It was remarkable that the prairie guide, however, had acceded to the progress of improvement in firearms, in lieu of the long and heavy rifle so celebrated along the backbone of the continent in the hands of the trapper and hunter, this man carried, like his employer, a finely finished Winchester breech-loading and repeating rifle, much stronger and larger than the general pattern.
The pair had just emerged from an immense forest of cedar, which had never yet known the woodman's threat, though doomed ere long to feed a locomotive engine's furnace, and were glad to cry halt at the skirts of the covert. Then they trotted down to a pretty stream, which was one of the sources of the Yaqui River, and bending so far to the westward as to make an inexperienced explorer fancy it had something to do rather with the San Miguel.
Indeed, the woodsman examined the muddy waters with serious heed for a long time, and executed some mental calculations in that wonderful untaught trigonometry of the frontiersman. Then, stopping his _broncho_ by a scarcely perceptible pressure of his knees, he bent gracefully towards his employer, and said, as he smiled good-humouredly:
"Hyar you hev it, Mr. Gladsden; this ar the safe ford, though the melting snow has set the sink pits filling, of which I war speaking this noonday."
"Quite certain, eh, Oliver?" remarked the English gentleman.
"I wish I was as sartin sure I shell die with my har on," was the other's laughing answer, showing magnificent teeth for a man of fifty, which hard biscuit and harder deer meat, with plenty of "chaw" in it, seemed nowise to have impaired. "Anybody but me mout go askew, but I have known all these _tracks_ (he meant 'tracts,' for it was a trackless wild, in plain truth), now an' agen, off an' on, for over fifteen year."
"Pray overlook my offensive persistency, Oliver; but I cannot help observing that I do not see any of the sites by which, according to my informants at The Pass, I was to learn the exact position of a crossing line in a treacherous stream. And I have been a sailor, too, and accustomed to go any course, if I have reasonable bearings laid down and visible."
"Oh, I never mind your being cornered, sir," went on the other, still merry; "they forgot to tell you the distances in mapping out the pints. You cannot see the Chinapa Peak even from here. But it's all one, Mr. Gladsden; here is the point of the Yaqui. Yonder, I can see the smoke of a _pueblo_--the village they call Fronteras, as they do half a dozen such places within a crow's fly along the borderland. That reddish haze is over the Río Bravo, whence we came. Now, to reach the road to Arispe, you cross and you keep dead ahead, and you must strike it."