“I must go. Sonora Jack will not come here again to-night. If he should, I will be near. Sleep in peace. When I return I will have something to tell you.”
All that following day, Hugh Edwards watched for another visit from Sonora Jack and his companions, and waited with no little anxiety for Natachee’s return.
But the outlaws did not come again. It was a little after noon the second day when the Indian finally appeared. He was driving four burros equipped with packsaddles.
When Hugh expressed surprise at sight of the pack animals, Natachee offered no explanation. In stolid silence the Indian prepared his dinner. He ate as if he had not touched food for many hours. When he had finished he said simply:
“I must sleep. In two hours I will awaken. Then we will talk. Do not go away from the cabin, please. Watch! If you see anything moving on the mountain side, call me.”
He threw himself on his couch and almost instantly was sound asleep.
Hugh Edwards, sitting just outside the cabin door, waited.
A gentle wind breathed through the trees of juniper and live oak and cedar and sighed among the cliffs and crags; and from below, faint and far away, came the murmur of the distant creek. He saw the sunlight, warm on the green of the cottonwoods and willows in the Cañon of Gold. He watched the cloud shadows drifting across the mountain slopes and ridges and, looking up to the high peaks, saw the somber pines against the blue of the sky.
A rock wren from a bowlder near by observed him with friendly eye and bobbed a cheerful greeting, and a painted redstart swung on a cat-claw bush. From somewhere on the side of the gulch where he worked came the exquisitely finished song of a grosbeak. The towering cliffs behind the cabin echoed the hoarse croaking call of a raven and now and then there was a flash of black and white and a bulletlike whiz, as a company of white-throated swifts shot past.
But no human thing moved within the range of his vision.