The aged Carib woman was frying cakes made from casabas ground to powder and mixed with water. Jean was frying slices of meat from the ham of a peccary. Johnny was engaged in the business of making coffee. After his first demonstration this had been his allotted task.
While the coffee was now coming to a boil, he sat alternating gazing away at the swift flowing waters and looking dreamily at the golden girl whose hair was glorified by a touch of sunrise mingled with the glow of the fire.
“Fine chance she’s got of finding her way home,” he thought. They had searched all the previous day for the right creek. “There are a hundred creeks. They don’t know how long they drifted nor how far. Not a chance. Have to be some other way. Some of her father’s men may come upon us, or we might go back to camp. Someone there might know the way.”
He was meditating on the advisability of proposing this last course when there came a sudden excited shout from the bush.
“Roderick!” exclaimed the girl. “Something has happened to him.” For a moment the camp was in commotion, then the Scotch boy came bounding out of the bush.
“Jean! Jean!” he shouted, seizing her by the shoulders and waltzing her about. “I’ve found a trail, a hard-beaten trail.”
“The Old Portage,” the girl cried breathlessly. “The trail that leads to home!”
Suddenly crumpling up in her tracks, she sank to the ground and hid her face in her hands. Unmoved as she had been through all this strange and trying adventure, now as the end appeared at hand she was for a moment just a girl with the heart of a girl and a girl’s way of shedding tears in times of great joy or deep sorrow. And who would not like her the better for it?
The Old Portage, the brother and sister informed Johnny, was a trail used alike by Mexicans and Indians. The trail led from Rio Hondo to the upper waters of their own river, the one on which their father’s camp was located. Neither had been over this trail, but their father had. He had told them of passing over it. It was an old, old trail, he had explained, which might have been in existence at the time of the Spanish conquest.
“There can’t be a bit of doubt about its being the trail,” said Roderick. “It’s so hard-packed and old that it seems made of cement.”