"My age? How old do you think I am?"
"I never guessed. Maybe you're not much over sixty."
"Sixty!"—he said that with a sort of low laugh. "Why, my dear boy, I'm hardly turned of forty-five, white hair and all. The white came to my hair the day I spent in hunting among the ruins the Apaches left behind them for my wife and my little girl."
"Only forty-five! Why, Murray, you're young yet. And you know all about mines."
"And all about Indians too. Come on, Steve; we must look a little further before we set out for the camp."
Steve would willingly have staid to look at all that useless ledge of gold ore, but his friend was on his feet again, now resolutely turning his wrinkled face away from it all, and there was nothing to be gained by mere gazing. A gold mine can not be worked by a person's eyes, even if they are as good and bright a pair as were those of Steve Harrison.
Before them lay the broken level of the table-land, and it was clearer and clearer, as they walked on, that it was not at all a desert.
It was greater in extent, too, than appeared at first sight, and it was not long before their march brought them to quite a grove of trees.
"Oak and maple, I declare," said Murray. "I'd hardly have thought of finding them here. There's good grass too, beyond, and running water."
"Hullo, Murray, what's that? Look! Are they houses?"