CHAPTER XII
A NIGHT RIDE
When Li Yow clattered up the trail leading out of the river bed and up the mesa, he was a happy man, in spite of the fact that a horse was to him the last means of locomotion that he would have chosen for an all night trip, with the possible exception of a camel or an elephant. Except as objects for his scientific skill, horses were not dear to his heart. A wagon, a train, an automobile, these were sensible conveyances for an intellectual man of an old and distinguished family going about his business, but a horse, never!
Not that Li would have admitted that his family was old. Distinguished, perhaps, but scarcely old when it only counted its ancestry through some eight or nine hundred years. In China that is to be classed among the blatantly new. He was happy, however, because he was being given a chance to use his skill for that great purpose for which it had been acquired, the alleviation of pain.
Li was a student, and for five years he had had very little opportunity for the work that he loved. With the patience of the Oriental, he had toiled at an inferior art; now opportunity had come, and so eager was he to grasp it, that a twenty-mile ride on an uncongenial animal, in the night, did not deter him. Not that he was afraid of the dark as we like to think the Chinese are. Li Yow had a philosophy, old when the Christian philosophy was born, which amply sufficed to relieve his mind of any superstitious terrors. Mexicans on the rampage, and Yaquis on the warpath, did not, however, come under the category of superstitious fears, and he heartily hoped he might accomplish his journey without meeting either of them.
He rode Scott’s big roan, Cochise, a common-sense animal which could be trusted to the tender mercies of what its master called “a crazy Chink.” This excellent beast understood thoroughly the art of saving his strength, and curbing any foolish enthusiasm on the part of a rider to race up-hill or to exhaust one’s wind too early in the game.
“Spirit and a bit of deviltry are all right in a horse or a woman, I’ll grant you,” Scott used to say when anyone derided the roan. “But the horse or the woman who lives with me has got to have common sense.”
So Li Yow and Cochise trotted placidly along the mesa, one thinking of the joys of surgery, and the other of the pleasure of feeding in one’s own corral. They had been out a couple of hours perhaps, and Li, moved by the beauty of the night, quoted a fragment of eighth century poetry and turned in his saddle to see how far he had come—when, suddenly, he gave an exclamation of horror!
Back of him, across the river bed, back of the round-topped hill, from exactly the spot where Casa Grande stood, he saw the tops of flames shooting up against the sky line! Something was being burned. Something sizable, or its flames would not rise so high. It must be either Casa Grande, its barn, or both. Li’s heart stood still. He stopped Cochise in sympathy with that important organ. What to do? At Casa Grande was a friend to whom he was attached. Things of a most unpleasant nature might be happening to him—could he ride away and leave him?