While he was waiting and watching he saw a man come out of the cabin. The fellow lounged down to the spring for a pan of water and lounged back to the house; the eternal Mexican cigaret in his lips sent its floating ribbon of smoke behind him. Ten minutes later the same man came out, this time to lie down on the ground under a tree.
"Just one hombre," decided Kendric. "A lazy devil of a sheepherder. There's more than a fair chance that his siesta will last all afternoon."
At any rate, here appeared his even break. He sprang up, went with swinging strides down the slope, taking the shortest cut, and reached the cabin by the back door. The Mexican still lay under his tree. Kendric looked in at the door. No one there, just a bare, empty untidy room. It was bedroom, kitchen and dining-room. In the latter capacity it appealed strongly to Kendric. He went in, set his rifle down, and rummaged.
There was, of course, a big pot of red beans. And there were tortillas, a great heap of them. Kendric took half a dozen of them, moistened them in the half pan of water and poured a high heap of beans on them. Then he rolled the tortillas up, making a monster cylindrical bean sandwich. A soiled newspaper, with a look almost of antiquity to it, he found on a shelf and wrapped about his sandwich which he thrust into the bosom of his shirt. All of this had required about two minutes and in the meantime his eyes had been busy, still rummaging.
There was a box nailed to the wall with a cloth over it. In it he found what he expected; a lot of jerked beef, dry and hard. He filled his pockets, his mouth already full. On a table was a flour sack; he put into it the bulk of the remaining beef, some coffee and sugar, a couple of cans of milk. Then he looked out at the Mexican. The man still lay in the gorged torpor of the afternoon siesta.
"What will he think?" chuckled Kendric, "when he finds his larder raided and this on the table?"
This was a twenty dollar gold piece, enough to pay many times over the amount of the commandeered victuals. Kendric took up sack and rifle, had another mouthful of frijoles and beef, and went out the way he had come. And, all the way up the slope, he chuckled to himself.
"Enough to last Betty and me a week," he estimated. "And a place to get more if need be. That hombre will pray the rest of his life to be raided again.—And never a shot fired!"
He ate as he went, enough to keep life and strength in him but not all that his hunger craved. For he thought of Betty hungering and waiting in that hideous loneliness of uncertainty, and had no heart for a solitary meal. But in fancy, over and over, he feasted with her, and beans and jerked beef and coffee boiled in a milk-can made a banquet.
He hastened all that he could to return to her, though he knew that speeding along the trail could hardly bring him to her a second earlier. For he would, in the end, be constrained to wait for the coming of night before he climbed again to their camp. He realized soberly that Betty must not again fall into Zoraida's hands; that the result, inevitably, would be her death. Were Zoraida mad or sane, she was filled with a frenzy of blood lust. There was danger enough without his increasing it for the sake of coming an hour sooner with food. In one day Betty would not starve and fast she must.