A MEXICAN EAGLET
The silver wheel of the moon was rolling into the west when the Indian
girl urged the mule forward, and caught the bridle of the burro.
"What is it, Tula?" asked Rhodes, "we are doing well on the trail to
Mesa Blanca; why stop here?"
"Look," she said. "See you anything? Know you this place in the
road?"
He looked over the sand dunes and scrubby desert growths stretching
far and misty under the moon, and, then to the rugged gray range of
the mountain spur rising to the south. They were skirting the very
edge of it where it rose abruptly from the plain; a very great gray
upthrust of granite wall beside them was like a gray blade slanted out
of the plain. He had noticed it as one of the landmarks on the road to
Mesa Blanca, and on its face were a few curious scratchings or
peckings, one a rude sun symbol, and others of stars and waves of
water. He recalled remarking to Pike that it must have been a prayer
place for some of the old tribes.
"Yes, I know the place, when we reach this big rock it means that we
are nearing the border of the ranch, this rock wall tells me that. We
can be at Palomitas before noon."
"No," she said, and got down from the mule, "not to Palomitas now.
Here we carry the food, and here we hide the saddles, and the mule go
free. The burro we take, nothing else."
"Where is a place to hide saddles here?" and he made gesture toward
the great granite plane glistening in the moonlight.
"A place is found," she returned, "it is better we ride off the trail
at this place."
She did so, circling back the way they had come until they were
opposite a more broken part of the mountain side, then she began
deftly to help unsaddle.
"Break no brush and make all tracks like an Apache on the trail," she
said.
Miguel sat silent on the burro as if asleep. He had never once roused
to give heed to the words or the trail through the long ride. At times
where the way was rough he would mutter thanks at the help of Kit and
sink again into stupor.
"I can't spare that mule," protested Kit, but she nodded her head as
if that had been all thought out.
"He will maybe not go far, there is grass and a very little spring
below. Come now, I show you that hidden trail."
She picked up one of the packs and led the burro.
"But we can't pack all this at once," decided Kit, who was beginning
to feel like the working partner in a nightmare.
"Two times," said Tula, holding up her fingers, "I show you."
She led the way, nervous, silent and in haste, as though in fear of
unseen enemies. Rhodes looked after her irritably. He was fagged and
worn out by one of the hardest trails he had ever covered, and was in
no condition to solve the curious problems of the Indian mind, but the
girl had proven a good soldier of the desert, and was, for the first
time, betraying anxiety, so as the burro disappeared in the blue mist,
and only the faint patter of his hoofs told the way he had gone, Kit
picked up the saddle and followed.
The way was rough and there was no trail, simply stumbling between
great jagged slabs hewn and tossed recklessly by some convulsion of
nature. Occasionally dwarfed and stunted brush, odorous with the faint
dew of night, reached out and touched his face as he followed up and
up with ever the forbidding lances of granite sharp edged against the
sky. From the plain below there was not even an indication that
progress would be possible for any human being over the range of
shattered rock, and he was surprised to turn a corner and find Tula
helping Miguel from the saddle in a little nook where scant herbage
grew.
"No, not in this place we camp," she said. "It is good only to hide
saddles and rest for my father. Dawn is on the trail, and the other
packs must come."
He would have remonstrated about a return trip, but she held up her
hand.
"It must be, if you would live," she said. "The eyes of you have not
yet seen what they are to see, it is not to be told. All hiding must
be with care, or----"
She made swift pantomime of sighting along a gun barrel at him, and
even in the shadows he could fancy the deadly half closing of her
ungirlish eyes. Tula did not play gaily.
Tired as he was, Kit grinned.
"You win," he said. "Let's hit what would be the breeze if this fried
land could stir one up."
They plodded back without further converse, secured the packs, and
this time it was Rhodes who led, as there appeared no possible way but
the one they had covered. Only once did he make a wrong turn and a
sharp "s-st" from the girl warned him of the mistake.
They found Miguel asleep, and Kit Rhodes would willingly have sunk
down beside him and achingly striven for the same forgetfulness, but
Tula relentlessly shook Miguel awake, got him on the burro, unerringly
designated the food bag in the dark, and started again in the lead.
"I reckon you're some sort of Indian devil," decided Kit, shouldering
the bag. "No mere mortal ever made this trail or kept it open."
Several times the towering walls suggested the bottom of a well, and
as another and another loomed up ahead, he gloomily prophesied an
ultimate wall, and the need of wings.
Then, just as the first faint light began in the eastern heavens, he
was aware that the uneven trail was going down and down, zig-zagging
into a ravine like a great gray bowl, and the bottom of it filled with
shadows of night.
The girl was staggering now with exhaustion though she would not
confess it. Once she fell, and he lifted her thinking she was hurt,
but she clung to him, shaking from weakness, but whispering, "_Pronto,
pronto!_"
"Sure!" he agreed, "all the swiftness the outfit can muster."
Curious odors came to him from the shadowy bowl, not exactly a
pleasing fragrance, yet he knew it--But his mind refused to work. As
the trail grew wider, and earth was under his feet instead of rock
slivers and round boulders, he discovered that he was leading the
burro, the grub sack over his shoulder, and with the other arm was
supporting the girl, who was evidently walking with closed eyes, able
to progress but not to guide herself.
Then there was the swish-swish of grasses about their feet and poor
Bunting snatched mouthfuls as all three staggered downward. The light
began to grow, and somewhere in the shadowy bowl there was the most
blest sound known in the desert, the gurgle of running water!
"We hear it--but we can't believe it--old Buntin'," muttered Kit
holding the burro from steady and stubborn attempts to break away,
"and you are just loco enough to think you smell it."
Then suddenly their feet struck rock again, not jagged or slippery
fragments, but solid paving, and a whiff of faint mist drifted across
his face in the gray of the first dawn, and the burro craned his neck
forward at the very edge of a black rock basin where warm vapor struck
the nostrils like a soporific.
The girl roused herself at a wordless exclamation from Rhodes, and
began automatically helping Miguel from the saddle, and stripping him
to the breechcloth.
Kit's amazement startled him out of his lethargy of exhaustion. It was
light enough now to see that her eyes were bloodshot, and her
movements quick with a final desperation.
"There!" she said and motioned towards a shelving place in the rock,
"there--medicine--all quick!"
She half lifted the staggering, unconscious Indian, and Kit,
perceiving her intention, helped her with Miguel to the shallow edge
of the basin where she rolled him over until he was submerged to the
shoulder in the shallow bath, cupping her hands she scooped water and
drenched his face.
"Why,--it's warm!" muttered Kit.
"Medicine," said Tula, and staggered away.
How Rhodes shed his own garments and slipped into the basin beside
Miguel he never knew, only he knew he had found an early substitute
for heaven. It was warm sulphur water,--tonic, refreshing and
infinitely soothing to every sore muscle and every frazzled nerve. He
ducked his head in it, tossed some more over the head and shoulders of
the sleeping Indian, and then, submerged to his arms, he promptly
drifted into slumber himself.
He wakened to the sound of Baby Bunting pawing around the grub pack.
Hunger was his next conviction, for the heavenly rest in the medicine
bath had taken every vestige of weariness away. He felt lethargic from
the sulphur fumes, and more sleep was an enticing thought, yet he put
it from him and got into his clothes after the use of a handkerchief
as a bath towel. Miguel still slept and Kit bent over him in some
concern, for the sleep appeared curiously deep and still, the breath
coming lightly, yet he did not waken when lifted out of the water and
covered with a poncho in the shade of a great yucca.
"I reckon it's some dope in these hot springs," decided Kit. "I feel
top heavy myself, and won't trouble him till I've rustled some grub
and have something to offer. Well, Buntin', we are all here but the
daughter of the Glen," he said, rescuing the grub sack, "and if she
was a dream and you inveigled me here by your own diabolical powers,
I've a hunch this is our graveyard; we'll never see the world and its
vanities again!"
A bit of the blue and scarlet on a bush above caught his eye. It was
the belt of Tula, and he went upwards vaguely disturbed that he had
drifted into ease without question of her welfare.
He found her emerging from a smaller rock basin, her one garment
dripping a wet trail as she came towards him. There was no smile in
her greeting, but a look of content, of achievement.
"My father," she said, "he is----"
"Sleeping beyond belief! good medicine sleep, I hope."
She nodded her head comprehendingly, for she had done the impossible
and had triumphed. She looked at the sack of food he held.
"There is one place for fire, and other water is there. Come, it is to
you."
She struck off across the sun-bathed little grass plot to a jumble of
rock where a cool spring emerged, ran only a few rods, and sank again
out of sight. The shattered rock was as a sponge, so completely was
the water sucked downward again. Marks of burro's hoofs were there.
"Baby Buntin' been prospecting while we wallowed in the dope bath,"
said Kit.
"Maybe so, maybe not," uttered the Indian child, if such she could be
called after the super-woman initiative of that forbidding trail. She
was down on her knees peering at the tracks in the one little wet spot
below the spring.
"Two," she said enigmatically. "That is good, much good. It will be
meat."
Then she saw him pulling dry grasses and breaking branches of scrub
growth for a fire, and she stood up and motioned him to follow. They
were in a narrow, deep ravine separated from the main one by the
miniature plain of lush grass, a green cradle of rest in the heart of
the gray hills. She went as directly upward as the broken rock would
permit, and suddenly he followed her into a blackened cave formed by a
great granite slab thrusting itself upwards and enduring through the
ages when the broken rock had shattered down to form an opposite wall.
And the cloud bursts of the desert had swept through, and washed the
sands clear, leaving a high black roof slanting upwards to the
summit.
Tula moved ahead into the far shadows. He could see that beyond her
somewhere a ray of light filtered blue, but he halted at the entrance,
puzzled at the black roof where all the rock of the mountain was gray
and white except where mineral streaks were of reds and russets and
moldy greens. Then he put his hand up and touched the roof and
understood. Soot from ancient fires was discernible on his hand,
flakes of it fell to the floor, dry and black, scaling off under
pressure. The scales were thick and very old, like blackened moss. He
had seen blackened rock like that in other volcanic regions, but this
was different.
"It is here," said Tula, and he followed the voice through a darker
shadowed bit of the way, then through the ray of light, and then----
The first thing he saw was the raised hearth of a rather pretentious
fireplace, or place of fire, for it resembled not at all the tiny
little cooking hearth of desert Indians. A stone hatchet lay beside
it, and, what was much more surprising, two iron instruments of white
man's manufacturing, a wedge and a long chisel.
He picked up the chisel, weighed it in his hand, and looked at the
girl. He was now becoming accustomed to the dim light and could see
her eyes following his every movement with curious questioning. There
was a tiny frowning wrinkle between her brows as if serious matters
were being decided there.
"It is here," she said again. "Maybe someone dies when a white friend
is shown the way--maybe I die, who knows?--but it is here--El Alisal
of the gold of the rose!"
She made a little gesture and moved aside, and the chisel fell to the
stone floor with a clang as Kit shouted and dropped on his knees
before an incredible thing in the gray wall.
That upthrust of the rock wall had strange variety of color, and
between the granite and the gray limestone there was a ragged rusty
band of iron as a note of contrast to the sprinkling of glittering
quartz catching the ray of light, but the quartz was sprinkled on a
six inch band of yellow--not the usual quartz formation with dots of
color, but a deep definite yellow held together by white crystals.
"The red gold! it's the red gold!" he said feeling the yellow surface
instinctively.
"Yes, senor, it is the red gold of El Alisal, and it is to you," but
her eyes were watching him hungrily as she spoke. And something of
that pathetic fear penetrated his amazed mind, and he remembered.
"No, Tula, only my share to me. I do the work, but the great share is
to you, that it may buy back your mother from the slavers of the
south."
"Also my sister," said the girl, and for the first time she wept.
"Come, come! This is the time for joy. The danger is gone, and we are
at rest beside this--why, it's a dream come true, the golden dream!
Come, help me cook that we may be strong for the work."
She helped silently, fetching water and more sticks for the fire.
There were many things to ask, but he asked no questions, only gazed
between bites and sups at the amazing facts facing him.
"I've seen ores and ores in my time, but nothing like this!" he
exulted. "Why, I can 'high grade' mule loads of this and take it out
without smelting," and then he grinned at his little partner. "We just
struck it in time,--meat is mighty near done."
"Plenty meat!" she said nodding her head wisely. "Burro, big burro,
wild burro! I see track."
"Wild burro? Sure, that makes it simple till we rest up. You are one
great little commissary sergeant."
He noted that the pitch of the roof towards the face of the mountain
carried the smoke in a sort of funnel to be sifted through high
unseen crannies of shattered rock above. All was dark in the end of
the gallery, but a perceptible draught from the portal bore the smoke
upward.
"It's too good to be true," he decided, looking it over. "I'm chewing
bacon and it tastes natural, but I'm betting with myself that this is
a dream, and I'll wake up in the dope pond with my mouth full of
sulphur water."
The girl watched him gravely, and ate sparingly, though parched corn
had been her only sustenance through the trail of the dreadful night.
Her poor sandals were almost cut from her feet, and even while jesting
at the unreality of it all, Kit was making mental note of her
needs--the wild burro would at least provide green hide sandals for
her until better could be found, and she had earned the best.
He was amazed at her keenness. She did not seem to think, but
instinctively to feel her way to required knowledge, caring for
herself in the desert as a fledgling bird tossed by some storm from
the home nest. He remembered there were wild burros in the Sonora
hills, but that she should have already located one on this most
barren of mountains was but another unbelievable touch to the trail of
enchantment, and after a century of lost lives and treasure in the
search for the Indian mine, to think that this Indian stray, picked up
on a desolate trail, should have been the one to know that secret and
lead him to it!
"Other times you have been here?" he asked as he poured coffee in a
tin for Miguel, and dug out the last box of crackers from the grub
pack.
"Once I come, one time, and it was to make prayer here. It is mine to
know, but not my mother, not other peoples, only the father of me and
me. If I die then he show the trail to other one, not if I live. That
is how."
"He surely picked the right member of his honorable family," decided
Kit. "Only once over the trail, once?"
"I knowing it long before I see it," she explained gravely. "The
father of me make that trail in the sand for my eyes when I am only
little. I make the same for him in a game to play. When I make every
turn right, and name the place, and never forget--then he bring me,
for it is mine to know."
"Sufferin' cats!" muttered Rhodes, eyeing her in wonder. "The next
time I see an Indian kid playing in the sand, I'll linger on the trail
and absorb wisdom!"
"Come," she said, "you not seeing the one enchant look, the--how you
say?--the not believe look."
"Well, take it from me, Cinderella, I'm seeing not believe things this
very now," announced Kit, giving a fond look towards that comforting
gleam of yellow metal bedding flecks of quartz. "I see it, but will
have to sleep, and wake up to find it in the same place before I can
believe what I think I see."
With the food and drink for Miguel in his hands he had followed the
girl through the shadowed gallery of the slanting smoke-stained roof.
His eyes were mainly directed to the rock floor lest he stumble and
spill the precious coffee; thus he gave slight thought to the little
ravine up which she had led him to the cave which was also a mine.
But as he stepped out into the sunlight she stood looking up into his
face with almost a smile, the first he had seen in her wistful tragic
eyes. Then she lifted her hand and pointed straight out, and the
"enchant look," the "not believe" look was there! He stared as at a
mirage for an incredulous moment, and then whispered, "Great God of
the Desert!"
For a little space, a few rods only, the mountain dipped steeply, and
trickling water from above fell in little cascades to lower levels,
where a great jagged wall of impregnable granite arose as a barrier
along the foot of the mountain.
But he was above the sharp outline of the huge saw with the jagged
granite teeth, and between the serrated edges he could look far across
the yellow-gray reaches of sand and desert growths. Far and wide was
the "not believe" look, to the blue phantom-like peaks on the horizon,
but between the two ranges was a white line with curious dots drifting
and whirling like flies along it, and smoke curling up, and----
Then it was he uttered the incredulous cry, for he was indeed viewing
the thing scarce to be believed.
He was looking across the great Rancho Soledad, and the white line
against the sand was the wall of the old mission where the vaqueros
were herding a band of horses into the great quadrangle of the
one-time patio turned into a corral since the buildings on three sides
had melted down again into mother earth.
He remembered riding around these lines of the old arches seeking
trace of that door of the legend,--the door from which the aliso tree
of the mine could be seen,--and there was nowhere a trace of a door.
"Queer that every other part of the prospect developed according
to specifications and not the door," he grumbled whimsically.
"Cinderella, why have you hid the door in the wall from me?"
She looked around uncertainly, not understanding.
"No portal but it," she said with a movement of her head towards the
great slab forming a pointed arch against the mountain and shielding
the unbelievable richness there, "also El Alisal, the great tree, is
gone. This was the place of it; the old ones tell my father it was as
chief of the trees and stand high to be seen. The sky fire took it,
and took the padres that time they make an altar in this place."
"Um," assented Kit, noting traces of ancient charcoal where the aliso
tree had grown great in the moisture of the spring before lightning
had decided its tragic finish, "a great storm it must have been to
send sky fire enough to kill them all."
"Yes," said Tula quietly,--"also there was already another shrine at
this place, and the gods near."
He glanced at her quickly and away.
"Sure," he agreed, "sure, that's how it must have been. They destroyed
the aliso and there was no other landmark to steer by. White men might
find a thousand other dimples in the range but never this one, the
saw-tooth range below us has the best of them buffaloed. Come along,
Senorita Aladdin, and help me with the guardian of the treasure. We've
got to look after Miguel, and then start in where the padres left off.
And you might do a prayer stunt or two at the shrine you mentioned. We
need all the good medicine help you can evoke."
As they approached the pool where the faintest mist drifted above the
water warm from hidden fires of the mountain, Kit halted before he
quite reached the still form beside the yucca, and, handing the food
and drink to the girl, he went forward alone.
He was puzzled afterward as to why he had done that, for no fold of
the garment was disturbed, nothing visible to occasion doubt, yet he
bent over and lifted the cover very gently. The face of Miguel was
strangely gray and there was no longer sign of breath. The medicine of
the sacred pool had given him rest, but not life.
He replaced the blanket and turned to the girl;--the last of the
guardians of the shrine of the red gold.
"Little sister," he said, "Miguel grew tired of the trails of a hard
land. He has made his choice to go asleep here in the place where you
tell me the gods are near. He does not want us to have sad hearts, for
he was very sad and very tired, and he will not need food, Tula."
Her eyes filled with tears, but she made no reply, only unbound her
hair as she had seen mourning women do, and seated herself apart, her
face hidden in her arms.
"No one is left to mourn but me, and I mourn!" she half chanted. "I
say it for the mother of me, and for my sister, that the ghosts may
listen. Happily he is going now from hard trails! He has chosen at
this place! Happily he has chosen, and only we are sad. No debt is
ours to pay at this place; he has chosen--and a life is paid at El
Alisal! Happily he will find the trail of the birds from this place,
and the trail of the clouds over the high mountain. No one is left to
mourn but me; and I mourn!"
Rhodes understood no word of her lamentations, chanted now loudly, now
lowly, at intervals hour after hour that day. He set grimly to work
digging a grave in the lower part of the ravine, gathering dry grass
for lining as best he could to make clear to the girl that no lack of
care or honor was shown the last man of Cajame's stock.
The work took most of the day, for he carried stone and built a wall
around the grave and covered it with slatelike slabs gathered from a
shattered upheaval of long ago.
Tula watched all this gravely, and with approval, for she drew with
her finger the mark of the sun symbol on one of the slabs.
"It is well to make that mark," she said, "for the sons of Cajame were
priests of the sun. The sign is on the great rock of the trail, and it
is theirs."
With the chisel he carved the symbol as she suggested, glad to do
anything for the one mourner for the dead man who had offered the
treasure of the desert to him.
"That is how he made choice," she said when it was marked plainly.
"Me, I think he was leading us on the night trail to this place--I
think so. He is here to guard the gold of El Alisal for you. That is
how it will be. He has made choice."
Kit got away by himself to think over the unexpected situation. The
girl climbed to a higher point, seated herself, and continued her
chant of mourning. He knew she was following, as best she knew, the
traditional formalities of a woman for the death of a chief. He found
himself more affected by that brave fatalistic recital, now loud and
brave, now weirdly slow and tender, than if she had given way to
tempests of tears. A man could comfort and console a weeping stray of
the desert, but not a girl who sat with unbound hair under the yucca
and called messages to the ghosts until the sun,--a flaming ball of
fire,--sank beyond the far purple hills.
And that was the first day of many days at the hidden treasure place
of the red gold.