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The night after the big snake-killing Jefferson Creede picked up his blankets and moved quietly back to the ramada with Hardy. "Them locoed punchers have been skinnin' rattlers and stretchin' their hides," he said, "until the camp stinks like a buzzard roost.
That evening Jefferson Worth and his daughter sat alone under the arrow weed ramada facing the river. Moving her camp chair closer in the dusk so close that, reaching out she laid her warm young hand on the hand of her father Barbara said in a low tone: "Daddy, I wish you would tell me all about this South Central District business." She felt the slim nervous fingers move uneasily.
He pulled down his hat, swung dexterously up on Bat Wings and galloped away down the valley, waving his hand at the barred window as he passed. Long after the clatter of hoofs had ceased Lucy stood in the shade of the ramada, gazing pensively at the fire-blasted buttes and the tender blue mountains beyond.
In the round corral at Hidden Water there was roping and riding as Creede and Hardy gentled their prizes; in the cool evenings they rode forth along the Alamo, counting the cows as they came down to water or doctoring any that were sick; and at night they lay on their cots beneath the ramada telling long stories till they fell asleep.
When the great procession had drifted past, with its braying clamor, its dogs, its men on muleback and afoot, the herders with their carbines, the camp rustlers with their burros, belled and laden with water casks and kyacks of grub, the sheep owners hustling about with an energy that was almost a mania, Hardy sat beneath the ramada of the ranch house with dog-fighting Tommy in his lap and pondered deeply upon the spectacle.
It formed two sides of a hollow square; the other two sides were a high wall, and the Government freight-house respectively. The courtyard was partly shaded by a ramada and partly open to the hot sun. There was a chicken-yard in one corner of the inclosed square, and in the centre stood a rickety old pump, which indicated some sort of a well. Not a green leaf or tree or blade of grass in sight.
A broken row of cottonwoods and sycamores stretched along the farther side, following the broad, twisting bed of the sand wash where the last flood had ripped its way to the Salagua; and on the opposite side, close up against the base of the cliff, a flash of white walls and the shadow of a ramada showed where man had built his puny dwelling high in order to escape its fury.
I've had enough of this monkey business. Now gimme that gun, I tell ye, or I'll come back with more of 'em and take it!" He raised his voice to a roar, muffled to a beast-like hoarseness by his swollen jaws, and the ramada reverberated like a cavern as he bellowed out his challenge. Then the door was snatched violently open and Jefferson Creede stepped forth, looking black as hell itself.
Like a famine-stricken creature, the parched earth could not drink; its bone-dry dust set like cement beneath the too generous flood and refused to take it in and still the rain came down in sluicing torrents that never stayed or slackened. The cracked dirt of the ramada roof dissolved and fell away, and the stick frame leaked like a sieve.
He dragged up a cot as he spoke and was hurriedly arranging a bed when Lucy interposed. "Oh, but don't leave him out here!" she protested, "put him back in his own room, where I can take care of him." "All right," said Creede, and picking him up from his bare cot beneath the ramada he carried Hardy into the little room where he had lived before Lucy Ware came.
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