Two days later in the blue clear air of the Arizona morning a sage hen slipped with her young through the coarse grass by the irrigation ditch, and a flock of quail raised and fluttered before the quick rhythmic beat of a loping horse along the trail in the mesquite thicket.
The slender gallant figure of his rider leaned forward looking, listening at every turn, and at the forks of the trail where a clump of squat mesquite and giant sahuarro made a screen, she checked the horse, and held her breath.
“Good Pat, good horse!” she whispered. “They’ve got nothing that can run away from us. We’ll show them!”
Then a man’s quavering old voice came to her through the winding trail of the arroya. It was lifted tunefully insistent in an old-time song of the mining camps:
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Oh, Mexico! we’re coming, Mexico! Our six mule team, Will soon be seen, On the trail to Mexico! |
“We made it, Pat!” confided the girl grimly. “We made it. Quiet now––quiet!”
She peered out through the green mesquite as Captain Pike emerged from the west arroya on a gray burro, herding two other pack animals ahead of him into the south trail.
He rode jauntily, his old sombrero at a rakish angle, his eyes bright with enthusiasm supplied by that which he designated as a morning “bracer,” and his long gray locks bobbed in the breeze as he swayed in the saddle and droned his cheerful epic of the trail:
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A––and when we’ve been there long enough, And back we wish to go, We’ll fill our pockets with the shining dust And then leave Mexico! Oh––Mexico! Good-bye my Mexico! Our six mule team will then be seen On the trail from Mexico. |
“Hi there! you Balaam––get into the road and keep a-going, you ornery little rat-tailed son-of-a-gun! Pick up your feet and travel, or I’ll yank out your back bone and make a quirt out of it! For–––”