The Forbidden Trail

He sighed heavily and yet his thoughts returned to the little new power plant with a vague heart warming as though already it spelled home to him.

Toward sundown, a curiously picturesque group passed them on the trail. Half a dozen squaws, with bare black heads and capes of red bandannas sewed together, were plodding toward town laden with ollas. Roger pulled up his team and called to them. Dick had told him to buy one of the great Indian water jars at his first opportunity.

"Will you sell me one?" he asked.

The oldest squaw nodded and held up a fine two gallon jar. It was just the color of the desert sand and was ornamented with swastikas and triangles in lines of vivid black.

"How much?" asked Roger.

"Eight bits," she said.

Roger dropped a dollar into her slender brown palm. The squaw flashed white teeth at him and a younger woman pressed forward holding up an olla no bigger than a teacup, a duplicate in design of the one he had just bought.

"I'll take that for Felicia," he murmured. "How much?"

"Two bits."

He tossed her the quarter. "You make 'em camp up there?" asked the old squaw.

"Yes," replied Roger. "Come and call on us, ladies."

"We bring 'em baskets, maybe," replied the squaw.

Roger nodded and started the horses on, looking back from time to time for pure pleasure in the beauty of those scarlet fluttering capes.

They reached the camp about ten o'clock and were vociferously welcomed by Ernest, who, before taking the horses up to the corral, insisted on showing them his day's work.

"Nothing doing on the carpenter's bench," he said, flashing the "lightning bug" toward the site of the engine house. "Look here. Dick came over right after breakfast and we were hard at this all day."

All the lumber in the camp had been requisitioned to make adobe molds. "We mixed the adobe with that clutter of broken hay that the glass came in," explained Ernest. "Dick says the Mexicans use stable scrapings, but I couldn't stomach that. You see you just peg the boards up in the sand, a foot apart and pack them full of the adobe. That'll be the thickness of the house. Then when the strips are dried, we'll cut them the length we want. Two days more work will give us all we need."

"Vat a country!" exclaimed Gustav.

Ernest and Roger laughed. "I take it Dick is O. K. again," said Roger.

"Quite himself. Said Charley was used up, but she came down late this afternoon with Felicia and she said she was feeling fine. Felicia made those little bricks yonder. Charley has put her into overalls. She's simply ravishing in them."