He rode back, care free and content, through the fragrant valley. The cool air was following the lowering sun, and a thin mauve veil was drifting along the hills of mystery in the south; he sang as he rode and then checked the song to listen to the flutelike call of a lark. His lips curved in a smile as he heard it, and with it came the thought of the girl and the barred window of Vijil’s adobe.
She permeated the life of Granados just as the soft veil enwrapped the far hills, and she had seemed almost as far away if not so mysterious. Not once had he crossed her trail, and he heard she was no longer permitted to ride south of the line. The vaqueros commented on this variously according to their own point of view. Some of the Mexicans resented it, and in one way or another her name was mentioned whenever problems of the future were discussed. Singleton was regarded as temporary, and Conrad was a salaried business manager. But on a day to come, the señorita, as her mother’s daughter, would be their mistress, and the older men with families showed content at the thought.
Rhodes never could think of her as the chatelaine of those wide ranges. She was to him the “meadow-lark child” of jests and laughter, heard and remembered but not seen. She was the haunting music of youth meeting him at the gateway of a new land which is yet so old!
Some such vagrant thought drifted through his mind as the sweet calls of the drowsy birds cut the warm silence, now from some graceful palo verde along a barranca and again from the slender pedestal of an occotilla.
“Lucky you, for you get an answer!” he thought whimsically. “Amble along, Pardner, or the night witches get us!”
And then he circled a little at the north of the cañon, and the black horse, champing and fidgeting, was held there across the trail by its rider.
“We are seeing things in broad daylight, Pardner, and there ain’t no such animal,” decided Rhodes, but Pardner whinnied, and the girl threw up her hand.
“This time I am a highwayman, the far-famed terror of the ranges!” she called.
“Sure!” he conceded. “I’ve been thinking quite a while that your term must be about up.”
She laughed at that, and came alongside.
“Didn’t you suppose I might have my time shortened for good behavior?” she asked. “You never even ride our way to see.”
“Me? Why, child, I’m so busy absorbing kultur from your scientific manager that my spare moments for damsels in distress are none too plenty. You sent out nary a call, and how expect the lowest of your serfs to hang around?”
“Serf? That’s good!” she said skeptically. “And say, you must love Conrad about as much as Cap Pike does.”
“And that?”
“Is like a rattlesnake.”
“Don’t know that rattlesnake would be my first choice of comparison,” remarked Rhodes. “Back in Tennessee we have a variety beside which the rattlesnake is a gentleman; a rattlesnake does his best to give warning of intention, but the copperhead never does.”
“Copperhead! that’s funny, for you know Conrad’s hair is just about the color of copper, dusty copper, faded copper–copper with tin filings sifted through.”
“Don’t strain yourself,” laughed Rhodes. “That beautiful blondness makes him mighty attractive to our Mexican cousins.”
“They can have my share,” decided the girl. “I could worry along without him quite awhile. He manages to get rid of all the likeable range men muy pronto.”
Rhodes laughed until she stared at him frowningly, and then the delicious color swept over her face.
“Oh, you!” she said, and Rhodes thought of sweet peas, and pink roses in old southern gardens as her lips strove to be straight, yet curved deliciously. No one had mentioned to him how pretty she was; he had thought of her as a browned tom-boy, but instead she was a shell-pink bud on a slender stem, and wonder of wonders–she rode a side-saddle in Arizona!
She noticed him looking at it.
“Are you going to laugh at that, too?” she demanded.
“Why no, it hadn’t occurred to me. It sort of looks like home to me–our southern girls use them.”
She turned to him with a quick birdlike movement, her gray eyes softened and trusting.
“It was my mother’s saddle, a wedding present from the vaqueros of our ranches when she married my father. I am only beginning to use it, and not so sure of myself as with the one I learned on.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” he observed. “You certainly looked sure when you jumped that fence at Herrara’s.”
She glanced at him quickly, curious, and then smiling.
“And it was you, not the meadow lark! You are too clever!”
“And you didn’t answer, just turned your back on the lonely ranger,” he stated dolefully, but she laughed.
“This doesn’t look it, waiting to go home with you,” she retorted. “Cap Pike has been telling me about you until I feel as if I had known you forever. He says you are his family now, so of course that makes Granados different for you.”
“Why, yes. I’ve been in sight of Granados as much as twice since I struck this neck of the woods. Your manager seems to think my valuable services are indispensable at the southern side of this little world.”
“So that’s the reason? I didn’t know,” she said slowly. “One would have to be a seventh son of a seventh son to understand his queer ways. But you are going along home today, for I am a damsel in distress and need to be escorted.”
“You don’t look distressed, and I’ve an idea you could run away from your escort if you took a notion,” he returned. “But it is my lucky day that I had a hunch for this cañon trail and the Green Springs, and I am happy to tag along.”
They had reached Herrara’s corral and Rhodes glanced up the little gulch to the well. The flat rock there was stripped of the odd collection, and Narcisco stood at the corner of the adobe watching them somberly.
“Buenos tardes!” called the girl. “Take care of the niño as the very treasure of your heart!”
“Sure!” agreed the lad, “Adios, señorita.”
“Why the special guard over the treasure?” asked Rhodes as their horses fell into the long easy lope side by side. “The house seems full and running over, and niñitas to spare.”
“There are never any to spare,” she reminded him, “and this one is doubly precious for it is named for me–together its saint and its two grandmothers! Benicia promised me long ago that whether it was a boy or a girl it would be Billie Bernard Herrara. I was just taking the extra clothes I had Tia Luz make for him–and he is a little black-eyed darling! Soon as he is weaned I’m going to adopt him; I always did want a piccaninny for my own.”
Rhodes guided his horse carefully around a barranca edge, honeycombed by gophers, and then let his eyes rest again on the lustrous confiding eyes, and the rose-leaf lips.
Afterward he told himself that was the moment he began to be bewitched by Billie Bernard.
But what he really said was–“Shoo, child, you’re only a piccaninny yourself!” and they both laughed.
It was quite wonderful how old Captain Pike had managed to serve as a family foundation for their knowledge of each other. There was not a doubt or a barrier between them, they were “home folks” riding from different ways and meeting in the desert, and silently claiming kindred.
The shadows grew long and long under the sun of the old Mexic land, and the high heavens blazed above in yellows and pinks fading into veiled blues and far misty lavenders in the hollows of the