Krane hurrying about anything.

"We'll just 'prospect,' as Daniel Boone says," he declared, as he
marshaled us for the day. "We are strangers, sight-seein', got no other
business on earth, least of all any to take us up to this old San Miguel
Church for unholy purposes. 'Course if we see a pretty little dark-eyed,
golden-haired lassie anywhere, we'll just make a diagram of the spot
she's stand'n' on, for future reference. We're in this game to win, but
we don't do no foolish hurryin' about it."

So we wandered away, a happy quartet, and the city offered us strange
sights on every hand. It was all so old, so different, so silent, so
baffling--the narrow, crooked street; the solid house-walls that hemmed
them in; the strange tongue, strange dress, strange customs; the absence
of smiling faces or friendly greetings; the sudden mystery of seeking
for one whom we must not seem to seek, and the consciousness of an
enemy, Ferdinand Ramero, whom we must avoid--that it is small wonder
that we lived in fairyland.

We saw the boy, Marcos, here and there, sometimes staring defiantly at
us from some projected angle; sometimes slipping out of sight as we
approached; sometimes quarreling with other children at their play. But
nowhere, since the moment when I had seen the door close on her up that
crooked street beside the old church, could we find any trace of the
little girl.

In the dim morning light of our fifth day in Santa Fe, a man on
horseback, carrying a big, bulky bundle in his arms, slipped out of the
crooked, shadow-filled street beside the old church of San Miguel. He
halted a moment before the structure and looked up at the ancient crude
spire outlined against the sky, then sped down the narrow way by the
hotel at the end of the trail. He crossed the Plaza swiftly and dashed
out beyond the Palace of the Governors and turned toward the west.

Aunty Boone, who slept in the family wagon--or under it--in the
inclosure at the rear of the hotel, had risen in time to peer out of the
wooden gate just as the rider was passing. It was still too dark to see
the man's face distinctly, but his form, and the burden he carried, and
the trappings of the horse she noted carefully, as was her habit.

"Up to cussedness, that man is. Mighty long an' slim. Lemme see! Humph!
I know _him_. I'll go wake up somebody."

As the woman leaned far out of the gate she caught sight of a little
Indian girl crouching outside of the wall.

"You go