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"I never forget that, Frank," came back from the disappearing hunter. Frank went on with his preparations. A fire would be necessary, if they expected to cook fresh meat; and it is not always an easy thing to have such when out on the open plain or mesa.
Now and then one or another of the blind keepers of the camp will come across to where you sit gossiping, tapping her way among the kitchen middens, guided by your voice that carries far in the clearness and stillness of mesa afternoons. But suppose you find Seyavi retired into the privacy of her blanket, you will get nothing for that day. There is no other privacy possible in a campoodie.
The blue grouse sat stiff and close to the tree-trunk, while gray squirrels with quaintly tufted ears peered curiously at sinuous forms that nosed from side to side of the hidden trail below. The two cabins of the Blue Mesa, hooded in white, thrust their lean stovepipes skyward through two feet of snow. The corrals were shallow fortifications, banked breast-high.
But he couldn't lick Demijohn right there in town nohow. Demijohn was too frequent for him. "When young John wakes up next mornin' he is layin' under a tree, mighty sick. He sees he is up on the high mesa, but he don' know how he got there; only his pony is grazin' near by, with reins all tromped and the saddle 'way up on his withers.
"Lady," said the Shadid, "these words become you well, but it has pleased the gods to choose you and not my daughter, the lady Mesa, or any other woman, and the choice of the gods may not be set aside. Till death shall take you, you and you alone are the lady Baaltis whom we obey." "Must I then be made divine against my will," she pleaded, and turned to Aziel as though for counsel.
In the shade of the forest that edged the mesa, and just back of Fernando's camp, a Ranger trail cuts through a patch of quaking-asp and meanders through the heavy-timbered land toward the Blue range, a spruce-clad ridge of southern hills. Close to the trail two saddle horses were tied. Fadeaway, riding toward his home ranch on the "Blue," reined up, eyed the horses, and grinned.
Applehead was easy-going to a fault in most things, but his dislike had grown in Luck's absence to the point where he considered himself aggrieved whenever Annie-Many-Ponies saddled the horse which had been tacitly set aside for her use, and rode off into the mesa without a word of explanation or excuse. Applehead reminded the boys that she had not acted like that when luck was home.
Conditions were favorable for success at the mounds called by the Indians Sikyatki. These ruins are situated near the modern Tusayan pueblos of East Mesa, from which I could hire workmen, and not far from Keam's Canyon, which could be made a base of supplies. The existing legends bearing on these ruins, although obscure, are sufficiently definite for all practical purposes.
Then they walked back to their quarters. The men on the mesa, balked of their purpose, had withdrawn. Sam accompanied Sinclair to his door, and then sententiously remarked: "Major, I think I'll light out and find some of the boys. You ain't got no call to know anything about it, but I allow it's about time them cusses was bounced."
But there wasn't a sign of any trail there, and we didn't know what to think. We never dreamed you'd be on the mesa," he added to Mr. DeVere. "I suppose we never should have come," admitted the actor. "It was on a sudden impulse, and sorry enough we were for it, too."
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