Far at the back came the unhappy drivers of the drag—the old, the maimed, the halt and the blind, steers bowed down with weight of woe. Here were gaunt cows, heavy with young, calves newborn trotting with their dams, all in a vast pastoral hegira.
Young Cinquo Centavos, hustling his caballada together, wailed in a high thin treble. “Neeter, Neeter, Wah-a-hah-neeter, ast thy-y-y so-o-oul ef we mus’ part!”
Came shufflng of hoofs, crack and creak of joints, rattling of wide horns not yet shaken down into good spacing in the march. At times the great remuda, a hundred and fifty head of saddle stock, would thunder off in a brief side break, and Cinquo must cease in his appeal to Juanita. Forsooth, to his young soul Juanita was a tall maid, of red hair that curled up only at the ends.
In less than an hour after they first moved, the lone herd of Del Sol was made and trailed. Sinuous among the tall grasses, it rolled out and on, northbound. It made a vast historic picture, in a vast forgotten day; a day when a new world was made and peopled overnight.
Jim Nabours rode ahead of the herd as general guide and forelooper. From his place, a half mile in advance, he turned back in his saddle, looking at the long cloud of dust; the rolling sea of backs, the pale swing of wide horns above. His fierce soul exulted at the sight. He shut his teeth, his eyes gleaming, as he faced north and settled down into a plodding walk.
Ten in the morning, and the last of Del Sol’s drag, little calves and all, misfits, ignorant mistakes and all, had rabbled off and away, sore under the fly-bitten road brand fresh on every hide. The dust cloud was hours old at the upper edge of the flat, when at the opposite edge, on the rim that divided the flat and the big house of Del Sol, another and lesser dust cloud appeared over the broken turf.
It was made by two rude two-wheeled carts, each drawn by a double span of oxen. The roughly spoked wheels, stiffened by slats lashed on with rawhide thongs, emitted shrieking protest at each revolution on the axle. Each carreta had a tilt of canvas stretched above its rough bows, and each had certain cargo. On the front seat of the first vehicle sat old Anita, brown and gray and wrinkled. The rear cart was handled by a vast negro woman with a long musket at her side—Milly, as usual grumbling to herself.
These two women, old beyond love and life, doggedly loyal, passionately affectionate, made the bodyguard of Anastasie Lockhart, educated and dead-broke orphan, setting out into the world at twenty-two on one of the most impossible adventures any woman ever knew.
Just now Anastasie Lockhart, trousered, booted, gloved and hatted like some slim, curiously eye-arresting young man, rode alone on her crossbar, Blancocito. Her mass of heavy hair was down her back, burned tawnier beyond the shade of the sombrero. Her eye moody, she gazed on ahead at the procession that held every friend she had on earth and every dollar that she owned.
She dropped back and rode alongside the leading cart.