The Forbidden Trail Part 26

"How much?" asked Roger.

"Eight bits," she said.

Roger dropped a dollar into her slender brown palm. The squaw flashed white teeth at him and a younger woman pressed forward holding up an olla no bigger than a teacup, a duplicate in design of the one he had just bought.

"I'll take that for Felicia," he murmured. "How much?"

"Two bits."

He tossed her the quarter. "You make 'em camp up there?" asked the old squaw.

"Yes," replied Roger. "Come and call on us, ladies."

"We bring 'em baskets, maybe," replied the squaw.

Roger nodded and started the horses on, looking back from time to time for pure pleasure in the beauty of those scarlet fluttering capes.

They reached the camp about ten o'clock and were vociferously welcomed by Ernest, who, before taking the horses up to the corral, insisted on showing them his day's work.

"Nothing doing on the carpenter's bench," he said, flashing the "lightning bug" toward the site of the engine house. "Look here. d.i.c.k came over right after breakfast and we were hard at this all day."

All the lumber in the camp had been requisitioned to make adobe molds.

"We mixed the adobe with that clutter of broken hay that the gla.s.s came in," explained Ernest. "d.i.c.k says the Mexicans use stable sc.r.a.pings, but I couldn't stomach that. You see you just peg the boards up in the sand, a foot apart and pack them full of the adobe. That'll be the thickness of the house. Then when the strips are dried, we'll cut them the length we want. Two days more work will give us all we need."

"Vat a country!" exclaimed Gustav.

Ernest and Roger laughed. "I take it d.i.c.k is O. K. again," said Roger.

"Quite himself. Said Charley was used up, but she came down late this afternoon with Felicia and she said she was feeling fine. Felicia made those little bricks yonder. Charley has put her into overalls. She's simply ravishing in them."

"And how is your guest?" asked Roger. "I've been telling Schmidt about her. He's heard of Von Minden at Archer's. And it seems she outfitted there. Claimed to have come up from Phoenix and said she had an engagement with us."

"Well, she was invisible, practically until noon to-day. Then she brought her rocking chair here where d.i.c.k and I were at work and concentrated on us all the afternoon."

"Concentrated? Vat iss concentrated?" asked Gustav.

"Well, she rocks in the chair, holding the pink umbrella till d.i.c.k lashed it to the chair back for her. She keeps her eyes closed and doesn't speak, though she did explain that she was talking to her mother, who is on the seventh plane, concerning the successful erection of the engine house. d.i.c.k seems quite smitten by her. He gazes on her and gazes as if fascinated, then he goes off behind the living tent and laughs."

"My G.o.d, what a country!" groaned Roger.

"I've got a bed fixed up for you in the cook tent, Schmidt," said Ernest. "You'll be safe if none of Mrs. von Minden's spirit friends bother you. She told me that she heard them playing the accordion in the cook tent last night."

"I love music," was Schmidt's response, and the three men went laughing to bed. Roger wakened in the night but once. Through the open tent flap he beheld Mrs. von Minden rocking silently in the starlight before her tent.

"She's going to get on my nerves," he murmured and fell asleep again.

Dawn was just breaking over the mountains the next morning when Roger entered the cook tent. He was greeted by Gustav, who was purple with the cold but grinning cheerfully, and the smell of coffee.

"It vas not so soft, sleeping on Frau Nature's heart in the desert, nicht wahr!" he exclaimed. "Coyotes vere eating the garbage last night mit gulps and snortings and I slept not. It vas not the music I had been promised. So I make the breakfast early."

"I didn't sleep well myself the first night or two," said Roger. "Desert silence makes a lot of noise to a town-bred man. Hey!"--going to the door--"Ern! You lazy Dutchman! The new cook'll leave if you don't get up for your breakfast."

Gustav and Roger were half through the meal when Ernest appeared.

"Mud-pie making is hard work," he groaned, sliding stiffly onto the bench beside Roger.

"I certainly hate to make adobe brick when every day counts so," said Roger. "Let's use sheet iron."

"It'll be better to take d.i.c.k's advice," insisted Ernest. "He says the dust storms are frightful here and the heat worse. The adobe shelter will be grateful on many counts."

"Ve'll all vork hard," said Gustav, "and the 'dobe vill be up strong, before ve know it. Ven it is done, it is done good, and that is right. I vash the d.a.m.n dishes. You go make the mud mixing. Then I come."

"We're going to hate to let that chap go when his visit's up," said Roger, as he and Ernest began work on the adobe.

"Maybe we won't have to let him go," replied Ernest. "You stir the mess up, Rog, and I'll put it into the molds. d.i.c.k is going on with his grading, but he'll be over in a day or so and show us how to begin the house building."

"The trouble with you is, Ern, that you're flighty-minded. You're tired of making a Sun Plant and all excitement over building a mud house."

"I wouldn't have a single track mind like yours for a million dollars,"

returned Ernest cheerfully.

Roger grinned and presently began to whistle as he worked. Mrs. von Minden proved to be an exceedingly unexacting guest. After it was evident to her that her hosts had not the slightest intention of doing special cooking for her she did her own. She ate only two meals a day, preparing one at mid-morning and one at sundown. The remainder of the day she spent within her tent, reading or rocking in her chair, concentrating on the camp work. She seldom talked and then only on the matter of what she called Yogi-ism.

Gustav took a violent dislike to her and refused to work if she looked at him. Roger declared that on the next trip to town he was going to telegraph Phoenix and see if she had not escaped from an insane asylum. But Ernest only laughed.

"Poor old soul! She's not crazy except on her religion. Let her alone.

She's no expense and no trouble!"

"She gives me the w.i.l.l.i.e.s," insisted Roger. "I never knew before that I had a temperament."

"Gosh, I could have broken that to you twenty-five years ago," said Ernest. "Only I supposed obvious facts were as plain to you as to other people. Here she comes for her afternoon's work, bless her, pink umbrella, pink nighty and all. What a lucky dog Von Minden is."

Roger chuckled and joined Gustav, who moved hastily to continue his brick making back of the lady's chair.

Working so, he was facing the ranch and presently he saw Charley cross the alfalfa field to join d.i.c.k. A moment later, the two figures were following the team across the field. Next Felicia flashed down the trail, a tiny dot of blue, and shortly he saw d.i.c.k lift her to one of the horse's backs. Roger's mind harked back to old days. He recalled Charley's father giving her and him just such a ride over the fertile corn fields of home. And he pondered for a moment on the thing called fate.

There was a little hand that clung to his as he and Charley scuffled up the dusty road to the farm. There was d.i.c.k's ruddy boyish face, sternly disapproving. There was a childish treble, "I shall love Charley. She'll take such care of me as never was on sea nor land. Aunt May says so."

And finally there was the woman's voice. "Go home to bed now, or you won't be fit for work to-morrow. And that work is about the most important thing in this valley now."

And now, Charley drove a team over a desert field, while he--what was he doing after all? Roger rose abruptly and lighting his pipe began to stroll aimlessly around the camp. Was this dream that had worked itself into the very fiber of his nature worth while? The desert, shimmering in endless silence about him, seemed very far from that world of machinery that he had worshiped so long. Supposing that Charley did bring the desert to bearing. Supposing that he did harness the sun and start an empire to building in these barren wastes. To what avail?

Though his dream were the very foundation of their existence, men would fight here for the supremacy of riches, just as of old. And why not?

Through the welter of cut-throat striving man had won his intelligence.

Who was he to endeavor to lessen that compet.i.tion?

How restless, how discontented he had been for nearly ten years! Was he not missing the best of life and was not happiness the real goal of living? And did not men get the only real joy from wife and child? Did any work that did not focus round these two bring real content?

A sudden swelling of his heart, a sudden rush of blood through his brain, a sudden thrill of his lean strong body that seemed to extend to the very heart of the desert, brought Roger to pause in his walking. He gazed for a long moment at the little blue figure astride the horse, and at the tall figure in khaki beside d.i.c.k.

The March afternoon was hot but with a clear tang that was as exhilarating as winter frost. The range back of the ranch house was brown where the sky line shone clear. But the gashed and eroded sides of the mountains were filled with drifts of purple clouds that melted now in soft blue billows into the sky, now in ragged streams of crimson into canyons black in the distance. The little sounds of the camp were as nothing. The pygmy figures in the alfalfa field were infinitesimal. A new sense of the immensity of the universe poured into Roger's soul with devastating force and for the first time in his life Roger realized his own lack of importance.