"Si, Senor. Senor Texas he come las' night with two horses. He say Senor Abe want you quick, Pablo. La Senorita say you come. So I am come pronto, like he say."
"Texas Joe went for you last night?" repeated Abe.
"Si, Senor. If you want me come—if La Senorita want me come—Senor Tex he go tell me come. I come. It is no much ride for vaqueros like Senor Tex and me."
"But you have your job with the Company?"
The Mexican shrugged his shoulders and his teeth showed. "Senor Worth and Senores Lee and Tex and Pat good company for Pablo. Beside, is there not La Senorita? She was good to me when I was sick with no one to help. Do not we all—Senores Lee and Tex and Pat, and Senor Worth and me—do not we all work for La Senorita in La Palma de la Mano de Dios? Is it not so? Beside I think sometime La Senorita come—then I would be near. In the Company there is no Senorita."
CHAPTER XIV.
MUCH CONFUSION AND HAPPY EXCITEMENT.
As the trying months of the semi-tropical summer approached, the great Desert, so awful in its fierce desolation, so pregnant with the life it was still so reluctant to yield, gathered all its dreadful forces to withstand the inflowing streams of human energy. In the fierce winds that rushed through the mountain passes and swept across the hot plains like a torrid furnace blast; in the blinding, stinging, choking, smothering dust that moved in golden clouds from rim to rim of the Basin; in the blazing, scorching strength of the sun; in the hard, hot sky, without shred or raveling of cloud; in the creeping, silent, poison life of insect and reptile; in the maddening dryness of the thirsty vegetation; in the weird, beautiful falseness of the ever-changing mirage, the spirit of the Desert issued its silent challenge.
It was not the majestic challenge of the mountains with their unsealed heights of peak and dome and impassable barriers of rugged crag and sheer cliff. It was not the glad challenge of the untamed wilderness with its myriad formed life of tree and plant and glen and stream. It was not the noble challenge of the wide-sweeping, pathless plains; nor the wild challenge of the restless, storm-driven sea. It was the silent, sinister, menacing threat of a desolation that had conquered by cruel waiting and that lay in wait still to conquer.
With grim determination, nervous energy, enduring strength and a dogged tenacity of purpose, the invading flood of humanity, irresistibly driven by that master passion, Good Business, matched its strength against that of the Desert in the season of its greatest power.