Two tilted wagons, a good deal the worse for wear, apparently pretty heavily laden, and drawn by six mules each, were accompanied by about two dozen men on horseback. Their portraits would have made the fortune of any picture-gallery in the world. Everybody would have gone to look at such a collection of bearded desperadoes.
They were not Indians, nor were they dressed as such. They were attired in every fashion except well and cleanly. If the odds and ends of several clothing stores had been picked up after a fire, and then worn about out, and patched and mended with bits of blankets and greasy buckskin, something like those twenty odd suits of clothes might have been produced; that is, if the man who tried to do it could have had these for a pattern. If not, he would have failed.
The men themselves were as much out of the common way as were the clothes they wore, but they had somehow managed to keep their horses and mules in pretty good condition.
Horses and mules are of more importance than clothing to men who are as far away from tailors and civilization as were these new-comers in the neighborhood of Steve's mine.
If Steve had seen them he would probably have trembled for the "Buckhorn," for Murray would at once have told him that these men were miners.
That was nothing against them, certainly, and they must have been daring fellows to push their hunt for gold so far beyond any region known to such hunters.
One look at their hard, reckless faces would have convinced anybody about their "daring." They looked as if they were ready for anything.
So they were, indeed, and it is quite probable a man of Murray's experience would have guessed at once that they were ready for a good many other things besides mining.
Just now certainly they were thinking of something else.
"Bill," said the foremost rider to a man a little behind him, "we were wrong to leave the trail of them army fellers. We're stuck and lost in here among the mountains."