Philip's reticence regarding his own immediate past was too characteristic to excite any suspicion or surprise in the mind of his friend. In truth, the doctor was too well pleased with his presence, and the undoubted support which he should have in Philip's sympathetic tastes and congenial habits, to think of much else. He was proud of his friend—proud of the impression he had made among the rude unlettered men with whom he was forced by the conditions of frontier democracy to associate on terms of equality. And Philip, though young, was accustomed to have his friends proud of him. Indeed, he always felt some complacency with himself that he seldom took advantage of this fact. Satisfied that he might have confided to the doctor the truth of his connection with the ill-fated party and his flight with Grace, and that the doctor would probably have regarded him as a hero, he felt less compunction at his suppression of the fact.
Their way lay by Monument Point and the dismantled cairn. Philip had already passed it on his way to the cañon, and had felt a thankfulness for the unexpected tragedy that had, as he believed, conscientiously relieved him of a duty to the departed naturalist, yet he could not forego a question.
"Is there anything among these papers and collections worth our preserving?" he asked the surgeon.
The doctor, who had not for many months had an opportunity to air his general scepticism, was nothing if not derogatory.
"No," he answered, shortly. "If there were any way that we might restore them to the living Dr. Devarges, they might minister to his vanity, and please the poor fellow. I see nothing in them that should make them worthy to survive him."
The tone was so like Dr. Devarges' own manner, as Philip remembered it, that he smiled grimly and felt relieved. When they reached the spot Nature seemed to have already taken the same cynical view; the metallic case was already deeply sunken in the snow, the wind had scattered the papers far and wide, and even the cairn itself had tumbled into a shapeless, meaningless ruin.
CHAPTER IX.
IN WHICH THE FOOTPRINTS ARE LOST FOR EVER.
A fervid May sun had been baking the adobe walls of the Presidio of San Ramon, firing the red tiles, scorching the black courtyard, and driving the mules and vaqueros of a train that had just arrived into the shade of the long galleries of the quadrangle, when the Comandante, who was taking his noonday siesta in a low, studded chamber beside the guard-room, was gently awakened by his secretary. For thirty years the noonday slumbers of the Commander had never been broken; his first thought was the heathen!—his first impulse to reach for his trusty Toledo. But, as it so happened, the cook had borrowed it that morning to rake tortillas from the Presidio oven, and Don Juan Salvatierra contented himself with sternly demanding the reason for this unwonted intrusion.