Whizz! whizz! went the arrows. With one shaft quivering in her flank, the mule fairly sprang into the air, while the other transfixed the left arm of David Morning, and pinned it to his side.
And then his question was answered, and he knew what was the matter with Julia.
The frenzied animal leaped the Rillito at a bound, and swept across the valley to the corral adjoining the Gonzales ranch house. Once within the inclosure, she stopped and uttered her most melodious notes of delight. With a crescendo of welcome a dozen of her kindred greeted Julia, and the swarthy major-domo of the ranch, accompanied by half a dozen vaqueros with lights, rushed out, and Morning, weak from pain and loss of blood, was half-led and half-carried into the ranch house.
The Señor Don Pedro Gonzales a year before had journeyed into Paradise, from the effects of an attack of mountain fever, aggravated by too copious use of mescal, and left his ranch houses and corral, his two hundred mules and horses, his two thousand cattle, his brand of G on a triangle, and his rancho Santa Ysbel to his señora, the Donna Maria, who, with her family, continued to occupy the place.
Messengers dispatched to Tucson returned with physicians, who cut out the arrow and found that the wound was severe, and its result might be fatal. They agreed that for Morning to endeavor to travel with such a wound would be simply suicide, and that he must not attempt to leave the shelter and care which the hospitable Gonzales family were glad to accord him.
CHAPTER XI.
“It is only mirage.”
A long, low, adobe building, roofed with tiles of pottery clay, situated near the banks of the river Santa Cruz. Long rows of cottonwood-trees spread their branches nearly over the little stream, and the graceful masses of pepper, combed to a fringe, drop their courtesied obeisance to every passing breeze, and throw their uneasy shadows well over the walls, neatly stuccoed with cobblestones.
The air curdles with the heat rising from the arid plain, and hangs, a shimmering sheet of translucent vapor, between the eye and the ever-lengthening distance, which softly melts into the Santa Rita Mountains.
Is that a lake out of which rises the well-outlined range of nearer hills? or a sea, throwing up billows of foam and shadow, with islands of green glimpsing their shapes in the placid waters that encircle their feet? And ships, with well-fashioned hulls and wide-spreading sails, and pictured rocks, and beating breakers, and lifeboats with men tugging at the oars. No! it is only mirage, a pretty picture written with the electric pen of nature upon the parchment hot from the press of her untongued fancies. In her luring tale strong men have trusted themselves to fatal deception, and beasts, with lapping tongues, and knotted with water greed, have gnashed their teeth at her beautiful garments of fateful film, and lain down to die. Art has been outvied in pictorial effects, for she filters her shadows from daintiest clouds, and borrows her bath of oscurial glints from the unfathomed deeps of heaven. Even austere science hides his forged shackles shamedly away, and turns with unsatisfied scorn from the flitting gleam of her mocking brow.
“It is only mirage, one of nature’s cleverest tricks; and what more is life?” comes once and again from parched lips and longing eyes. For, although water, sweet and cool, drips from an olla near at hand, yet, stretched upon a bed carefully prepared of finely-stripped rawhide, placed upon the well-beaten and smooth earth, under the sheltering roof of a ramada connecting two sections of the Gonzales casa, lies David Morning, hot with fever, and still unable to leave his couch.