He drove his burros down the sandy aisle. A glimpse of an old adobe wall, gray through the mesquites, stopped his heart. He went on. The house of Arallanes was a roofless ruin, the vacant windows and doors staring darkly, the walls crumbling to the sands. The shed where Adam had slept was now half hidden by mesquites. The ocatilla poles were bleached and rotten and the brush was gone from the roof; but the sandy floor looked as clean and white as the day Adam had spread his blankets there. Fourteen years! Silent he stood, and the low, mournful wind was a knell. The past could never be undone.
He went back to the lane and to the open. Old stone walls were all that appeared left of houses he expected to see. Over the trees, far up the slope, he espied the ruins of the dismantled mill. Unreal it looked there, out of place, marring the majestic sweep of the slope.
His keen desert nostrils detected smoke before he saw blue columns rising through the green. He passed a plot of sand-mounded graves. Had they been there? How fierce a pang pierced his heart! Rude stones marked the graves, and on one a single wooden cross, crude and weathered, slanted away. Adam peered low at the lettering—M. A. And swiftly he swung erect.
There was a cluster of houses farther on, low and squat, a few of them new, but most of them Adam remembered. A post-office sign marked this village of Picacho. The stone-fronted store looked just the same, and the loungers there might never have moved from their tracks in fourteen years. But the faces were strange.
A lean old man, gray and peaked, detached himself from the group and tottered toward Adam with his cane in the sand.
“Wal, stranger, howdy! You down from upriver?”
His voice twanged a chord of memory. Merryvale! Slowly the tide of emotion rose in Adam’s breast. He peered down into the gray old face, with its narrow, half-shut eyes and its sunken cheeks. Yes, it was Merryvale.
“Howdy, friend!” replied Adam. “Yes, I come from up the river.”
“Strange in these parts, I reckon?”
“Yes. But I—I was here years ago.”