With the food and drink for Miguel in his hands he had followed the girl through the shadowed gallery of the slanting smoke-stained roof. His eyes were mainly directed to the rock floor lest he stumble and spill the precious coffee; thus he gave slight thought to the little ravine up which she had led him to the cave which was also a mine.
But as he stepped out into the sunlight she stood looking up into his face with almost a smile, the first he had seen in her wistful tragic eyes. Then she lifted her hand and pointed straight out, and the “enchant look,” the “not believe” look was there! He stared as at a mirage for an incredulous moment, and then whispered, “Great God of the Desert!”
For a little space, a few rods only, the mountain dipped steeply, and trickling water from above fell in little cascades to lower levels, where a great jagged wall of impregnable granite arose as a barrier along the foot of the mountain.
But he was above the sharp outline of the huge saw with the jagged granite teeth, and between the serrated edges he could look far across the yellow-gray reaches of sand and desert growths. Far and wide was the “not believe” look, to the blue phantom-like peaks on the horizon, but between the two ranges was a white line with curious dots drifting and whirling like flies along it, and smoke curling up, and–––
Then it was he uttered the incredulous cry, for he was indeed viewing the thing scarce to be believed.
He was looking across the great Rancho Soledad, and the white line against the sand was the wall of the old mission where the vaqueros were herding a band of horses into the great quadrangle of the one-time patio turned into a corral since the buildings on three sides had melted down again into mother earth.
He remembered riding around these lines of the old arches seeking trace of that door of the legend,––the door from which the aliso tree of the mine could be seen,––and there was nowhere a trace of a door.
“Queer that every other part of the prospect developed according to specifications and not the door,” he grumbled whimsically. “Cinderella, why have you hid the door in the wall from me?”
She looked around uncertainly, not understanding.
“No portal but it,” she said with a movement of her head towards the great slab forming a pointed arch against the mountain and shielding the unbelievable richness there, “also El Alisal, the great tree, is gone. This was the place of it; the old ones tell my father it was as chief of the trees and stand high to be seen. The sky fire took it, and took the padres that time they make an altar in this place.”