Billie translated for her, whereupon she arose and summoned Clodomiro by a gesture.
“My bed,” she said briefly, “over there,” and she indicated a thicket of greasewood the wagon had passed on their arrival. “Also this first night of safety you will be the sentinel to keep guard that Señor Rhodes may at last have sleep. All the danger trail he had none.”
Cap Pike protested that he do guard duty, but the smile of Doña Jocasta won her way.
“He is younger and not weary, señor. It is good for him, and it pleases me,” she said.
“The camp is yours,” he agreed weakly, and against his better judgment. He did not like Indians who were like “sulky slim brown dumb snakes”; that was what he muttered when he looked at Clodomiro. In his irritation at the Indian’s silence it didn’t even occur to him that he never had known any snakes but dumb ones.
But if the voice of Clodomiro was uncannily silent, his eyes spoke for him as they followed Doña Jocasta. Kit could only think of a lost, homesick dog begging for the scent of the trail to his own kennel. He said so to Billie as he made her bed in the camp wagon.
“Cap and I will be right here at the hind wheels,” he promised. “Yes,––sure, I’ll let the Indian ride herd for the night. Doña Jocasta is right, it’s his turn, and we seem to have passed the danger line.”
“Knock wood!” cautioned Billie.
So he rapped his head with his knuckles, and they laughed together as young happy things do at trifles. Then he stretched himself for sleep under the stars and almost within arm’s reach of the girl––the girl who had ridden to meet him in the night, the wonderful girl who had promised to wait until he came back from France ... of course he could get into the army now! They would need men too badly to turn him down again. If there was a trifle of discrepancy in sight of his eyes––which he didn’t at all believe––he had the dust now, also the nuggets, to buy any and all treatment to adjust that little matter. He had nearly four hundred pounds, aside from giving all he dared give at once as Tula’s gift to those women of the slave raid. After the war was over he would find ways of again crossing over to the great treasure chest in the hidden cañon. The little information Pike had managed to convey to him about that sheepskin map told him that the most important indications had been destroyed during those years it had been buried for safe-keeping. The only true map in existence was the one in his own memory,––no use to tell Pike and Billie that! He could leave them in comfort and content, and when he got back from France––He wondered how long it would last––the war. Hadn’t the greatest of Americans tried three years ago to hammer the fact into the alleged brain pans of the practical politicians that the sooner the little old United States made guns, and ships, and flying machines for herself, the sooner she could help end that upheaval of hell in Europe?... and they wouldn’t listen! Listen?––They brought every ounce of influence they could round up to silence those facts,––the eternally condemned ostriches sticking their own heads in the sand to blind the world to the situation! Now they were in, and he wondered if they had even ten rounds of ammunition for the cartridge belts of the few trained soldiers in service? They had not had even three rounds for the showy grand review attempted in Texas not long since; also the transportation had been a joke, some of the National Guards started, but never did arrive––and France was a longer trail than Texas. God! they should be ready to fight as the French were ready, in twelve hours––and it would have to be months––a long unequal hell for a time over there, but only one finish, and the brown rats driven back to their den! After that the most wonderful girl would––would––would–––
Then all the sleep due him on the sleepless trail settled over him like a net weighted, yet very caressing, and the world war and the wonderful girl drifted far away!