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An old prospector had returned to Peoria, and he had told relatives of meeting Robert Burton at the Sonoyta Oasis fifteen years before, and that Burton had gone into the desert never to return. To Belding this was no surprise, for he had heard that before his marriage. There appeared to have been no doubts as to the death of his wife's first husband.
So he began to make up some of the sleep he had lost. It was noteworthy, however, that Ladd did not share Belding's sanguine hopes. Jim Lash rode in, reporting that all was well out along the line toward the Sonoyta Oasis. Days passed, and Belding kept his rangers home. Nothing was heard of raiders at hand.
Shore you get quieter all the time. Did you see any sign of Jim out Sonoyta way?" Then Belding led the lame horse toward the watering-trough, while the two rangers went toward the house, Dick was telling Ladd about the affair at Papago Well when they turned the corner under the porch. Nell was sitting in the door. She rose with a little scream and came flying toward them.
But he could not reconcile himself to misfortune for Gale. Moreover, Belding had other worry and strain. April arrived with no news of the rangers. From Casita came vague reports of raiders in the Sonoyta country reports impossible to verify until his Mexican rangers returned.
In Arizona, there are a few very small bands, very widely scattered. They are in the Santa Catalina Mountains, the Grand Canyon country, the Gila Range, and the Quitovaquita Mountains, near Sonoyta. But who can protect from slaughter those Arizona sheep? Absolutely no one! They are too few and too widely scattered for the game wardens to keep in touch with them.
To the right stretched the road toward Papago Well and the Sonoyta Oasis. The trail of the raiders took a southeasterly course over untrodden desert. The Yaqui spoke in his own tongue, then in Spanish. "Think he means slow march," said Belding. "Laddy, from the looks of that trail the Greasers are having trouble with the horses." "Tom, shore a boy could see that," replied Laddy.
When these men rode in, one of them, Gonzales, an intelligent and reliable halfbreed, said he had met prospectors at the oasis. They had just come in on the Camino del Diablo, reported a terrible trip of heat and drought, and not a trace of the Yaqui's party. "That settles it," declared Belding. "Yaqui never went to Sonoyta.
On this December afternoon the three rangers, as often, were separated. Lash was far to the westward of Sonoyta, somewhere along Camino del Diablo, that terrible Devil's Road, where many desert wayfarers had perished. Ladd had long been overdue in a prearranged meeting with Gale. The fact that Ladd had not shown up miles west of the Papago Well was significant.
He hired a couple of trustworthy Mexicans to ride the boundary line, and he settled down to think of ranching and irrigation and mining projects. Every morning he expected to receive some word form Sonoyta or Yuma, telling him that Yaqui had guided his party safely across the desert. Belding was simple-minded, a man more inclined to action than reflection.
On February 16, 1938, José Rebey and Francisco Cuen, old and close friends of Gov. Roman Yocupicio, drove a Buick to the sandy, deserted wastes near Sonoyta, just south of the American border where one of the two unidentified Americans delivered a carload of cases securely covered with sheet metal.
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