"Good Pat, good horse!" she whispered. "They've got nothing that can run away from us. We'll show them!"
Then a man's quavering old voice came to her through the winding trail of the arroya. It was lifted tunefully insistent in an old-time song of the mining camps:
_Oh, Mexico! we're coming, Mexico! Our six mule team, Will soon be seen, On the trail to Mexico!_
"We made it, Pat!" confided the girl grimly. "We made it. Quiet now--quiet!"
She peered out through the green mesquite as Captain Pike emerged from the west arroya on a gray burro, herding two other pack animals ahead of him into the south trail.
He rode jauntily, his old sombrero at a rakish angle, his eyes bright with enthusiasm supplied by that which he designated as a morning "bracer," and his long gray locks bobbed in the breeze as he swayed in the saddle and droned his cheerful epic of the trail:
_A--and when we've been there long enough, And back we wish to go, We'll fill our pockets with the shining dust And then leave Mexico! Oh--Mexico! Good-bye my Mexico! Our six mule team will then be seen On the trail from Mexico._
"Hi there! you Balaam--get into the road and keep a-going, you ornery little rat-tailed son-of-a-gun! Pick up your feet and travel, or I'll yank out your back bone and make a quirt out of it! For----"
_My name was Captain Kidd as I sailed As I sailed, My name was Captain Kidd, As I sailed! My name was Captain Kidd And most wickedly I di-i-id All holy laws forbid As I sailed!_
The confessor of superlative wickedness droned his avowal in diminishing volume as the burros pattered along the white dust of the valley road, then the curve to the west hid them, and all was silence but for the rustle of the wind in the mesquite and the far bay of Singleton's hounds circling a coyote.
But Pat pricked up his ears, and lifted his head as if feeling rather than hearing the growing thud of coming hoofs. The girl waited until they were within fifty feet, when she pursed up her lips and whistled the call of the meadow lark. It sounded like a fairy bugle call across the morning, and the roan was halted quickly at the forks of the road.
"Howdy, señorita?" he called softly. "I can't see you, but your song beats the birds. Got a flag of truce? Willing to parley with the enemy?"
