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Clad in the picturesque garb of the Southwest Indian, her hair hanging in a great braid over each shoulder, her dark eyes fixed on us, she made a picture in that dusky setting that an artist might not have given to his brush twice in a lifetime on the plains. A few feet from us she halted. "Throw up your hands!" Jondo commanded.
Something creeping across the trail, not a coyote, for it stood upright a moment, then bent again, and was lost in the deep gloom. Jondo had shifted to another angle of the outlook, had seen it again, and again at a third point. It was encircling the camp. Then all of us, except Jondo, began to see moving shapes. He saw nothing for a long time, and our spirits rose again.
One day I had asked Jondo the reason for this, and had learned that it was because of the level ground on the farther side of the valley. I began then to love the level places of the earth. I love them still.
Just then Jondo halted the train, and we gathered about him. "Clarenden, let's pitch camp at the rock. The horses are dead tired and this wind is making them nervous. There's a storm due as soon as it lays a bit, and we would be sort of protected here. A tornado's a giant out in this country, you know." "This tavern doesn't have a very good name with the traveling public, does it, Clarenden?"
"They's two of him I know there is," Rex Krane declared. "One of him went east, to cut us off I reckon; an' t'other faded into nothin' toward the river. Kind of a double deal, looks to me." Both men looked doubtingly at the young man; but without further words, Jondo took command, and we knew that the big plainsman would put through whatever Esmond Clarenden had planned.
I ought to have kept still, Jondo" Beverly's ready smile came to his face "but I'd made that fellow swear he'd let me eternally alone when we had our little fracas up by the San Christobal Arroyo, so something like conscience, mean as the stomach-ache, made me call out: "'Don't drink there; it's poison.
Every man had his place on the plains, and Jondo out of the chrism of his own life-struggle knew that Bill was bearing a cross in silence, and that his was the martyr spirit that finds salvation only in deeds. Bill was the man for the place.
Uncle Esmond had added three swift ponies to our equipment, which Jondo and Bill found time to tame for riding as we went along. We met wagon-trains, scouts, and solitary trappers going east, but so far as we knew our little company was the only westward-facing one on all the big prairies. "It's just like living in a fairy-story, isn't it, Gail?"
And the stars watched over me through that black night, lying there half dead and utterly alone. Out to the northwest Jondo and Bill Banney rode long on the trail of the fleeing Kiowas.
And it was Rex who most aided Jondo in finding that the Indian had gone with Ramero's men northward. "That fellow is Santan, of Fort Bent, Rex," Jondo said. "Yes, you thought he was Santa and I took him for Satan then. We missed out on which to knock out of him. Bev won't care nothin' about his name. He will knock hell out of him if he gets in that Clarenden boy's way," Rex had replied.
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