the bandit. Johnny, stretched gracefully on the sand, passed from
“Ultimo Amor” to “Fluvia de Oro,” and then to “Noches de Algeria,”
playing languidly.
Every one was busy with his own thoughts. Mrs. Tellamantez was thinking
of the square in the little town in which she was born; of the white
church steps, with people genuflecting as they passed, and the
round-topped acacia trees, and the band playing in the plaza. Ray
Kennedy was thinking of the future, dreaming the large Western dream of
easy money, of a fortune kicked up somewhere in the hills,—an oil well,
a gold mine, a ledge of copper. He always told himself, when he accepted
a cigar from a newly married railroad man, that he knew enough not to
marry until he had found his ideal, and could keep her like a queen. He
believed that in the yellow head over there in the sand he had found his
ideal, and that by the time she was old enough to marry, he would be
able to keep her like a queen. He would kick it up from somewhere, when
he got loose from the railroad.
Thea, stirred by tales of adventure, of the Grand Canyon and Death
Valley, was recalling a great adventure of her own. Early in the summer
her father had been invited to conduct a reunion of old frontiersmen, up
in Wyoming, near Laramie, and he took Thea along with him to play the
organ and sing patriotic songs. There they stayed at the house of an old
ranchman who told them about a ridge up in the hills called Laramie
Plain, where the wagon-trails of the Forty-niners and the Mormons were
still visible. The old man even volunteered to take Mr. Kronborg up into
the hills to see this place, though it was a very long drive to make in
one day. Thea had begged frantically to go along, and the old rancher,
flattered by her rapt attention to his stories, had interceded for her.
They set out from Laramie before daylight, behind a strong team of
mules. All the way there was much talk of the Forty-niners. The old
rancher had been a teamster in a freight train that used to crawl back
and forth across the plains between Omaha and Cherry Creek, as Denver
was then called, and he had met many a wagon train bound for California.
He told of Indians and buffalo, thirst and slaughter, wanderings in
snowstorms, and lonely graves in the desert.
The road they followed was a wild and beautiful one. It led up and up,
by granite rocks and stunted pines, around deep ravines and echoing
gorges. The top of the ridge, when they reached it, was a great flat
plain, strewn with white boulders, with the wind howling over it. There
was not one trail, as Thea had expected; there were a score; deep
furrows, cut in the earth by heavy wagon wheels, and now grown over with
dry, whitish grass. The furrows ran side by side; when one trail had
been worn too deep, the next party had abandoned it and made a new trail
to the right or left. They were, indeed, only old wagon ruts, running
east and west, and grown over with grass. But as Thea ran about among
the white stones, her skirts blowing this way and that, the wind brought
to her eyes tears that might have come anyway. The old rancher picked up
an iron ox-shoe from one of the furrows and gave it to her for a
keepsake. To the west one could see range after range of blue mountains,
and at last the snowy range, with its white, windy peaks, the clouds
caught here and there on their spurs. Again and again Thea had to hide
