It was not the address we expected from a man who had seen worse deeds than Jesse James. It was out of the picture, somehow. I knew Manchester, N. H., and had met nothing in the town so tough and bad as Biron had described himself, unless it were the sandwiches sold in the Boston and Maine station. When we turned to Tucson for his name, we were prepared to have him give the address of a theological seminary, and again we were surprised. For Tucson hesitated and stammered, and took longer recalling his name than is usually needed. I remembered a remark Biron threw off the night before,—“a man gets to calling himself a lot of different names in this country,” and snickered, while Tucson remained grave as a judge. I wondered, if his voluble friend had given him a chance, whether Tucson might have told us something interesting. However, Tucson had just discovered a copper vein on his land, and as this book goes to print may already be a respectable Fifth Avenue millionaire.
As we thanked them and said good-by, Toby said, “We can’t be too grateful you saw our sign in the road.”
“Sign? What sign?”
“Didn’t you see a sign made of white pebbles on the road from Rodeo, asking for help?”
“No, we didn’t see no sign. We didn’t come from Rodeo. We came the other road,—over the hills.”
There it is. No matter how much one does as Robinson Crusoe would have done, the other characters will not play up to their opportunities. Instead of following your footprints cunningly, step by step, they will insist on catching sight of you across lots, completely spoiling the climax. No doubt Crusoe was firm with infringers on his plot. Probably when they came by the wrong road, he refused to be rescued till they had gone back and done the thing properly.
But then, we were very glad to be rescued at all.
CHAPTER XII
WHY ISLETA’S CHURCH HAS A WOODEN FLOOR
WE had trailed spring up from Texas through Arizona, timing our progress so cleverly that it seemed as if we had only to turn our radiator’s nose down a desert path for blue lupin and golden poppies to blaze up before us. At last we reached the meeting of the Rockies with the Rio Grande in New Mexico, led by the devious route, sometimes a concrete avenue, but oftener a mere track in the sand, of the old Spanish highway. El Camino Real is the imposing name it bears, suggesting ancient caravans of colonial grandees, and pack-trains bearing treasure from Mexico City to the provincial trading-post of Santa Fé. Even today what sign-posts the road displays bear the letters K T, which from Mexico to Canada stand for King’s Trail. The name gave us a little thrill, to be still extant in a government which had supposedly repudiated kings this century and a half.