Now, having smoothed his ruffled feelings some, she let Walker assist her back on her mule. The party moved slowly along the narrow stony trail while huge limbs of great palm trees waved slightly above them.
Reaching the top of a high hill on the estate they looked out over the countryside.
"What's that?" Laura, ever curious, indicated a point in the distance, something that showed black against the sky and that clearly had been built by man.
Walker drew forth his field glasses and directed his glance toward the object. "Can't be sure," he rendered his verdict after some thought, "but think it might be a pyramid. There are several in the district you know. Perhaps the most famous of them all is the one that a hunter down from New York discovered three or four years ago. It's rather inaccessible, but such an old one that some old codger in the East with a lot of money on his hands donated a considerable sum to have it opened."
"Well, not exactly," Walker admitted and then stopped. He enjoyed teasing these youngsters.
"Well, what did they find then," Nan persisted.
"Some jewels. Some gold. Some exceptionally fine pottery."
"And--" Nan saw that he was still holding out.
"Some poison spiders that killed three members of the excavation party. Now you satisfied?" Walker grinned down at her.
"Well, yes," Nan agreed. "But I still want to visit a pyramid sometime."
"Visit those in Egypt," Walker advised. "There's nothing more impressive."
"You been there?" Nan questioned. The path was wide enough so that they could ride now with their mules side by side.
"Yes, years ago, with my father," Walker answered. "He had a bad case of the wanderlust, so whenever he could scrape a few dollars together, off he would go to some outlandish place."
"Oh, sometimes. She went up into Alaska when he went to pan gold from the streams. She went down into South America when he went as an engineer on a big industrial project. And she went when he set out for Russia after the revolution, but after that she gave up."
"You must be like your father," Nan commented.
"Oh, a little," Walker admitted. "But I haven't quite got the wanderlust as much as he has. He could go into raptures over anything that was far away from him. I've been thinking of him a lot today, riding over this estate. He spent some time down here in Mexico, and never grew tired of extolling the country. This was after my mother died.