RED MESA

NILTCI GOT ONE GLIMPSE OF VASQUEZ, STANDING WITH HIS RIFLE POISED.

RED MESA

A TALE OF THE SOUTHWEST

BY
WARREN H. MILLER
AUTHOR OF
“THE BLACK PANTHER OF THE NAVAHO,”
“THE RING-NECKED GRIZZLY,” ETC.

D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
NEW YORK : : 1923 : : LONDON

COPYRIGHT, 1923, BY
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

CONTENTS

RED MESA

CHAPTER I
CAÑON HONANKI

ABOVE a timbered valley in the southwest rises a towering wall of gorgeous cliffs such as only Arizona can produce. Their rock pinnacles are banded with color—red strata, ochre, blue, green, and white—all in wavy horizontal lines like layer cake. These long walls were scoured clean and smooth long ago by prehistoric water action. They were broken with deep fissures—fissures that now cleave the cliff from top to bottom—“chimneys” that mean seven hundred feet of sheer ascent to him who would dare scale these heights.

Two riders sat gazing up, searching this cliff face, while an Airedale dog of huge and leonine aspect prowled about in the creek bottom near them, investigating this and that with snuffing nose.

“That cliff dwelling is up here somewhere, according to Doctor Fewkes’ map, John,” said the smaller and rangier of the pair, his puckered-up black eyes never leaving off their scrutiny of the cliff face. “Think we’ll find her?”

The older man, a great, bony and leathery cowman, who might have hailed from anywhere in the west from Montana to Arizona, took off his sombrero and mopped a sweaty brow with the loose end of his bandanna.

“Search me!” he grinned. “I’m a cowman, not no prophet—as the greenhorn axman said when the lumber boss as’t him which way his tree was goin’ to fall.” He looked lugubriously up at the cliff, shaking his head solemnly. “It’d take a horned toad with suckers on his feet to bust her, Siddy son.”

The youth tugged determinedly at the fine fuzz of black mustache that adorned his upper lip. “Honanki Ruins or bust—that’s our motto, John!” he retorted, his black eyes twinkling merrily at the reluctant cowman. “Here’s Fewkes’ map, with the ruins marked ‘Inaccessible’ on it, and, by jerry, we’re here, if the map’s right. They’re somewhere above us, and it’s up to us to bust ’em.”

“Yaas,” said Big John, shifting his weight to the nigh stirrup to give the white horse under him a change of load. “Somethin’ hed orter be done about it, thet’s shore! You mosey up—an’ I’ll hold yore hoss!”

All of which preliminaries usually meant that Big John really meant to take the lead in climbing himself once the ruins were found. Sid knew that all this feigned reluctance about climbing cliffs was mere camouflage on Big John’s part. He urged his pinto across the cañon so as to get a better view of the cliff face. He wanted to size up that cañon wall first, for he knew that the only way to keep Big John off that cliff was to tie him down, which “ain’t done.” The two had been boon comrades for a long time; first up in Montana on the hunt for the Ring-Necked Grizzly, later in the Cañon de Chelly region where the Black Panther of the Navaho had met his end. That expedition had been Sid’s start in practical ethnology. Now they were down in the White River reservation of the Apache, seeking out ruins that had been noted by Dr. Fewkes of the Smithsonian but had been left unexplored for lack of time and facilities.

“There it is!” rang out the youth’s voice excitedly from across Cañon Honanki (Bear Cañon). “Come over here, John!”

The huge cowman trotted his white mustang over to where Sid had halted his pinto under a big western pine. Far up, at least three hundred feet above the floor of the valley, they saw holes like swallow’s nests pierced in the cliff at irregular intervals. They seemed small and round and black as ink, and near them were carved on the rock odd circular spirals, lightning zigzags, primitive horses, apparently all legs, and geometrical armed-and-legged designs intended to represent men. Ragged holes further along on the cliff face showed that galleries and passageways ran in behind the living rock up there. These natural caves, common enough in Arizona, had been scoured out by water action in geologic times.

But it was a fearful place for human beings to attempt to climb to! Tall perpendicular folds in the cliff face cast their black shadows on the surrounding stone, the cracks beginning and ending nowhere. There were impracticable clefts, ledges that shaded off to flat precipice faces, dents and scoriations not over two feet deep, yet they seemed to be all the footholds for climbing that the place afforded.

“Gorry!—a cavate dwelling!” whooped Sid, overjoyed. “The kind that is built in the solid rock instead of being made of stone slabs, John,” he explained with the ethnologist’s enthusiasm.

Big John grinned. “Gawsh!” he exploded. “I s’pose that humans once tried to live in such places—but eagles would know better! Nawthin’ll do but we gotto bust her, eh?”

“Yep,” said Sid confidently. “A shaman or a pueblo priest lived up there once. Sort of hermit, you know. Holy man. If that old scout lived there we ought to be able to climb up once.—What think?”

“He didn’t come pilgriming down to shoot up the gulch muy plentiful, I’m bettin’!” averred Big John sardonically. “I’ll tell ye, Sid; thar’s only one way to bust her, and that’s to make a string of long ladders, same as he done. You don’t get me off this hoss on no fly-creepin’ climb without a-doin’ jest that—savvy?”

“Oh, thunder!” exclaimed Sid impatiently. “It’d take two days of perishing work. Le’s try to get up this cleft here.” He pointed to the beginnings of a practical ascent.

“No!” barked Big John, and his tone was final. “The Colonel, yore pappy, he’d stake me out an’ build a fire on me tummy ef I let ye do any sech thing. Thet halter’s still waitin’ for you, Sid, I’ll admit, to save having it proved on me, but I ain’t aimin’ to cheat your friends out of their necktie party none. We camps right here an’ does the job proper, sabe, lil’ hombre?”

Sid acquiesced, after a little further study of the cliff. There was a tall vertical cleft that led up to the swallow’s nest holes by a series of breaks and rises. It was easy to reconstruct the old shaman’s route by imagining the proper ladders set up so as to negotiate a number of these vertical rises. They could be made of slender lodgepole pine, with the branches left on for steps in place of the heavier logs with notched steps which the aborigines had used. And not over half a dozen of them would be needed altogether. It was worth doing, to “bust” an “Inaccessible.”

Making camp in that rainless country was a simple matter. Sid simply selected a pleasant site on a knoll down the cañon overlooking the brook under a canopy of huge pines, while Big John unsaddled both horses and took them to the nearest grass plot, staking them out and leaving Blaze, his Airedale, on guard. The dog had been a present from Colonel Colvin after the Black Panther trip. He had the noted sagacity of his breed, and with a year’s hunting experience with Ruler, the giant coonhound of that expedition, had become a most devoted and dependable “pardner” on all their hunts. After merely piling the sleeping and cooking gear and hanging up their food bags above the rodent zone, Sid was ready to go ladder cutting.

The White Mountain region is pine forest, sparsely timbered, the trees not crowded or packed so densely as in eastern forest growth. As a result, the mountains, which resemble much the rounded and rolling Alleghanies of the east, seem stippled with individual trees instead of banked in mossy green as with closely growing timber. In the river valleys, however, there are thickets as dense as in any well watered clime, so Sid lost no time in getting into such a pine grove armed with his light belt ax. That light, little long-handled ax of his was far more efficient than any sort of hatchet. It would drop a four-inch pole thirty feet high almost as quickly as a full ax.

Before the first tree crashed down Big John had joined him.

“This here Pinus Contorta (sounds like Julius Seizher only it ain’t) is the boy that will bust her quick, Siddy boy,” he laughed, rolling up his sleeves and baring a forearm like a lean ham. “You give a leetle feller like me elbowroom!” He took a full ax in one fist and smote a tree with it like chopping with a hatchet. About two judgmatical cuts sufficed to send it crashing down, whereat the giant cowman started after another. Sid saw that he would have his hands full just trimming the felled ones so he went for their boughs with his small ax.

“You cut off them tops whar’ there’s somethin’ substantial to it, Sid,” rang out Big John’s voice from the timber as he sent another pine tumbling about the youth’s ears. “Remember that I weigh a pound or two more’n a straw hat, son!”

“Help me put up this first one, now, John, she’s ready,” announced Sid, struggling to lift the trunk clear of the underbrush. Big John came over and heaved the whole tree unceremoniously up on his shoulder. With Sid guiding the lean end they made for the cliff. Pushing and panting they up-ended it and stood it ladderwise in a vertical fissure which gave on a ledge above. Sid swarmed up the short branch stubs, climbed out on the ledge, and waved his arms down to Big John below.

“Looks like one of us’d have to shinny up and haul the next one with a lariat,” he called down.

“Son, I got an idee—ef she don’t get away while I’m picketin’ her down,” said Big John. “You git up thar and hang my lariat honda over that point of rock, sabe, an’ then we’ll run yore lariat through the honda and snake up the next pole by one of the hosses.”

He got both lariats up from camp while Sid waited. Presently he returned, to cast it up with the sure whirling pitch of the born rope artist. Sid snatched it in and hauled his own up by the end of the other. Then he coiled both, attached them to his belt and started up the next cleft. The very pockets in the rock where feet of the ancient log ladders used to rest were easy to pick out as he climbed. What men had done a man could do! By the time he had everything fixed and the honda, or brass eye of the lariat, hung with the other rove through it, Big John was below with a horse and a fresh pole. It came snaking up as the cowman led the horse away, hauling on the lower end by the lariat tied to a cinch strap above the pony’s back.

Sid set the pole and climbed higher to the next ledge so that they could repeat the maneuver with a third pole. This was the limit for that horse-hoisting stunt, however, for he was now up over eighty feet and there was not rope enough in camp to double through the next honda. Big John yelled up as he tied on the fourth pole and then he led the horse back to graze again.

In a few minutes Sid saw him climbing up below him. He had no fear of height himself. That all belongs to the tenderfoot aloft for the first time. It attacks man in a sickening sort of stage fright at first, whether on cliff, high building, or the upper rigging of a ship. After a time familiarity wears it off and in its place there comes a cheerfulness over the immense outlook, the height and the distant scenery of it all; a joyous sense of freedom that must be part of the bird’s outlook on life. He waited for Big John on the ledge, looking about him interestedly. It was narrow but not dangerous up here. An old woman might have wanted a rail fence or something, he thought, but things were done on such a huge scale on this cliff that this very ledge that looked from below like a mere trace proved up here to be nearly three feet wide. Plenty!—Thousands! as the facetious Big John would have said.

Presently that cheerful son of Montana arrived, breathing heavily but entirely at ease. “Waal, son, it ain’t goin’ to freeze up an’ snow on our scheme jest yit! Tail on to this yere lariat and we’ll yank up another pole.”

They hauled away on the long rope which the cowman had tied to the butt of the fourth pole while down there. It weighed perhaps fifty pounds—nothing at all to mountain men! After a period of grunting effort the butt end came up over the ledge and the pole was gathered in and laid lengthwise. They then started on to prospect for the next fissure.

“Gosh durn it, how come, son? Hyar be stone steps leadin’ up back hyar, or you can steal my hoss!” came back Big John’s voice in the lead as they rounded the face of the huge pinnacle of rock. Sid hurried to catch up. That simplified matters a whole lot!

“Look yonder, John!” he cried excitedly, as they climbed up the row of stone pockets, “one more pole finishes us! See that hole in the wall across the crevasse?”

“Sho’ I do! But Sid, you ought to show some respect for the naked truth, son—which-same means we’re busted! Yore hole’s across a no-bottomed chasm, hombre, an’ we ain’t flies nor yit eagles, nohow!”

Sid climbed more notched steps that led up over a smooth billow of rock and then eyed the hole opposite, measuring the distance carefully. Here, evidently, began those scoured-out caves and tunnels in the living rock which led up to the cavate dwelling. There had been a log bridge across here once, but it had long since rotted through and perished.

“Let’s drop our fourth pole across and then, we’ve got her, John—that’s the answer!” declared Sid.

Big John shook his head solemnly. “Ef she breaks an’ lets this gent down, they ain’t goin’ to be no come-back, that’s sartain! No sir, nawthin’ stirring!”

“Oh, shucks—where’s that pole, John? Le’s get her up here and let her fall over anyhow!” exclaimed Sid hopefully. “Maybe we can hit the hole opposite with its other end.”

“I’ll try that much,” agreed Big John. “I ain’t purty but I’m shore strong—as the bohunk said when they as’t him to tote a saw log.” And without more ado he retraced his steps and picked up the pole. With it on his shoulder he came teetering along the ledge.

“Thar, Sid—miss an’ out! We got jest one shot,” he grunted, standing the pole up and aiming its fall carefully.

“Wait!” shouted Sid. “Tie the lariat to the middle of it! You’ll feel better if you’ve got that to keep her from breaking,” he suggested.

“Center shot, son; plumb center! Shore you got almost human intelligence!” grinned Big John, lowering the pole again. Sid seemed to have an even better idea than that, now. He coiled the lariat and cast it up, to fall around a rock pinnacle above them. Then he tied its other end near the center of the pole and they let it fall slowly, paying out rope while Big John guided it by main strength until its other end rested square in the jagged black pit of the cave across the chasm from where they were standing.

“Ain’t afraid of nawthin’, now, with that good old rawhide lariat holdin’ her up,” declared Big John, beginning to climb across. Sid followed him, once the heavy bulk of the cowman had left the pole on the other side. Below him dropped away an endless shadowy chasm, with the tiny pines and firs of the valley visible hot in the sunlight far below. On both sides towered above him the huge smooth walls of the chimney made by the pinnacle and its neighbors. Sid cast a mere glance at the prospect below, and then climbed over swiftly and joined Big John in the black depths of the tunnel.

It was some time before their eyes became accustomed to the dim light. Up and up inside the living rock the narrow fissure climbed. Old steps, cut in the rock or built of flat stone slabs, guided them. Here and there light was let in by those irregular ragged holes in the cliff wall which they had seen from below.

“No one but a shaman would live here,” declared Sid, speaking ethnologically; “a basket of corn, some dried meat and a string of peppers would last him a whole season. But there’s water up here somewhere.”

“Hed orter be!” said Big John laconically. “This place’s as dry as the professor’s book, whar the dust flewed out of the pages when you opened it. Besides, that Indian’d grow a beard a mile long while he’s jest gittin’ down out’n hyar fer a drink!”

There was water up there. After a long climb, when their aching knees positively refused to lift for another step, they came to a little basin hollowed out of the rock by human hands. A thin trace of water came weeping down from somewhere in the interior here, to lose itself and evaporate on the outside cliff face. A spruce growing out of the crevice, which they could see through the next window, showed that all that water was being preëmpted by just that one tree. A spruce seed had found it somehow. Nature leaves nothing unutilized.

A blaze of light now lit up the chasm ahead. The gallery in the rock became more open and led upward to a wide door cut out of the rock. Here the shaman of long ago had looked out on the frailties and follies of the world below him, serene, indifferent, meditating on the destinies of his people. Those times surely needed one wise man to sit apart and do the thinking for them all, for in this pueblo country the hostile and warlike Apaches had been fearsome invaders even before the time of the Spaniards. How long before that they and the Navaho had come down from the far north no man knows. But they found the peaceful and sedentary pueblo Indians an easy prey, and gradually they drove them all out of these cliff dwellings in the mountains to build themselves defensive villages on the high mesas of the Painted Desert to the north.

Sid and Big John stopped at that natural doorway to look out below. Cañon Honanki lay a green-spired paradise below them. Bare, barren cliffs, streaked with color, rose opposite. A short way down the valley the horses could be picked out grazing placidly. The watchful Blaze lay near them and he rose and barked at sight of his master, his faint volleys echoing up the cliffs.

“Now for Mr. Inaccessible—the cavate dwelling!” exclaimed Sid triumphantly. He led on upward until he came to a low door built in a stone wall laid up without mortar. Entering it, they saw that a round window cut through the cliff stone lit up the small cave room. Baskets, finely woven, of a texture and quality seldom seen nowadays, greeted Sid’s delighted eyes. There were shallow marriage and ceremonial baskets; bottle-shaped ones waterproofed with piñon gum, the kind now called tus and used in medicine dances; large granary baskets still filled with dry kernels of blue, black, red, and white corn. A few black pottery jars, decorated with white lightning zigzags, stood in the corners. Strings of corn ears, red peppers, and dried onions, all musty and shriveled, hung from poles let into the roof of the cave.

“The old bird was a rain-maker, all right,” said Big John, pointing irreverently at the zigzags on the jars and baskets. “Claimed he invented the lightning, all-same as Benjamin Franklin.”

But Sid did not answer. Instead his eyes were riveted in sheer astonishment on the smooth rock wall of the cave, and he grabbed Big John’s sleeve and pointed, speechless with wonder.

“Gorry!—Look there, John!” he finally found breath to exclaim. “Here is the last place a fellow would expect to see the writing of a white man, I’ll say!”

“Well, I’ll be durned!” growled Big John, peering at the letters with Sid.

Written on the wall, in red earth letters and still as bright as the day they were made, was—a name! a Spanish name!

Fra Pedro Del Vacas, 1680.

“Can you beat it!” cried Sid, breathlessly. “Gorry, what a find!—Le’s see, John,” he went on excitedly, “1680 was the year of the big massacre, wasn’t it?”

“Search me!” said Big John whimsically. “All I know about them greasers is that you shore don’t have to oil yore bullets none to slip ’em through their feathers.”

“Sure it was 1680!” continued Sid, ignoring Big John’s observation upon our Mexican neighbors. “That year all the tribes rose against their Spanish friars. Most of them were murdered or martyred—especially those that the Apaches got hold of. This Fra came up here to the old shaman for refuge. Why did he write that inscription then? Because he was dying, of course! Escaped from the Apaches somehow, wounded perhaps, and was carried up here by the pueblo people. The Spanish missionaries did not carve their initials on every rock. He left his name for the next missionary to find, if ever one should visit this pueblo again. It means something, John. We’ll look for pueblo graves, next, and maybe get some more light on it.”

Sid’s idea of searching for graves might seem astounding to any one but an ethnologist. But the richest prehistoric relics are always obtained from exhumed graves, usually located near some shaman’s cave. The body was always mummied, and with it were buried most of the pueblo Indian’s possessions. Here the early cotton blankets, yucca sandals, baskets, pottery, and weapons are found in a tolerable state of preservation, and they all show that the prehistoric pueblo dwellers lived very much as their descendants do to-day.

Big John was used to Sid’s intense enthusiasms in ethnological matters and was accustomed to following him around—to see that he “didn’t break his fool neck an’ so cheat that rope that’s waitin’ fer him” as he always put it. He bent his tall frame in pursuit as Sid dodged out of the house and darted for a deep and dusty grotto that lay behind it. A huge horizontal fissure, not over four feet high, had been worn out here by the waters, undermining the cliffs above for a considerable distance. A stratum of mud, long since dried to dust, covered the floor of the fissure. Closely dotted over it were slabs of stone, under each of which one would find a small stone kiva or dry well. The mummy would be discovered sitting upright in it, swathed about with cotton blanketing made long before the first wool from the first sheep that gave it was stolen from the Spaniards by the Navaho. Generally also the mummy was covered with ceremonial basketry. But Sid passed them all by, for the present. What he was searching for now was a white man’s grave. And, far back under the rock he found it, a long mound with a rude cross set in the dust at its head. A single flat stone lay across the center of the mound.

Raising it, the persistent Indian burial customs proved to have been still adhered to. A long black robe, with a ghastly skull peeping from the cowl, lay flat on the bottom of the niche, which was a sort of stone coffin, its sides lined with stone slabs built in shallow walls precisely like the Indian rivas. The top was roofed over with stone, on which the earth had been mounded up as the white priest had evidently directed it should be. There was nothing else in the grave. Nothing, that is, but a flat slab of pottery, lying across the dead friar’s chest!

Its square shape at once attracted Sid as unusual and not Indian. He picked it up with queer thrills running all through him. A message from that white man of long ago! For there was writing graven on the clay, and the three letters “D. O. M.” stood at the head of the plaque.

“A Dominican friar, he was, John,” said Sid, reverently. He began to read aloud the sonorous Latin written on the plaque, conjuring up his forgotten Cæsar of high-school days.

“What’s that stuff, huh?” inquired Big John. “Sounds like spig talk, but ’tain’t. I’m a hundred per cent American, Sid, I am, an’ I don’t like it,” he growled, shaking his head sturdily.

“Can’t make it out myself,” confessed Sid, after reading it a little farther. He found that he had forgotten his Latin so much that merely to pronounce the words was an effort. “Here’s a few that I do know, though, John: ‘Aurum et Argentum,’ that’s gold and silver; ‘Pinacate,’ ‘Sonoyta,’ those are places; ‘Papagoii’, the Papagoes; ‘Mesa Rubra’ that’s Red Mesa——”

“Never heard tell of it,” declared Big John, promptly. “Thar’s a red mesa up Zuñi way, but there’s no gold or silver thar; an’ Pinacate is a long thirsty ride down over the lava country into Mexico. Ain’t no mesas in that country nohow. She’s all red lava saw-teeth an’ spiny choyas—if you asks me.”

“It’s an old Spanish mine—that’s what the plaque’s all about!” shouted Sid, excitedly. “Some of the Papagoes must have told this old fra about a gold and silver mine, located in Red Mesa down Pinacate way—say, Scotty will have to hear of this John!” whooped Sid, carried away by the enthusiasm of the moment.

Big John shook his head solemnly: “Son, folks has died of thirst in thousands, chasing lost Spanish mines in that country! Santa Fé’s full of old priest reports like this-yer. The Indians shore did stuff ’em with gauzy tales! Thar’s mineral down thar, I’ll ’low; but after ye find it, what ye got? Reminds me of the recipe for cookin’ a fish-duck. Ye take an’ soaks him in three kinds of soup; bile him four days; stuff him with an apple an’ a onion; tie a bunch of celery ’round his neck, wrap him in a couple of slabs of bacon; stick in a hunk of garlic; add salt, pepper, and a bottle of wine; bake him three hours—an’ presto, the gosh-darn fish-duck is gone! That’s how a feller feels when he finds a mine in that country, Sid; ye cayn’t git the miner’l out nohow!”

Sid’s laughter pealed out. “Well, we’ll hunt up old Scotty just the same and then go get some one to translate this Latin. Scotty’ll just go crazy over this tablet, and he needs the money, John. We can come back here for the Indian relics some other time. Scotty and Niltci are prospecting down in the Santa Catalinas for mineral, right now, you know——”

“An’ they won’t find nawthin’ down thar thet ain’t been found long ago, jest as I told him,” interjected Big John.

“Sure! We’ll ride down there and give him this tablet. It will be a life-saver for old Scotty! Red Mesa or bust! John—how’s that for a new motto?”

“Looks handsome, but she ain’t edible,” said Big John, enigmatically.

But Sid just couldn’t get over his enthusiasm for his chum Scotty’s sake about this Latin tablet. What a find for good old Les! That mine would be his big chance! Friendship was sweet; to be able to do something for a chum was keen pleasure. He sat down and went on studying over the tablet, balking at strange Latin words, digging up more of them out of his memories of his school Cæsar. The old pottery plaque fascinated him. He kept speculating about it, how it came to be made, where the old fra had got his information about the mine. What an ancient old story this was!

“This fra used to live with the cavate dwellers here, John, I tell you! He made this plaque and had them fire it when they baked their own pottery. Imperishable record, you see. It’s a real find, I tell you! One of those lost Spanish mines that really is so! ‘In regione Papagoii’ that’s the Papago country of Pinacate, all right. ‘XXI milia S-O ab Pinacate’ plain as shootin’, twenty-one miles northeast from Pinacate, ‘Mesa Rubra’—there’s a hill that looks like a red mesa down there—that’s the dope! Gee! What a start for good old Scotty! Le’s go! We’ll ride straight for his camp in the Catalinas!”

Big John grinned saturnine grins as he deposited the pottery plaque in the small rucksack without which he never left his horse. Then he got up and followed the eager Sid down the long, dark ascent of steps up which they had come.

CHAPTER II
THE LURE OF THE MINE

“IT’S panning out mighty low-grade stuff!—Dog-gone it!”

The young man who made this ejaculation, and in a most discouraged tone, too, was slender and wiry, with sandy reddish hair surmounting a Scotch cast of features. His face was freckled and sunburned. The inextinguishable hope of youth still flickered in his blue eyes, but there was worry, anxiety, there, too—the sign of that nagging, cankering care that keeps a fellow thin.

He shook his head as he held up a test tube in its wooden holder to the sunlight.

“Won’t do!” he muttered. “Anybody can find a mine in Arizona—but few can find a paying one.”

He looked about him at the silent and colorful mountains surrounding him, hopeless misery in his eyes. They had no answer for him! The brush sunshade that he and the Indian boy who was his companion had established was Scotty Henderson’s base camp for mine prospecting. Our readers may have met him before—on the trip for the Ring-necked Grizzly in Montana or when after the Black Panther of the Painted Desert country of Arizona.

Leslie Henderson—Scotty’s real name—had a heavy load to carry, for a youth of nineteen. It weighed nothing physically but mentally it was a burden far beyond his years. And the letter from his mother that he was now carrying in a hip pocket of his riding breeches had added a sickening load upon a mind already worn with anxiety. It had told him, as gently and self-sacrificingly as possible, of his mother’s decision to sell the old Henderson place back east. The cost of living had gradually come to exceed Major Henderson’s pension, which was all the Great War had left them of his father, the good old Doctor. To a woman used to comforts and a roof over her head as a matter of course, to say nothing of the ancestral associations of that homestead, that decision of Scotty’s mother was a far heavier blow to her than her words would admit. Delicately put, it meant in plain words that Scotty would either have to strike a paying mine claim soon or else give up his heritage of independence, that heritage that every real man claims as his birthright, and take a position somewhere in some great mining corporation. And the outlook was pretty black, now.

“No go, Niltci!” groaned Scotty, emptying the green fluid in the test tube with a gesture of discouragement, “we’ll have to break camp and move on.”

With that decision the hopelessness of all this endless prospecting surged over Scotty in an overwhelming wave. Arizona had been combed all over for mines! There was plenty of this sort of thing, this scanty and scattered deposit of copper carbonate, poor in per cent of metal, all through its mountains. The real thing was far different. Not impossible to locate; for each year, even now, sees some new and fabulous lode opened up. But the scattered, thin deposit of this gulch would take a mountain railroad to develop it and the most expensive of electric process works to reduce it to metal. Take this ore back east and men could make money out of it, but that “take,” that train-haul which would cost more than the ore was worth, was the rub!

For a moment a gorgeous vista of temptation opened up before Scotty. All he really needed to do to become rich was to go east with some of these picked specimens and float a “paper” copper mine, the kind that robs thousands of poor people of their earnings by false and visionary “literature”; that were never intended to do more than line the pockets of those scoundrels who make their living cheating the public that way.

But the mute reproach of the silent mountains to that temptation was enough for Scotty. Even the poor prospector with burro and pick who had come this way before had been too honest for that! He, some one of him, had without doubt explored this very valley long before Scotty; he had looked over this ore and gone on, knowing well that in practice it would never pay.

“Nothing doing!” said Scotty to himself, his honest soul recoiling in horror before the gilded prospect of a wildcat mine floated back east. “But, while there’s life there’s dope!” he grinned. “Where next? Dashed if I know! Le’s break camp anyhow, Niltci.”

The Indian youth grunted inquiringly from where he squatted, with the stoic patience of the Indian, under their brush shade. He pointed a coppery finger out at a lariat rope stretched between two mesquites in the sunlight of the hill slope. On it hung a ragged collection of meat strips, like stockings on a clothesline. They still glistened, raw and red, in the hot blaze of the cloudless sky overhead.

“Charqui no done,” he demurred, shaking his head. “Three sleeps yet.”

He was referring to their store of dried venison; “jerky” as the cowmen call it, only he used the original Spanish name for it, charqui—dried meat.

“Gee, I’d forgot about our grub stake! Hope,” observed Scotty, “springs infernal in the human breast, Niltci! Grub’s our real problem, now. Let’s let the mine wait and play hunters a bit, eh?”

As if to answer him the musical notes of a hound belled down from a distant mountain flank. There was sparse, dry-soil timber all over these hills, piñon, spruce, stunted western yellow pine and the inevitable aspens. The hills were bare and bony, and they blazed with orange and lavender color, for it was November, but there was game in the valley timber, lots of it, deer, cougar, bobcat, and an occasional cinnamon bear. Wild turkey inhabited the depths of the cañons, so plentiful that they formed the daily fresh meat of their camp in addition to the abundant trout which the Apaches disdained to catch and eat.

Scotty listened a moment to the musical notes floating down through the valley.

“There goes Ruler!” he cried. “Let’s get the horses and see what he’s after!”

Niltci, the Navaho boy, sprang to his feet grunting assent eagerly. His lithe form bounded down the slope towards a grass meadow, his red bandanna a blazing note of color, set off by an equally blazing white cotton shirt contrasting with his long, dark blue leggins which sparkled with rows of barbaric silver buttons. In a trice he was leading back Scotty’s chestnut mare and his own flea-bitten desert pony. Ever since Niltci had miraculously “disappeared” during the religious excitements of his own people over the Black Panther, he had been with Scotty on his mining expeditions down here, far to the south in the Apache country of White River and far away from his own people. To his white friends he had owed his life that time—a debt that, to a Navaho, is never paid.

He handed Scotty the mare’s halter and started deftly saddling his own pony. Ruler’s bays came unceasingly down through the mountains. Their giant coonhound was of an indomitable persistence; he could be depended upon to follow that trail, whatever it was, for days on end without relenting.

“Up the coulée, Niltci!” shouted Scotty, vaulting his horse and clattering down the slope from camp. Behind him the fast hoofbeats of the Navaho’s pony followed. The mare crossed the creek bottom in a single jump and began working up the opposite flank in a long slant. On ahead an occasional yelp from Ruler gave inkling of his whereabouts. He was traveling fast, for the distance between them did not seem to close up. Frightened deer burst from cover and dashed down and across the stream bottom as they rode. A wild turkey, scared into flight by the showers of rolling stones struck loose by the horses, soared over the willows in the ravine and disappeared in a mass of thick green.

Then, behind Scotty, Niltci grunted eagerly and made a queer sound that was half a yelp.

“Yep! I see him, Niltci—cougar! There he goes!—regular old he-one!” gasped Scotty, jouncing in his saddle as he bent to drag his rifle from the holster. The mare shied as the heavy .405 swung out around her flanks. Scotty’s knees gripped her fast and he let the horse go with the bridle reins dropped over the pommel.

Ruler’s deep tones now came back in explosive volleys.

“Ow-ow-ow! Ow-ow-ow!” he sang, belling a hot trail.

“Heading north, up the cañon!” yelled Scotty, galloping through the timber at full speed. “Look at him go!”

He pointed out a running cougar far up on the yellow mountain sides, galloping along in easy bounds that seemed effortless. His tawny body doubled and stretched out in the queer lope of the cat tribe, now trotting with fast-moving feet, now humping up in the swinging bounds of the gallop. He seemed very like a buff and white household cat magnified to enormous size. His tail drooped behind, tapering from a thick root seemingly as wide as his hips to a ropy furry length that undulated as he sprang easily up over the rock ledges.

“Gee, he’s an old Tom, Niltci!” called back Scotty over his shoulder, “Hi-Hi!—Go it, Ruler!”

The big reddish brown coonhound yodeled in answer. He was racing along perhaps halfway between them and the cougar, a red dot on the hot sunlight, bellowing forth bursts of hound music as he ran. Above them soared the high walls of the cañon, at least a mile up to the rim, yellow and blue-shadowed and dotted with dark green conifers. A hideous gulch, as it would look to a city dweller, terminated the cañon walls as they narrowed, and it was cleft high above by a dry arroyo that was all stones and boulders. But to Scotty this was the finest place on earth, and it was a jolly old world anyhow—in spite of mines that failed to pan out! His one anxiety was that the cougar might reach the timber up on the rim plateau and then turn on Ruler before they could get up there. The cat was far up, near the head of the gulch, and going even faster than they were. Like tiny Japanese pines the distant trees on the rim seemed to welcome him, and, while the panting horses and men labored hard up the slope, the cougar bounded over a ledge of broken rock and was gone into the timber.

Niltci grunted. “Wah!” he exclaimed disgustedly. “Lose dog! Cougar kill him! No good! Take pony quick—me climb up straight.”

His little horse clattered close behind and Scotty reached back for the bridle. Niltci vaulted from the saddle and with quick lithe movements he began to climb vertically up the cañon slope. Scotty urged the mare on up the long slant that would bring him out somewhere near the beginning of the cleft that made the arroyo. He got two glimpses of Niltci’s blue leggins swarming up over vertical ledges far above him; one brief sight of Ruler scrambling up over the rim ahead on the cougar’s trail; and then he was all alone, with the empty, silent, gorgeous mountains brooding majestically around him. With his passing and the shower of stones that his pony was sending down, they would return again to the eternal peace that was theirs. Apache, frontiersman, cavalryman, prospector, all in their turn had come and gone, to disturb their meditations for a brief moment, to pass on leaving these lonely cliffs and pines their silent and inscrutable witnesses.

Scotty leaned over and whispered a word in the mare’s ear. The noble creature was giving him her best, with the boundless generosity and disinterestedness of our four-footed hunting companions, but somehow, somewhere, she found it in her to call upon an extra burst of speed, some hidden reserve in response to her master’s whisper. The top of the gulch was near now. With distended nostrils, with heaving flanks, and hoarse soughing breath the mare toiled up the last ledges and then vaulted over the rim.

An open country of great pines was that plateau. Shadows and sunlight flecked the needles under the huge ponderosas. Scotty saw a white flash running like a deer through the tree trunks—Niltci, who could run faster than a horse for a short spurt. He was far ahead, and as for Ruler, only a deep ringing bay told of his whereabouts.

“Wahoo!—Wahoo!” sang out Scotty, his whoops intended more to let them know he was up and coming than anything else. The pony he led behind him snorted and whickered at sight of Niltci and Scotty let him go free at the hint. The flea-bitten little mustang immediately loped on ahead in a fast clatter. This urged the mare to top speed again, for she would let no horse pass her, if wind and legs could prevent it!

Came a wild piercing screech and a savage miauling on ahead somewhere. It sounded hoarse and ropy and vengeful; terrifying; intended to strike a paralysis of fright into the creature attacked. Scotty realized that the cougar had turned to the attack, finding that only a dog was following him. Then Ruler’s voice floated back, yelping and barking in a mixed medley of pain and fury. Scotty knew instantly what had happened. The old Tom was mauling the dog unmercifully. He would kill Ruler if help did not come instantly. Ruler was all of eighty pounds in weight but the cougar was at least two hundred and fifty and could beat him easily in a single combat.

A piercing whoop came from Niltci in answer to Ruler’s cry of distress. Scotty at once whipped out the heavy .405 and its thunderous roar rang out. The mare ducked and shied under its cannonlike reports, but Scotty fired again and again, for he hoped the sound of the bullets ripping through the timber would frighten the cat into treeing if not too savagely engaged with Ruler.

As the mare burst out into an open glade, a wild drama under the pines across from it met Scotty’s eyes. Ruler was dodging and giving back, the cat following up and striking again and again with a tawny and scimitar-clawed forepaw—bright flashes in the sunlight as of curved steel hooks. Niltci was racing across the clearing, his bright knife flashing in the sun, his wild black hair streaming out behind him. He was sprinting his utmost to save the hound but he would be too late if one of those terrible blows ever got home on Ruler!

Scotty threw the mare back on her haunches and raised a wabbling rifle barrel. The scene through the sights was not reassuring. Dog and cougar were so instantly changing places that it was impossible to fire. All this was happening with the quickness of thought, and Scotty felt reluctant to fire even a flash shot, for Ruler was whirling about so fast that he might run into the bullet while it was getting there.

And then a queer thing happened. Another tawny and grizzled body suddenly projected itself into the fray! Where he came from Scotty could not imagine, but a volleying bay of savage barks told him that it was no cougar but another dog.

Scotty stared for a moment, rifle lowered. Then—“Blaze!” he yelled in amazed delight—“Yeeoow!—Tear him, puppy!” he whooped. The giant Airedale launched himself like a gray thunderbolt surcharged with vim and power at the cougar’s throat. As Scotty watched them, not daring to fire, the cat spun around and Ruler instantly seized a hock hold. Claws flew through the air. Blaze bounded about the cat like a rubber ball, just out of reach. A whoop of triumph came from Niltci as he closed in swiftly with upraised knife. For a tense instant Scotty sat watching a chance to fire from his saddle, his heart beating so that he could hear the pulses through his own open mouth. Then the cat whirled and soared through the air in one tremendous bound that carried him twenty feet away. He hit the ground running. There is no such speed as an old Tom can put on when in a tight place! He seemed literally to fly through the air, Blaze and Ruler a jump or two behind him. Niltci gave up the chase and snatched at the bridle of his pony as that faithful creature raced up after him. Scotty put spurs to the mare and galloped off in hot pursuit.

“Hi! Blaze! Hi! Ruler!—Wahoo!” he yelled, throwing the bridle over the mare’s neck. In answer a stentorian Whoopee! came ringing back through the forest. That was a man’s voice, and almost immediately following it there was a crash in the timber and a white horse thundered through the pines at right angles to Scotty’s course, the tree trunks seeming to pass the white flash of the horse like fence pickets.

“Left!—Left!—You pisen—li’l—horned—toad!” came Big John’s iron voice, jolting to the rhythm of his gallop. Scotty whooped back greeting at him and then wheeled obediently. The cat and both dogs were in plain sight ahead of him but Big John had an uncanny foresight in the ways of big game, and he had no doubt foreseen some sort of twist or short cut on the cougar’s part. The timber cleared ahead of Scotty now, and out to the left in it he saw a giant pine, already dying of old age. For it the cougar had turned and was now racing at top speed. He ran up its huge bole like a cat climbing a tree, a shower of bark spalls raining down from his claws. At the first big dead branch he stopped and turned below his black muzzle, spitting and snarling from an open pink mouth at the dogs underneath. Ruler was prancing around on his hind legs, yelling with eagerness, while Blaze savagely scrambled up the trunk, to lose his grip and tumble down and indomitably attempted it again.

Big John reined in the white horse. “Now’s yore chance to do the pretty, Scotty, old-timer—afore he jumps down—shoot!” he yelled.

Scotty quieted the mare and raised the .405. Its enormous bellow rang out. The cat screeched and launched forth with all four claws spread in the convulsive flurry of death. He struck the pine needles with a heavy thud and instantly the dogs charged in, growling and worrying at him, while old Tom rolled over on his back and spun his claws in the instinctive defense of a cat in his last throes. Niltci clattered up on the mustang at that instant. In a flash he had leaped from his horse, bounded to the cougar’s side and jumped away, leaving a red knife-handle sticking out behind the cougar’s shoulder blades. Again there was a flash of his nimble body and the knife came out, while blood spurted six feet from the gash. The cougar groaned and stretched out on his side, quivering and sighing peacefully as if falling asleep. His eyes glazed; then the body stiffened and stretched in a last tremor.

Blaze ran up on the carcass and bared white fangs at Ruler. His attitude was crinky, cocky as a prize fighter’s, and he honestly believed that he had killed that whole cougar all by himself! He dared Ruler to come on. As the latter had convictions of his own concerning that cat, a royal dog-fight seemed imminent—but Niltci seized the hound’s collar and held him back by main force.

Big John laughed uproariously. “Hol’ him, Injun!” he roared. “Ruler’ll be gobblin’ more’n he kin chow, fust ye know! That Blazie boy’s feelin’ reel mean an’ ornery, danged ef he ain’t!”

Scotty laughed as Big John dismounted to boot the Airedale off the cougar, for Niltci had signified that he wanted to begin skinning out but wasn’t any too anxious to go near the belligerent Blaze.

“Where’s Sid, John?” asked Scotty, collecting his thoughts for the first coherent greeting that the swift action of the hunt so far had allowed.

The big cowman’s eyes twinkled. “Sid, he ain’t travelin’ none, these days,” he grinned. “He’s back thar, somewhar, nursin’ along a sort of present for ye, Scotty.” He winked enigmatically at the youth.

“How come?” asked Scotty, mystified. “Present, eh?”

“Yaas, he’ll come a-singin’ with it, pronto. Some dago writin’ on a piece of Injun pottery, ’tis. We-all was headin’ for yore camp when we heard Ruler kyoodlin’ back thar a-piece,” he explained, “so Blazie and I, we ’lows to set in the game. But Sid he’s afear’d to ride, which-same’s because he mought break that thar curio. We found it in one of them caves, after the most all-fired climb this hombre ever got inter, I’m settin’ here to tell ye——”

“Here he comes, now!” interrupted Scotty, whipping off his sombrero to wave it at a new rider who came plodding through the pines with a led pack cayuse following him. “Whoopee!—Oh, Sid!” he yelled.

The rider waved back. The dogs put out for him pell-mell, Ruler leaping and fawning up on his saddle flanks, so overjoyed was he at seeing Sid again, the Airedale jealously shoving in to get his share of the caresses. Presently Sid rode up to where Big John and Niltci were busily skinning out the cougar and butchering big sections of the delicious meat.

“Hi, Sid!—what’s all this Big John’s telling me about a present?” Scotty greeted him. “Gosh knows, I was feeling pretty blue not so very long ago! Did you remember it was my birthday or anything?” he bantered.

“It’s a mine for you, Scotty!” announced Sid, breathlessly, his eyes alight with the joy of him who gives, “an old Spanish mine! Got the dope here on a pottery tablet that we found in a cave dwelling.”

“Gorry!—a mine!—le’s see it!” cried Scotty. “A real, sure-enough mine? I’d begun to think there was no such thing left in Arizona.”

“It’s at a place called Red Mesa, down near Pinacate, Scotty,” said Sid. “The dope’s all in Latin and I can’t read much of it, but we’ll hunt up a priest somewhere and get him to translate it——”

Scotty’s face fell, even while Sid was speaking. “‘Down near Pinacate!’” he echoed, huge disappointment in his tones. “It can’t be, Sid! Why, that’s all lava country! There’s no mesa or mineral down there.”

“How about the Ajo Mines?” challenged Sid. “And there’s lots of ore north of Sonoyta, only it costs too much to work it. You know that yourself.”

“By gosh, you never can tell!” exclaimed Scotty, excitedly. “It’s possible, though! There’s granite outcropping, even down at MacDougal Pass, only fifteen miles from Pinacate. We’ll try it!”

“Hope it isn’t in Mexican territory—but no, ‘twenty-one miles northeast of Pinacate,’ the plaque says——”

“Gee! Le’s see it!” cried Scotty eagerly.

Big John grinned sardonic grins as the two youths got the plaque out of Sid’s saddlebags and held it between them, scanning it excitedly. He heard Scotty eagerly bark out the word “‘aurum’—gold?” and shook his head.

“’Pears to me that every white man but me goes crazy over that word ‘gold’!” he growled whimsically. “Fellers will lie, steal, murder, get themselves killed with thirst or et by grizzlies—an’ all for somethin’ that they don’t want when they’ve got it!” he exclaimed. “Scotty, ef it warn’t for you bein’ a minin’ engineer I’d warn ye to leave it alone!” he said positively. “Exceptin’ it’s now November and the tanks is probably full down thar, I wouldn’t let you go, nohow.”

But Scotty was hardly listening to him. A planning look was in his eye and his engineer mind was already envisioning not the mine itself but the practical ways to get out the metal.

“Ship base in Adair Bay; burros up to the mine; carry the ore in bottoms through the Panama Canal to the East, where we can get cheap process reduction—Gee! There’s nothing to it!” he averred enthusiastically.

“C’rect—nawthin’ a-tall, li’l hombre!” grinned Big John sardonically. “No water; no feed for yore burros; no road—an’ no mine!” he declared.

“Yes, but ships, John!” urged Scotty. “That’s different. We can send out a year’s supply of hay, oats and supplies for the camp just as they do at Las Pintas, and bring back the bottoms in ore. It’s mighty different from some inland proposition, hundreds of miles from either rail or sea routes. If this tablet is reliable, the engineering side of it is a cinch! Le’s hear the ethnologist.”

Sid spoke up on this prompting: “We know well that all that country has been explored since the earliest times by the Spaniards,” he contributed. “Sonoyta has been inhabited by them for over two hundred years, and one of their oldest missions is San Xavier, the one for Papago Indians who used to hunt all that country. The friars were Dominicans—D.O.M., you see. This Fra Pedro undoubtedly got his information from some Papago visitors to the pueblo tribes. He made that pottery record and had it fired while proselyting among the pueblos of the San Pedro River—probably named the river himself after his patron saint. It all fits in, see, John? Then he got wounded or hurt, somehow, in the general massacre of the friars in 1680 and died in the refuge of that cavate dwelling. The Indians buried his plaque with him in a sort of kiva. The thing seems straight enough to me,” concluded Sid.

“Me too!” grinned Big John. “I gotto nurse you two pisen mean young reptyles down into that no-man’s land—I see that!” he snorted. “Waal, le’s git back to yore camp, Scotty, an’ I’ll git the outfit ready. Niltci’s goin’, of course. We gotto hev at least one Injun down in that country. Thar’s lots of mountain sheep down thar, an’ that means hoss feed, galleta grass. We’ll git a few pronghorns (antelope), mebbe, out’n them lava craters. Ef the tanks is not dry, we kin resk it.”

CHAPTER III
VASQUEZ

LEAVING Big John and Niltci hard at work making pemmican from the cougar and deer meat, and bags of pinole or parched corn meal from corn purchased at a near-by Apache encampment, Sid and Scotty rode a day’s march through the mountains to where there was a mission school—San Mateo of the Apaches. Scotty’s idea was to get the Red Mesa tablet translated by the teacher, who no doubt still remembered his Latin.

A small adobe schoolhouse of primitive Spanish architecture came in sight shortly after noon, surmounting a little knoll in the mountains. As they rode toward it Indian children, boys and girls, came running and yelling around them to beg pennies, and with them as an escort they rode up to the hitching rail before the school, dismounted and entered.

A lone Mexican teacher, poor and of uncertain temper apparently, sat reading at the school desk as they entered. With an annoyed exclamation in Spanish he put down his book and came toward them during the time that their eyes were becoming accustomed to the dim light of the interior of the building.

“And what can I do for the señores?” inquired the man suspiciously, after the usual polite Spanish greetings had been exchanged.

Sid had already sized him up with a sense of misgiving, even then, before a word of their object had been disclosed. The Mexican—his nationality oozed out all over him—was a little weazened man, dirty, old, with one eye drooping nearly shut from some violent slash gotten during his past history. His face bore a sardonic, cynical, rascally expression, even under the smooth suavity of the crooked smile that now leered upon them. Sid felt like taking Scotty’s arm and leading him away, right then and there! Surely this man was no one to trust with such a mining secret as might be written on the Red Mesa tablet.

But Scotty had already guilelessly begun explaining their visit. His simple, “We have a Latin inscription here, señor, that we would like you to translate for us,” had settled it, for the man was already holding out his hand for the plaque which Scotty bore.

“You understand Latin, señor?” put in Sid, hoping that he didn’t.

“Vasquez,” supplied the Mexican, “ees my name. For the Latin, si!—indifferently,” he shrugged. “Anything that my poor efforts can do to help you, though—” Once more he held out his hand for the plaque.

Again Sid felt that queer inner warning not to let the matter go further. He disliked any man who depreciated his own worth with every other word. Due modesty was admirable, but this groveling disdain of one’s self was in truth but the inevitable expression of a fundamental lack of esteem for one’s own integrity—and that usually came from a guilty conscience.

But it was too late now. Before Sid could obey a mad impulse to snatch the tablet away—no matter what explanations might be needed—no matter how absurd and incomprehensible and rude it might seem—the Mexican had begun reading the script on the pottery.

“D.O.M.—Deo Optimo Maximo,” he rolled out in the sonorous Latin tongue. That was as far as he got in reading it out aloud to the boys. For, immediately thereafter, an expression of amazed, puzzled surprise came into his eyes as the boys watched him reading over the script to himself. Then Sid noted intense concentration, and this gradually gave way to an expression of crafty cupidity, an air of envisioning something other than the words that his eyes were falling on, of planning big enterprise, great affairs in connection with this tablet. Vasquez went on to read the script entirely through in a still, tense silence. Before he had finished, those snaky black eyes of his were fairly blazing with avarice. Talk of the power of the word “gold” to excite man! This man’s primitive nature stood stripped before the boys; revealed was an elemental desire for possession before which the rights of others, the entire veneer of civilization were stricken off as phantoms. He might as well have been some Mexican greaser griping at a pile of gold on some disreputable faro table along the border!

As Sid watched, the face before him looked up. Instantly it went blank, expressionless. There was a period of reflection, while the boys waited expectantly, then a crafty, planning look came into the eyes.

He folded the plaque under his arm—gesture of possession, which we are told, is nine points of the law.

Vasquez smiled—a practical declaration of ownership—a maddening, infuriating smile; the superior smile of the older man toward youth, which seems to question the right of the young man to busy himself with anything at all but the toys of childhood. Sid found it particularly unbearable. He had been smiled at that way before, when some staid and sophisticated professor had smiled indulgently at him over some of his own theories in Indian ethnology, theories which Sid propounded with all the fire of his youthful enthusiasm and conviction.

“Caballeros,” said the Mexican craftily, “this matter can have no possible interest to you, since it happens to refer to the work of the missionary brothers among the—ah, the Papagoes—” he hesitated, referring to the script as if to refresh his memory, his thought evidently being that the boys might have recognized that word in the Latin. “Over two hundred years ago this—ah, yes, missionary matter it is, my young friends—was written concerning our poor red brothers who lived down near Pinacate,” Vasquez smiled down at them suavely.

Sid glanced at Scotty. The latter’s Scotch nature was so incensed over this bald smiling perversion of what even his limited knowledge of Latin had told him was the truth that he was utterly speechless. “Minem Argenti” indeed! That meant “silver mine” at any rate! Scotty’s faced blazed red, his eyes burned blue fire. As for Sid, he saw no use in prolonging this conversation further, for in craft the Mexican was more than his match. Boylike he preferred direct action.

“Sorry that I can’t see it that way, señor,” he replied shortly, gulping down his indignation. “I should be glad to furnish you with a copy of this tablet for your archives, if you wish,” he conceded, “but that original plaque is mine.”

He held out his hand for it with a gesture that told he was not to be trifled with further. Vasquez looked around desperately. Give him a moment more and he would think up some smooth reply that would at least gain time, perhaps argue the thing out of their very hands! But Sid made a determined lunge for him as the Mexican backed away.

At once the man raised his voice in a hoarse scream, “Ladrones! Gringoes!” he yelled, fending off Sid with a push of his hand while he turned the side with the plaque under his arm away from them. Then he ran for a door at the back of the school. Shrill yells and the shouts of Apache came in answer to his call from outside. There was not a second further to lose! Scotty sprang for the man, lunging low in the football tackle for his legs, while Sid with a fierce and accurate grip of his strong hands tore the plaque away from under his arm, the scuffle sending the three rolling together in a heap on the dirt floor of the church.

“Quick! Make for that rear door!” barked Sid as he and Scotty leaped to their feet. Vasquez squirmed on the dirt floor of the schoolhouse, cursing horribly in Spanish and rocking to and fro as he hugged a sprained ankle. If looks could kill, the malignant fire that darted from his snaky eyes would have paralyzed them both! Sid raced for the rear door while Scotty stood guard over the man with threatening fists. The patter of running feet sounded outside the ’dobe walls. Then a leggined Apache, with long, matted black hair, stood blinking in at them in the blazing square of sunlight that was the front door.

Sid had reached the back door. He looked in, then beckoned Scotty to join him. The boy raced over and, once inside the room, both boys slammed the stout panels behind them and let drop a heavy oak beam.

“There’s a small window, with a mesquite bush growing out in front of it, Scotty—give me a stirrup hold!” gasped Sid, who was breathing heavily from their tussle.

He stepped up in Scotty’s clasped hands and peered out the window, with one arm crooked over the edge. A mesquite grew just outside, and it was so heavily laden with dense clumps of mistletoe as to be in a dying state. Sid figured they might climb out into it and remain there undiscovered among the mistletoe clumps for a few moments. Outside he saw three or four Apache bucks running toward the schoolhouse from the grass huts perched upon the hillside. All over the village he heard an indescribable commotion of children and squealing squaws, but the Indians had no idea of what really was the matter. So far only Vasquez’s screech for help had come to their ears.

Sid climbed out through the window and then reached down his arms to help Scotty up to its sill. An uproar and a drumming of fists and impotent squalls in Spanish was sounding outside the oak door of the room as they both climbed out and gained the shelter of the mesquite. As the last buck outside ran into the school, Sid dropped to the ground and the boys raced for their horses. An outcry of Indian children greeted the appearance of the two fugitives, but none offered to interfere; only one little shaver had the presence of mind to run shrieking to the school door while Sid and Scotty were swinging up into their saddles.

“Now ride, Scotty, old scout—these Apache can run!” grunted Sid, hanging low over his pinto and putting spurs to him. Scotty’s mare had no idea of letting that pinto leave her, so they galloped away from San Mateo together, leaving behind a cloud of dust and a riot of angry war whoops from the red men piling out of the schoolhouse.

Sid’s caution as to the running abilities of the Apache was entirely true. Behind them streaked out two lean and sinewy bucks, who had raced out of the school door and were coming after them like arrows. What was more surprising was the way they kept up that speed. The mare and the pinto were going like the wind, but not a yard did those Indians on foot behind them seem to lose! There was not a horse save their own in sight. But three men and a swarm of children were already running down the hill to where the ragged poles of a horse corral and the glint of a watering pond near by shimmered in the broiling sun. Even barebacked it would be some time yet before these could join in the chase, but when it was once begun it would be tireless.

Not a word passed between the boys. Both were watching sharp ahead for prairie dog holes and urging on their ponies at top gallop. If they could outrun those two bucks behind them for half a mile they would have passed the limits of even Apache endurance. Indeed, before half the distance between them and the friendly hills had passed, they saw first one, then the other, give up, with arms tossed up in weary abandon, as both bucks threw themselves panting on the bare plain. Sid and Scotty then let their ponies ride on at their own stride. It was well to have an extra spurt left in them to call on, even yet!

“Mucho bad, Sid; look back!” said Scotty, a short time after the menace of the foot-racers had disappeared and the two bucks had risen and begun slowly to retrace their steps back to the school. Sid turned half around in his saddle. Out from the high ’dobe façade of San Mateo were riding four horsemen and their leader was swathed in a gaudy striped Mexican serapé. Surely he was that rascally Vasquez. And he would follow them until doomsday for the Red Mesa tablet!

“The whole thing’s bad, Scotty,” replied Sid. “This fellow knows now what’s written on the tablet. Nothing can take that knowledge away from him, either. We’ve got the plaque; but he has the knowledge it contains—and I’ll bet it’s indelible in his mind! They’ll never catch us with those Indian ponies, but what’s to prevent his reporting this Red Mesa mine to friends of his down in Mexico? What then?—you can have my shirt if a squad of their guerrillas doesn’t cross the border, pronto, and get to Red Mesa first! See it? That’s where we get off. I doubt if this fellow will follow us very hard. He knows all he needs to know right now.”

Scotty rode on in silence. Indeed this business had been bungled! Far better would it have been for them to have ridden into Tucson and gotten some scientist whom Sid knew and could trust to read the Latin for them. The very word “Gold” is bad medicine to let get abroad among the sons of men! Many a miner’s stampede has been started on less.

As the trail reached the foothills they drew rein and looked back. Far across the plain that little knot of horsemen was still coming on in the tireless lope of the Indian pony. Give them twenty miles of it and their own horses would be run off their feet!

“Here’s where we’ve got to step light and easy, old-timer!” grinned Sid. “The Indians will be in their own country in these hills, and they know every short cut to head us off. I wish Big John and Niltci were here.”

Scotty growled assent abstractedly as they rode up a bare and rocky arroyo. He was thinking of all that this Red Mesa mine meant to him. If it really existed, its nearness to the sea made the engineering problems of it so simple that it would be easy to get capital invested in it. Las Pintas mines, only thirty miles south of Pinacate, had already established a successful precedent for that, for it now had a little railroad of its own and a ship base, just as the young engineer had dreamed for Red Mesa. But now that Red Mesa’s location was known to outsiders—and after being buried two hundred years, too!—the whole thing was a mess, and of his own naïve making. The curse of trustful youth! There was just one point of hope. According to government regulations, whoever got there first and staked out a claim owned Red Mesa, now matter how discovered.

Scotty raged inwardly over it, driving his mare hard under that maddening goad of chagrin. Sid, who was less interested, followed phlegmatically behind. As the trail reached up high on the flanks of the mountains and headed up over a “saddle” into the next valley, Scotty rode ahead, dismounted and began climbing rapidly up toward the saw-teeth ridges that hung low in the sky above him. A persistent suspicion had haunted him ever since this ride had begun, and now he wanted that suspicion verified or dispelled.

As Sid passed below him then halted his pinto and waited, Scotty climbed on up and soon was peering through a ragged granite gap in the ridge. Below him fell away the bare, sage-strewn slopes and the low ridges of the foothills. Beyond that the great sun-baked plain of San Mateo lay like a floor. Up on its lonely hill, dim, in the blue distance, rose the school, yellow, and as Spanish as old Mexico. A mass of green around it told of water and of its permanent Apache colony.

Scotty then searched the plain for signs of their pursuers. At first he thought they had followed them into the mountains, for the plain below was bare as a table. Then he drew back, with a shock of intense discouragement and misgiving, for his eyes had at last found them—riding along under the foothills, toward the south! There were two of the Indians following Vasquez who was quirting his pony mercilessly. The third Apache had disappeared.

“Gee!” groaned the boy anxiously. “He’s riding south! Toward the railroad! That means a telegram as soon as he can send one. And the third Indian is following us!”

He scrambled down and told Sid his news.

“Kick me for a rank tenderfoot, Sid!” he groaned. “Kick me from here back to camp, and then kick me clear on down to Pinacate! Gorry, but I let the cat out that time!”

Sid grinned. “Buck up, old settler!” he cheered him. “I knew we were in wrong as soon as I saw that greaser schoolmaster. To give the Red Mesa plaque to some benign old priest to read, yes; but this bird was just a sinful man like the rest of us. The temptation proved too strong for him. Gee, but you handed him our dope, as innocent as innocent! Whee! Big John’ll think up something to do about it, though, and if he don’t we will. Remember, too, that Mexico is the land of mañana. I doubt if they even get any one started up from Sonora before we can make a fast push and get there first, old scout, so don’t worry. Besides, they can’t cross the border, unless a party of guerrillas does it. And—they’d have a lot of explaining to do to get the grant of a claim from the government unless regularly entered as immigrants through Nogales—which is further from Red Mesa than we are. Our job, now, is to keep an eye on this third Indian. He was sent after us as a spy, to keep track of us and report, you can depend on that. We’ll send Niltci after him.”

Scotty rode on, more hopeful. Sid’s rugged cheerfulness was what he always needed to brace him up. The one strong note in his character was his indomitable Scotch persistence. He never let go a thing once his mind was set on it, but he was easily disheartened and set back, for he had yet to learn that nine-tenths of our troubles exist solely in our imaginations.

It was nightfall when they reached camp. Not a sign had they seen of the third Indian, lurking in the hills somewhere behind them. That he had seen them was quite to be believed; he was probably watching their entry into camp at that very moment!

Big John hee-hawed when the boys told their story; then he jumped up, cackling hideously, grabbed Scotty and booted him all around the camp. “Thar!—Ye pisen li’l, ornery, horned toad!—Gol-darn ye—anyhow!” he guffawed, administering that kicking that Scotty had begged for but Sid had overlooked. “You boys ain’t satisfied with draggin’ me down to a country glowerin’ with petrified lava, but ye got to add to my troubles by ringin’ in a bunch of greasers on me! I tell ye what, Scotty, Pinacate means, ‘Bug-that-stands-on-his-haid,’ in Papago talk, an’ durned ef I don’t stand ye on yore haid, ef we don’t find no mine—an’ we won’t! Up you goes by the heels, I’ll be plumb hornswoggled ef I don’t do it!”

“Yeeow—attaboy!” yelled Sid, enthusiastically. “Well, how come? We’ve got to shake off this Apache, first, or he’ll follow us clear down to Pinacate. What’s the word, John?”

“My idee’s to do a leetle night ridin’, son—and sorter leave Niltci behind,” grinned Big John enigmatically. “Might’s well be rollin’ yore blankets right now, boys. The jerky’s all done and Niltci’s got it pickled away in a bunch of parfléche skins.”

That night the four horses, with Ruler and Blaze on rawhide leaders, pulled out of camp in the silence and gloom after dusk. One horse, Niltci’s flea-bitten mustang, was led riderless, his halter tied to the tail of Sid’s pinto. The white mustang that bore Big John’s long frame started ahead up the trail, a guide barely distinguishable in the faint light of the big Arizona stars. Black and inky buttes, jagged peaks and swelling ridges passed them in a slow procession around the horizon while Big John led on, stopping occasionally on the trail to reassure himself by some blazed stake set up in a cairn of stones or a rude corner of weathered granite rocks marking a turning point in the route.

The sun rose over the range of mountains left behind them next morning as the pack train wound down through the last pass in the hills and crossed the railroad track above Tucson. The horses were watered at a little river near the tracks, a river that was bravely hurrying on to its fate, to disappear forever in the thirsty sands of the desert to the north. Bare and rocky hills confronted them across the valley. As they headed into them Sid turned and looked back. A lone rider came galloping after them like a black speck hurrying out of the ranges across the valley. The whole party halted waiting for the rider, whether friend or foe.

It was Niltci, the Navaho, flinging along Indian fashion on a pony, his elbows flopping jerkily, his whole body swaying with the loose abandon of a rag tied somehow to the saddle.

“Well?” said Sid, as the Navaho boy overtook them, “what’s become of Vasquez’s Apache scout?”

Niltci’s bronze face cracked once in a saturnine grin. “Quien sabe?” (Who knows!) he shrugged his dusty shoulders. “Me got hees pony!” That was all they ever had out of him about it.

“Them thar rails says we gotta lope along pronto, boys!” said Big John as he pushed the white mustang to the head of the column. “Yore schoolmarm friend has gone by hyar, in the cyars, shore’s yore a foot high. ’Cause why? I didn’t see no pony tracks headin’ down fer Tucson, nohow, comin’ down this valley.”

“Think he’s gone to Nogales, by train, John?” asked Scotty anxiously.

“Shore has! Or else he’s takin’ the jerkwater local out of Tucson to San Xavier, so he can reach the Papago Reservation ahead of us. We’ll be crossin’ thet Injun ole folks’ home soon as we git out’n these hills an’ we’ll shore hev trouble!”

Big John shook his head ominously and urged on the white mustang. For him the race for Red Mesa had already begun.

“Yes, but the Papagoes are harmless,” objected Scotty.

“Not this time of year!” put in Sid. “This is corn time with them, and every other buck is drunk on a ferment that they make of it. That Vasquez could arouse them to almost anything, now.—Hey, John?”

“Shore, them Injuns is bad medicine for all white men in November!” quoth Big John sententiously.

They rode on in silence. A row ahead was tolerably certain, Sid thought. If Vasquez had reached them first by the railroad they would probably get a hot reception!

Two hours later their cavalcade filed out of the mountains and headed across a wide and hot plain. It was like riding into an entirely new world. Odd twisted and contorted cactus vegetation now covered the desert. Every plant and tree was different from anything the boys had ever seen before. Even the mountains were different, for instead of having the usual foothills they rose, gray and jagged and bare in the blue sky, abruptly from a flat and sandy floor. A faint tinge of green on their sides showed that the queer vegetation of this arboreal desert climbed up for a considerable distance even on that dry and inhospitable soil.

In front of them stretched a wide and flat plain, clear to the bases of the distant gray mountains. Sparse galleta grass and patches of gray sand dotted with creosote bushes covered it. There were clumps of mesquite, looking like dwarfed and twisted locust trees; here and there a bright green patch which, on riding closer, developed on to a palo verde, its bright green branches and twigs a dense lacery of glistening green. Sid rose close to one, looking for its leaves for apparently it had none. They were infinitesimal, spiky little things, adding nothing to its beauty, which he saw came entirely from the palo verde’s masses of sap-green branches.

As they rode further to the southwest, multitudes of what looked like tall green fence posts appeared. They covered the ridges, each as straight as a lance and as thick as a tree. They were small saguarro or giant cactus, ribbed and pleated in green, and covered with thorns. Further west they grew larger and put forth branches like huge candelabra.

To Sid’s naturalist soul all this arboreal desert was weird and beautiful and interesting. The tree choya, a clubby specimen with stiff branches of thorn bristles at the ends of crooked branches, began to appear; then the ocatilla, the “Devil’s Chair,” as Big John called it, a tree with no trunk but with more arms than an octopus and each branch covered with thorns and small green leaves bunched along a green stem as hard as iron.

Towards evening, across the gray-green miles, a small brown visita or mission outpost came to view. It was merely a large hut of adobe, but the bell in its upper tower told its purpose instantly. The boys thrilled as they looked at it, for they were now nearing the Papago Reservation and it was quite possible that Vasquez had forestalled them by train from Tucson.

Big John reined in the white mustang. “Nobody to home, thar, these days,” quoth he. “The Injuns is all away at the cornfields. We gotto ride in thar though, an’ help ourselves to water afore these hosses kin go further.”

Sid would have preferred to keep away, but there was no choice. Water was king in this country! They had to get it, if it meant encountering a thousand malignant school-teachers. Vasquez’s subtle Spanish mind had no doubt led him to reason that they must come here. But what redskin reinforcements he might have picked up in that lonely mission station imagination could not conjecture.

Slowly the miles lessened; the building loomed up brown and enigmatical in the setting sun before them. ’Dobe houses, each with a mesquite pole veranda in front, appeared like magic among the green stakes of saguarros on the hillsides; then a round stone oven out in the valley near the schoolhouse became plain to sight.

They were perhaps yet a mile away when around the corner of the building appeared a man on horseback. A cape or serapé of some sort hung over his shoulders, but it was too far away to get any sense of color from it. Niltci squinted his keen eyes and gazed at him long and fixedly while the others reined up.

“Mexicano!” he ejaculated.

“Sho’ is!” agreed Big John. “I’ll bet my hoss it’s that bird who tried to steal your tablet, boys!”

Sid and Scotty fumbled for their hunting binoculars. A moment later they had trained them on the man.

“It’s him, John, all right!” cried Sid. “Now what do we do?”

The rider in the serapé answered that question himself, for, wheeling his horse, he galloped off at full speed.

“Ride, fellers! Burn it up!” roared Big John. “We got about no time to git in thar an’ water our hosses. He’ll be back, right sudden, with the hull b’ilin’ of drunken Injuns!”

CHAPTER IV
PINACATE

IN a lather of foam the four horses raced in to the deserted Papago village. ’Dobe houses with small blunt chimneys dotted the hillside, but there was not so much as a dog in sight. The well was easy to find—a cube of palings built around a curbstone to keep wandering burros from falling in. It topped a low knoll and had a primitive windlass lowering a bucket into its depths.

Ten minutes of sweating activity followed, Sid and Scotty scanning the hills anxiously while each horse drank his fill; the two dogs lapped up a hatful from Big John’s sombrero; then all the canteens were filled.

“Now roll yore tails, boys!” urged Big John, flinging himself up on the white mustang. Sid looked to his stirrups and mounted the pinto in a running jump. Blaze and Ruler barked excitedly as the horses clattered up a steep slope that led through a gap in the hills. What might be on the other side of that ridge!

From its summit they saw a wide arboreal desert stretching away below, bounded on the west by a red, saw-tooth range of silent mountains. The rays of the setting sun swept across the plain, lighting up each saguarro pole in a spike of vivid green. But over in the hills to the east was coming a long file of riders—the Papagoes! They wound down a defile, galloping at full speed, and a tiny horseman swathed in a flying, striped serapé led them.

“Now, fellers, we shore got a race ahead of us!” declared Big John. “We’ll make for Red Tank, out thar in the middle of this valley. See them two little ’dobe houses? That’s her. Head for them ef any of ye git separated.”

Across the waste of creosote bushes, choyas and giant cactus that was the Baboquivari Desert galloped the whole party, heading due west toward the red water pond which lies about the center of it. Near its borders Sid could see the two ’dobe Papago houses, still ten miles off, yet they showed as tiny landmarks, even more noticeable than the many-branched giant saguarros which dotted the plain. Beyond them rose the Quijotoa mountains, abrupt and sheer, bare as the ribbed sides of a cliff. They were twenty miles away, but seemed quite neighborly, a refuge to ride for, a place for a stand-off fight if need be.

“Gee!—regular movie stuff!” chortled Sid to Scotty as he looked back over his shoulder again. Vasquez and his muster of motley Papagoes were crossing from the east but had not gained a yard on them yet. But they surely would, by the time those ’dobe houses were reached! The horses could keep their distance easily—at first. In time these tireless Indian mustangs would ride them down, sure as death!

“We’ll stop and stand ’em off from those ’dobe houses, eh?” answered Scotty. “My old .405 will be the boy then, you bet!”

“Won’t be no movie scrap, nohow!” growled Big John back from where he and Niltci were breaking trail. “The real thing don’t pan out that way. Ride, fellers! All tarnation won’t stop these horses from drinkin’ up the pond when we git thar, an’ we gotto make time so’s to let ’em do it. You, Blaze,” he stormed at the big Airedale loping along beside him, “I gotto turn ye loose, now, spite of thorns ketchin’ yore coat. Cayn’t take no more chances with this leader.”

Big John hauled up the huge furry Airedale on his saddle as he rode, unsnapped the leash and let him drop again. Twice before during the race the white mustang and Blaze had run on different sides of the same bush—with almost disastrous results but he had been still more afraid of thorns catching and holding the woolly-coated Airedale. Ruler had no such danger. The big hound loped along easily beside Sid’s pinto and his sleek sides passed the thorns like silk.

In half an hour more of twisting and turning through the arboreal desert seven miles of the distance had been covered. They still maintained perhaps two miles of lead over the Papagoes, in spite of the furious urgings and gesticulations of their leader in the striped serapé.

Big John glanced a sardonic eye back at him occasionally. “Greaser—I’d plumb dote on stoppin’ a leetle lead with ye!” the boys heard him mutter through his clenched teeth, as he galloped along. “But them good old days is gone forever, now. We gotto put up a tin-horn game on ye instead.”

Just what the hoax was going to be neither Sid nor Scotty could conjecture, but they knew Big John’s resourcefulness of old. They rode on silently, wondering, nursing the horses around the surprising twists and turns that Niltci ahead saw fit to make, usually to avoid great beds of bristly choyas. Both the mare and the pinto were breathing heavily now, and snorting in labored wheezes through their foaming nostrils. The pace was beginning to tell! The ’dobe houses loomed up not two miles off, but behind them came that tireless knot of Papago riders, light and lithe, and they could keep this up all day!

Then came a yelp of pain from Blaze. The Airedale, in leaping to avoid a spiky choya, had slammed full into a bushy acacia whose incurved cat claw spines showed no intention of letting go again. Doglike, he stopped still, waiting for his master to extricate him and not trying to tear himself loose. Big John let out a round oath and flung himself from the white horse while the rest all stopped.

“Get out yore .405 and let her talk, Scotty,” he barked, “she can outrange anything they’ve got, an’ this-yer dawg’s goin’ to make us take time out.”

Faint yells from their pursuers and the waving of rifles by upflung arms greeted the stoppage of their party. The cowman cut rapidly at the tufts of kinky hair that held Blaze fast, while Scotty yanked out his big rifle and ran back a short way to hide behind the cover of a giant saguarro. The distance between the parties closed up rapidly; to one mile, to half a mile, while Blaze whined and groaned, with mute fang laid protestingly on Big John’s bony hands as one by one the cat-claws were cut loose from his coat.

Then the .405 whanged out and its bullets screamed high in the air. A puff of dust flew up in front of the Mexican rider’s mustang and he checked his horse viciously. The Indians around him, looking more like a collection of disreputable tramps than the real thing, reined up and presently puffs of white smoke came from them, followed by the faint pop of their weapons.

At one of the shots Niltci suddenly threw up his arms and tumbled off his horse. Sid gasped with dismay, but to his astonishment the Indian boy was now wriggling off through the sage like a snake! He left his gaudy Navaho blanket behind, though, and Sid caught Big John’s eye winking at him. Evidently this was part of a ruse!

“You, Sid—make believe you was bending over something,” grunted Big John. “Thar, Blaze, yore free, old-timer! Now bring me that flea-bitten cayuse of Niltci’s, Siddy boy.”

Grinning, the youth held Niltci’s horse for him while Big John flung the blanket over Blaze, lifted him up on the saddle, and sprawled him out with his collar tied fast to the pommel horn. “Come on in, son!” roared Big John to Scotty as he threw a turn of rope around the dog’s back and vaulted up on the white mustang himself. “Now ride for all yore wuth, boys!”

“But Niltci—how come?” gasped Sid. “Are we going to leave him?”

“Never mind Niltci—he’s some busy, ’bout now. Hep, boys!” retorted Big John, putting spurs to the mustang. Indeed, as Sid looked around for him, Niltci had disappeared as if the earth had swallowed him up. He himself rode on lightheartedly. Shots rang out behind them and the puff of sandspurts kicked up the desert floor near by, but the Papagoes’ shooting was wild and the range a good deal too great as yet. The four horses swung down toward the first ’dobe house and Big John quickly led Niltci’s cayuse behind it and stopped them all.

“Them Injuns may hev taken Blaze under the blanket fer Niltci wounded—an’ again they mayn’t! We’ve got ’em guessin’ anyhow,” he grinned, peering out around the corner. “Sid, you take the hosses to the pawnd, an’ water ’em, while Scotty and I sorter dally with these excited hombres a leetle.” He dragged out his old meat gun, a .35 with a mouth like a young cannon and a knockout punch. “C’mon, Scotty, le’s mosey!”

Around the corner of the house they looked out and back across the plain. The Mexican rider had reined in at long rifle range. His Indians were dismounting and creeping out through the bushes to right and left while one of them held all their horses by a handful of halter ropes. Finally the Mexican also dismounted and joined them in the ambush attack. Their idea was evidently to creep up close and then carry the house by a simultaneous rush.

“Fooled ’em, all right!” grinned Big John. “They shore think that Niltci got hurt in the shootin’ an’ we brought him in hyar lashed to his saddle. Let ’em come! You an’ I mought’s well be a-sprinklin’ the sage, Scotty, so as to make it more excitin’. Don’t shoot nobody—tain’t wuth it.”

He went to the other corner of the house and opened fire with the .35. Nothing loath, Scotty tore loose with the monstrous shout of his big .405. It made a fine noise, and its bullets ripped and ricochetted across the sand, throwing up small shell-spouts like a naval gun. Answering shots and the whizz and smash of lead bullets striking the building told the youth that this was not all play. Whatever story Vasquez, if it was he, had told the Papagoes it had evidently aroused them to an unwonted fury. It all seemed incredible, preposterous to Scotty. The Bean-Eaters were the most peaceful of red men. Were it not corn time he could not have believed that they were really fighting in earnest.

“Got them hosses watered, Sid?” called out Big John presently. “Bring ’em hyar; show’s comin’ off, pronto.”

Sid led the horses back under the shelter of the house and ran to help in the defense. Shots rang out in the sage, coming from both sides on their flanks. It was getting high time to move on, before one of the horses should be hit. Sid aimed carefully behind a puff of white smoke that rose from a creosote bush at his right, and let go with his .30 army carbine. Before he could watch the result a yell and a shout of laughter from Scotty spun him around. Out there on the plain a funny thing was happening. The Indian in charge of the Papagoes’ horses had now apparently mounted one of them and was riding off with the entire bunch!

It was several seconds before Sid realized the truth—that that white rider with the red bandanna about his forehead could be none other than Niltci himself! While Sid had been shooting, the Navaho boy had crept up through the sage, knocked down the Papago holding the horses and ridden off with all of them!

At sight of this disaster a chorus of vengeful whoops rose out of the desert all around them and two or three Papagoes leaped from cover in a futile spurt to catch the runaways. Sid could have bowled them over easily but he was instantly recalled by Big John’s shout.

“Mount and ride, boys!” the big cowman was yelling. He himself leaped up on the white mustang and the boys followed hard after, riding along the banks of the red pond. A flock of teal rose in a great flutter of wings and there were yells and imprecations behind them from out in the creosote bushes, but they waited not to hear them. Big John was guffawing so that he could hardly keep his saddle. “Sing, redskins!—Yell, ye pisen horned toads! Ain’t it a grand an’ glorious feelin’ to be set afoot though!” he shouted back at them. “Gosh durn it, boys, I ain’t hed so much fun since we made Apache Sam eat a rattlesnake! Niltci an’ I, we cooked up thet hoss-thievin’ stunt whilst ridin’ out hyar. Blaze, he jest nat’rally helped!”

As for Niltci, he was now making a wide circle around the other side of the pond, leaving behind him the screaming and fist-shaking Vasquez, who stood in the sage searching his soul for Spanish expletives that would relieve his feelings! Niltci rode in to join them shortly after, with all the Papago ponies following him and a broad grin on his face.

“Mucho bueno!” he grunted. “What do with pony?”

“Oh, we’ll pilgrim along a while, an’ then drop ’em after dark somewhar near the Quijotoas,” laughed Big John. “Fine work, Injun! I reckon we’re shut of that outfit for a piece, eh, boys?”

“Not to be a crape-hanger, I’d say that we won’t see another Mexican unless it’s a bunch of guerrillas down near Pinacate,” said Sid.

“Shore! More fun!” grinned Big John. “Them rebel greasers has Mausers—but they cayn’t hit nawthin’ with them. Hope that Vasquez person aims to round ’em up an’ bring ’em along. ’Twell be some fine li’l party, I’m settin’ hyar to tell ye.”

They rode on and dropped the Papago ponies shortly before pushing through the pass in the Quijotoas to Poso Blanco. There they encountered a new village of Papagoes and the inhabitants lined up to watch them go by. Big John, nothing loath, bought oats from them, as friendly as friendly! They, of course, had heard nothing of the row over at Red Tank. Some of them even did their best to sell the party baskets!

“Shore, but a runner from Red Tank will git in hyar late to-night, fellers,” quoth Big John, as they rode out on the desert once more. “This lot of Injuns’ll be some surprised, I’m thinkin’! We’ll water at Poso Blanco an’ pull our freight for ole Montezuma Haid early to-morrow morning, or the hull kadoodle will be on our heels.”

After dark a dry camp was made, in a patch of mesquite and palo verde, a long distance out from Poso Blanco. It had been a hard day of riding! Fifty miles, in all, had they covered, and now the country was changing from gray to red, and lava began to show up, black and glowering under the horses’ hoofs.

It was sharp and chilly in the dark before dawn when Big John roused out the camp next morning. “Now, fellers, we’ll water for the last time at Wall’s Well by sun-up, an’ then make a long pull through the gap in the Growlers, which-same brings us to Represa Tanks on the Camino del Diablo. You-all hev never been thar, an’ hev no idee what it’s like, but the Spaniards told the truth, fer once, when they named it the Road of the Devil. Thar’s always water in Represa, an’ from thare we kin work out to Cerro Colorado, the first of them extinct volcanoes. If Red Mesa’s twenty mile northeast of Pinacate, as that pottery slate says, you’ll see her from thar.”

The horses, freshened and invigorated with grass feed and the cool of night, led off spiritedly, all four riding together in a bunch. In two hours more the sky began to lighten in the east and then a shaft of red sunlight struck into living fire the top of a mountain that rose ahead of them, solitary and shrouded like a monk—Montezuma’s Head. Sid held his breath in wonderment, to see the red bath of color spread down the flanks of that huge and imposing presence, widening and broadening its base with color, bringing out the vivid green posts of saguarros, the dark greens of creosote, and the white patches of barrel cactus wrapped in their dense mantles of thorns. They were in the heart of the giant cactus country now. The floor of the desert was dotted all over with them. Everywhere their weird candelabra shapes stood like sentinels, upholding bent and contorted arms, notes of bright green on a gray and pale green waste.

As they rode nearer, Sid raised a shout of discovery. “First organ pipe cactus!” he whooped, pointing excitedly. “See it? Up yonder on the hill!”

Out of a cleft in the rock rose a nest of what seemed to be tall and crooked green horns, bunched together like some coral growth of the depths of the sea. A queer plant, but all this country was filled with these dry-soil and water-storing species, and nature did queer things with them to make them able to survive.

Under the towering ramparts of Montezuma’s Head the horses were watered and canteens were filled. The wide flat stretch of arboreal desert across to the Growlers lay before them. It would be twenty miles of riding in the hot sun. Extra bags of feed were bought and hung over the saddle bows before they started, and from a lone cowman, an old settler who had come here for peace and quiet, Big John borrowed a five-gallon canvas water bag.

That “valley” was a flat stage floor, surrounded by an amphitheater of bare, granite mountains. They rose all about them, interminable distances away. Yet every mile of that crossing proved interesting, for the boys never grew tired of studying this abundant desert plant life. Saguarros in troops and regiments marched up and over the ridges or filled in the foregrounds of mesquite and palo verde at appropriate intervals. Patches of galleta grass that simply could not be ignored invited the horses to a step and a munch of fodder. Gambel’s quail ran through the bushes in droves and caused many a chase and much popping of the small six-shooters that the boys carried. An occasional road runner darted through the creosotes, long-legged and long-tailed. Desert wrens sang from the white choyas where their nests lay adroitly concealed from predatory hawks. It was high noon before the Growler mountains were reached. They rose abruptly out of the plain, so very steep and sudden that Scotty was convinced that the foothills that properly belong to all mountains must lay buried in the sand underneath the horses’ hoofs. A minute before, the cavalcade had been trotting easily across a table-land like a hall floor; in the next step the horses were laboring up a steep and rocky trail that raised them higher and higher with each step.

At an elevation of some eight hundred feet they paused in a gap that broke through to the west and the party spied out the land spread out like a map below. Red and jagged mountains rose across the flat valley of a red and scowling land below them. A blue haze enveloped it all, out of which rose dark purple cones of extinct volcanoes, hundreds of them. It all seemed a black and purple mass of peaked hills, devoid of vegetation, sizzling in the sun. “Petrified hell,” Big John had well named it!

As they looked, the haze of vapors shifted slowly, and out of the far distances appeared for a brief while a faint line of higher mountains, culminating in a couple of smooth and wrinkly teeth etched faintly against the blue.

“That’s old Pinacate, boys,” said Big John. “Look hard at her; for you won’t see her again for a long while yet.”

“Pinacate or bust!” said Sid solemnly. “Red Mesa must be somewhere between here and it, then, John, since we are now due northeast of the old boy.”

“Mebbe,” retorted Big John, shaking his head. “Search me! If thar’s a mesa, such as we have up in the Hopi country, anywhere down hyar—I’ll eat it! Hey, Niltci!”

The Navaho youth grunted negatively. He had the keenest eyes of them all. If there was a mesa, such as he was familiar with in his own country, he would have been the first to spy it out and exclaim over it.

“Welp! Let’s get movin’,” said Big John. “Thar’s a leetle tank somewhere down this trail, ef she ain’t gone dry. She don’t last long after the rains in this country.”

He and Niltci started on down the granite, but Sid and Scotty tarried to look out once more over this lava land, iron-bound and torrid in the heat of midday.

“Lord, what a country!” exclaimed Scotty, dejectedly. He was disturbed to find himself frankly afraid of it. Nothing here to exercise his constructive engineering instincts upon! Nothing—but Death!

“To me it’s a challenge,” retorted Sid brightly. “It’s still another mood of grand old Dame Nature, of whose wonders there is no end! She cares nothing at all for Man; but each new aspect of her is a challenge to him to stay alive, if he dare. Doctor Hornaday”—Sid pronounced the name with all the fervor of boyish hero-worship—“he dared this country once, and discovered that mountain sheep and antelope had a refuge here. Those granite mountains across from us to the north of Pinacate are named after him. This lava looks good to me, for it makes a game sanctuary of this country forever. Except for your sake, old man, I’d rather there never was a Red Mesa mine.”

Scotty shrugged his shoulders impatiently. He was fast falling into a mood that had often been fatal to him before, that of trying to rush a thing through, jumping to a conclusion on presumptive evidence and then acting on that conclusion immediately, without trying out that homely old remedy known as “sticking around a bit.”

“Well, le’s push through to Cerro Colorado and have it over with, Sid,” he urged. “If there’s no Red Mesa, the sooner we find it out and get away the better.”

But by nightfall they had reached only Represa Tank. It was an enormous run that their tired horses had made, for that hot country, had Scotty’s impatience only admitted it. The tank was a muddy little hole with a small oasis of grass and a grove of mesquites surrounding it. Near by was the famous Camino del Diablo, the thirst-haunted road to Yuma, one hundred and thirty miles away to the west—all dry desert travel. Big John and the boys sauntered out to look at it after supper. Up through a gap in two red lava hills led the old trail, a sure-enough road, as good (or bad) as the day it was made. Looking southeast behind them, the thing lost itself in the bushes of the Tule Desert. Why or when it had been built, the boys had no idea.

Big John regarded it solemnly for a while. “Injuns, Greasers, prospectors an’ sodjers—they all had a purple time of it along this trail, boys!” he exclaimed. “More’n four hundred people hev died along this Camino del Diablo, of thirst, exhaustion, an’ jist plumb discouragement.”

Scotty shook his head ruefully. “Let’s make a break for that Cerro Colorado hill to-morrow, John,” he urged. “It’s about twenty miles northeast of Pinacate, so Red Mesa can’t be more than five miles from it and directly between it and Pinacate. Ought to be a cinch to find it, if that plaque is O. K. And, if we don’t, we’ll clear out, pronto, and waste no more time on it, eh?”

“I’ve never climbed Red Hill myself, son,” said Big John. “But as for clearin’ out—we cayn’t! Not yet awhile.”

Sid grinned delightedly. “How come?” he asked, all interest.

“What think? Ef four men goes to chowin’ man’s food, in alligator-sized doses like you boys hev been doin’ for the last four days, how long d’ye suppose three skins of pemmican will last?” asked Big John sardonically. “We’re almost out of meat, boys. We’ll try Cerro Colorado to-morrow, an’ then, Red Mesa or no Red Mesa, we rolls our freight for them Hornaday mountains whar thar’s mountain sheep an’ antelope. Shoot or starve—that’s us, old-timer!”