Conrad sauntered along the corridor and seated himself, flicking idly some leather thongs he had cut out from a green hide with a curved sheath knife rather fine and foreign looking. Singleton called him to come in and have coffee, but he would not enter, pleading his evil-smelling pipe as a reason.
“It can’t beat mine for a downright bachelor equipment,” affirmed Pike, “but I’ve scandalized this outfit enough, or thereabout, and that venison has killed all our appetites until breakfast, so why hang around where ungrateful children swat a man’s dearest hobbies?”
“If you think you’ll get rid of me that way you had better think again,” said Billie. “I don’t mind your old smokes, or any other of your evil ways, so long as you and Tia Luz tell us more bewitched mine stories. Say, Cap, wouldn’t it be great if that old sheepskin was found again, and we’d all outfit for a Sonora pasear, and–”
“We would not!” decided the old man patting her hair. “You, my lady, will take a pasear to some highbrow finishing school beyond the ranges, and I’ll hit the trail for Yuma in a day or two, but at the present moment you can wind up the music box and start it warbling. That supper sure was so perfect nothing but music will do for a finish!”
The men drifted out in the corridor and settled into the built-in seats of the plazita, though Rhodes remained standing in the portal facing inward to the patio where the girl’s shimmering white dress fluttered in the moonlight beside the shadowy bulk of Tia Luz.
He lit a cigarette and listened for the music box Pike had suggested, but instead he heard guitar strings, and the little ripple of introduction to the old Spanish serenade Vengo a tu ventana, “I come to your window.”
He turned and glanced towards the men who were discussing horse shipments, and possibilities of the Prussian sea raiders sinking transports on the way to France, but decided his part of that discussion could wait until morning.
Tia Luz had lit the lamp in the sala, and the light streamed across the patio where the night moths fluttered about the white oleanders. He smiled in comical self-derision as he noticed the moths, but tossed away the cigarette and followed the light.
When Captain Pike indulged the following morning in sarcastic comment over Kit’s defection, the latter only laughed at him.
“Shirk business? Nothing doing. I was strictly on the job listening to local items on treasure trails instead of powwowing with you all over the latest news reports from the Balkans. Soon as my pocket has a jingle again, I am to get to the French front if little old U. S. won’t give me a home uniform, but in the meantime Doña Luz Moreno is some reporter if she is humored, and I mean to camp alongside every chance I get. She has the woman at the cantina backed off the map, and my future Spanish lessons will be under the wing of Doña Luz. Me for her!”
“Avaricious young scalawag!” grunted Pike. “You’d study African whistles and clicks and clacks if it blazed trail to that lost gold deposit! Say, I sort of held the others out there in front thinking I would let you get acquainted with little Billie, and you waste the time chinning about death in the desert, and dry camps to that black-and-tan talking machine.”
Kit only laughed at him.
“A record breaker of a moon too!” grumbled the old man. “Lord!–lord! at your age I’d crawled over hell on a rotten rail to just sit alongside a girl like Billie–and you pass her up for an old hen with a mustache, and a gold trail!”
Kit Rhodes laughed some more as he got into the saddle and headed for the Granados corral, singing:
Oh–I’ll cut off my long yellow hair
To dress in men’s array,
And go along with you, my dear
Your waiting man to be!
He droned out the doleful and incongruous love ballad of old lands, and old days, for the absurd reason that the youth of the world in his own land beat in his blood, and because in the night time one of the twinkling stars of heaven had dropped down the sky and become a girl of earth who touched a guitar and taught him the words of a Spanish serenade,–in case he should find a Mexican sweetheart along the border!
For to neither of the young, care-free things, had come a glimmer of fore-vision of the long tragic days, treasure trails and desert deaths, primitive devotions and ungodly vengeance, in which the threads of their own lives would be entangled before those two ever heard the music of the patio again–together.
If in Holland fields I met a maid
All handsome fond and gay,
And I should chance to love her
What would my Mary say?
What would I say, dear Willie?
That I would love her too,
And I would step to the one side
That she might speak with you!
“Yes, you would–not!” he stated in practical prose to no one in particular. “Not if you were our girl, would she, Pardner?”
Pardner tossed up his head in recognition of the comradeship in the tone, and Kit Rhodes became silent, and rode on to the corrals, happily smiling at some new thoughts.
CHAPTER III
A VERIFIED PROPHECY OF SEÑORITA BILLIE
That smile was yet with him when he saw the herd and the vaqueros coming up from the water tanks, and noted Conrad and Tomas Herrara talking together beside Conrad’s automobile.
The beat of the many hoofs prevented the two men from noting one horse near them, and words of Conrad came to him clearly.
“It has to be that way. You to go instead of Miguel. You have enough English, you can do it.”
Tomas Herrara muttered something, evidently reluctance, for again Conrad’s words were heard.
“But think of the dinero, much of money to you! And that fool swine will not see what is under his nose. You can do it, sure you can! There is no danger. The blame will be to him if it is found; my agent will see to that. Not you but the gringo will be the one to answer the law. You will know nothing.”
He spoke in Spanish rapidly, while both men watched the approaching vaqueros.
The smile had gone from Kit’s face, and he was puzzled to follow the words, or even trust his own ears.
“Bueno,” said Herrara with a nod of consent. “Since Miguel is hurt–”
“Whoa, Pardner,” sang out Rhodes, back of them as he slid out of the saddle. “Good morning, gentlemen. Do you say Miguel is hurt, Herrara? How comes that?”
The face of Herrara went a curious gray, and his lips blue and apparently stiff for he only murmured, “Buenas dias, señor,” and gulped and stared at Conrad. But the surprise of Conrad, while apparent, was easily accounted for, and he was too well poised to be startled unduly by any emergency.
“Hah! Is it you, Rhodes, so early? Yes, Miguel is reported hurt over Poso Verde way. Not serious, but for the fact that he was the one to go with you on the horse shipment, and now another must go. Perhaps his brother here.”
“Oh–ah–yes,” assented Rhodes thoughtfully. He was not so old as Conrad, and quite aware he was not so clever, and he didn’t know their game, so he strove as he could to hold the meaning of what he had heard, and ended rather lamely: “Well, too bad about Miguel, but if you, Tomas, are going instead, you had better get your war togs ready. We start tonight from the Junction,