"Yes?" observed Phil. "Then why don't you dig the gold out? But as for us, we find our own mines. That is our business."
"Seguro!" nodded Mendez, glancing at their outfit approvingly. "But I am a poor man—very poor—I cannot denounce the mine. So I wait for some rich American to come and buy it. I have a friend—a very rich man—in Gadsden, but he will not come; so I will sell it to you."
"Did you get that, Bud?" jested Phil in English. "The old man here thinks we're rich Americans and he wants to sell us a mine."
Bud laughed silently at this, and Mr. Mendez, his hopes somewhat blasted by their levity, began to boast of his find, giving the history of the Eagle Tail with much circumstantiality and explaining that it was a lost padre mine.
"Sure," observed Phil, going back to his horse and picking up the bridle, "that's what they all say. They're all lost padre mines, and you can see them from the door of the church. Come on, Bud, let's go!"
"And so you could this," cried Mendez, running along after them as they rode slowly up the cañon, "from the old church that was washed away by the flood! This is the very mine where the padres dug out all their gold! Are you going up this way? Come, then, and I will show you—the very place, except that the Americano ruined it with a blast!"
He tagged along after them, wheedling and protesting while they bantered him about his mine, until they finally came to the place—the ruins of the old Eagle Tail.
It lay spraddled out along the hillside, a series of gopher-holes, dumps, and abandoned workings, looking more like a badly managed stone-quarry than a relic of padre days. Kruger's magazine of giant powder exploded in one big blast, had destroyed all traces of his mine, besides starting an avalanche of loose shale that had poured down and filled the pocket.
Added to this, Aragon and his men had rooted around in the débris in search of the vein, and the story of their inefficient work was told by great piles of loose rock stacked up beside caved-in trenches and a series of timid tunnels driven into the neighboring ridges.
Under the circumstances it would certainly call for a mining engineer to locate the lost lead, and De Lancey looked it over thoughtfully as he began to figure on the work to be done. Undoubtedly there was a mine there—and the remains of an old Spanish smelter down the creek showed that the ground had once been very rich—but if Kruger had not told him in advance he would have passed up the job in a minute.