The Treasure Trail

by Marah Ellis Ryan

  Tula moved ahead into the far shadows. He could see that beyond her somewhere a ray of light filtered blue, but he halted at the entrance, puzzled at the black roof where all the rock of the mountain was gray and white except where mineral streaks were of reds and russets and moldy greens. Then he put his hand up and touched the roof and understood. Soot from ancient fires was discernible on his hand, flakes of it fell to the floor, dry and black, scaling off under pressure. The scales were thick and very old, like blackened moss. He had seen blackened rock like that in other volcanic regions, but this was different.

  “It is here,” said Tula, and he followed the voice through a darker shadowed bit of the way, then through the ray of light, and then–––

  The first thing he saw was the raised hearth of a rather pretentious fireplace, or place of fire, for it resembled not at all the tiny little cooking hearth of desert Indians. A stone hatchet lay beside it, and, what was much more surprising, two iron instruments of white man’s manufacturing, a wedge and a long chisel.

  He picked up the chisel, weighed it in his hand, and looked at the girl. He was now becoming accustomed to the dim light and could see her eyes following his every movement with curious questioning. There was a tiny frowning wrinkle between her brows as if serious matters were being decided there.

  “It is here,” she said again. “Maybe someone dies when a white friend is shown the way––maybe I die, who knows?––but it is here––El Alisal of the gold of the rose!”

  She made a little gesture and moved aside, and the chisel fell to the stone floor with a clang as Kit shouted and dropped on his knees before an incredible thing in the gray wall.

  That upthrust of the rock wall had strange variety of color, and between the granite and the gray limestone there was a ragged rusty band of iron as a note of contrast to the sprinkling of glittering quartz catching the ray of light, but the quartz was sprinkled on a six inch band of yellow––not the usual quartz formation with dots of color, but a deep definite yellow held together by white crystals.

  “The red gold! it’s the red gold!” he said feeling the yellow surface instinctively.

  “Yes, señor, it is the red gold of El Alisal, and it is to you,” but her eyes were watching him hungrily as she spoke. And something of that pathetic fear penetrated his amazed mind, and he remembered.

  “No, Tula, only my share to me. I do the work, but the great share is to you, that it may buy back your mother from the slavers of the south.”

  “Also my sister,” said the girl, and for the first time she wept.

  “Come, come! This is the time for joy. The danger is gone, and we are at rest beside this––why, it’s a dream come true, the golden dream! Come, help me cook that we may be strong for the work.”

  She helped silently, fetching water and more sticks for the fire.

  There were many things to ask, but he asked no questions, only gazed between bites and sups at the amazing facts facing him.

  “I’ve seen ores and ores in my time, but nothing like this!” he exulted. “Why, I can ‘high grade’ mule loads of this and take it out without smelting,” and then he grinned at his little partner. “We just struck it in time,––meat is mighty near done.”

  “Plenty meat!” she said nodding her head wisely. “Burro, big burro, wild burro! I see track.”

  “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 see
king 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 11

  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, t
he 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?”