“I didn’t mean, though, for you to walk no more.” Stooping suddenly, he rose with her sitting on his shoulder.
“Your weight ain’t no more to me than a fly,” he replied to her protest; and while the weird red lights faded to amber washes and these brightened into a fierce sunblaze, he carried her on to a mesa that raised its limestone face like the walls of an old castle from the boulders and sage.
“’Tain’t safe to go on,” he said, setting her down. “You’d think, to look around, there wasn’t a living thing within a hundred thousand miles. But you never kin tell. The desert has eyes that see without being seen; voices that tell of a stranger without being heard. Sometimes it is a herder in search of strays; sometimes a rustler hiding from the rurales; but there’s always some one. We’ll stop while it’s safe.”
He was right. Already they had been seen—by a peon who had been driven by the good looks of his woman to seek a harborage by a secret spring from revueltoso lovers. But the tale of their passing did not go forth by him. Already he and his woman were trudging at the heels of their burro deeper into the desert. But only twelve miles away “Alberto,” the engineer, was pointing out their footprints to the troop of revueltosos he had guided up the line.
“Here it was they got off, el capitan. See the marks of their feet? These little ones no larger than a child’s are those of the woman.”
“A white girl, thou sayest?” the leader asked.
“Si, señor, an Americana white as milk. Dressed she was in man’s riding-clothes that showed her very shapely. She will make the fine mate for thee.”
“There should be some pay.” The capitan went on, with a vile oath. “Twenty of us, see you, mashed by the engine the gringo loosed upon us; si, mashed to a pulp. As many more cleaned of hair and hide like pigs come out of a scald. Slow roasting would have been the least I had dealt that gringo. But he goes out like”—he blew out the match with which he was lighting his cigarette—“this! and takes a hundred more of us with him. Bueno!” His shrug accepted that which could not be undone. “They are gone, our compañeros, but we shall meet again—in hell. But these others, the girl and her men, shall pay.”
At his order, his men, about a dozen, strung out on a line the units of which rode a quarter-mile apart. Riding slowly, beating the country to the north and east as they went, they approached Bull’s limestone castle just as the shortening shadows proclaimed high noon.
After Lee and Gordon had eaten and lain down, Bull had built over them a rough ramada of sage-brush to protect them from the sun. Then, sitting in the shadow, he had held his tireless watch. While the revueltoso line was still miles away his keen eyes picked up the individual dust clouds that marked its units serpentining across the sage. He knew, yet let them approach almost within rifle-shot before he woke up Gordon, so carefully that Lee slept on.