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For two days after the round-up nothing was done at the ranch, beyond the oiling of guns, and consultations among the men. Walt Lampson seemed to be waiting for something. On the third night there was a meeting in the ranch-house living-room. A meeting which Whitey and Injun attended unseen, by the simple method of hiding.
If it wasn't so far to Bill Edwards' I'd ride that way and find out if the fellow is there, or what they know about him." Silent Sam earned his nickname, if ever, during the next hour. He did not say ten words; but his efficient management got a posse of the most trustworthy men together, and they rode away from the ranch-house. There was no use advising the Captain not to accompany the party.
At six o'clock each night Bull sat near the ranch-house front door as though waiting for some one. He waited a long time. Bill Jordan, who prided himself on what he knew about dogs, and men, said that Bull's former owner probably was a city man, and was in the habit of coming home at six; that the dog was waiting for him to appear. Be that as it may, in the days to come Bull gave up this custom.
One day a being named Bartholomew, a sheep-man and therefore of little account from the lower Rio Grande country, rode in sight of the Nopalito ranch-house, and felt hunger assail him. Ex consuetudine he was soon seated at the mid-day dining table of that hospitable kingdom.
At a certain point on this trail a frontiersman named Barker built a forlorn ranch-house and corral, and offered what is conventionally called "entertainment for man and beast." For years he lived there, dividing his time between fighting the Indians and feeding the passing emigrants and their stock.
Here and there the bright sun spotted on a cow as she threaded the gray stretches; a little coyote-wolf sat on his haunches on a near-by hill-side, and howled protests at his new-found companions; while dimly through the gray meshes of the leaf-denuded chaparral we could see the main ranch-house of the Soledad.
She arrived at Paradise on the ramshackle old stage-coach late one Saturday afternoon. Ajax and I carried her small hair-trunk into the ranch-house; Mrs. Spafford received her. We retreated to the corrals. "She'll never, never do," said Ajax. "Never," said I. Alethea-Belle Buchanan looked about eighteen; and her face was white as the dust that lay thick upon her grey linen cloak.
With his water rights a man might work modern magic; far back in the hills he had found the natural site for his storage dams; slightly lower in a nest of hills there would be some day a pygmy lake whose seductive beauty to him who dwells on desert lands calls like the soft beauty of a woman; upon a knoll where now was nothing there would come to be a comfortable, roomy, hospitable ranch-house to displace forever the shacks which housed the men now farther down the slopes; and everywhere, because there was water aplenty, would there be roses and grape-vines and orange-trees.
"Marion will get a message to-morrow, a message from Sinclair, asking her to come to see him at his ranch-house before she goes back. I don't know what he wants but she is his wife. He has treated her infamously; that is why she will not live with him and does not speak of him.
I don't care what I don't know, or can't do, HE thinks I'm fine!" And she went off to bed in high spirits. She was too entirely normal a young woman to let anything worry her very long, too busy to brood. The visitor soon learned why the ranch-house parlor presented so dismal an aspect of unuse. It was because Manzanita was never inside it.
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