“Do you reckon this here Natachee really knows anything about that old lost mine in the cañon, like some folks seem to think?”
The Lizard wagged his head in solemn and portentous silence, signifying that, however ready he might be to talk about the Pardners’ girl, the Mine with the Iron Door was not a subject to be lightly discussed in the presence of a stranger.
CHAPTER III
THE PARDNERS’ GIRL
“Marta is bound to know, when she stops to think about it, that she jest can’t have two fathers.”
THE house in the Cañon of Gold where the Pardners and their girl lived was little more than a cabin of rough, unpainted boards. But there was a wide porch overrun with vines, and a vegetable garden with flowers. Beyond the garden there was a rude barn or shelter, built as the Indians build, of sahuaro poles and mud, with a small corra made of thorny ocotillo, and the place as a whole was roughly inclosed by an old fence of mesquite posts and barbed wire. On every side the mountains rose—ridge and dome and peak—into the sky, and night and day, through summer droughts and winter rains, the cañon creek murmured or sang or roared on its way from the woodsy heart of the Catalinas to lose itself in the sandy wastes of the desert below. The little mine where the Pardners worked was across the creek a hundred yards or more from the kitchen door.
It was that time of the year when, if the rain gods of the Indians have been kind, the deserts and mountains of Arizona riot in a blaze of color. On the mountain sides, silvery white Apache plumes and graceful wands of brilliant scarlet mallow were nodding amid the lilac of the loco-weed, while, in every glade and damp depression, the gold of the buck-bean shone in settings of brightest green. And on the cañon floor, the pink white bloom of cañon anemone, with yellow primroses and whispering bells, made points and patches of light in the shadow of the rocky walls.
It is not enough to say that the Pardners’ girl fully justified the Lizard’s somewhat qualified admiration. There was something more—something that neither the Lizard nor his kind could appreciate. She was rather boyish, perhaps, as girls reared in the healthful out-of-door atmosphere are apt to be, but it was a dainty boyishness—if sturdy—that in no way marred the exquisite feminine qualities of her beauty. Her hair and eyes were dark, and her cheeks richly colored with good health and sunshine; and she looked at one with a disconcerting combination of innocence and frankness which, together with the charm of her sex, was certain to fix the attention of any mere male, whatever his station in life or previous condition of servitude. In short, the strangeness of Marta Hillgrove’s relationship to the grizzled old Pardners, with the mystery of her real parentage, was not at all needed to make her the talk of the country side. She was the kind of a girl that both men and women instinctively discuss, though for quite different reasons.
Bob Hill put his empty coffee cup down that Saturday morning with a long breath of satisfaction, and felt for the pipe and the sack of tobacco in his shirt pocket.
“Thar’s nothin’ to it, daughter,” he remarked—his faded blue eyes twinkling and his leathery, wrinkled, old face beaming with pride and love—“if Mother Burton learns you any more cookin’, Thad an’ me will founder ourselves sure. I’m here to maintain that one whiff of a breakfast like that would make one of them Egypt mummies claw himself right out of his pyramid.”
Thad Grove grunted a scornful, pessimistic, protesting grunt and rubbed the top of his totally bald head with aggressive vigor.