The Girl Aviators on Golden Wings Part 20

But curiously enough the very hopelessness of their situation inspired in Peggy a far different feeling to the terror that had clutched at her heart a moment before. She was conscious of a swift tide of anger. In one of the figures she had recognized the renegade guide.

"Juan--you!" she exclaimed in tones in which scorn struggled with indignation.

The guide turned away. Even his effrontery wilted before the young girl's frank contempt. It was all clear enough to Peggy now.

Evidently, Juan had been bribed by these men to stay with the party till he had learned their plans, which he was then to betray to the band. For, in the moonlight Peggy had had no difficulty in recognizing the men whose conversation she had overheard at the National House.

There was the red-headed man, with his coa.r.s.e, bristling crop of hair, and the mustache like the stumpy bristles of an old tooth brush, the tall, dark young fellow with the red sash and the silver spurs, poor Peggy's "romantic brigand," and the hawk-nosed man with the drooping mustache, who had formed the red-headed one's companion on the train.

"Hearn of Red Bill Summers, I op-ine," shot out the man with the red hair in a voice that rasped like a file on rusty iron.

"I think so," rejoined Roy quietly, and Peggy rejoiced to hear her brother's calm, steady tones.

"Wall, I'm him. You treat me right and don't make no fuss an' we'll git along all right. If not--"

He paused significantly.

"Whar's Buck Bellew?"

The red-headed one gazed about him. From the shadows stepped Peggy's "romantic brigand."

"Buck, you put a couple of half hitches about them kids."

"The gal, too?" hesitated the silver-spurred one addressed as "Buck."

"Sure. Didn't I tell yer to."

"Wa-al, I won't. That's flat. I ain't never persecuted women folks an' I ain't goin' ter start now."

Red Bill Summers paused and then grumbled out:

"All right, then. She kin ride the greaser's horse. Juan, you yellow-skinned bronco, go git ther ponies."

Juan flitted off and presently reappeared, leading half a dozen wiry little ponies. In the meantime the remainder of the band had gathered about Roy and Peggy, regarding them with frank curiosity.

Except that their weapons were taken away from them no harm was offered them however, and Roy had not, so far, even been tied up.

"This isn't a bit like the story-book hold-ups", thought Peggy. "If it wasn't for their rough clothes and fierce looks these men wouldn't be so very different from anyone else."

"Now, miss, I'll help you to mount. Sorry we ain't got a side saddle, but we don't hev much use fer such contraptions with our outfit."

It was the red-sashed man speaking. He held out a stirrup for Peggy, and the girl, perforce, mounted the pony. She caught herself wondering as she did so what her friends at home in the East would have thought if they could have seen her at the moment. It was Roy's turn next. Brother and sister were permitted to ride side by side. Juan, to Peggy's secret satisfaction, was compelled to give up his burro to one of the outlaws while he tramped along.

"Serves him right," thought the girl.

The man whose pony Roy bestrode leaped nimbly into the saddle behind Buck Bellew.

Hardly a word was spoken, but their captors closed in silently about the boy and the girl prisoners.

"Death Valley," ordered Red Bill briefly, swinging himself into the saddle. Peggy guessed that the sinisterly named place must be their destination.

Amid the maze of pinnacles, minarets and spires of the desert range the hors.e.m.e.n forged slowly forward. From the fact that they traveled toward the newly risen moon Peggy surmised that their course lay to the eastward . But presently it shifted and they began moving north.

"Where can we be going?" Peggy found an opportunity to exchange a word or two with Roy. Owing to the rough nature of the ground their rear guard had, of necessity, fallen back a bit.

"No idea, sis. One thing seems certain, however, they don't mean to harm us, at least not yet."

The rear guard closed up again, necessitating silence once more.

All night they traveled, ambling at the plainsman's "trotecito" when opportunity offered, and then again slacking to a crawling walk where the baked ground grew uneven and criss-crossed with gullies and arroyos.

At last, when Peggy's head was beginning to sway with exhaustion, the eastern sky began to grow gray. The coming day lit up the desert wanly, as if it had been a leaden sea. But with the uprising of the sun the familiar glaring white of the alkali blazed out once more. They had left the pinnacled hills and were now traveling over undulating country overgrown with rough brush. It was a sad, drab color, and smelled pungently where the ponies' hooves trampled it.

But presently they broke into a different country. It was flatter than that which they had already traversed and, if possible, more desolate, sun-bleached and parched. The ponies stumbled over loose shale, raising clouds of suffocating dust that tingled in the nostrils. Down they rode into its basin-like formation. All about the depression arose the craggy, stripped hills. Their jagged peaks seemed to shut out the rest of the world and compress the universe into this baked, burning basin in the desert.

Across the bottom of it the alkali swept in little vagrant puffs, proceeding from the gaps of the hills. It piled in little gray heaps like ashes. The air hung steady and still as a plumb line dropped from the sky.

"We've got ter git across hyar muy p.r.o.nto, (very quickly)," grunted the red-headed man, whose perspiring, fat face was coated gray with dust and alkali. "What a hole fer white men ter be in."

"It's like a busted heat-blister on a big piecrust," commented Buck Bellew, whose jauntiness had wilted. His red sash was of a piece now with the rest of his garments-a dirty, dull gray.

After a while a hot wind sprang up. It felt like the heated blast from an opened oven door. It tore in mad witch-dances about the dismal basin, sending whirling dust-devils dancing over that dreary place.

They spread, gyrated, swelled to giant mushroom shape, and died down in a monstrous ballet. Peggy felt her senses slipping under the strain. But she kept a tight rein on herself.

"I must brace up for Roy's sake," she thought.

She stole a glance at her brother. Roy, despite his plight and the dust which enveloped him, was tight-lipped and defiant. No sign of a breakdown appeared on his features, for which Peggy breathed a prayer of thanks.

"After all, G.o.d is near us even in this dreadful place," she thought, and the reflection comforted her strangely.

Across the bottom of the bowl men and animals crawled like flies round the base of a pudding basin. From time to time the water kegs on the back of Juan's burro were sparingly tapped. At such times Buck Bellew never failed to be at Peggy's side with a tin cup of the warm, unpalatable stuff. But at least it was liquid, and Peggy thanked the man with as cheerful an air as she could a.s.sume.

But, unending as the progress across the red hot depression seemed to be, it came to an end at last, and the ponies began to climb the steep walls on the further side. At the summit, a surprise was in store for them--for Peggy and Roy that is. To the others the place was evidently familiar. Some rough huts, half of canvas and half of brush, showed that it had long been used as a rendezvous by the band.

The spot was a perfect little amphitheatre in the barren hills.

Green gra.s.s, actual green gra.s.s, covered its floor and wild oats grew on the hillsides in fair plent.i.tude. From the further end of the enclosed oasis arose clouds of steam which they afterwards learned came from boiling hot springs. But the waters of the hot springs soon lost their heat, and in the course of years had watered this little spot till it literally--in comparison with its surroundings--blossomed like the rose.

Red Bill Summers threw himself from his pony and, lying full length beside the creek that trickled through the valley from the springs above, he reveled in the water. When he had drunk his fill he stood erect.

"Wa-al," he drawled, running his hand through his stubbly red crop, "I reckon we're home again."

CHAPTER XVII

A FRIEND IN NEED

From one of the huts at the upper end of the miniature valley an odd figure emerged. It was garbed in a blue blouse and loose trousers of the same color. Embroidered slippers without heels caused a curious shuffling gait in the newcomer. As he drew closer Peggy and Roy perceived that he was a Chinaman. His queue was coiled upon the top of his skull, giving a queer expression to his stolid features, over which the yellow skin was stretched as tightly as parchment on a drum.