Charley sighed and Gustav shrugged his shoulders.
Roger relighted his pipe and went into a brown study. Gustav waited patiently for several moments, then left to do the evening chores. Charley sat on an empty box beside the pump watching now the stream that flowed over the field and now Roger's half closed eyes. Finally he emptied his pipe and rose.
"Didn't Elsa call supper?" he asked.
"Some time ago." Charley rose too. "But I didn't want to interrupt. Have you solved your troubles?"
"I don't know. But I've thought of something I'm going to try out. Wasn't that camp Felicia went to a permanent one?"
"Yes, in a way. The Indians come there again and again. But they won't work, Roger."
"Old Rabbit Tail works. Charley, take a little trip with me to-morrow. Let's see if my idea works."
"I'd like to, Roger. I haven't been away from sight of this adobe hut but twice in a year. Once, the night we found you, and once, the night you and I--"
"I know, poor old girl! Well, let's have a little picnic trip of our own to-morrow. We'll take Peter and some grub--get a dawn start and be back by sundown."
"Oh, I'd love it!" cried Charley, looking like Felicia with the sudden flash of joy in her eyes. "I'll put up the best lunch ever. Come along, Roger, do! Elsa will take our heads off."
Roger invited Elsa to accompany them on the mysterious trip, but Elsa refused to go.
"Dick will be back any day now," she said, "and I'm going to be here when he comes."
Charley made no reply to this but Roger frankly shrugged his shoulders. "I feel as if I never wanted to see him again. I'll be here at dawn, Charley. You can meet me at the corral, can't you, so's not to rout the others out too early?"
Charley agreed and dawn was just unfolding over the desert when she tied the grub pack to Peter's saddle. She waited for some time, sitting on the rock, her back against the corral, before Roger came. He appeared at last, just as the first rays of the sun shot over the mountains.
"Sorry to be late," he said, "but my gasoline's given out and I had to cook breakfast by hand, as it were, over some chips. Whew, it's going to be one hot day."
"I don't care how hot it is," replied Charley, recklessly. "I feel as I were being taken to the county fair, and I was almost too excited to sleep. Come along! I know the trail well."
It was a well beaten trail. The Indians had used it for countless generations in their search for pottery clay. It lifted zig-zag over the Coyote Range, giving at the crest this morning a superb view of distant peaks and of gold melting into blue infinities. It dropped zig-zag into canyons that were parched and cracked with late summer heat and lifted again to cross a peak whose top and sides had been blasted and left purple and gashed by an ancient volcano. Then once more it dropped gradually and gracefully into the canyon where the little spring mirrored the blue of the Arizona sky.