The Round-Up | Page 4

does
fire. However, there's lots of cactus around here, and they're natural
water-jars. My knife may get me a drink out of the desert's thorns, as
well as kindle a fire from its stones. And right here's my watermelon,
the bisnaga, the first one I've found in months," he exclaimed, going
over to the edge of the cliff, above the level of which peered the fat
head of a cactus covered with spines that were barbed like a fish-hook.
Its short tap-root was fixed in a crevice a few feet below the parapet.
Lying on the edge of the cliff, the man sliced off the top of the cactus,
and began jabbing into its interior, breaking down the fibrous walls of
the water-cells, of which the top-heavy plant is almost entirely
composed. In a few moments he arose.
"Now I can empty my canteen in the coffee-pot, sure of a fresh supply
of water by the time I am ready to mosey along."
He filled the pot, set it on the fire, and then pressed the uncorked and

empty canteen down into the macerated interior of the bisnaga.
While his coffee was boiling, the prospector continued his examination
of the fortification, beginning, in the manner of his kind, with the more
minute "signs," and ending with what, to a tourist, would have been the
first and only subject of observation--the view. On the inner side of the
large boulder in the wall he discerned, the faint outline of a cross,
painted with red ochre.
Scraping with his pick beneath the rock, to see if the emblem was the
sign of hidden treasure or relic, he unearthed a rattlesnake.
Before it could strike, with a quick fling of his tool he sent the reptile
whirling high in the air toward the precipice. But from the clump of
cactus growth along the parapet arose a sahuaro, with branching arms,
and against this the snake was flung. Wrapped around the thorny top by
the momentum of the cast, it hung, hissing and rattling with pain and
hatred.
The prospector looked up at the impaled rattlesnake with a smile.
Reminiscences of Sunday-school flashed across his mind.
"Gee, I'm a regular Moses," he ejaculated. "First I bring water from the
face of the rock, and then I lift up the serpent in the wilderness. The
year I've spent in the mountains and desert seem like forty to me, and
now,, at last, I have a sight of the Promised Land. God, what a
magnificent view!"
Dropping his pick, he stretched out his arms with instinctive
symbolization of the wide prospect, and expression of an exile's
yearning for his native land.
"Over there is God's country, sure enough," he continued, giving the
trite phrase a reverential tone, which he had not used in his first
expression of the name of Deity. "Thank Him, the parallel with old
Moses stops right here. Many a time I thought I would never get out of
the mountains alive, and that my grave would be unmarked by so much

as a boulder with a red cross upon it. But now, before night, I'll be back
in States, and in three more days at home on the ranch. I promised to
return in a year, and I'll make good to the hour. I sure did hate to leave
that strike, though, after all the hard luck I had been having. Sixty
dollars a day, and growing richer. But the last horn was blowing. No
tobacco, six matches, and nothing left of the bacon but rinds. Well, the
gold is there and the claim'll bring whatever I choose to ask for it. And
Echo shall have a home as good as Allen Hacienda, and a ranch as fine
as Bar One--yes, by God, it'll be Bar None, my ranch!"
Out of the sea of molten air that stretched before him, that nebulous
chaos of quivering bars and belts of heated atmosphere which remains
above the desert as a memorial of the first stage of the entire planet's
existence, the imagination of the prospector created a paradise of his
own. There took shape before his eyes a Mexican hacienda, larger and
more beautiful even than that of Echo's father, the beau-ideal of a home
to his limited fancy. And on the piazza in front, covered with flowering
vines, there stood awaiting him the slender figure of a woman, with
outstretched arms and dark eyes, tender with yearning love.
"Echo--Echo Allen!" he murmured, fondly repeating the name. "No,
not Echo Allen, but Echo Lane, for Dick Lane has redeemed his
promise, and returns to claim you as his own."
As he gazed upon the shimmering heat waves which distorted and
displaced the objects within and beneath them, a group of horsemen
suddenly appeared to him in