"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 farther before we set out for the camp."
Steve would willingly have stayed 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 be mere gazing. A gold-mine cannot 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."