic chapter in their acquaintance, the trip was a flat failure. Nevada was businesslike,—and aloof. Rawley’s faint hope that some unforeseen incident would occur to shock Nevada out of her insouciant mood died of inanition. The camp outfit they found exactly as it had been left, except that a rat had rashly decided to make a nest in a fold of the wrapped tent. This did not seem to interest Nevada in the slightest degree. She helped him with the packing and did not seem to care whether he hurt his newly healed arm or not. They returned as they had gone,—Nevada silent, following the burros that plodded sedately homeward under their loads, Rawley trailing after her in complete discouragement over the rebuffs his friendly overtures had received.
They did not so much as see a rattlesnake.