The stream along which the camp lay was hardly more than two yards wide in many places, but it ran slowly and seemed to be deep. There were places clear of bushes, here and there, where it could be seen, and it had a black look, from the density of the shadows which lay upon it. It was good water, pretty cool, and the Apaches had taken some fine fish out of it, but there was something remarkable in the fact that it ran in a straight line.
Cal walked slowly on, glancing at lodge after lodge. Most of them were pretty well peopled, and one that was not so had a guard before it, for it contained the treasures of the Mexican pack-mule train. There was not an Apache in the band wicked enough to have stolen anything out of that storehouse lodge, and the solitary dog-soldier who lounged in front of it was not there as a protection against human thieves. He was to keep out dogs, snakes, and any other kind of "bad medicine" that might attempt an investigation of the good things the loss of which Colonel Romero's cavalry were at that time growling about. He probably had other duties, but none of them related to Pull Stick, and Cal sauntered on, barely catching a glimpse of a pair of Apache boys who were doing the same among the trees on the other side of the brook.
He had never seen finer trees, nor had he ever before noticed precisely such a run of water, for just a little distance beyond the last of the widely separated lodges he came to a point where the stream turned off at right angles.
"It never did that of its own accord," suddenly flashed into the mind of Cal, and he added, aloud: "Some time or other it was dug out!"
"Ugh!" exclaimed a voice behind him. "What Pull Stick see?"
Cal pointed to the water and tried to explain himself, startled as he was a little by finding Crooked Nose so near him.
The deeply wrinkled, forbidding face of the Apache brave put on a look of very dark solemnity as he lifted a hand and pointed at something about a hundred yards beyond the turn in the stream.
"Ugh!" he said. "Pull Stick good eye."
The first thing that caught Cal's attention was an enormous dead tree, whose gaunt, leafless arms reached grimly out above a great mound that it leaned over. He looked again, following the line of the water, and saw something else that was remarkable. The small rill which fed that long, deep, shadowed channel fell into it out of a massive stone tank. The masonry was overgrown with vegetation everywhere except at the place where the rill poured out.
At some unknown day, away back in the past, when not one of those old trees had been more than a sapling, some people had been civilized enough and prosperous enough to construct that granite reservoir.