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Tents were scattered over a dim, stumpy clearing, lights shone through trees that were still standing, a meandering trail led past a straggling row of canvas-topped structures, and from one of these issued the wavering, metallic notes of a phonograph, advertising the place as a house of entertainment.
We depended somewhat upon supplies from Boston, but sometimes we used to chase a butcher who took a drive in his old canvas-topped cart when he felt like it, and as for fish, there were always enough to be caught, even if we could not buy any.
We did the drive of twenty miles to the ranch in a canvas-topped buggy, drawn by a pair of devil-may-care little nags, who took us across dry arroyos and the rocky beds of running streams in a style that promised to make sticks of the vehicle. It held good, however, and rattled out a sort of derisive snicker at every fresh attempt to shiver it.
Sometimes the men caught an odour of burning meat, of rice and breadstuffs. In a marshy meadow a number of wrecked, canvas-topped wagons showed like a patch of mushrooms, giant and dingy. In a forest glade rested like a Siegfried smithy an abandoned travelling forge. Camp-kettles hacked in two were met with, and boxes of sutlers' wares smashed to fragments.
Some distance beyond the flock, or where the flock had been, for the sheep were now rushing across the plain, was a two-horse, canvas-topped wagon, with a stove-pipe protruding through the top at the back. For your sheepherder does not sleep on the ground like the cowboy, but prefers a sheltering wagon. When the men reached this shelter, there was no one in sight.
Two days later the shopkeepers greeted him from the doors of their shops, and the idlers, gathered on the narrow square before the Commercial Exchange, glanced at him with those affable looks that greet a stranger in a small city where nobody keeps his secret. He walked along in the middle of the street, avoiding the light, canvas-topped carriages.
The two men spluttered wildly, half in anger, half in fear of their tormentors, but in a few seconds they were secured firmly against the canvas-topped wagon. "Now sit easy, gentlemen, sit easy. Nothing's going to hurt you." Long Jim shoved fresh cartridges into his forty-five. "That is, unless you're unlucky. Line up there, boys, one at a time now.
We will ask him to-night or to-morrow. Thornton will be back to-morrow. Then we'll be getting ready the wagons and our own kit." "What wagons?" "Did you no see the canvas-topped wagons in the barn? Verra like gipsy wagons they are. We call them prairie schooners because they are the sort of wagon the first settlers crossed the country in. Ships of the Desert they were indeed!
The Señorita Teresa, bethinking her of the "pretty señora" who would have scant shelter in that canvas-topped wagon-box, even though it had been set under the thickest branches of a great live oak, called guardedly to Diego who was passing, and ordered Tejon, her swiftest little mustang, saddled and held ready for her behind the last hut, where it could not be seen from the house.
But that road had been traveled by a multitude. Out across the valley in the rear Joan saw a canvas-topped wagon, and she had not ridden far on the road when she saw a bobbing pack-burros to the fore. Kells had called Wood and Smith and Pearce and Cleve together, and now they went on in a bunch, all driving the pack-train.
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