“Uh––huh, they are as real to us this minute as the red gold that we’ve trailed until we’re at the tag end of our grub stake. I tell you, Bub, they stacked the cards on us with that door of the old Soledad Mission, and the view of the gold cañon from there! Why, Whitely showed us that the mission door never did face the hills, but looked right down the valley towards the Rio del Altar just as the Soledad plaza does today; all the old Mexicans and Indians tell us that.”
“Well, we’ve combed over most of the arroyas leading into the Altar from Rancho Soledad, and all we’ve found is placer gravel; yet the placers are facts, and the mother lode is somewhere, Cap.”
“Worn down to pan dirt, that’s what!” grunted Pike. “I tell you these heathen sit around and dream lost mission tales and lost mine lies; dream them by the dozen to delude just such innocent yaps as you and me. They’ve nothing else to do between crops. We should have stuck to a white man’s land, north into Arizona where the Three Hills of Gold are waiting, to say nothing of the Lost Stone Cabin mine, lost not twenty miles from Quartzite, and in plain sight of Castle Dome. Now there is nothing visionary about that, Kit! Why, I knew an old-timer who freighted rich ore out of that mine thirty years ago, and even the road to it has been lost for years! We know things once did exist up in that country, Kit, and down here we are all tangled up with Mexican-Indian stories of ghosts and enchantments, and such vagaries. I’m fed up with them to the limit, for everyone of them we listen to is different from the last. We’ll head up into the Castle Dome country next time, hear me?”
“Sure, I hear,” agreed Kit cheerfully. “Perhaps we do lose, but it’s not so bad. Since Whitely sent his family north, he has intimated that Mesa Blanca is a single man’s job, and I reckon I can have it when he goes––as he will. Then in the month we have scouted free of Whitelys, we have dry washed enough dust to put you on velvet till things come our way. Say, what will you bet that a month of comfort around Nogales won’t make you hungry for the trail again?”
“A gold trail?” queried the weary and dejected Pike.
“Any old trail to any old place just so we keep ambling on. You can’t live contented under cover, and you know it.”
“Well,” decided Pike after a rod or two of tramping along the shaly, hot bed of a dry arroya. “I won’t bet, for you may be among the prophets. But while you are about it, I’d be thankful if you’d prophesy me a wet trail next time instead of skimpy mud holes where springs ought to be. I’m sick of dry camps, and so is Baby Buntin’.”
“‘Oh, there was a frog lived in the spring!’” chanted Kit derisively. “Cheer up, Cap, the worst is yet to come, for I’ve an idea that the gang of Mexican vaqueros we glimpsed from the butte at noon will just about muss up the water hole in Yaqui cañon until it will be us for a sleep there before the fluid is fit for a water bottle. ‘Oh, there was a frog lived in the spring!’ Buntin’ Baby, we’ll fish the frog out, and let you wallow in it instead, you game little dusty rat! Say, Pike, when we load up with grub again we’ll keep further west to the Cerrado Pintado. I’ll follow a hunch of my own next trip.”
The older man grunted disdain for the hunches of Kit, even while his eyes smiled response to the ever-living call of youth. To Rhodes there was ever a “next time.” He was young enough to deal in futures, and had a way with him by which friends were to be found for even unstable venturings with no backing more substantial than a “hunch.”
Not that Kit was gifted with any great degree of fatal beauty––men are not often pretty on the trail, unwashed, unshaven, and unshorn––added to which their equipment had reached the point where his most pretentious garment was a square of an Indian serape with a hole in the middle worn as a poncho, and adopted to save his coat and other shirt on the hard trail.