“Then, let’s not bother about a rough looking miner who has hardly taken his eyes off us since we came here this morning. Nicky, run over to the mine office building and tell Mr. Gray we’ve got everything ready to start back.”
Nicky dropped his own pony’s rein over its head, while Tom, with his lithe movements apparent in the ease with which he mounted his own animal, caught the bridle of an extra mount and Cliff took the burro’s leading rope. Nicky ambled across the flat ground toward a zinc sheathed shack at a little distance.
Cliff and Tom sat on their ponies, watching covertly as the man they had been discussing finished the remnants of his chili con carne, wiped his mouth on a ragged coat sleeve, rose and strolled with a seemingly aimless air toward the upper level on which stood the engine house, the mouth of the mine and other timbered and metal covered buildings.
Nicky, on his return, looked around, saw that the man was gone and voiced a proposal.
“Mr. Gray says he won’t be ready to go for more than an hour,” he informed his chums. “The mine superintendent is telling him about some old Aztec curios he owns, and you know how that will chain Cliff’s father in his chair. What do you say if we take a little gallop down the trail—a race, maybe?”
Tom vetoed the race: they had a good ride before them and he did not want to start on winded ponies: however, he agreed to a short ride on a trail that they had not explored and the trio rode off, tying their burro to await their return.
The extra pony, also left standing, may have wondered why his own rider, the older one, had not come; but he waited with the patience of a well trained animal.
As the boys rode along, the trail became rapidly steeper and the small plateau narrowed into a rough, rocky coulee.
“It certainly is too bad,” Nicky said, with a sidewise glance of rueful sympathy toward Tom. “After we came all the way to Mexico City and then rode out here to the old mine, it is too bad that we can’t get even a trace of your missing sister.”
Tom nodded.