The Treasure Trail: A Romance of the Land of Gold and Sunshine

“Wild burro? Sure, that makes it simple till we rest up. You are one great little commissary sergeant.”

He noted that the pitch of the roof towards the face of the mountain carried the smoke in a sort of funnel to be sifted through high unseen crannies of shattered rock above. All was dark in the end of the gallery, but a perceptible draught from the portal bore the smoke upward.

“It’s too good to be true,” he decided, looking it over. “I’m chewing bacon and it tastes natural, but I’m betting with myself that this is a dream, and I’ll wake up in the dope pond with my mouth full of sulphur water.”

The girl watched him gravely, and ate sparingly, though parched corn had been her only sustenance through the trail of the dreadful night. Her poor sandals were almost cut from her feet, and even while jesting at the unreality of it all, Kit was making mental note of her needs–the wild burro would at least provide green hide sandals for her until better could be found, and she had earned the best.

He was amazed at her keenness. She did not seem to think, but instinctively to feel her way to required knowledge, caring for herself in the desert as a fledgling bird tossed by some storm from the home nest. He remembered there were wild burros in the Sonora hills, but that she should have already located one on this most barren of mountains was but another unbelievable touch to the trail of enchantment, and after a century of lost lives and treasure in the search for the Indian mine, to think that this Indian stray, picked up on a desolate trail, should have been the one to know that secret and lead him to it!

“Other times you have been here?” he asked as he poured coffee in a tin for Miguel, and dug out the last box of crackers from the grub pack.

“Once I come, one time, and it was to make prayer here. It is mine to know, but not my mother, not other peoples, only the father of me and me. If I die then he show the trail to other one, not if I live. That is how.”

“He surely picked the right member of his honorable family,” decided Kit. “Only once over the trail, once?”

“I knowing it long before I see it,” she explained gravely. “The father of me make that trail in the sand for my eyes when I am only little. I make the same for him in a game to play. When I make every turn right, and name the place, and never forget–then he bring me, for it is mine to know.”

“Sufferin’ cats!” muttered Rhodes, eyeing her in wonder. “The next time I see an Indian kid playing in the sand, I’ll linger on the trail and absorb wisdom!”

“Come,” she said, “you not seeing the one enchant look, the–how you say?–the not believe look.”

“Well, take it from me, Cinderella, I’m seeing not believe things this very now,” announced Kit, giving a fond look towards that comforting gleam of yellow metal bedding flecks of quartz. “I see it, but will have to sleep, and wake up to find it in the same place before I can believe what I think I see.”

With the food and drink for Miguel in his hands he had followed the girl through the shadowed gallery of the slanting smoke-stained roof. His eyes were mainly directed to the rock floor lest he stumble and spill the precious coffee; thus he gave slight thought to the little ravine up which she had led him to the cave which was also a mine.

But as he stepped out into the sunlight she stood looking up into his face with almost a smile, the first he had seen in her wistful tragic eyes. Then she lifted her hand and pointed straight out, and the “enchant look,” the “not believe” look was there! He stared as at a mirage for an incredulous moment, and then whispered, “Great God of the Desert!”

For a little space, a few rods only, the mountain dipped steeply, and trickling water from above fell in little cascades to lower levels, where a great jagged wall of impregnable granite arose as a barrier along the foot of the mountain.

But he was above the sharp outline of the huge saw with the jagged granite teeth, and between the serrated edges he could look far across the yellow-gray reaches of sand and desert growths. Far and wide was the “not believe” look, to the blue phantom-like peaks on the horizon, but between the two ranges was a white line with curious dots drifting and whirling like flies along it, and smoke curling up, and–

Then it was he uttered the incredulous cry, for he was indeed viewing the thing scarce to be believed.

He was looking across the great Rancho Soledad, and the white line against the sand was the wall of the old mission where the vaqueros were herding a band of horses into the great quadrangle of the one-time patio turned into a corral since the buildings on three sides had melted down again into mother earth.

He remembered riding around these lines of the old arches seeking trace of that door of the legend,–the door from which the aliso tree of the mine could be seen,–and there was nowhere a trace of a door.

“Queer that every other part of the prospect developed according to specifications and not the door,” he grumbled whimsically. “Cinderella, why have you hid the door in the wall from me?”

She looked around uncertainly, not understanding.

“No portal but it,” she said with a movement of her head towards the great slab forming a pointed arch against the mountain and shielding the unbelievable richness there, “also El Alisal, the great tree, is gone. This was the place of it; the old ones tell my father it was as chief of the trees and stand high to be seen. The sky fire took it, and took the padres that time they make an altar in this place.”

“Um,” assented Kit, noting traces of ancient charcoal where the aliso tree had grown great in the moisture of the spring before lightning had decided its tragic finish, “a great storm it must have been to send sky fire enough to kill them all.”

“Yes,” said Tula quietly,–“also there was already another shrine at this place, and the gods near.”

He glanced at her quickly and away.

“Sure,” he agreed, “sure, that’s how it must have been. They destroyed the aliso and there was no other landmark to steer by. White men might find a thousand other dimples in the range but never this one, the saw-tooth range below us has the best of them buffaloed. Come along, Señorita Aladdin, and help me with the guardian of the treasure. We’ve got to look after Miguel, and then start in where the padres left off. And you might do a prayer stunt or two at the shrine you mentioned. We need all the good medicine help you can evoke.”

As they approached the pool where the faintest mist drifted above the water warm from hidden fires of the mountain, Kit halted before he quite reached the still form beside the yucca, and, handing the food and drink to the girl, he went forward alone.

He was puzzled afterward as to why he had done that, for no fold of the garment was disturbed, nothing visible to occasion doubt, yet he bent over and lifted the cover very gently. The face of Miguel was strangely gray and there was no longer sign of breath. The medicine of the sacred pool had given him rest, but not life.

He replaced the blanket and turned to the girl;–the last of the guardians of the shrine of the red gold.

“Little sister,” he said, “Miguel grew tired of the trails of a hard land. He has made his choice to go asleep here in the place where you tell me the gods are near. He does not want us to have sad hearts, for he was very sad and very tired, and he will not need food, Tula.”

Her eyes filled with tears, but she made no reply, only unbound her hair as she had seen mourning women do, and seated herself apart, her face hidden in her arms.

“No one is left to mourn but me, and I mourn!” she half chanted. “I say it for the mother of me, and for my sister, that the ghosts may listen. Happily he is going now from hard trails! He has chosen at this place! Happily he has chosen, and only we are sad. No debt is ours to pay at this place; he has chosen–and a life is paid at El Alisal! Happily he will find the trail of the birds from this place, and the trail of the clouds over the high mountain. No one is left to mourn but me; and I mourn!”

Rhodes understood no word of her lamentations, chanted now loudly, now lowly, at intervals hour after hour that day. He set grimly to work digging a grave in the lower part of the ravine, gathering dry grass for lining as best he could to make clear to the girl that no lack of care or honor was shown the last man of Cajame’s stock.

The work took most of the day, for he carried stone and built a wall around the grave and covered it with slatelike slabs gathered from a shattered upheaval of long ago.

Tula watched all this gravely, and with approval, for she drew with her finger the mark of the sun symbol on one of the slabs.

“It is well to make that mark,” she said, “for the sons of Cajame were priests of the sun. The sign is on the great rock of the trail, and it is theirs.”

With the chisel he carved the symbol as she suggested, glad to do anything for the one mourner for the dead man who had offered the treasure of the desert to him.

“That is how he made choice,” she said when it was marked plainly. “Me, I think he was leading us on the night trail to this place–I think so. He is here to guard the gold of El Alisal for you. That is how it will be. He has made choice.”

Kit got away by himself to think over the unexpected situation. The girl climbed to a higher point, seated herself, and continued her chant of mourning. He knew she was following, as best she knew, the traditional formalities of a woman for the death of a chief. He found himself more affected by that brave fatalistic recital, now loud and brave, now weirdly slow and tender, than if she had given way to tempests of tears. A man could comfort and console a weeping stray of the desert, but not a girl who sat with unbound hair under the yucca and called messages to the ghosts until the sun,–a flaming ball of fire,–sank beyond the far purple hills.

And that was the first day of many days at the hidden treasure place of the red gold.

CHAPTER XI

GLOOM OF BILLIE

The return of Captain Pike on Kit’s horse was a matter of considerable conjecture at Granados, but the old prospector was so fagged that at first he said little, and after listening to the things Billie had to tell him–he said less.

“That explains the curious ways of the Mexicans as I reached the border,” he decided. “They’d look first at the horse, then at me, but asked no questions, and told me nothing. Queer that no word reached us about Singleton! No, it isn’t either. We never crossed trails with any from up here. There’s so much devilment of various sorts going on down there that a harmless chap like Singleton wouldn’t be remembered.”

“Conrad’s down at Magdalena now, but we seldom know how far he ranges. Sometimes he stays at the lower ranch a week at a time, and he might go on to Sinaloa for all we know. He seems always busy and is extremely polite, but I gave him the adobe house across the arroya after Papa Phil–went. I know he has the Mexicans thinking Kit Rhodes came back for that murder; half of them believe it!”

“Well, I reckon I can prove him an alibi if it’s needed. I’ll go see the old judge.”

“He’ll tell you not to travel at night, or alone, if you know anything,” she prophesied. “That’s what he tells me. To think of old Rancho Granados coming to that pass! We never did have trouble here except a little when Apaches went on the warpath before my time, and now the whole border is simmering and ready to boil over if anyone struck a match to it. The judge hints that Conrad is probably only one cog in the big border wheel, and they are after the engineer who turns that wheel, and do you know you haven’t told me one word of Kit Rhodes, or whether he’s alive or dead!”

“Nothing to tell! We didn’t find it, and he took the back trail with an Indian girl and her daddy, and–”

“An–Indian girl?”

“Yes, a queer little kid who was in a lot of trouble. Her father was wounded in one of the fracases they have down there every little while. Nary one of us could give an address when we took different trails, for we didn’t know how far we’d be allowed to travel–the warring factions are swarming and troublesome over the line.”

“Well, if a girl could stand the trail, it doesn’t look dangerous.”

“Looks are deceptive, child,–and this isn’t just any old girl! It’s a rare bird, it’s tougher than whalebone and possessed of a wise little devil. She froze to Kit as a compadre at first chance. He headed back to Mesa Blanca. I reckon they’d make it,–barring accidents.”

“Mesa Blanca? That’s the Whitely outfit?”

“Um!” assented Pike, “but I reckon Whitely’s hit the trail by now. There’s no real profit in raising stock for the warriors down there; each band confiscates what he needs, and gives a promissory note on an empty treasury.”

“Well, the attraction must be pretty strong to hold him down there in spite of conditions,” said Billie gloomily.

“Attraction? Sure. Kit’s gone loco on that attraction,” agreed the old prospector, and then with a reminiscent light in his tired old eyes he added, “I reckon there’s no other thing so likely to snare a man on a desert trail. You see, Billie-child, it’s just as if the great God had hid a treasure in the beginning of the world to stay hid till the right lad ambled along the trail, and lifted the cover, and when a fellow has youth, and health and not a care in the world, the search alone is a great game–And when he finds it!–why, Billie, the dictionary hasn’t words enough to tell the story!”

“No–I–I reckon not,” said his listener in a small voice, and when he looked around to speak to her again she had disappeared, and across the patio Doña Luz was coming towards him in no good humor.

“How is it that poor little one weeps now when you are returned, and not at other times?” she demanded. “Me, I have my troubles since that day they find the Don Filipe shot dead,–Jesusita give him rest! That child is watching the Sonora trail and waiting since that day, but no tears until you are come. I ask you how is the way of that?”

Captain Pike stared at her reflectively.

“You are a bringer of news, likewise a faithful warden,” he observed. “I’m peaceably disposed, and not wise to your lingo. Billie and me were talking as man to man, free and confidential, and no argument. There were no weeps that I noticed. What’s the reason why?”

“The saints alone know, and not me!” she returned miserably. “I think she is scared that it was the Señor Rhodes who shooting Don Filipe, the vaqueros thinking that! But she tells no one, and she is unhappy. Also there is reason. That poor little one has the ranchos, but have you hear how the debts are so high all the herds can never pay? That is how they are saying now about Granados and La Partida, and at the last our señorita will have no herds, and no ranchos, and no people but me. Madre de Dios! I try to think of her in a little adobe by the river with only frijoles in the dinner pot, and I no see it that way. And I not seeing it other way. How you think?”

“I don’t, it’s too new,” confessed Pike. “Who says this?”

“The Señor Henderson. I hear him talk with Señor Conrad, who has much sorrow because the Don Filipe made bad contracts and losing the money little and little, and then the counting comes, and it is big, very big!”

“Ah! the Señor Conrad has much sorrow, has he?” queried Pike, “and Billie is getting her face to the wall and crying? That’s queer. Billie always unloaded her troubles on me, and you say there was none of this weeping till I came back?”

“That is so, señor.”

“Cause why?”

“Quien sabe? She was making a long letter to Señor Rhodes in Sonora,–that I know. He sends no word, so–I leave it to you, señor, it takes faith and more faith when a man is silent, and the word of a killing is against him.”

“Great Godfrey, woman! He never got a letter, he knows nothing of a killing. How in hell–” Then the captain checked himself as he saw the uselessness of protesting to Doña Luz. “Where’s Billie?”

Billie was perched on a window seat in the sala, her eyes were more than a trifle red, and she appeared deeply engrossed in the pages of a week-old country paper.

“I see here that Don José Perez of Hermosillo is to marry Doña Dolores Terain, the daughter of the general,” she observed impersonally. “He owns Rancho Soledad, and promises the Sonora people he will drive the rebel Rotil into the sea, and it was but yesterday Tia Luz was telling me of his beautiful wife, Jocasta, who was only a little mountain girl when he rode through her village and saw her first. She is still alive, and it looks to me as if all men are alike!”

“More or less,” agreed Pike amicably, “some of us more, some of us less. Doña Dolores probably spells politics, but Doña Jocasta is a wildcat of the sierras, and I can’t figure out any harmonious days for a man who picks two like that.”

“He doesn’t deserve harmony; no man does who isn’t true–isn’t true,” finished Billie rather lamely.

“Look here, honey child,” observed Pike, “you’ll turn man hater if you keep on working your imagination. Luz tells me you are cranky against Kit, and that the ranches are tied up in business knots tighter than I had any notion of, so you had better unload the worst you can think of on me; that’s what I’m here for. What difference do the Perez favorites make to our young lives? Neither Dolores nor Jocasta will help play the cards in our fortunes.”

Wherein Captain Pike was not of the prophets. The wells of Sonora are not so many but that he who pitches his tent near one has a view and greetings of all drifting things of the desert, and the shadowed star of Doña Jocasta of the south was leading her into the Soledad wilderness forsaken of all white men but one.

CHAPTER XII

COVERING THE TRAIL

Each minute of the long days, Rhodes worked steadily and gaily, picking out the high grade ore from the old Indian mine, and every possible night he and the burro and Tula made a trip out to the foot of the range, where they buried their treasure against the happy day when they could go out of the silent desert content for the time with what gold they could carry in secret to the border.

For two days he had watched the Soledad ranch house rather closely through the field glass, for there was more activity there than before; men in groups rode in who were not herding. He wondered if it meant a military occupation, in which case he would need to be doubly cautious when emerging from the hidden trail.

The girl worked as he worked. Twice he had made new sandals for her, and also for himself in order to save his boots so that they might at least be wearable when he got among people. All plans had been thought out and discussed until no words would be needed between them when they separated. She was to appear alone at Palomitas with a tale of escape from the slavers, and he was carefully crushing and mashing enough color to partly fill a buckskin bag to show as the usual fruits of a prospect trip from which he was returning to Mesa Blanca after exhausting grub stake and shoe leather.

The things of the world had stood still for him during that hidden time of feverish work. He scarcely dared try to estimate the value of the ore he had dug as honey from a hollow tree, but it was rich–rich! There were nuggets of pure gold, assorted as to their various sizes, while he milled and ground the quartz roughly, and cradled it in the water of the brook.

By the innocent aid of Baby Bunting, two wild burros of the sierra had been enticed within reach for slaughter, and, aside from the food values, they furnished green hide which under Kit’s direction, Tula deftly made into bags for carrying the gold.

All activities during the day were carefully confined within a certain radius, low enough in the little cañon to run no risk in case any inquisitive resident of Soledad should study the ranges with a field glass, though Kit had not seen one aside from his own since he entered Sonora. And he used his own very carefully every morning and evening on the wide valley of Soledad.

“Something doing down there, sister,” he decided, as they were preparing for the last trail out. “Riders who look like cavalry, mules, and some wagons–mighty queer!”

Tula came over and stood beside him expectantly. He had learned that a look through the magic glasses was the most coveted gift the camp could grant to her, and it had become part of the regular routine that she stood waiting her turn for the wide look, the “enchant look,” as she had called it that first morning. It had become a game to try to see more than he, and this time she mentioned as he had, the wagons, and mules, and riders. And then she looked long and uttered a brief Indian word of surprise.

“Beat me again, have you?” queried Kit good humoredly. “What do you find?”

“A woman is there, in that wagon,–sick maybe. Also one man is a padre; see you!”

Kit took the glasses and saw she was right. A man who looked like a priest was helping a woman from a wagon, she stumbled forward and then was half carried by two men towards the house.

“Not an Indian woman?” asked Kit, and again her unchildlike mind worked quickly.

“A padre does not bow his head to help Indian woman. Caballeros do not lift them up.”

“Well I reckon Don José Perez is home on a visit, and brought his family. A queer time! Other ranch folks are getting their women north over the border for safety.”

“Don José not bring woman to Soledad–ever. He take them away. His men take them away.”

It was the first reference she had made to the slavers since they had entered the cañon, though she knew that each pile of nuggets was part of the redemption money for those exiles of whom she did not speak.

But she worked tirelessly until Kit would stop her, or suggest some restful task to vary the steady grind of carrying, pounding, or washing the quartz. He had ordered her to make two belts, that each of them might carry some of the gold hidden under their garments. She had a nugget tied in a corner of her manta, and other small ones fastened in her girdle, while in the belt next her body she carried all he deemed safe to weight her with, probably five pounds. At any hint of danger she would hide the belt and walk free.

His own belt would carry ten pounds without undue bulkiness. And over three hundred pounds of high grade gold was already safely hidden near the great rock with the symbols of sun and rain marking its weathered surface.

“A fair hundred thousand, and the vein only scratched!” he exulted. “I was sore over losing the job on Billie’s ranch,–but gee! this looks as if I was knocked out in the cold world to reach my good luck!”

In a blue dusk of evening they left the camp behind and started over the trail, after Tula had carefully left fragments of food on the tomb of Miguel, placed there for the ghosts who are drawn to a comrade.

Kit asked no questions concerning any of her tribal customs, since to do so would emphasize the fact that they were peculiar and strange to him, and the Indian mind, wistfully alert, would sense that strangeness and lose its unconsciousness in the presence of an alien. So, when she went, after meals, to offer dregs of the soup kettle or bones of the burro, she often found a bunch of desert blossoms wilting there in the heat, and these tributes left by Kit went far to strengthen her confidence. It was as if Miguel was a live partner in their activities, never forgotten by either. So they left him on guard, and turned their faces toward the outer world of people.

Knowing more than he dare tell the girl his mind was considerably occupied with that woman at Soledad, for military control changed over night in many a province of Mexico in revolutionary days, and the time at the hidden mine might have served for many changes.

Starlight and good luck was on the trail for them, and at earliest streak of dawn they buried their treasure, divided their dried burro meat, and with every precaution to hide the trail where they emerged from the gray sierra, they struck the road to Mesa Blanca.

Until full day came Tula rode the burro, and slipped off at a ravine where she could walk hidden, on the way to Palomitas.

“Buntin’,” said Kit, watching her go, “we’ll have pardners and pardners in our time, but we’ll never find one more of a thoroughbred than that raggedy Indian witch-child of ours.”