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When they ventured to peep over the edge of the arroyo, they saw an Indian camp of women and old men in plain view could catch the voices, now and then. The country was an open country; nothing could stir above its surface without being sighted. Finally the sun set, the dusk gathered, and in darkness again they crept out.
It was a break in the plain, a buffalo road, or the channel of an arroyo, in either case, the very cover I wanted, for the animals were not a hundred yards from it; and were getting still nearer to it as they fed. Creeping back out of the thicket, I ran along the side of the slope toward a point, where I had noticed that the ridge was depressed to the prairie level.
Lennon began to whistle a dance tune as he sauntered unconcernedly at the heels of his slow-moving burro up a rise and along a badly broken rocky slope. They came down into a sandy wash that curved out of the mass of jagged ridges on the north. When midway across the bottom of the arroyo Lennon heard a sharp ping close above his ear his sombrero whirled from his head.
The nakedness of the stony arroyo, the gnarled and stunted thickets, were softened by the magic of twilight; the air had suddenly cooled; overhead the empty, flawless sky was deepening swiftly from blue to purple; the chaparral had awakened and echoed now to the sounds of life. Nestling in a shallow, flinty bowl was a pool of water, and on its brink a little fire was burning.
Stanley bent over, pelted by flying pebbles and fragments of idle words. Small chance to overhaul the prodigy on that ribbed and splintered hill; Awguan held the sidelong trail at the red pony's heels. They dipped to cross an arroyo; Stan lifted his head and shouted: "Fall off in the sand!" "Damnfido!" wailed the blue boy.
By the time we reached the ranch, I was just beginning to realize that, socially, Shepherd's Ferry and the Nueces was a poky place. The next morning I returned to Las Palomas. The horse-breaking was nearing an end. During the month of May we went into camp on a new tract of land which had been recently acquired, to build a tank on a dry arroyo which crossed this last landed addition to the ranch.
"He didn't have a chance." Waring was startled by his own voice. He thrust the gun in his waistband. The twilight deepened rapidly. Rocks and ridges in the arroyo assumed peculiar shapes like those of men crouching; men prone; men with heads up, listening, watching, waiting.
Ga-lump, ga-lump, ga-lump, with measured beat he went an hour an hour, and another hour Arroyo Alamosa just ahead with fresh relays, and Jo yelled at his horse and pushed him on and on.
Roderick Norton, entering swiftly, his spurs dragging and jangling, swept the faces in the room with eyes which had in them none of that human glint of good-will which the girl at the arroyo had glimpsed in them. Again they were steely, angry, bespeaking both threat and suspicion. "Who is it this time?" he demanded sharply. "Bisbee, from Las Palmas," they told him.
Like all men of the prairie, rude trappers as well as Indians, Carlos had an eye for the picturesque, and therefore chose a beautiful spot for his camp. It was a grassy bottom, through which ran a clear "arroyo" of sweet water, shaded by pecan, mulberry, and wild-china-trees, and under the shadow of a mulberry grove his carretas were halted and his tent was pitched.
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