“I never could see, myself, how people could spend twenty-two out of their twenty-four hours under a roof, the way most of them do,” said Scott, thoughtfully. “Here, we turn now into the trail.”
“That’s where Pachuca’s men went yesterday,” said Polly. “I hope we don’t meet them.”
“No danger of that. Those fly-by-nights are a long way from here by this time.”
“They told me yesterday in Conejo that Obregon had been put under arrest in Mexico City. If that’s true it may put a cog in the revolutionary machinery,” said Hard.
“I wish we’d managed to keep our hands on that automobile,” remarked Scott, wistfully. “I don’t half fancy trying to make the border in a wagon, and no one knows how the railroads will be.”
The trail debouched from the road, running over ground very slightly elevated. There was for some distance no particular reason as far as Polly could see for its being a trail at all except that it hadn’t been sufficiently traveled to make it a road. It was merely a narrow little path leading over some very barren-looking country, but leading ever upward, gradually but surely, toward the hills.
“You see, the regular road runs fairly straight along toward Conejo for maybe twenty miles, and then meets a crossroad which runs past Casa Grande,” explained Scott. “Now, with this trail, we cut directly across those foothills, over a couple of ranges of mountains, across a big mesa and down. Casa Grande is almost in a straight line from here and we cut off a lot.”
“Casa Grande is an awfully fancy sort of name. Is it a wonderful place?”
“Just a good little ranch. These Latins like big sounding names,” replied Scott. “Casa Grande is very common down here.”
A dip in the trail took them into an arroyo and out the other side, where they lost sight entirely of Athens. A few moments later, they wound their way through some brush into a narrow canyon, walled on one side by hills and with a drop of some fifteen feet on the other side into a ravine. Out of the ravine grew more brush so densely that it almost crowded the little trail out of existence.