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These walls, with no growth but the tussocks of bunch-grass, the prickly pear cactus, the mescal, and the yucca, were more destitute of growth than any we had seen, excepting the upper end of Desolation Canyon, even the upper walls lacking the growth of piñon pine and juniper which we usually associated with them.
"Silvermane!... My God!" he gasped, suddenly. "They caught him after all!" He fell backward upon the cliff and lay there with hands clinching his rifle, shudderingly conscious of a blow, trying to comprehend its meaning. "Silvermane!... they caught him after all!" he kept repeating; then in a flash of agonized understanding he whispered: "Mescal... Mescal!"
He rode with Mescal behind the flock; he hunted hour by hour, crawling over the fragrant brown mats of cedar, through the sage and juniper, up the grassy slopes. He rode back to camp beside Mescal, drove the sheep, and put Silvermane to his fleetest to beat Black Bolly down the level stretch where once the gray, even with freedom at stake, had lost to the black.
Sleep did not close his eyes again that night; he lay in a fever waiting for the dawn, and when the gray gloom lightened he knew what he must do. After breakfast he sought August Naab. "May I go across the river?" he asked. The old man looked up from his carpenter's task and fastened his glance on Hare. "Mescal?" "Yes." "I saw it long ago." He shook his head and spread his great hands.
The new trail led up and down over dark red rich earth, through thickets of jack-pine and maple, and then across long slopes of manzanita and juniper, mescal and oak. Junipers were not fruitful this year as they were last, only a few having clusters of lavender-colored berries.
The monotonous beat of that melody you heard is supposed to represent the beating of the tom-toms of the Indians during their mescal rites. We are having a mescal evening here, whiling away the hours of exile from our native Vespuccia." "Mescal?" I repeated blankly at first, then feeling a nudge from Kennedy, I added hastily: "Oh, yes, to be sure. I think I have heard of it.
"Jack, you'll find this Indian one you can trust, for all he's a Piute outcast," went on August. "I've had him with me ever since Mescal found him on the Coconina Trail five years ago. What Piute doesn't know about this side of Coconina isn't worth learning." In a depression sheltered from the wind lay the camp.
Nearby also, were some mescal pits used for baking the agave, a native plant that is in great demand as food by the Indians. The spot was evidently an old rendezvous where the marauding Apaches were accustomed to meet in council to plan their bloody raids, and to feast on mescal and pinole in honor of some successful foray or victory over an enemy.
"Perhaps," she admitted, raising her beautiful shoulders in polite deprecation. "The mescal religion, we found, has spread very largely in New Mexico and Arizona among the Indians, and with the removal of the Kiowas to the Indian reservation it has been adopted by other tribes even, I have heard, as far north as the Canadian border." "Is that so?" asked Kennedy.
While waiting for death he had utterly forgotten it; he remembered now, when life gleamed in the girl's dark eyes. Passionate joy flooded his heart. "Mescal Mescal!" he cried, brokenly. The eyes were true that shed this sudden light on him; glad and sweet were the lips that bade him hope and live again.
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