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Then the slow ride to the Carreras House through the darkened hills: the smell of warm earth from the thick growths by the trail-side; little stars slipping into place like the glisten of fireflies in a garden, or gems in a maiden's hair; a scandalously-naked new moon lying low, like an arc of white-hot wire in the purple twilight, and always behind them, a majestic splash of jewel-edged crimson which showed the West.
Wright came along and found me sitting in deep dejection on a bed of vivid, green moss by an old stump at the trail-side. "What ye doing here?" he asked in surprise. "Nothing," I answered gravely. The Comptroller must have observed the sorrow in my face, for he asked: "What's the matter?" "Nothing," I lied, and then my conscience caught up with my tongue and I added: "It's a secret."
Then he paused, glancing out of the doorway, and the girl watched the return of that thoughtful expression which she had come to associate with his usual manner. "Wal," he said at last, in his final way, "I'm Buck, and I was picked up on the trail-side, starving, twenty years ago by the Padre. He's raised me, an' we're big friends.
The peace of that lonely little trail-side camp has gone. War, a thousand times more fierce than the war of civilized nations, is raging round it in the light of the summer moon. The dead bodies of three white men are lying within a few yards of the tent which belongs to the ill-fated colonel and his wife.
Smoking a pipe by the trail-side or lounging around the stove, men made rough estimates of the numbers that had perished at his hand. They had been whites, all of them, these poor murdered people, and they had been slain singly, in pairs, and in parties.
Smoking a pipe by the trail-side or lounging around the stove, men made rough estimates of the numbers that had perished at his hand. They had been whites, all of them, these poor murdered people, and they had been slain singly, in pairs, and in parties.
He is so wise, too, he is quite wonderful. You know, he only sold his farm to me to keep the miners from starving before they found the gold. He is a sort of foster-father to Buck. He found him when he was a little boy picked him up on the trail-side. That's about twenty years ago, soon after the Padre that's what they call him first came here." "Yes, yes; but his name?"
The drive continued. Slowly the panting brutes were urged on; at every water-hole and every trail-side pasture they were rested. In the afternoon Howard found a rancher who could spare half a dozen bales of hay; they were promptly purchased, opened and thrown to the herd; to disappear instantly. That night camp was made on the upper courses of the Morales Creek.
Here were the chesty men again, rovers and adventurers, and while they didn't mind a grub famine, whisky they could not do without. Whisky went over the trail, while the flour lay cached and untouched by the trail-side. As good fortune would have it, the three men in my party were not drinkers. Therefore I didn't drink save on rare occasions and disgracefully when with other men.
The thought carried him back to days long gone by, to a time when a lad of something less than eight years, clad in the stained and worn garb of a prairie juvenile, his feet torn and bleeding, his large brown eyes staring out of gaunt, hungry sockets, his thin, pinched, sunburnt face drawn by the ravages of starvation, had cheerfully hailed him from beneath the shelter of a trail-side bush.
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