“Suits me!” caroled Sid. “We’ve got to stock up before we start back, eh? Well—what did we bring Ruler and Blaze along for, anyhow!” he demanded enthusiastically.
Scotty was silent as they went back to camp. He was silent, too, and anxious all through the ride to Cerro Colorado next morning. Face to face with the reality, with these vast fields of scowling lava, with the dry and level plains of endless creosote bushes, with these parched and stunted bisangas, choyas, and saguarros, his dream shriveled and faded. A mine! Here, in all this five hundred square miles of barren lava! A railroad to it! How cross the grim ranges of Pinacate, looming up now not twenty miles away to the west? It all seemed so hopeless! It would take a far sterner and more determined man than he to push through such a project!
But Sid sang happily as they rode toward Cerro Colorado. This wild, free land struck a response in the deepest notes in his being, the love and enjoyment of that freedom that every explorer, every pioneer, every adventurer feels to be his most precious birthright; for which he will sacrifice ease, comfort, wealth, civilization itself. New species of this marvelous desert life constantly claimed his attention. White trees, fluffy in foliage as cotton, appeared. “Smoke Trees,” Big John named them. A new bush, all frosty white, met them along the march, securing a roothold even in crevices between red and sterile lava chunks as large as a ragged rock boulder. He recognized the species as the Brittle Bush and would have tried breaking its twigs except for the formidable and glistening thorns with which it was armed. Then came a vast carpet of lowly little plants that seemed made of frosted silver and Big John drew rein. He inspected them closely and then scanned the neighboring craters and all the vast plain about him with keen eyes.
“Antelope fodder, fellers!” he announced. “Whar ye see thet leetle plant, thar’ll be pronghorns. They love it better than grass.”
No antelope were in sight, however. Even if so, they would be quite invisible under that burning sun. The horses loped on. Gradually there rose out of the desert a low hill, sheered off flat at its summit and covered with the dense lacery of creosote bushes. Cerro Colorado it was, and they picketed the animals out and began to climb its rocky slopes. Rough, sharp lava, in boulders of all sizes, marked the lava flow of geologic times from this hill; indeed the whole plain below was made entirely of the outpourings of this one crater. Once on its top they looked out over the country between them and Pinacate, who loomed up grim and imposing in the west and surrounded by his wide and desolate lava fields. Twenty dreary miles away was he!
Sid had carried with him the Red Mesa plaque, bearing its enigmatical message in Latin which Fate had not permitted them yet to have translated and he now produced it for that last reading. The words they knew were still there, staring up at them from its red pottery surface.
“XXI Milia S-O ab Pinacate—Minem aurum et argentum—In Mesam Rubram”—there was no mistaking that!
But the more they pored over the words the more unbelievable they became! It was surely a cruel joke, a wild tale that the Papagoes had brought to that old priest, Fra Pedro. It must be—now! For, below them stretched a vast plain, stippled all over with creosote bushes, clear to the base of Pinacate itself, twenty miles away! There was no Red Mesa, no hill of any sort on that plain! If those bearings on the plaque were true, Red Mesa ought to be in plain sight, right now, and not over five miles away! But there was nothing of the kind, anywhere in sight!
Scotty finally turned to look at Sid, silent misery in his eyes. His dream had vanished. Already his thoughts were turning to the future. His next letter to his mother would not be the triumphant announcement of a valuable claim staked out, a triumphant return east to organize a company, but—well, nothing much; nothing but perhaps a brief note, saying that he had got a job somewhere.
Sid gripped his hand sympathetically. There was nothing to say. If Red Mesa existed it certainly was not here.