"What shall I do with the beasts?" he said in his ordinary voice.
"Was that all you were going to say?" said Stephens, looking at him keenly. "What's the matter with you? What's up?"
"Nothing, Don Estevan—it's nothing," said Felipe. "Shall I put them into the meadow as usual?"
"Yes, certainly," replied Stephens. "I sha'n't ride. I shall walk up the acequia to the rock I am going to blast. If I want them after, I'll come down."
"Very well, señor," said the boy; and taking the lariats he went back to the corral, caught the stock, and led them down the Indian road, through the unfenced fields of springing crops, towards the river.
At the lower end of the plough-lands a steep bank of bare earth and clay dropped sharply to the green flat fifteen or twenty feet below, through which the river ran. The plough-lands lay on a sort of natural terrace, and were all watered by numerous channels and runlets, which had their sources in the great acequia madre, or main ditch. This ditch was taken out of the river some miles above, where it was dammed for the purpose, and was led along the side of the valley as high up as possible; the pueblo was built beside the ditch more than a league below the dam, nearly half a mile from the river in a direct line. The grassy flat through which the river flowed remained unploughed, because it was liable to be overflowed in flood time. It was a verdant meadow, the common pasture-ground of the milch cows of the village, which were herded here during the day by small boys and at night were shut up in the corrals to keep them out of the unfenced crops. Felipe hobbled the three animals in the meadow, and set to work weeding in the wheat land above, where he could keep an eye upon them.
Some time after Felipe's departure, Stephens went to his powder-keg and measured out three charges of blasting-powder.
"Curious, isn't it?" said he aloud to himself as he handled the coarse black grains in which so much potential energy lay hid,—"curious how these Indians, hard-working folk as ever I saw, have lived two or three hundred years here under the Spanish Government, and been allowed by those old Dons to go on, year after year, short of water for irrigating, every time."
He closed up his powder-keg again securely, and locked it away in the room that he used as a storeroom; it was the inner of the two rooms that he rented in the block of dwellings inhabited by the Turquoise family. Here he lived, alone and independent, simply paying Felipe a trifle to do his chores and go up to the mesas and get his fire-wood. Indoors the prospector distinctly preferred to keep himself free and unbeholden to anybody; he continued to live exactly as he did in camp, doing his own cooking and mending, and doing them thoroughly well too, with a pioneer's pride in being sufficient to himself in all things.