"And, Firio—" Jack's hand slipped with a quick, gripping caress onto Firio's shoulder. An inspiration had come to the mind of action, just as a line comes to a poet in a flash; as one must have come to the ancestor many times after he had gone into a tight place trusting to his wits and his blade to bring him out. "And, Firio, we are going to change our base, as the army men say—and change it before the moon rises. Jag Ear, we shall have to leave you behind," he added, when they had dropped back to the burro's side. "Just make yourself comfortable. Leddy surely wouldn't think of killing so valuable a member of the non-combatant class. We will come for you, by and by. It will be all right!"
He gave the sliver of ear an affectionate corkscrew twist before he and Firio, taking all their ammunition, crawled along the bottom of the arroyo and up the ridge where they settled down comfortably behind a ledge commanding the water-hole at easy range.
"It's lucky we learned to shoot in the moonlight!" Jack whispered.
"Sí"! Firio answered, in perfect understanding.
XXXVII
THE END OF THE WEAVING
For over a week a private car had stood on a siding at Little Rivers. Every morning a porter polished the brasswork of the platform in heraldry of the luxury within. Occasionally a young man with a plaster over a wound on his cheek would walk up and down the road-bed on the far side of the car. Indeed, he had worn a path there. He never went into town, and any glances that he may have cast in that direction spoke his desire to be forever free of its sight. Not a train passed that he did not wish himself aboard and away. But as heir-apparent he had no thought of endangering his new kingdom by going before his father went. He meant to keep very close to the throne. He had become clingingly, determinedly filial. At times the gleam of the brasswork would exercise the same hypnosis over his senses as the scintillation of the jewelry counters of the store, and he would rub his hands crisply together.
John Wingfield, Sr. spent little time in the car. Morning and afternoon and evening he would go over to Dr. Patterson's with the question: "How is he?" which all Little Rivers was asking. The rules of longevity were in oblivion and the routine channels of a mind, so used to teeming detail, had become abysses as dark and void as the canyons of the range.
On the day of his arrival in Little Rivers he found a town peopled mostly by women and children. All of the men who could bear arms and get a horse had departed, and with them Mary. Thereby hangs a story all to the honor of little Ignacio. After Jack had ridden away with his insistent refusal of assistance, apprehension among the group that watched him disappear in the gathering darkness was allayed by reports of men who had been at the store, where they found the Leddyites hanging about as usual. True, no one had seen either Pete or Ropey Smith, but Lang said that they were upstairs playing poker, a favorite relaxation from the strain of their intellectual life.
But Ignacio learned from another Indian in Lang's service that Pete and seven of his best shots had started for Agua Fria about the same time as Jack, while the rest of the gang that had been left behind were making it their business to cover the leader's absence. Distrusting Ignacio, they locked him in a closet off the bar. In the early hours of the morning he succeeded in escaping with his news, which he carried first to Mary. She was not asleep when he rapped at her door. It had been a night of wakefulness for her, recalling the night after her meeting with Jack on the pass before the duel in the arroyo.