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Page 4
"Lucky strike!" observed the prospector. "I was down to my last
match." And, gathering some mesquit brush for fuel, and rubbing
a dead branch into tinder, he drew out a knife and, rapidly and
repeatedly striking the back of its blade with the flint,
produced a stream of sparks, which fell on the tinder. Blowing
the while, he started a flame. When the fire was ready the man
shook his canteen. "Precious little drink left," he said. "I
wish that potsherd carried water as the flint-chip does fire.
However, there's lots of cactus around here, and they're natural
water-jars. My knife may get me a drink out of the desert's
thorns, as well as kindle a fire from its stones. And right
here's my watermelon, the bisnaga, the first one I've found in
months," he exclaimed, going over to the edge of the cliff, above
the level of which peered the fat head of a cactus covered with
spines that were barbed like a fish-hook. Its short tap-root was
fixed in a crevice a few feet below the parapet. Lying on the
edge of the cliff, the man sliced off the top of the cactus, and
began jabbing into its interior, breaking down the fibrous walls
of the water-cells, of which the top-heavy plant is almost
entirely composed. In a few moments he arose.
"Now I can empty my canteen in the coffee-pot, sure of a fresh
supply of water by the time I am ready to mosey along."
He filled the pot, set it on the fire, and then pressed the
uncorked and empty canteen down into the macerated interior of
the bisnaga.
While his coffee was boiling, the prospector continued his
examination of the fortification, beginning, in the manner of his
kind, with the more minute "signs," and ending with what, to a
tourist, would have been the first and only subject of
observation--the view. On the inner side of the large boulder in
the wall he discerned, the faint outline of a cross, painted with
red ochre.
Scraping with his pick beneath the rock, to see if the emblem was
the sign of hidden treasure or relic, he unearthed a rattlesnake.
Before it could strike, with a quick fling of his tool he sent
the reptile whirling high in the air toward the precipice. But
from the clump of cactus growth along the parapet arose a
sahuaro, with branching arms, and against this the snake was
flung. Wrapped around the thorny top by the momentum of the
cast, it hung, hissing and rattling with pain and hatred.
The prospector looked up at the impaled rattlesnake with a smile.
Reminiscences of Sunday-school flashed across his mind.
"Gee, I'm a regular Moses," he ejaculated. "First I bring water
from the face of the rock, and then I lift up the serpent in the
wilderness. The year I've spent in the mountains and desert seem
like forty to me, and now, at last, I have a sight of the
Promised Land. God, what a magnificent view!"
Dropping his pick, he stretched out his arms with instinctive
symbolization of the wide prospect, and expression of an exile's
yearning for his native land.
"Over there is God's country, sure enough," he continued, giving
the trite phrase a reverential tone, which he had not used in his
first expression of the name of Deity. "Thank Him, the parallel
with old Moses stops right here. Many a time I thought I would
never get out of the mountains alive, and that my grave would be
unmarked by so much as a boulder with a red cross upon it. But
now, before night, I'll be back in the States, and in three more
days at home on the ranch. I promised to return in a year, and
I'll make good to the hour. I sure did hate to leave that strike,
though, after all the hard luck I had been having. Sixty dollars
a day, and growing richer. But the last horn was blowing. No
tobacco, six matches, and nothing left of the bacon but rinds.
Well, the gold is there and the claim'll bring whatever I choose
to ask for it. And Echo shall have a home as good as Allen
Hacienda, and a ranch as fine as Bar One--yes, by God, it'll be
Bar None, my ranch!"
Out of the sea of molten air that stretched before him, that
nebulous chaos of quivering bars and belts of heated atmosphere
which remains above the desert as a memorial of the first stage
of the entire planet's existence, the imagination of the
prospector created a paradise of his own. There took shape
before his eyes a Mexican hacienda, larger and more beautiful
even than that of Echo's father, the beau-ideal of a home to his
limited fancy. And on the piazza in front, covered with
flowering vines, there stood awaiting him the slender figure of a
woman, with outstretched arms and dark eyes, tender with yearning
love.
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