“How well it hides down there in its own cañon!” said Luis. “How pretty and clear! But there’s plenty of water, Lolita.”
“Can you see the Black Cross?”
“Not from here.”
They began descending around the sides of the crumbled slate-rock face that tilted too steep for foothold.
“The other well is dry, of course,” said Lolita. In the slaty, many-ledged formation a little lower down the cañon, towards the peep of outlying open country which the cloven hills let in, was a second round hole, twin of the first. Except after storms, water was never in this place, and it lay dry as a kiln nine-tenths of the year. But in size and depth and color, and the circular fashion of its shaft, which seemed man’s rather than nature’s design, it might have been the real Tinaja’s reflection, conjured in some evil mirror where everything was faithfully represented except the water.
“It must have been a real well once,” said Luis.
“Once, yes.”
“And what made it go dry?”
“Who knows?”
“How strange it should be the lower well that failed, Lolita!”