“Huh! yes, and warn you to ride him north!”
“Correct;––but Pike, it was a warning, not a threat! Oh, I’m coming back all right, all right! That gold by the hidden stream sure has got me roped and hog tied for keeps.”
Pike growled good-natured disdain of his confidence, and suggested that the stream, which was probably only a measly mud hole, could have dropped to purgatory in an earthquake tremor since those first old mission days, or filled up with quicksand.
“Right you are, Cap. That’s a first-rate idea,” agreed Kit the irrepressible. “Next trip we’ll start looking for streams that were and are not; we’re in the bed of one now for that matter!”
“Somewhere ahead we should come into the trail south from Carracita,” observed Pike, “but I reckon you’d just as soon camp with Pard out of sight of the trail.”
There was silence for a bit as they plodded on up the wide dry bed of the river, and then Kit turned, glancing at the old man keenly.
“I didn’t fool you much when I called that gang ‘vaqueros,’ did I?” he observed. “Well, they didn’t look good to me, and I decided I’d have to fight for my horse if we crossed trails, and––it wastes a lot of time, fighting does.”
“No, you didn’t fool me. You’d be seven kinds of an idiot to walk in this gully of purgatory when you could ride safely on the mesa above, so I guessed you had a hunch it was the friendly and acquisitive patriots.”
“Pike, they were between us and the Palomitas rancherias of Mesa Blanca or I’d have made a try to get through and warn the Indians there. Those men had no camp women with them, so they were not a detachment of the irregular cavalry,––that’s what puzzles me. And their horses were fresh. It’s some new devilment.”
“There’s nothing new in Sonora, son. Things happen over and over the same.”