The dust lay thick upon the bare ground near the tracks. Alvarita's
eye soon discovered the serrated trail of the escaped python. It
led across the depot grounds and away down a smaller street in the
direction of the little cañon, as predicted by her. A stillness and
lack of excitement in the neighbourhood encouraged the hope that, as
yet, the inhabitants were unaware that so formidable a guest traversed
their highways. The heat had driven them indoors, whence outdrifted
occasional shrill laughs, or the depressing whine of a maltreated
concertina. In the shade a few Mexican children, like vivified stolid
idols in clay, stared from their play, vision-struck and silent, as
Alvarita came and went. Here and there a woman peeped from a door and
stood dumb, reduced to silence by the aspect of the white silk
parasol.

A hundred yards and the limits of the town were passed, scattered
chaparral succeeding, and then a noble grove, overflowing the bijou
cañon. Through this a small bright stream meandered. Park-like it was,
with a kind of cockney ruralness further endorsed by the waste papers
and rifled tins of picnickers. Up this stream, and down it, among
its pseudo-sylvan glades and depressions, wandered the bright and
unruffled Alvarita. Once she saw evidence of the recreant reptile's
progress in his distinctive trail across a spread of fine sand in the
arroyo. The living water was bound to lure him; he could not be far
away.

So sure was she of his immediate proximity that she perched herself
to idle for a time in the curve of a great creeper that looped down
from a giant water-elm. To reach this she climbed from the pathway a
little distance up the side of a steep and rugged incline. Around her
chaparral grew thick and high. A late-blooming ratama tree dispensed