It was only recently that Clint Wadley had become a man of wealth, and life in the Panhandle was even yet very primitive according to present-day standards. There was no railroad within one hundred and fifty miles of the A T O ranch. Once in two weeks one of the cowboys rode to Clarendon to get the mail and to buy small supplies. Otherwise contact with the world was limited to occasional visits to town.
As a little girl Ramona had lived in a one-room house built of round logs, with a stick-and-mud chimney, a door of clapboards daubed with mud at the chinks, and a dirt floor covered with puncheons. She had slept in a one-legged bedstead fitted into the wall, through the sides and ends of which bed, at intervals of eight inches, holes had been bored to admit of green rawhide strips for slats. She had sat on a home-made three-legged stool at a home-made table in homespun clothes and eaten a dish of cush[8] for her supper. She had watched her aunt make soap out of lye dripping from an ash-hopper. The only cooking utensils in the house had been a Dutch oven, a three-legged skillet, a dinner-pot, a tea-kettle, a big iron shovel, and a pair of pot-hooks suspended from an iron that hung above the open fire.
But those were memories of her childhood in southern Texas. With the coming of prosperity Clint had sent his children to Tennessee to school, and Ramona had been patiently trained to the feebleness of purpose civilization in those days demanded of women of her class and section. She had been taught to do fancy needlework and to play the piano as a parlor accomplishment. It had been made plain to her that her business in life was to marry and keep the home fires burning, and her schooling had been designed, not to prepare her as a mate for her future husband, but to fit her with the little graces that might entice him into choosing her for a wife.
Upon her return to the ranch Ramona had compromised between her training and her inheritance. She took again to horseback riding and to shooting, even though she read a good deal and paid due attention to her pink-and-white complexion.
So that when she looked up from the cavern in which she was buried and caught a gleam of a star in the slit of blue sky above, she was not so helpless as her schooling had been designed to make her. The girl was compact of supple strength. Endurance and a certain toughness of fiber had come to her from old Clint Wadley.
She began the climb, taking advantage of every bit of roughness, of every projection in the almost sheer wall. A knob of feldspar, a stunted shrub growing from a crevice, a fault in the rock structure, offered here and there toe-or hand-holds. She struggled upward, stopped more than once by the smooth surface against which her soft warm body was pressing. On such occasions she would lower herself again, turn to the right or the left, and work toward another objective.
Ramona knew that the least slip, the slightest failure of any one of her muscles, would send her plunging down to the bottom of the crevasse. The worst of it was that she could not put any dependence upon her injured leg. It might see her through or it might not.
It was within a few feet of the top, just below the arrowweed bush, that she came to an impasse. The cold wall offered no hand-hold by which she could gain the few inches that would bring her within reach of the bunched roots. She undid her belt, threw one end of it over the body of the bush, and worked it carefully down until she could buckle it. By means of this she went up hand over hand till she could reach the arrowweed. Her knee found support in the loop of the belt, and in another moment she had zigzagged herself inch by inch over the edge to the flat surface above.
No sign of the Apaches was to be seen. 'Mona recovered her belt and began to move up the rock spur toward the summit of the hill. A sound stopped her in her tracks. It was the beating of a tom-tom.
She knew the Indians must be camped by the lake. They were probably having a feast and dances. In any case she could not strike direct for home. She must keep on this side of the hill, make a wide circuit, and come in from the west.