“I’ll be shot if I don’t believe you are old Cajames stock,” said Cap Pike staring at her, and then meeting the gaze of Rhodes in wonder at her clear-cut summing up of the situation. “But he was a handful for the government in his day, Bub, and I’m hornswaggled if I’d pick out his breed for a kindergarten.”
The girl heard and understood at least the jocular tenor of his meaning, but no glance in his direction indicated it. She placed the second stone, and then in obedience to Rhodes she looked back the way she had come where the desert growth crisped in the waves of heat. On one side lay the low, cactus-dotted hillocks, and on the other the sage green and dull yellow faded into the blue mists of the eastern range.
“I am no forgetting it, this place ever,” she said and then lifted her water bottle and trudged on beside Rhodes. “It is where my trail begins, with you.”
Cape Pike grinned at the joke on the boy, for it looked as if the Yaqui girl were adopting him!
CHAPTER IX
A MEETING AT YAQUI WELL
Good luck was with them, for the water hole in Yaqui cañon had not been either muddied or exhausted, evidence that the raiders had not ranged that way. The sorry looking quartette fairly staggered into the little cañon, and the animals were frantic with desire to drink their fill.
“I was so near fried that the first gallon fairly sizzled down my gullet,” confessed Cap Pike after a long glorious hour of rest under the alamos with saturated handkerchief over his burning eyes. “That last three mile stretch was hell’s back yard for me. How you reckon the little trick over there ever stood it?”