The bugles began to send their music out over the spider-web wilderness of the chaparral west of the spring, and Captain Moore declared, hopefully, that if Cal were anywhere in all that range he would be sure of hearing music before noon.
The trouble was that he was so many long, tiresome miles beyond the reach of the loudest bugle, and that he had heard music of an altogether different sort before the very earliest riser among them had opened his eyes.
The northern edge of Mexico was marked deeply by the surveyor's chisel upon the quartz rock at Cold Spring. All the country north and south of it had once been Apache land. Away back, nobody knows how long, before any Apaches had ever drank of that water, the entire region had belonged to another race of people, who disappeared, but left traces behind them, here and there. They did not leave any written history.
There are men who hold an opinion that the deserts of the southwest, such as Cal Evans made his gloomy march through that night, were not always desert. To Cal himself, as he rode along, the waste around him had seemed utterly hopeless, as if nothing good ever had been there or ever could be.
After the desert was passed, and after the whoop which announced the finding of water, he and his grim guard rode on until the forest around them became so dark that they and all others were compelled to halt. It was only for a few minutes, and then from the head of the cavalcade came back braves and squaws and boys carrying blazing torches of resinous wood. The huge tree-trunks that Cal now rode among seemed positively gigantic. No axe had been at work in that place for an age, and there was only a moderate amount of underbrush. What bushes could be seen were mostly gathered around and over the decaying trunks of fallen trees, and it was easy for the train to pick its winding way.
Before long Cal saw ahead of him great gleams of light, for the Apaches were kindling camp-fires, and there was an abundance of dry branches to make swift blazes.
The next thing of particular interest to him was a portly-looking squaw, who wore a somewhat battered straw bonnet, very much mixed up with gay ribbons. She seemed to be looking for somebody, and she carried in one hand a large water-gourd and in the other a flaming torch.