The Bells of San Juan by Jackson Gregory (notion reading list txt) 📕

Whereupon Brocky Lane grew promptly crimson and tongue-tied.

"And now the view, Mr. Norton, and I am ready to go."

He led the way to the outer ledge from which last night they had entered the cave.

"In daylight you can see half round the world from here," he said as they stood with their backs to the rock. "Now you can get an idea of what it's like."

Below her was the chasm formed by these cliffs standing sheer and fronting other tall cliffs looming blackly, the stars beginning to fade in the sky above them. Norton pushed a stone outward with his boot; she heard it strike, rebound, strike again . . . and then there was silence; when the falling stone reached the bottom no sound came back to tell her how far it had dropped.

Turning a little to look southward, she saw the cliffs standing farther and farther back on each side so that the eye might travel between them and out over the lower slopes and the distant stretches of level land which, more now than ever, seemed a great limitless sea. The stars were paling rapidly; the first glint of the new day was in the air, the world lay shadowy and silent and lifeless, softened in the seeming, but, as in the daytime, slumbrous under an atmosphere of brooding mystery.

"When you told me last night . . . when you put your rope around me and said that I might fall half a dozen feet. . . ."

"Had we fallen it would have been a hundred feet, many a time," he said quietly. "But I knew we wouldn't fall. And," looking into her face with an expression in his eyes which the shadows hid, "I shouldn't have sought to minimize the danger to you had I known you as well as I think I know you now."

"Thank you," she said lightly. But she was conscious of a warm pleasurable glow throughout her entire being. It was good to live life in the open, it was good to stand upon the cliff tops with a man like Roderick Norton, it was good to have such a man speak thus.

Five minutes later they were making their way down the cliffs toward the horses.

Here and there throughout the great stretches of the sun-smitten southwest are spots which still remain practically unknown, wherein men come seldom or not at all, where no man cares to tarry. Barren mountains that are blistering hot, sucked dry long ago of their last vestige of moisture; endless drifts of sand where the silent animal life is scanty, where fanged cactus and stubborn mesquite fight their eternal battles for life; mesas and lomas little known, shunned by humanity. True, men have been here, some few poking into the dust of ancient ruins, more seeking minerals, and now and then one, fleeing the law, to be followed relentlessly by such as Roderick Norton. And yet there is the evidence, if one looks, that this desolate, shunned land once had its teeming tribes and its green fields.

Virginia and Roderick, having made their hazardous way down the cliffs and to their horses in silence, found their tongues loosened as they rode westward in the soft dawn. Virginia put her questions and he, as best he could, answered them. She asked eagerly of the old cliff-dwellers and he shrugged his shoulders. Aztecs, were they? Toltecs? What? Quien sabe! They were a people of mystery who had left behind them a silence like that of the desert wastes themselves. Whence they came, where they went, and why, must long remain questions with many answers and therefore none at all. But he could tell her a few things of the ancient civilization . . . and a civilization it truly was . . . and of the signs left for posterity to puzzle over.

They had builded cities, and the ruins of their pueblos still stand scattered across the weary, scorched land; they constructed mile after mile of aqueducts whose lines are followed to-day by reclamation engineers; they irrigated and cultivated their lands; they made abodes high up on the mountains, dwelling in caves, enlarging their dwellings, shaping homes and fortresses and lookouts. And just so long as the mountains themselves last, will men come now and then into such places as that wherein Jim Galloway's rifles lay hidden.

"I have lived in this part of the world all but two or three years of my life," said Norton at the end, "and yet I never heard of these particular caves until a very few days ago. I don't believe that there are ten people living who know of them; so Galloway, hiding his stuff out there was playing just as safe as a man can play--when he plays the game crooked, anyway."

"But won't he guess something when he misses Moraga?"

"I don't think so." Norton shook his head. "Tom Cutter and Brocky made Moraga talk. His job was to keep an eye on this end, but he was commissioned also to make a trip over to the county line. The first thing Jim Galloway will hear will be that Moraga got drunk and into a scrape and was taken in by Sheriff Roberts. Then I think that Galloway himself will slip out of San Juan himself some dark night and climb the cliffs to make sure. When he finds everything absolutely as it was left, when time passes and nothing is done, I think he will replace Moraga with another man and figure that everything is all right. Why shouldn't he?"

From Galloway and Moraga they got back to a discussion of the ancient peoples of the desert, venturing surmise for surmise, finding that their stimulated fancies winged together, daring to construct for themselves something of the forgotten annals of a forgotten folk who, perhaps, were living in walled cities while old Egypt was building her pyramids. Then, abruptly, in a patch of tall mesquite, Norton reined in his horse and stopped.

"You understand why I must leave you here," he said. "Yonder, beyond those trees straight ahead . . . you will see it from that little ridge . . . is Las Estrellas, a town of a dozen houses. But before you get there you will come to the house where old Ramorez, a half-breed, lives. You remember; if you are missed in San Juan, Struve will say that you have gone to see Ramorez. He is actually sick by the way; maybe you can do something for him. His shack is in those cottonwoods, this side of Las Estrellas. You'll find Ignacio there, too; he'll go back to San Juan with you. And, once again, thank you."

He put out his hand; she gave him hers and for a moment they sat looking at each other gravely. Then Norton smiled, the pleasant boyish smile, her lips curved at him deliciously, he touched his hat and was gone. And she, riding slowly, turned Persis toward Las Estrellas.

From Las Estrellas, an unkempt, ugly village strangely named, it was necessary to ride some fifteen miles through sand and scrub before coming again into San Juan. Virginia Page, sincerely glad that she had made her call upon old Ramorez who was suffering painfully from acute stomach trouble and whose distress she could partially alleviate, made the return ride in the company of Ignacio. But first, from Ramorez's baking hovel, the Indian conducted her to another where a young woman with a baby a week old needed her. So it was well on in the afternoon and with a securely established alibi that she rode by the old Mission and to the hotel. As Ignacio rode listlessly away with the horses, as innocent looking a lazy beggar as the world ever knew, Virginia caught a glimpse of a white skirt and cool sunshade coming up the street.

"Florence Engle," she thought. "Who, no doubt, will cut me dead if I give her the opportunity."

A little hurriedly she turned in at the hotel door and went to her room. She had removed hat and gantlets, and was preparing for a bath and change of clothing when a light knock sounded on her door. The rap, preceded by quick little steps down the hall, was essentially feminine.

"Hello, Cousin Virginia," said Florence. "May I come in?"

Virginia brought her in, gave her a chair and regarded her curiously. The girl's face was flushed and pink, her eyes were bright and quite gay and untroubled, her whole air genuinely friendly. Last night Virginia had judged her to be about seventeen; now she looked a mere child.

"I was perfectly nasty last night, wasn't I?" Florrie remarked as she stood her sunshade by her chair and smiled engagingly. "Oh, I know it. Just a horrid little cat . . . but then I'm that most of the time. I came all this way and in all this dust and heat just to ask you to forgive me. Will you?"

For the moment Virginia was nonplussed. But Florence only laughed, clasped her hands somewhat affectedly and ran on, her words tumbling out in helter-skelter fashion.

"Oh, I know. I'm spoiled and I'm selfish, and I'm mean, I suppose. And, oh dear, I'm as jealous as anything. But I'm ashamed of myself this time. Whew! You ought to have listened in on the party after you left! If you could have heard mama scold me and papa jaw me about the way I acted it would have made you almost sorry for me."

"But you weren't horrid at all," Virginia broke in at last, her heart suddenly warming to this very obviously spoiled, futile, but none the less likable, Florrie. "You mustn't talk that way. And if your parents made you come. . . ."

"They didn't," said Florrie calmly. "They couldn't. Nobody ever made me do anything; that's what's the matter with me. I came because I wanted to. As the men say, I wanted to square myself. And, would you believe it, this is the third time I have called. Mr. Struve kept telling me that you had gone to see old Joe Ramorez . . . isn't he the awfullest old pirate you ever saw? And the dirtiest? I don't see how you can go near a man like that, even if he is dying; honestly I don't. But you must do all kinds of things, being a doctor."

Her clasped hands tightened, she put her head of fluffy hair to one side and looked at Virginia with such frank wonder in her eyes that Virginia colored under them.

"And," ran on Florrie, forestalling a possible interruption, "I was ready to poke fun at you last night just for being something capable and . . . and splendid. There was my jealousy again, I suppose. You ought to have heard papa on that score; 'Look here, my fine miss; if you could just be something worth while in the world, if you could do as much good in all of your silly life as Virginia Page does every day of hers,' . . . and so forth until he was