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The earliest Spanish settlement of Arizona, within its present political boundaries, was in the Santa Cruz Valley not far from the southern border. There was a large ranch at Calabasas at a very early date, and at that point Custodian Frank Pinkley of the Tumacacori mission ruins lately discovered the remains of a sizable church. A priest had station at San Xavier in 1701.
Within a few miles of the snow-covered peak the hoof-prints ran directly into the road from Calabasas to Morgan's Gap and were practically lost in the dust of the wagon road. "Here's a go," muttered Pardaloe at fault, after riding back and forth for a mile in an effort to pick the horse up again.
"Calabasas?" Scott nodded. "You must have moved a couple of inches at the right nick, Henry. That man Sandusky," Bob smiled a sickly smile, "doesn't miss very often. He was bothered a little by his friends being all around you." The two regarded each other for a moment in silence. "Why," asked de Spain, boiling a little, "should that damned, hulking brute try to blow my head off just now?"
He had ridden the trail but a short time when it led him in a wide angle backward and around toward Calabasas, and he found, presently, that the men he was riding after were apparently heading for the stage barns. In the north the rising curtain had darkened. Toward Sleepy Cat the landscape was already obliterated.
Not but what the saint has his day every year; but this particular day is a day of days, a fiesta of fiestas: for the Padre has arranged a procession in San Gabriel's honor, and what Mexican would not ride thirty miles to see a procession? So to the hitching-posts all up the long street are tied tired horses that have come that hot morning from San Fernando, and Calabasas, and farther still.
McAlpin made even the most inconsequential approaches to a statement with a keen and questioning glance. "The girl went up to the Cat on the early stage, sir. She's coming back this afternoon." "What is she riding away over here to Calabasas for to take the stage, instead of riding straight into Sleepy Cat?" Once more McAlpin eyed him carefully. "The girl's been sick." "Sick?"
But this danger, which after all was a portion of his responsibility in freeing his stages from the depredations of the Calabasas gang, failed to make on him the moving impression of one moment of Nan Morgan's eyes. She could upset him completely, he was forced to admit, by a glance, a word, a gesture a mere turn of her head.
Nan paused at her uncle's ferocious command. She looked at him either really or feignedly surprised, her expression changing to one of indignation, and waited for him to speak. Since he did no more than glare angrily at her, Nan lifted her brows a little. "What do you want, uncle?" "Where did you go this afternoon?" "Over to Calabasas," she answered innocently. "Who'd you meet there?"
Master of the art of persuading and convincing, of hammering and pounding, of swaying the doubting and deciding the undecided, the strong-eyed mountain-man looked his best as he held the younger man under his spell. "Do you know," he repeated, "I suspect that Morgan Gap bunch are really behind and beneath a lot of this deviltry around Calabasas?
While her people were not all equally reprobate, some of them at least were not far better than the criminals of Calabasas. To conceive of her gambling publicly in Sleepy Cat was too much. He had even taken a horse, after cautiously but persistently haunting the streets for an hour, and ridden across the river away out on the mountain trail, hoping to catch a sight of her.
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