“Well, I’ll be durned!” shouted the latter; “he ain’t got no shirt on, an’ there’s an ugly cut in his arm. It beats anything I ever seed!”
One by one the miners leaped the cleft, and crowded about Mississip and stared.
It was certainly Codago, and there was certainly his pack, made up in his poncho, in the usual Greaser manner, and held tightly in his arms.
But while they stared, there was a sudden movement of the pack itself.
Lynn Taps gave a mighty tug at it, extricated it from the dead man’s grasp, and rapidly undid it.
Suddenly, by the glare of a fresh light, the boys saw the face of a rather dirty, large-eyed, brown-skinned Mexican baby; and the baby, probably by way of recognition, raised high a voice such as the boys never heard before on that side of the Rocky Mountains.
“Here’s what that cut in his arm means,” shouted a miner who had struck a light on the trail; “there’s a finger-mark, done in blood on the snow, by the side of the trail, an’ a-pintin’ right to that ledge; an’ here’s his shirt a-flappin’ on a stick stuck in a snow-bank lookin’ t’ward camp.”
“There ain’t no doubt ’bout what the woman said to him, or what made him yell an’ git, boys,” said Chagres Charley, solemnly, as he took a blanket from his shoulders and spread it on the ground.
Mississip took off his hat, and lifting the poor Mexican from the snow, laid him in the blanket. Lynn Taps hid the baby, rewrapped, under his own blanket, and hurried down the mountain, while four men picked up Codago and followed.
Lynn Taps scratched on the raw-hide door; the doctor opened it.