that he do guard duty, but the smile of Dona
Jocasta won her way.

"He is younger and not weary, senor. It is good for him, and it
pleases me," she said.

"The camp is yours," he agreed weakly, and against his better
judgment. He did not like Indians who were like "sulky slim brown dumb
snakes"; that was what he muttered when he looked at Clodomiro. In his
irritation at the Indian's silence it didn't even occur to him that he
never had known any snakes but dumb ones.

But if the voice of Clodomiro was uncannily silent, his eyes spoke for
him as they followed Dona Jocasta. Kit could only think of a lost,
homesick dog begging for the scent of the trail to his own kennel. He
said so to Billie as he made her bed in the camp wagon.

"Cap and I will be right here at the hind wheels," he promised.
"Yes,--sure, I'll let the Indian ride herd for the night. Dona Jocasta
is right, it's his turn, and we seem to have passed the danger line."

"Knock wood!" cautioned Billie.

So he rapped his head with his knuckles, and they laughed together as
young happy things do at trifles. Then he stretched himself for sleep
under the stars and almost within arm's reach of the girl--the girl
who had ridden to meet him in the night, the wonderful girl who had
promised to wait until he came back from France ... of course he could
get into the army _now_! They would need men too badly to turn him
down again. If there was a trifle of discrepancy in sight of his
eyes--which he didn't at all believe--he had the dust now, also the
nuggets, to buy any and all treatment to adjust _that_ little matter.
He had nearly four hundred pounds, aside from giving all he dared give
at once as Tula's gift to those women of the slave raid. After the
war was over he would find ways of again crossing over to the great
treasure chest in the hidden canon. The little information Pike had
managed to convey to him about that sheepskin map told him that the
most important indications had been destroyed during those years it
had been buried for safe-keeping. The only true map in existence was
the one in his own memory,--no use to tell Pike and Billie that! He
could leave them in comfort and content, and when he got back from
France--He wondered how long it would last--the war. Hadn't the
greatest of Americans tried three years ago to hammer the fact into
the alleged brain pans of the practical politicians that the sooner
the little old United States made guns, and ship