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Then he attended to Firio, who was talking incoherently: "Take water-hole boil coffee in the morning quail for dinner, Señor Jack sí, sí!"
As Jack and Firio came within hailing distance, both Prather and Nogales glanced at them sharply; but no word was spoken on either side. The absence of any call between these isolated voyagers of the desert sea was strangely unlike the average desert meeting. Prather and Nogales did not look back again, not even when Jack and Firio were very near.
Firio did not understand much about parallels or mines or, for that matter, about sieges; but he could see the smile fading from Jack's lips and could comprehend that the future of which Jack was speaking was very far from another prospect, which was immediate and vivid in his mind. "But you must fight Leddy! Sí, sí! You must fight Leddy first!" "Then I must, I suppose," said Jack, absently.
She had refused to ride to the pass with him and here they were alone together on the pass. Three or four steps, so light that they seemed to be irresistibly winning permission from her, and he had sat down on another flat-topped rock close by. Firio and the baggage train moved on up the trail methodically and stopped well in the background.
Firio came with the eagerness of one who is restless for action. He leaned on the windowsill, his elbows spread, his chin cupped in his hands, his Indian blankness of countenance enlivened by the glow of his eyes, as jewels enliven dull brown velvet. "Firio, I have something to tell you." "Sí!" There was a laboring of Jack's throat muscles, and then he forced out the truth in a few words.
To Firio he seemed to have grown taller and older. Apprehensively he watched the end of the ribbon running under P.D.'s hoofs for the sight of a horsewoman breaking free of the foothills. The momentary fear which rode with him was that Mary might be returning earlier than usual.
"The clothes I bought to please Firio, you mean?" he inquired, his face lighting. "No, about death. It is horrible horrible! Death for which I am responsible!" "Why, have you forgotten that we settled all that?" he asked. "It was not you. It was the habit I had formed of whistling in the loneliness of the desert.
Firio squinted at the objects of their pursuit for a while, as if he wanted to be exact. "Almost as many hours as miles," he said. Near the zenith now, the sun was a bulging furnace eye, piercing through shirts into the flesh and sucking the very moisture of the veins.
Was he simply clay that served without feeling? The thought made Jack wince. He paused, and the dark eyes, as in a spell, kept staring into his. "And you get P.D. and Wrath of God and Jag Ear and, yes, the big spurs and the chaps, too, to keep to remember me by." Firio did not answer. "You are not pleased? You " "Sí! I will keep them for you.
He must reach the water-hole as soon as Prather; for it was not unlikely that Prather might have fresh mounts waiting there to take him on to the nearest railroad station in Mexico. "Look good, but bad. Nogales no know horses!" Firio answered. "And they rode in the heat of the day!" said Jack, confidently. "Sí! And we ride P.D. and Wrath of God!"
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