CHAPTER XIXTHE SORCERESS
WITH the pines bending and groaning above them, a group of men struggled against the demoniacal onslaught of the wind to the top of a peak that stood in the middle of Squawtooth Canby’s mountain meadowlands. Over his shoulder one of them carried a set of climbers, such as are used by linemen to ascend telephone and telegraph poles.
On the summit of the peak stood a lofty pine, alone and friendless and torn by the gale. At the base of it the party halted, and as much as possible sheltered themselves from the cutting blast. The pole climber adjusted his spiked leg irons, and, on the lee side of the old pine, began ascending.
“Now watch yerself, Pete!” he was cautioned from below. “By golly, she’s a resky job!”
The man made no reply, but continued to ascend rapidly, evincing confident familiarity with the climbers that he wore. He was a Mangan-Hatton man and was in charge of the electric-lighting system of the camp. Wind and swaying altitudes held no terrors for this old-time electrical man, familiar with all branches of his work.
Before very long he was well-nigh to the top.Settling himself at last on a whipping limb, he roped himself to the trunk of the tree, and then unslung a telescope from his shoulder. At once he deliberately began scouring the surrounding country, swaying back and forth as the tree bent before the wind and recovered its perpendicular stateliness.
A grand sight was revealed to the venturesome climber. To the south and east and west swept a magnificent forest of pines, tossing wildly like waves at sea. Here and there a peak uprose, snowcapped at its summit because of the recent fall. In the background more majestic peaks upreared themselves proudly, the summits of some of them above the line of perpetual snow and always white and glistening. To the west, seven thousand feet below him, swept the beleaguered desert, over which great sand waves rolled in tempestuous billows.
The watcher did not give lengthy attention to the desert nor to the distant peaks, enticing as was the view. Carefully he trained his spyglass here and there over the lower mountain country at his command.
He searched the lush meadows, where red cows braved the wind and grazed and pastured horses stood disconsolately, tail-on toward the tempest. Then suddenly, about three miles distant, as he judged, a man appeared on the top of a gigantic rock that was thrust up above the foliage.
The spyglass steadied. The eye glued to it saw the man stoop and haul up on a rope. Presently he staggered before the wind, then sat down abruptly on his perch and trained a pair of binoculars on the desert.
For some little time the spyglass man watched him. Frequently he saw his lips moving, so powerful were his lenses, and saw him look downward as if speaking to some one at the base of the rocky monument. Then he crawled over the edge and disappeared.
Studiously now the observer located lone trees and other peculiar outcroppings of rock which might serve in finding the eminence on which the wind-blown figure had appeared. Then he took out a pocket compass and lined the tree with The Falcon’s rock. He reslung his glass and descended to solid ground.
“I saw Falcon the Flunky,” he announced. Then he sat down, with his back against the tree, and in a notebook tried to map the country surrounding the lookout post of the hiding couple.
This they took to Squawtooth Canby, in camp below at the edge of the mountain meadow.
For many minutes the old cowman studied it, while those in camp with him stood silent and expectant.
“Just a leetle north o’ east, eh?” said Squawtooth reflectively. “And about three miles fromyour tree, you say? Well, I dunno. Distances at this altitude are mighty deceivin’—especially to a man used to down below. Air’s light, ye know, an’ funny that way. I’d say six mile, if you say three.”
The electrician shrugged. This was out of his line.
“They’s so many big rocks like that un croppin’ out that it don’t tell me anything. Still, we got the direction. That’s a lot. Le’s throw the saddles on ’em, boys, and see what we c’n do in this hurricane. I’d rather fight it on the move than stick around, holdin’ to limbs and bushes to keep myself from sailin’ down on the desert.”
Ten minutes afterward fifty mounted men, spread out like a skirmish line, moved through the forest toward the crow’s nest of Falcon the Flunky.
The two in their rocky rendezvous had just completed their sixth set of communications, and about all the paper had been used.
“Now for the secret messages to Mart,” said the girl.
“I’m glad we’ve got around to that,” dryly remarked The Falcon. “I’m growing the least bit curious.”
“All right, Thomas. We’ll satisfy that curiosity of yours. Please give me the fountain pen I seesticking out of the slot in the bib of your beautiful blue overalls.”
The Falcon handed her a handsome fountain pen, heavy with chased gold.
She laughed as she examined it. “Didn’t your brother stiffs wonder where you swiped this?” she inquired.
“I almost never carried it in sight,” he explained. “But I had taken it with me when Daisy and I went to Los Angeles, of course, and had forgotten to remove it when I went to see you at Squawtooth. But for that I doubt if we’d have it with us now. I assure you, however, it’s not a magic pen.”
“Oh, yes it is! Watch it!”
She unscrewed the pen and deliberately poured the ink on the ground. Then she went to the bubbling water, stooping till the two long braids of chestnut hair hanging forward over her shoulders had to be tossed aside to keep them dry. She thoroughly cleansed all parts of the pen, and held it up in the wind to drain.
Next she picked up from their scant supplies a can of evaporated milk, in the top of which two holes had been punched. One hole she held directly over the magazine of the pen. The white milk spurted out and filled it.
She screwed the pen together once more, laid one of the messages on her knee, and began towrite between the lines of the portions written by her in pencil.
“So young and sweet!” sighed The Falcon. “Isn’t it a pity!”
“You think so?” She picked up a discarded bit of paper and wrote something on it.
“Take this,” she commanded, and passed it to him. “Hold it until it’s dry. Convince yourself you can see no writing whatever. Then rake a hot stone from the camp fire and slowly heat the paper. I hope that will occupy you till I’ve finished.”
Falcon the Flunky carried out her instructions. Before he began heating the paper he could see only a faint glaze on its surface, which the casual observer would not have noticed at all. Now he pressed the paper to the hot stone, lifting it to cool it when it threatened to char; and gradually brown letters, clear and distinct, began to appear, till finally he found himself confronted by this:
Falcon the Flunky needeth a shave.
Falcon the Flunky needeth a shave.
“By George!” he exclaimed. “I never knew that!”
“You should carry a pocket mirror,” murmured the girl, deep in her copying of the form letter she had written in pencil.
She finished the sixth invisible communication.
“You haven’t read to me what you are writing to Mart,” he pointed out.
She handed him the copy, and he read:
Dear Rattle-pod: You can’t imagine the fun we’re having. Too bad you are not in on it; but this will give you the chance to get in, after a fashion.Martie boy, The Falcon is as innocent of the holdup as I am. I want you to believe it as I do, forI know. We are afraid this letter may fall into the wrong hands, and that a trap may be laid to lure us out of hiding. So we’ll pay no attention to the red-blanket signal from the big cottonwood at Squawtooth unless we get another one from you at the same time, assuring us that the other signal stands for a genuine surrender. And your signal must be a commonplace one, or some one may suspect. So if everything is all O. K. for us to come out, get on that gray colt you’ve been bragging you could break all summer, and ride him out in the open to the east of Squawtooth. I’m sure the colt will signal so we shall understand. You’ll get the rest of the idea from the penciled letters.What I wrote about your going to see Halfaman Daisy was written only to manufacture a reason for the letter to be given to you.Bet you my old spurs against fifty cents you pull leather before the gray has carried you a hundred feet from the corral. Lovingly,Manzanita.A Lady in Distress.Go to it!
Dear Rattle-pod: You can’t imagine the fun we’re having. Too bad you are not in on it; but this will give you the chance to get in, after a fashion.
Martie boy, The Falcon is as innocent of the holdup as I am. I want you to believe it as I do, forI know. We are afraid this letter may fall into the wrong hands, and that a trap may be laid to lure us out of hiding. So we’ll pay no attention to the red-blanket signal from the big cottonwood at Squawtooth unless we get another one from you at the same time, assuring us that the other signal stands for a genuine surrender. And your signal must be a commonplace one, or some one may suspect. So if everything is all O. K. for us to come out, get on that gray colt you’ve been bragging you could break all summer, and ride him out in the open to the east of Squawtooth. I’m sure the colt will signal so we shall understand. You’ll get the rest of the idea from the penciled letters.
What I wrote about your going to see Halfaman Daisy was written only to manufacture a reason for the letter to be given to you.
Bet you my old spurs against fifty cents you pull leather before the gray has carried you a hundred feet from the corral. Lovingly,
Manzanita.A Lady in Distress.Go to it!
“So that will protect us,” said Manzanita, as he laughingly returned the letter. “If we see a gray colt go bucking over the desert when theblanket is hoisted, we’ll know everything’s all right. Now—to send these messages down on the desert. Get the rifle and come on.”
Perhaps two hours later Manzanita and Falcon the Flunky slipped into a grove of yucca palms, tossing and singing in the wind that stood on the edge of the desert. They had crawled from the chaparral retreat, and by a circuitous, unmarked route descended a slope of the mountains, over steep slides and bushy expanses, to this vantage point.
“We won’t dare go a step farther,” objected the man. “We don’t know who or how many may be riding the desert in search of us. To walk out there over the level, open land would be suicidal to our plans.”
“Of course. We won’t have to. We’ll now scout up the magic letter bearers, give them the messages, and send them out over the desert to deliver them. Come on back up the slope.”
He followed her. Soon she paused beside a great, dry weed almost as high as her waist. The drying by the fierce desert sun had caused the tips of the branches to draw together so that the branches were bowed and the entire plant almost as round as a big ball.
“Allow me to introduce you to our first messenger, Mr. Tumbleweed,” said the girl. “When he has been uprooted, and a message tied to one ofhis branches, and we’ve pitched him up in the wind, he’ll go racing across the sands as fast as some horses can run. Have you never seen them? But this is your first windstorm to experience in this fair land. Well, cattle uproot them, I suppose, and when the wind comes they go scooting over the desert, rolling and bouncing ten feet into the air at times, and often, when a gust gets under them, they reach quite a height and sail through the air in great shape. Fences catch them, and Mart and I used to have to go get them out when we were kids. Then at school here on the desert, we kids used to play they were cows, and we’d ride after ’em on broomsticks when they came racing by at recess. But don’t ask me how many years ago that was. Now up with this one!”
He laid hold of the dry, tough tumbleweed and with an effort pulled it from the ground. The girl had torn strips from a handkerchief which was no concern of his, and with one of them she tied a message to an inside branch of the weed, after having wrapped the paper about the branch.
They collected three more, which were in like manner intrusted with messages by the wind witch. Then, with one in each hand—for they were as large as tubs—they hurried back to the yucca grove.
“It’s too bad we don’t dare slip along under cover till we’re abreast Squawtooth,” she complained. “But the wind’s sort of blowing in thatdirection, as it is. These will go out over the desert, and with folks hunting everywhere for us some one surely will see one of the six messages in one of our weeds.
“All right. Here we go! Say something mysterious or uncanny—some sort of incantation. Anything—on the spur of the moment, you know. I’m going to throw it up. Shoot!”
“The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog!” was The Falcon’s impromptu incantation as she pitched the weed, and it sailed off exultingly on the wings of the wind.
Away it sped, now and then striking the earth, only to spring up as if it were on delicate springs and soar for hundreds of feet again. Bounding, rolling, caroming from hummock to hummock, it raced away until it was only a tiny moving speck in the distance.
“Well, I’ll be jiggered!” muttered Falcon the Flunky.
Manzanita tossed up another and another and the fourth. After the first the three sped along as if they were live things released from long imprisonment.
Three times more The Falcon was jiggered; then they collected messengers for the two remaining letters, and sent them out.
Now they began the steep climb back into the mountains. Eventually they reached the top, andhad flattened themselves to crawl into the chaparral when a voice was borne to them on the wind.
“Mercy!” cried Manzanita in low tones of consternation. “They’re right on us. Crawl! Crawl!”
They did crawl desperately, and then came to a stop when well hidden and lay without a move, lest sounds of their progress be heard.
Now came a voice at the edge of the thicket.
“Could that rock be up there in the chaparral?” it cried.
“Where’d they get water up in there?” came another voice, from a little distance.
“Might sneak out and go down to that arroyo for it. Give the arroyo the once-over for tracks. Oughta be water there—I see ferns growin’. If she’s moist, I’ll say comb the chaparral for ’em. This is about the distance Squawtooth said the rock might be from that pine back there.”