Across a flat bristling with rhododendrons and so small as to be accounted scarce more than a ledge, trotted the cow-pony; insinuated his way through a fringe of Forsythia brush just beginning to yellow; dug his shoe-prongs into the earth of a steep, but easier slope. Pape, looking back, could see through the tree tips a mountainous range of turreted peaks and flat-topped buttes, terminating on the north in a massive green copper dome. The height gained, he was interested by the discovery of an unroofed blockhouse of rough stone that literally perched upon a precipitous granite hump. Was it a relic of Indian war-path days? Had the flintlocks of pioneers spit defiance through the oblong loopholes inserted at intervals in its walls? He wondered.
“You wouldn’t be homesick at all, Dot, if your imagination had the speed of your hoofs,” he leaned down to adjure his horse, after a habit formed on many a lonelier trail. “Can’t you just hear those old-fashioned pop-guns popping? No? Well, at least you can hear the dogwood yapping? Look around you, horse-alive! Don’t this scene remind you of home? Of course you’ve got to concentrate on things near at hand. But trust me, that’s the secret of living to-day—concentration. Look far afield and you’ll lose the illusion, just as you bark your shins when you mix gaits.”
A shrill trill startled both; centered Pape’s attention on the brush that edged the mesa to his right. But the quail he suspected was too expert in the art of camouflage to betray its presence except by a repetition of his call, closer and more imperative than the first.
“That bird-benedict must be sized like a sage hen to toot all that. Maybe he’s a Mormon and obliged to get noisy to assemble his wives.”
This sanguinary illusion, along with varied others which had preceded it, was dissipated a moment after its inception and rather rudely. The trill sounded next from their immediate rear. Both horse and rider turned, to see pounding toward them a man uniformed in blue, between his lips a nickel-bright whistle, in his right hand a short, but official-looking club. Of the pair of Westerners who awaited the approach, one at least remembered that he was two-thousand-odd miles away from the Hellroaring home range of his over-worked imagination; appreciated that he was in for a set-to with a “sparrow cop” of America’s most metropolitan police.
Gasping from the effort of hoisting his considerable avoirdupois up the height and sputtering with offended dignity, the officer stamped to a stand alongside and glared fearsomely.
“What you mean, leaving the bridle path? Say, I’m asking you!”
“Horse bolted.” Pape parried with a half-truth—Dot had sort of bolted up the rocks.
The official eye fixed derisively on the angora chaps; lifted to the blue flannel shirt; stopped at the stiff-brimmed white Stetson. “One of them film heroes, eh?”
“Film? Not me. You’ll be asking my pardon, brother, when you know who——”