Madeline saw a beautiful forest in the center of the valley toward the south.
“Wal, Miss Majesty, thet’s jest this deceivin’ air. There’s no forest. It’s a mirage.”
“Indeed! How beautiful it is!” Madeline strained her gaze on the dark blot, and it seemed to float in the atmosphere, to have no clearly defined margins, to waver and shimmer, and then it faded and vanished.
The mountains dropped down again behind the horizon, and presently the road began once more to slope up. The horses slowed to a walk. There was a mile of rolling ridge, and then came the foothills. The road ascended through winding valleys. Trees and brush and rocks began to appear in the dry ravines. There was no water, yet all along the sandy washes were indications of floods at some periods. The heat and the dust stifled Madeline, and she had already become tired. Still she looked with all her eyes and saw birds, and beautiful quail with crests, and rabbits, and once she saw a deer.
“Miss Majesty,” said Stillwell, “in the early days the Indians made this country a bad one to live in. I reckon you never heerd much about them times. Surely you was hardly born then. I’ll hev to tell you some day how I fought Comanches in the Panhandle—thet was northern Texas—an’ I had some mighty hair-raisin’ scares in this country with Apaches.”
He told her about Cochise, chief of the Chiricahua Apaches, the most savage and bloodthirsty tribe that ever made life a horror for the pioneer. Cochise befriended the whites once; but he was the victim of that friendliness, and he became the most implacable of foes. Then, Geronimo, another Apache chief, had, as late as 1885, gone on the war-path, and had left a bloody trail down the New Mexico and Arizona line almost to the border. Lone ranchmen and cowboys had been killed, and mothers had shot their children and then themselves at the approach of the Apache. The name Apache curdled the blood of any woman of the Southwest in those days.
Madeline shuddered, and was glad when the old frontiersman changed the subject and began to talk of the settling of that country by the Spaniards, the legends of lost gold-mines handed down to the Mexicans, and strange stories of heroism and mystery and religion. The Mexicans had not advanced much in spite of the spread of civilization to the Southwest. They were still superstitious, and believed the legends of treasures hidden in the walls of their missions, and that unseen hands rolled rocks down the gullies upon the heads of prospectors who dared to hunt for the lost mines of the padres.
“Up in the mountains back of my ranch there’s a lost mine,” said Stillwell. “Mebbe it’s only a legend. But somehow I believe it’s there. Other lost mines hev been found. An’ as fer’ the rollin’ stones, I sure know thet’s true, as any one can find out if he goes trailin’ up the gulch. Mebbe thet’s only the weatherin’ of the cliffs. It’s a sleepy, strange country, this Southwest, an’, Miss Majesty, you’re a-goin’ to love it. You’ll call it ro-mantic, Wal, I reckon ro-mantic is correct. A feller gets lazy out hyar an’ dreamy, an’ he wants to put off work till to-morrow. Some folks say it’s a land of manana—a land of to-morrow. Thet’s the Mexican of it.
“But I like best to think of what a lady said to me onct—an eddicated lady like you, Miss Majesty. Wal, she said it’s a land where it’s always afternoon. I liked thet. I always get up sore in the mawnin’s, an’ don’t feel good till noon. But in the afternoon I get sorta warm an’ like things. An’ sunset is my time. I reckon I don’t want nothin’ any finer than sunset from my ranch. You look out over a valley that spreads wide between Guadalupe Mountains an’ the Chiricahuas, down across the red Arizona desert clear to the Sierra Madres in Mexico. Two hundred miles, Miss Majesty! An’ all as clear as print! An’ the sun sets behind all thet! When my time comes to die I’d like it to be on my porch smokin’ my pipe an’ facin’ the west.”
So the old cattleman talked on while Madeline listened, and Florence dozed in her seat, and the sun began to wane, and the horses climbed steadily. Presently, at the foot of the steep ascent, Stillwell got out and walked, leading the team. During this long climb fatigue claimed Madeline, and she drowsily closed her eyes, to find when she opened them again that the glaring white sky had changed to a steel-blue. The sun had sunk behind the foothills and the air was growing chilly. Stillwell had returned to the driving-seat and was chuckling to the horses. Shadows crept up out of the hollows.