From another cloud of smoke came the quiet, respectful
answer: “But this is a mule’s track,
Mr. Holmes. It is Manuel Ramirez’s mule.
See, he has a broken shoe on the off fore-foot.
I noticed it yesterday when I sent Manuel to hunt
a water hole. Besides, Mr. Worth rode northeast;
not in this direction.”
THE MASTER PASSION—“GOOD BUSINESS.”
When Jefferson Worth left headquarters camp that morning,
his purpose was to ride over a part of the territory
lying southeast of the old San Felipe trail between
the sand hills and the old beach-line. He had
covered practically all of the land on the western
side of the ancient sea-bed, from the delta dam at
the southern end north to the lowest point in the
Basin, and southward again on the eastern side as
far as the old trail. There remained for him to
see only this section in the southeast.
It was nearly noon when the banker, from a slight
elevation that afforded him a view of the surrounding
country, recognized the group of sand hills and, by
the general course of Dry River, distinguished the
spot where the San Felipe trail crosses the deep arroyo.
Occupied with his thoughts, he had ridden farther from
camp than he had realized. He should turn back.
But the distant scene of the desert tragedy called
him. He became possessed of a desire to visit
once more the spot that was so closely associated with
the child, who had so strangely come into his life
and whom he loved as his own daughter.
An hour later he dismounted to stand beside the water
hole where, with his companions, he had found the
dead woman with the empty canteen by her side.
The incidents of that hour were as vivid in the banker’s
memory as if it had all happened only the day before.
He remembered how Texas Joe had lifted the canteen
and, inverting it, had held out to them his finger
moistened with the last drop of water in the cloth-covered
vessel; and how he and his companions, standing by
the dead body of the woman, had turned to each other
in startled awe at the coyotes’ ghostly call
in the dusk. He heard again with thrilling clearness
the baby’s plaintive voice: “Mamma,
mamma! Barba wants drink. Please bring drink,
mamma. Barba’s ’fraid!”
Going a short way up the wash, he stood with uncovered
head on the very spot where he had knelt with out-stretched
hands before the big-eyed, brown-haired baby girl,
who, crouching under the high bank, shrank back from
him in fear. He saw the frightened look in her
eyes and heard the sweet voice cry: “Go
’way! Go ’way! Go ’way!”
Then he saw the expression on the little face change
as Pat and Tex and the boy tried to reassure her;
saw her hold up her baby hands in full confidence
to the big engineer; and felt again the pain and humiliation
in his heart.
Why had the baby instinctively feared him? Why
had she turned from him to the Seer? Why, he
asked himself bitterly, had she always feared him?
Why did she still shrink from him? For Barbara
did shrink from him, unconsciously—unintentionally—but,
to Jefferson Worth, none the less plainly now than
when he knelt before her that night in the desert.
And it hurt him now as it had hurt him then; hurt
the more, perhaps, because Barbara did not know—because
her attitude was instinctive.
