"F'r instance?" suggested Hooker dryly. It had struck him that Phil was spending a good deal of time in town already.
"Well, there's this revolution. Sure as shooting they're going to pull one soon. There's two thousand Mexican miners working at Fortuna, and they say every one of 'em has got a rifle buried. Now they're beginning to quit and drift out into the hills, and we're likely to hear from them any time."
"All the more reason for staying in camp, then," remarked Bud. "I'll tell you, Phil, I need you here. That dogged ledge is lost, good and plenty, and I need you to say where to dig. We ain't doing much better than old Aragon did—just rooting around in that rock-pile—let's do a little timbering, and sink."
"You can't timber that rock," answered De Lancey decidedly. "And besides, it's cheaper to make a cut twenty feet deep than it is to tunnel or sink a shaft. Wait till we get to that porphyry contact—then we'll know where we're at."
"All right," grumbled Bud; "but seems like we're a long time getting there. What's the news downtown?"
"Well, the fireworks have begun again over in Chihauhua—Orozco and Salazar and that bunch—but it seems there was something to this Moctezuma scare, after all. I was talking to an American mining man from down that way and he told me that the Federals marched out to where the rebels were and then sat down and watched them cross the river without firing on them—some kind of an understanding between Bernardo Bravo and these black-leg Federals.
"The only fighting there was was when a bunch of twenty Yaquis got away from their officers in the rough country and went after Bernardo Bravo by their lonesome. That threw a big scare into him, too, but he managed to fight them off—and if I was making a guess I'd bet that your Yaqui friend was one of that fighting twenty."
"I reckon," assented Bud; "but don't you say nothing. I need that hombre in my business. Come on, let's go up and look at that cut—I come across an old board to-day, down in the muck, and I bet you it's a piece that Kruger left. Funny we don't come across some of his tools, though, or the hole where the powder went off."
"When we do that," observed Phil, "we'll be where we're going. Nothing to do then but lay off the men and wait till I get my papers. That's why I say don't hurry so hard—we haven't got our title to this claim, pardner, and we won't get it, either—not for some time yet. Suppose you'd hit this ledge—"
"Well, if I hit it," remarked Bud, "I'll stay with it—you can trust me for that. Hello, what's the Yaqui found?"