[CHAPTER XI]
THE REAL WEST
Roy’s idea of a camp at night included a smouldering fire in front of a tent wherein, on fragrant spruce boughs, carefully sheltered from the wind and the chill, one went to bed wrapped in blankets. When Sink Weston scattered the last coals of the little cook fire and pointed to the sand under the freight wagon as a “likely place to bunk,” the boy felt a little disappointment. It was one of a number of new things he learned that summer about life in the “open.”
Another one was, that riding all day on a lively cow pony when you are not used to it, does not exactly limber up your limbs. When the boy attempted to jump up early the next morning, he found his legs bent almost like hoops. The result was, when a breakfast of salt pork, crackers and coffee had been eaten, Roy complied with Sink’s good-natured orders and climbed up on the wagon seat along with Dan Doolin. His pony was tied to the tail board.
The day was perfect. The party was in sterile country—land that could hardly be called desert, although at that point, it was without water. There was mesquite and sage, rocks here and there—and now and then a jack rabbit. The misty blue mountains of New Mexico greeted them over the top of the gray Mesa Verde; peaks of the far Rockies, white-capped and cold, lay behind, while in front, beyond pink-tipped Ute mountains, rose the wall of the Utah Desert.
Before Weston could gallop on ahead, Roy begged of him the mysterious sheet of hieroglyphics. He wanted to see it in the daylight. Since he had heard the tale of the Lost Indians, he was able to think of little else. Sink Weston’s story had taken possession of the boy. He had told Weston all he knew of his great uncle, and where the Mormon had once lived. But they had both decided that it availed little to know that the disciple of Nauvoo had once lived in Parowan.
Even if Willard Banks left children or other relatives, it was certain that these would know nothing of the hidden Sink Hole. Weston was positive in his belief that the indecipherable words formed a key describing the location of the secret Indian city. And he was almost as positive that the words were beyond reading by any one but their writer. He had long since ascribed the existence of the paper to the fact that, before the Mormon elder visited the Lost Indians, he had learned their secret, probably from other Indians with whom he had lived in his missionary work. Not trusting to his memory, he had made a record of his secret in cipher.
As Roy took the paper and Weston rode on, old Dan Doolin smiled grimly.
“So ye got it, too, hev ye?” he said, chuckling.