I
“One time there was a white man who had got wind of a lot of Mexican dollars buried down below Roma. He had the place all located, and was so sure of hisself that he brung in an outfit of mules and scrapers to dig away the dirt. He was making a reg’lar tank digging down to that money when a Mexican living down there what I’ve knowed all my life comed along.
“This Mexican, when he come along clost to the tank that the white man was digging, stopped a minute under a mesquite tree to sorter cool off, and when he did he saw a hoe laying down on the ground half covered up in the dirt. He reached down to pick it up and then he saw a whole maleta of coins. A maleta, you know, is a kind of bag made out of hide. This maleta was old and rotten, and when he turned it over with the hoe it broke open and the gold money jest rolled out in the dirt.
“D’reckly, the Mexican went over to where the white man was bossing the teams, and he asked him what he was doing. The white man told him that he was digging up some buried money.
“ ‘Well, you’s digging where it ain’t no use to dig,’ said the Mexican. ‘The money ain’t there; hit’s over here. If you want to see it, come along and I’ll show it to you.’
“The white man laughed like he didn’t believe what the Mexican was telling him, but he come along. When they got to the mesquite there wa’n’t no money in sight, but there was a hole down at the root of the tree kinder like a badger hole and bumble bees was going in and out making a roaring sound and the dirt was fairly alive with great big bugs, maybe tumble bugs, only they was humming and making a sizzling noise and working around awful like.
“ ‘Huh, is this what you call money?’ says the white man, stamping down on the tumble bugs. ‘I’ll eat all the gold what they roll up.’ [[54]]
“ ‘That’s all right,’ says the Mexican. ‘There was dollars of gold and silver too here. But there ain’t now, I admit, ’cause them dollars’s evidently not intinded for you. White man didn’t hide that money and it ain’t meant for white man to find it. No matter how much you dig or where now, you won’t find nothing.’
“Shore enough, the man kept on digging and he didn’t get nothing. One time I asked the Mexican why he didn’t go back and take out the money.
“ ‘I didn’t want none of it,’ he said. ‘I never put it in the ground. ’Twa’n’t mine any more’n that white man’s.’
“A few days after he saw the money, though, he went back and scratched around in the dirt a little and picked up an old Mexican square dollar. He brung it to Roma and bought some flour and some coffee and some candy, and give some of the candy to my wife. She was living down there and knowed the man well and she’s told me many a time how she et some of the candy that the Mexican bought with that old square Mexican dollar. I always have thought that that money was intinded for him, but you know how some people are, and I can’t say as I blame him for not teching what he hadn’t a right to. If buried money like that is intinded for a human, he’ll come by it jest easy and nach’ral. If it’s not, he won’t come by it, no matter how much he hunts. Even if he did find it and it wa’n’t intinded for him, it ud prove a curse. I’d be afraid of it myself.”