“You know what happened up the trail,” my cousin said, sadly.  “Bill was ahead of me and he drank first, and galloped back to warn me and beg me to come on for water.  I thought I could get down here and take some water back to Bill in time.  It’s all shale up there.  No place to dig above, nor below, even if one dared to dig below that poison.  But I found a dead coyote that had just left here, and all springs began to look Comanche to me.  I lariated my pony and crept down under the bank there to think and rest.  Everything went poison-spotted before my eyes.”

“Where’s your pony now, Bev?” Jondo asked.

“I don’t know sure, but I expect he is about going over the Raton Pass by this time,” Beverly replied.  “Down there things seemed to swim around me like water everywhere and I knew I’d got to stir.  Just then an Indian came slipping up from somewhere to the spring to drink.  He didn’t look right to me at all, but I couldn’t sit still and see him kill himself.  If he needed killing I could have done it for him, for he never saw me.  Just as he stooped I saw his face.  It was that Apache—­Santan—­the wander-foot, for I never heard of an Apache getting so far from the mountains.  I ought to have kept still, Jondo”—­Beverly’s ready smile came to his face—­“but I’d made that fellow swear he’d let me eternally alone when we had our little fracas up by the San Christobal Arroyo, so something like conscience, mean as the stomach-ache, made me call out: 

“‘Don’t drink there; it’s poison.’

“He stopped and stared at me a minute, or ten minutes—­I didn’t count time on him—­and then he said, slow-like: 

“’It’s the spring west that is poisoned.  I put it there for you.  You will not see your men again.  They will drink and die.  Who put this poison here?’

“‘Lord knows.  I didn’t,’ I told him.  ’Two of you carrying poison are two too many for the Cimarron country.’

“And I hadn’t any more conscience after that, but I was faint and slow, and my aim was bad for eels.  He could have fixed me right then, but for some reason he didn’t.”

Beverly’s face grew sad.

“He made six jumps six ways, and caught my pony’s lariat.  I can hear his yell still as he tore a hole in the horizon and jumped right through.  Then I began on that spring.  ‘Dig or die.  Dig or die.’  I said over and over, and we are all here but Bill.  I wish I’d got that Apache, though.”

Jondo and I looked at each other.

“The thing is clear now,” he said, aside to me.  “That single trail I found back yonder day before yesterday was Santan’s running on ahead of us to poison the water for us and then steal a horse and make his way back to the mountains.  An Apache can live on this cactus-covered sand the same as a rattlesnake.  He fixed the upper spring and came down here to drink.  Only Beverly’s conscience saved him here.  Heaven knows how Fred Ramer got out here.  He may have come with some Mexicans on ahead of us and left them here to drop his poison in this lower spring.  Then he turned back toward Santa Fe and found his doom up there at Santan’s spring.