"Señores," said Pedro, cutting in at this moment, "with your pardon, we must be getting out of this cañon: it will be black night down here in another ten minutes."
"That's true!" our friend assented. "So come along. We camp together, of course. How are you off for provisions? We have the hind-quarter of a deer which Pedro shot three days ago; pretty lean and stringy, but if you are as hungry as I am we can make it do."
"Hungry!" cried Dick. "I'm ravenous. We've had nothing to eat since six o'clock this morning. How is it with you, Frank?"
"I'll show you," I replied, snapping my teeth together, "as soon as I get the chance."
With a laugh, we set off over the dam, and half an hour later were all busy round the fire toasting strips of deer-meat on sticks and eating them as fast as they were cooked, with an appetite which illustrated—if it needed illustration—the truth of the old saying, that the best of all sauces is hunger.
Our supper finished, we made ourselves comfortable round the fire, and far into the night—long after Pedro had rolled himself in his blanket and had gone to sleep—we sat there talking.
The reasons for our own presence in these parts were briefly and easily explained, when our new friend, Arthur—with whom, by the way, we very soon felt ourselves sufficiently familiar to address by his first name—Arthur related to us the motives which had brought him so far from home.
"It was not only to hunt up this old mine," said he; "in fact, that was quite a secondary object. My chief reason for coming out was to look into the condition of the Hermanos Grant, and to find out why it was we had been unable for the past twelve years to get any reports from there."
"Why you hadn't been able to get reports!" exclaimed Dick. "What have you got to do with the Hermanos Grant, then?"
"It belongs to my father," replied Arthur, smiling.