THE MINE
WITH THE IRON DOOR

BOOKS BY
HAROLD BELL WRIGHT

THAT PRINTER OF UDELL’S
THE SHEPHERD OF THE HILLS
THE CALLING OF DAN MATTHEWS
THE WINNING OF BARBARA WORTH
THEIR YESTERDAYS
THE EYES OF THE WORLD
WHEN A MAN’S A MAN
THE RE-CREATION OF BRIAN KENT
THE UNCROWNED KING
HELEN OF THE OLD HOUSE
THE MINE WITH THE IRON DOOR

D. APPLETON & COMPANY
New York London

THE MINE
WITH THE IRON DOOR

A ROMANCE
BY
HAROLD BELL WRIGHT
AUTHOR OF “HELEN OF THE OLD HOUSE,” “THE
SHEPHERD OF THE HILLS,” “THE WINNING
OF BARBARA WORTH,” ETC.
THE RYERSON PRESS
TORONTO
1923

COPYRIGHT, 1923, BY
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

TO
MY FRIENDS
IN THE OLD PUEBLO
TUCSON

CONTENTS

THE MINE WITH THE IRON DOOR

CHAPTER I
THE CAÑON OF GOLD

And yet—those who look for it still find “color” in the Cañada del Oro. Romance and adventure still live in the Cañon of Gold. The treasures of life are not all hidden in a lost mine behind an iron door.

FROM every street and corner in Tucson we see the mountains. From our places of business, from our railway depots and hotels, from our University campus and halls, and from the windows and porches of our homes we look up to the mighty hills.

But of all the peaks and ranges that keep their sentinel posts around this old pueblo there are none so bold in the outlines of their granite heights and rugged cañons, so exquisitely beautiful in their soft colors of red and blue and purple, or so luring in the call of their remote and hidden fastnesses, as the Santa Catalinas.

Every morning they are there—looking down upon our little city in the desert with a brooding, Godlike tolerance—remote yet very near. All day long they watch with world-old patience our fretful activities, our puny strivings and our foolish pretenses. And when evening is come and the dusk of our desert basin deepens, their castle crags and turret peaks signal, with the red fire of the sunset, “good-night” to us who dwell in the gloom below. Even in the darkness we see their shadowy might against the sky, and feel the still and solemn mystery of their enduring strength under the desert stars.

This is a story of some people who lived in the Catalinas.

If you would find more exactly the scenes of this romance you must take the new Bankhead Highway that, in its course from Tucson to Florence and Phœnix, runs for miles in the shadow of these mountains. From the old Mexican quarter of the city—picturesque still with the colorful life of the West that is vanishing—you go straight north on Main Street, where the dust of your passing is the dust of the crumbled adobe buildings and fortifications of the ancient pueblo that had its beginning somewhere in the forgotten centuries. Leaving the outskirts of the town your way leads over rolling lands of greasewood and cacti, down the long grade past the cemetery, past the Government hospital in the valley, to the bridge that spans the Rillito. From the little river you climb quickly up to the desert slopes that form the western base of the main range and that lie under their wide skies unmarked by human hands since the beginning of deserts and mountains. Beyond the famous Steam Pump Ranch, some sixteen miles from Tucson, the road to Oracle branches off from the Bankhead Highway and climbs higher and higher until from a wide mesa you can see the place of my story—the mighty Cañada del Oro—the Cañon of Gold.

But if you know the way you may turn aside from the main road before you come to this new Oracle branch and take instead the old road that winds closer to the mountains and for several miles follows the bed of the lower cañon. It was along this ancient trail that the eventful and romantic life of this southern Arizona country, through its many ages, moved.

This way, centuries ago, came the Spaniards—lured by tales of a strange people who used silver and gold as we use tin and iron, and who set turquoise in the gates of their houses. This way came the Franciscan Fathers to find in the Cañada del Oro gold for their mission at San Xavier. This way, from the San Pedro and the Aravaipa, came savage Apache to raid the peaceful farming Papagos and later to war against the pale-face settlers in the valley of the Santa Cruz. Prehistoric races, explorers, Indians, priests, pioneers, prospectors, cattlemen, soldiers and adventurers of every sort from every land—all, all have come this way—along this old road through the Cañon of Gold.

And because there was water here, and because there was gold here, this wild and adventurous life, through the passing centuries, made this place a camping ground and a battle field—a place of labor and crime, of victory and defeat; of splendid heroism, noble sacrifice, and dreadful fear. Set amid the grandeur and the beauty of these vast deserts, lonely skies and wild and rugged mountains, the Cañada del Oro has been, most of all, as indeed it is to-day, a place of dreams that never came true; of hopes that were never fulfilled; of labor that was vain.

Of all the stirring tales of this picturesque region of the Santa Catalinas, of all the romantic legends and traditions that have come down to us from its shadowy past, none is more filled with the essence of human life and love and hopes and dreams than is the tale of the Mine with the Iron Door.

But this is not a story of those old Spaniards and padres and Indians and pioneers. It is a story of to-day.

The old, old tale of the Mine with the Iron Door is as true for us as it ever was for those who lived and loved so many years ago. We too, in these days, have our dreams that must remain always, merely dreams and nothing more. We too, in these modern times, are called upon to bury in the secret places of our modern hearts hopes that are dead. In every life there are the ashes of fires that have burned out or, by some cold fate, have been extinguished. For every living one of us, I believe, there is a Cañada del Oro—a Cañon of Gold—there is a lost mine that will never be found—there are iron doors that may never be opened.

And yet—those who look for it still find “color” in the Cañada del Oro. Romance and adventure still live in the Cañon of Gold. The treasures of life are not all hidden in a lost mine behind an iron door.

As the old prospector, Thad Grove, said to his pardner one time when their last pinch of dust was gone and their most promising lead had pinched out: “After all, it’s a dead immortal cinch that if we had a-happened to strike it rich like we was hopin’, we couldn’t never bin as rich as we was hopin’ to be. There jest naterally ain’t that much gold, nohow.”

“Sure,” returned Bob Hill, the other old-timer, “and ain’t you never took notice how much richer a feller with one poor, little, old nugget in his pan is than the hombre what only thinks he’s got a bonanza somewheres on the insides of a mountain? An’ look at this, will you: If everybody was to certain sure find the mine he’s huntin’ there’d be so blame much gold in the world that it’d take a hundred-mule train to pack enough to buy a mess of frijoles. It’s a good thing, I say, that somebody, er something has fixed it somehow so’s all our fool dreams can’t come true.”

“Speakin’ of love,” said Thad on another occasion, when the two were discussing the happiness that had so strangely come to them with their partnership daughter, “love ain’t no big deposit that a feller is allus hopin’ to find but mostly never does. Love is jest a medium high-grade ore that you got to dig for.”

“Yep,” agreed Bob, “an’ when you’ve got your ore you’ve sure got to run it through the mill an’ treat it scientific if you expect to recover much of the values.”

The affairs of the old Pardners and their daughter Marta were matters of great and never-failing interest to the loungers who gathered in front of the general store and post-office in Oracle.

Bill Janson, known as the Lizard, invariably opened and led the discussions. The Janson family, it should be said, had drifted into the Cañada del Oro from Arkansas. They were, in the picturesque vernacular of the cattlemen, “nesters.” The Lizard, an only son, was one of those rat-faced, shifty-eyed, loose-mouthed, male creatures who know everything about everybody and spend the major part of their days telling it.

It was on one of those social occasions when the Lizard was entertaining a group of idlers on the platform in front of the store that I first heard of the two old prospectors and their partnership girl.

CHAPTER II
AT THE ORACLE STORE

“My Gawd! Hit’s enough t’ drive a decent man plumb loony, a-tryin’ t’ figger hit out.”

“YES, sir,” said the Lizard, “I’m a-tellin’ ye that them thar Pardners an’ their gal—Marta her name is—are th’ beatenest outfit ye er ary other man ever seed. Ain’t nobody kin figger ’em out, nohow. They’ve been here nigh about five year, too. Me an’ paw an’ maw, we been here eight year ourselves—comin’ this fall. Yes, sir, they’re sure a queer actin’ lot.”

The Lizard had so evidently made his introductory remarks for my benefit that some sort of acknowledgment was unquestionably due.

“What are they, miners?”

“Uh-huh, they’re a-workin’ a claim—makin’ enough t’ live on, I reckon—leastways they’re a-livin’. But that ain’t hit—hit’s that thar gal of theirn.” He shook his head and heaved a troubled sigh. “Law, law!”

And no one could have failed to mark the eager viciousness of the Lizard’s expression as the loose-mouthed creature ruminated on the delectable gossip he was about to offer.

“Ye see hit’s like this: Them two old-timers had this here gal with ’em when they first come into th’ cañon down yonder. She was a kid—’long ’bout fourteen, then. An’ there ain’t nobody kin tell fer sure who she is, ner whar she come from. They say as how old Bob an’ Thad found her when they was a-prospectin’ onct down on th’ border somewhares—tuck her away from some Mexican outfit er other. Mebby hit’s so an’ mebby hit ain’t. But everybody ’lows as how she ain’t come from no good sort nohow, ’cause if she had why wouldn’t the Pardners tell hit? An’ take an’ look at this dad-beatin’ father arrangement—take their names fer instance: one is Bob Hill, t’other is Thad Grove, an’ what’s the gal’s name but Marta Hillgrove—Hill-Grove—d’ye ketch hit? An’ one week old Bob he’ll be her pappy, an’ th’ next week old Thad he’s her paw, an’ the gal she jist naterally ’lows they both her daddies. My Gawd! Hit’s enough t’ drive a decent man plumb loony a-tryin’ t’ figger hit out.”

The Lizard’s friends laughed.

“Oh, ye kin laugh, but I’m a-tellin’ ye thar’s somethin’ wrong somewhars an’ I ain’t th’ only one what says so neither. Won’t nobody over here in Oracle have nothin’ t’ do with her. Will they?” He turned to the loungers for confirmation.

“She’s a plumb beauty, too, an’ a mighty cute little piece—reg’lar spitfire, if ye git her started—an’ smart—say, she bosses them pore old Pardners till they’re scared mighty nigh t’ death of her—an’ proud—huh—she’s too all-fired proud to suit some of us.”

The crowd grinned.

“The Lizard, he sure ought to know,” said one.

“How about it, Lizard?” came from another. “You been a-tryin’ t’ make up t’ her ever since she moved into your neighborhood, ain’t you?”

“Ye all don’t need to mind about me,” retorted the Lizard, with a vicious leer. “My day’ll happen along yet. Ye notice I ain’t drawed what Chuck Billings got.”

“Chuck Billings,” he continued for the benefit of any one who might not be well versed in Cañada del Oro history, “he was one of George Wheeler’s punchers, an’ he tuck up with her one evenin’ when she was a-comin’ home from Saint Jimmy’s, an’ I’ll be dad-burned if her old prospectin’ daddies didn’t work on Chuck ’til George jist naterally had t’ send him int’ th’ hospital at Tucson. Chuck he ain’t never showed up in this neighborhood since neither. I heard as how George told him if he did get well an’ dast t’ come back he’d take a try at him hisself.”

“Good for George!”

“Heh? What’s that?”

“Does George Wheeler live in the Cañada del Oro, too?”

“Naw, Wheeler he’s got a big cow ranch jist back here from Oracle a piece. George he rides all th’ cañon country though—him an’ his punchers. An’ us folks down in th’ cañon we go through his hoss pasture when we come up here t’ Oracle fer anythin’. George an’ his wife they’re ’bout th’ only folks what’ll have any truck with that pardnership gal. But shucks, George an’ his wife they’d be good t’ anybody. Take Saint Jimmy an’ his maw now, they have her ’round of course.”

“Saint Jimmy is your minister, I suppose?”

“He’s what?”

“A minister—clergyman, you know—a preacher.”

“Oh, ye mean a parson—Shucks! Naw, Saint Jimmy he’s jist one of these here fellers what’s everybody’s friend. He lives with his maw up on th’ mountain ’bove Juniper Spring, ’bout three mile from Wheeler’s ranch, jist off th’ cañon trail after ye come up into th’ hills. A little white house hit is. You kin see hit easy from most anywheres. His real name’s Burton. He’s a doctor, er was ’fore he got t’ be a lunger. He was a-livin’ back East when he tuk sick. Then him an’ his maw they come t’ this country. He’s well enough here, ’pears like; but they do say he dassn’t never leave Arizona an’ go back t’ his doctorin’ agin like he was. He’s a funny cuss—plays th’ flute t’ beat anythin’. You kin hear him ’most any time of a pretty evenin’. He’ll roost up on some rock on th’ side of th’ mountain somewhares an’ toot away ’til plumb midnight; but he won’t never play when ye ask him, ner fer any of th’ dances we have over here in Oracle neither. I heard George Wheeler say onct as how Saint Jimmy war right smart of a doctor back t’ his home whar he come from. You see, Saint Jimmy he’s been a-teachin’ this here gal of th’ Pardners book larnin’.”

The Lizard opened his wide mouth in a laugh which showed every yellow tooth in his head. “I’ll say he’s a-teachin’ her. I’ve seed ’em together up on th’ mountains an’ in th’ cañon more’n onct—book larnin’—huh! Ye don’t need t’ take my word fer hit neither—ye kin ask anybody ’bout what decent folks thinks of Marta Hillgrove. She——“

How much more the Lizard would have said on his favorite topic will never be known for at that moment a man appeared in the open doorway of the store.

Not one of the group of loungers spoke, but every eye was turned on the man who stood looking them over with such cool contempt.

He was dressed in the ordinary garb of civilization, but his dark, impassive countenance, with the raven-black hair and eyes, was not to be mistaken. The man was an Indian.

Presently, without a word, the red man stepped past the loungers and walked away up the road.

Silently they watched until the Indian was out of sight.

The Lizard drew a long breath.

“That thar’s Natachee. He’s Injun. Lives all alone somewheres in th’ mountains, away up at th’ head of th’ Cañada del Oro. He’s one of them thar school Injuns. Talks like a reglar book when he wants t’, but mostly he won’t say nothin’ t’ nobody. Wears white clothes all right, like ye see, when he has t’ come t’ town fer anythin’; but out in th’ mountains he goes ’round jist like all th’ Injuns used to. Which goes t’ show, I claim, that an Injun’s an Injun no matter how much ye try t’ larn him.”

“That’s right,” agreed one of the listeners.

“He’s a real sociable cuss, ain’t he?” commented another with a grin.

“Him an’ Saint Jimmy’s friendly enough,” said the Lizard, “an’ I know th’ old Pardners claim he ain’t no harm. But I ain’t havin’ no truck with him myself. This here’s a white man’s country, I say.”

A chorus of “You bet!” “That’s what!” and “You’re a-shoutin’!” approved the Lizard’s sentiments.

Then another voice said:

“Do you reckon this here Natachee really knows anything about that old lost mine in the cañon, like some folks seem to think?”

The Lizard wagged his head in solemn and portentous silence, signifying that, however ready he might be to talk about the Pardners’ girl, the Mine with the Iron Door was not a subject to be lightly discussed in the presence of a stranger.

CHAPTER III
THE PARDNERS’ GIRL

“Marta is bound to know, when she stops to think about it, that she jest can’t have two fathers.”

THE house in the Cañon of Gold where the Pardners and their girl lived was little more than a cabin of rough, unpainted boards. But there was a wide porch overrun with vines, and a vegetable garden with flowers. Beyond the garden there was a rude barn or shelter, built as the Indians build, of sahuaro poles and mud, with a small corra made of thorny ocotillo, and the place as a whole was roughly inclosed by an old fence of mesquite posts and barbed wire. On every side the mountains rose—ridge and dome and peak—into the sky, and night and day, through summer droughts and winter rains, the cañon creek murmured or sang or roared on its way from the woodsy heart of the Catalinas to lose itself in the sandy wastes of the desert below. The little mine where the Pardners worked was across the creek a hundred yards or more from the kitchen door.

It was that time of the year when, if the rain gods of the Indians have been kind, the deserts and mountains of Arizona riot in a blaze of color. On the mountain sides, silvery white Apache plumes and graceful wands of brilliant scarlet mallow were nodding amid the lilac of the loco-weed, while, in every glade and damp depression, the gold of the buck-bean shone in settings of brightest green. And on the cañon floor, the pink white bloom of cañon anemone, with yellow primroses and whispering bells, made points and patches of light in the shadow of the rocky walls.

It is not enough to say that the Pardners’ girl fully justified the Lizard’s somewhat qualified admiration. There was something more—something that neither the Lizard nor his kind could appreciate. She was rather boyish, perhaps, as girls reared in the healthful out-of-door atmosphere are apt to be, but it was a dainty boyishness—if sturdy—that in no way marred the exquisite feminine qualities of her beauty. Her hair and eyes were dark, and her cheeks richly colored with good health and sunshine; and she looked at one with a disconcerting combination of innocence and frankness which, together with the charm of her sex, was certain to fix the attention of any mere male, whatever his station in life or previous condition of servitude. In short, the strangeness of Marta Hillgrove’s relationship to the grizzled old Pardners, with the mystery of her real parentage, was not at all needed to make her the talk of the country side. She was the kind of a girl that both men and women instinctively discuss, though for quite different reasons.

Bob Hill put his empty coffee cup down that Saturday morning with a long breath of satisfaction, and felt for the pipe and the sack of tobacco in his shirt pocket.

“Thar’s nothin’ to it, daughter,” he remarked—his faded blue eyes twinkling and his leathery, wrinkled, old face beaming with pride and love—“if Mother Burton learns you any more cookin’, Thad an’ me will founder ourselves sure. I’m here to maintain that one whiff of a breakfast like that would make one of them Egypt mummies claw himself right out of his pyramid.”

Thad Grove grunted a scornful, pessimistic, protesting grunt and rubbed the top of his totally bald head with aggressive vigor.

“She ain’t your daughter, Bob Hill—not this week. It’s my turn to be daddy an’ you know it. You’re allus a-tryin’ to gouge me out of my rights.”

Marta’s laughter was as unaffected as the song of the cardinal that at that moment was waking the cañon echoes. Patting Thad’s arm affectionately, she said:

“Make him play fair, daddy, make him play fair. I’ll back you up every time he tries to cheat.”

“By smoke!” ejaculated Bob. “I clean disremembered what day it was to-day. But to-morrer is another week an’ she’ll be mine all right then.” He glared at Thad triumphantly. “I tell you, Pardner, jest a-thinkin’ of me goin’ to be daddy to a gal like her makes me all set up. I’ve sure got a feelin’ that to-morrer is the day we’ll dig clean through to our bonanza.”

“Huh,” retorted Thad. “I got a feelin’ we ain’t goin’ to dig into no bonanza to-morrer, nor nothin’ else.”

“Why not?” demanded Bob.

“’Cause to-morrer is Sunday, ain’t it? Holy Cats! but you’re a-gettin’ loonier and loonier. If you keep on a-dyin’ at the top you won’t be fit to be daddy to nobody. I’ll jest up an’ git myself app’inted guardian for my off weeks—that’s what I’ll do.”

“I may be a-dyin’ at the top,” returned Bob, “but, by smoke, I ain’t coverin’ no alkali flat under my hat like you be. As for us workin’ Sundays—I know we ain’t allowed, in general, but it’s a plumb sin if we can’t—jest for to-morrer—with me all set like I am.”

He looked at Marta appealingly.

“Whatever my gal says goes,” said Thad.

Bob continued persuasively:

“You see, honey, I’ve got it all figgered out that when we git in about three feet further than we’ll make to-day we’re bound to uncover our everlastin’ fortunes. You want us all to be rich, don’t you?”

“It’s no use,” said the girl firmly. “You both know well enough that I will not permit you to break the Sabbath. Saint Jimmy’s mother says it is no way for Christians to do, and that settles it. Anything that Mother Burton says is wrong is wrong. You both consider yourselves Christians, don’t you?”

“You’re dead right, daughter,” said Thad, with an air of gentle complacency. “I hadn’t a mite of a notion to work on Sunday myself. I wouldn’t go so far as to say I was much of a Christian but”—he glared at his pardner—“it’s a cinch I’m no Zulu. As for anybody that intimates we got a chance to uncover a fortune anywhere in that hole out there, between the dump and China—wal, I’d hate to tell you what sort of a Christian I think he is.”

Bob grinned cheerfully.

“Mebby I ain’t so much of a Christian neither,” he agreed, “but if I’d a-been that old Pharaoh what built them pyramids——“

The girl interrupted:

“Now, there you go again. That’s the second time. What in the world started you to talking about Egypt and pyramids and Pharaoh and mummies and things like that?”

“Oh, I jest happened to take a peek into one of them books that Saint Jimmy got us to buy for you, that’s all,” returned the old-timer, with a sly wink at the smiling girl. “An’ anyway, it seems like I ought to know somethin’ about mummies by this time, after livin’ as long as I have with that there.” He pointed a long, gnarled finger at his pardner. “Egypt or Arizona, livin’ or dead, it’s all the same, I reckon. A mummy’s a mummy wherever you find it.”

Thad rubbed his bald head with deliberate care.

“Daughter, does Mother Burton’s brand of Christianity say anything about what a man should do to his enemies?”

“Indeed it does,” returned the girl. “It says we must love our enemies and forgive them.”

“All right—all right—an’ what does it say about lovin’ an’ forgivin’ your friends, heh?”

“Why—nothing, I guess.”

“Course it don’t,” cried the old prospector in shrill triumph.

“Course it don’t. An’ do you know why? I’ll tell you why. It’s because it’s so doggone easy to forgive an enemy compared to what it is to forgive a friend, that’s why. The Good Book knows ’tain’t necessary to say nothin’ about friends, ’cause it’s jest as nateral and virtuous to hate a friend as ’tis to love an enemy—that’s what I’m a-meanin’.”

Marta was not in the least disturbed over this exchange of courtesies by her two fathers. Rising from the table, she laughingly remarked that if they were not too busy they might saddle her horse, as she must go to Oracle for supplies. Whereupon the Pardners went to the barn, leaving their girl free to clear away the breakfast things, wash the dishes, and finish her morning housework.

It was an unwritten law of the partnership that the particular father of the week should stand obligated to the parental responsibilities of the position. It was by no means the least of his duties that he must endure the criticisms of the other upon the way he was “bringing up” his daughter. It seems scarcely necessary to add that criticism was never wanting and that it was never without directness and point. To compensate for this burden of responsibility, the parent was permitted to say “my gal” while the critic, by the rules of the game, must invariably say “that gal of yourn.”

While Thad the father was currying his daughter’s horse, Nugget—a bright little pinto—Bob squatted comfortably on his heels, his back against the wall of the barn.

“Pardner,” he said, as one who speaks after mature deliberation, “I ain’t meanin’ to mix none in your family affairs, but as a friend I’m a-feelin’ constrained to remark that you ain’t doin’ right by that gal of yourn nohow.”

Marta’s father was making a careful examination of the pinto’s off forefoot and seemed not to hear.

Bob continued:

“Anybody can see that she comes mighty nigh bein’ grown up. First thing you know somebody’ll make her understand all to once that she’s a woman, and then——“

Thad dropped the pinto’s foot and glared at his pardner over the horse’s back.

“Then what?”

“Then she’ll be wantin’ to know things. An’—it might be too late to tell her.”

“You mean that I ought to tell my gal what we know about her?” demanded Marta’s father. “Is that what you’re tryin’ to say?”

“You guessed it, Pardner,” returned the critical one cheerfully. “It’s time that your gal knowed about herself. Bein’ her daddy, it’s up to you to tell her.”

The other exploded:

“Which is exactly what I tried all last week to tell you, when you was her daddy, you blamed old numskull, an’ you wouldn’t near listen to me. A healthy father you are. When it’s your daughter that ought to be told, you can’t even whisper, but when she’s mine you can yell your fool head off tellin’ me what I ought to do. Besides, you said yourself that we don’t actually know enough to tell her anything.”

“But that was last week, you see,” returned Bob calmly. “You was doin’ the talkin’ then—now I’m tellin’ you.”

When Thad, without replying, fell to rubbing Nugget’s glossy hide with such energy that the little horse squirmed like a schoolboy undergoing maternal inspection, Bob continued:

“Marta is bound to know, when she stops to think about it, that she jest can’t have two fathers. It’s plumb unnateral, even for two such daddies as she’s got. So far she ain’t give it much thought. She’s sort of growed up with the idea an’ accepted things as young folks do—up to a certain time, that is. My point is, that from now on her time is liable to come any day. Right now, if she thinks of it at all she jest smiles an’ plays the game with us, but that’s ’cause she’s mostly kid yet. You wait ’til the woman in her is woke up—right there she’ll quit playin’ an’ somethin’ is due to happen. You ain’t doin’ right by your daughter, Thad, not to tell her—you sure ain’t.”

Thad Grove faced his old pardner miserably. “I know you’re right, Bob. Marta ought to be told what we know about her. I can see that it’ll look mighty bad to her some day if she ain’t. But, hang darn it, it’s jest like you said last week—we don’t know enough for me to tell her anything. If I was to tell her what little we do know, it would look a heap sight worse to her than it possibly can with her not bein’ told anything, like she is now. The way I figger, if the gal don’t know nothin’, she’s got a chance to ride over it; but if she knows the little that we know she’ll be plumb ruined.”

“I don’t reckon it’s near so bad as that, Pardner,” said the other soothingly. “I’m here to tell you that there ain’t nothin’ could ruin that gal of yourn.”

At this, the fire of old Thad’s soul flared up anew.

“Is that so?” he returned in a voice of withering scorn. “Is that so? Well, I’m a tellin’ you that you can ruin anybody.”

“Saint Jimmy, for instance?” retorted Bob with sarcasm.

“Yes, Saint Jimmy. You can’t tell what sort of a scoundrel Saint Jimmy would a-been if he hadn’t happened to a-turned sick. There’s many a man in the pen, right now, jest on account of havin’ too much good health.”

“I reckon you’re speakin’ gospel for once,” agreed Bob reluctantly. Then, as if he had not forgotten his critical privileges, he added: “But there’s something else you ought to tell your gal—something that the best authorities all agree ought to be told every gal by somebody—an’ bein’ as you’re her father, an’ she ain’t never had no real ma, why—it would look like it was up to you.”

“What’s that?” demanded Thad suspiciously.

“That’s what they call love,” returned the other gently. “Growin’ up like Marta has, with jest us two old, dried-up, desert rats, she don’t know no more about love an’ its consequences than—than—nothin’.”

Marta’s father dropped his brush and kicked it viciously across the stable. Nugget danced with excitement.

“Love! Holy Cats! What fool notion’ll take you next? You don’t need to worry none. Some feller will happen along some day an’ tell her more about love in a minute than you’ve ever knowed in all your life.”

“That’s jest it,” returned the other. “Some feller is bound to tell her, jest like you say. He’ll slip up on her quiet like, when she ain’t suspicionin’ nothin’, an’ break it to her sudden ’fore she knows where she’s at. That’s how them consequences happen. An’ that’s why she ought to know beforehand, so’s she can be watchin’ out.”

Thad was rubbing his bald head seeking, apparently, for an answer sufficiently crushing, when a clear call came from the house.

“Daddy—Oh, Daddy, I am ready.”

With frantic haste, the Pardners, working together as if they had never had a difference, saddled and bridled the pinto. Together they led the little horse to the house.

When the girl was in the saddle, she looked down into their upturned faces with such an expression of girlish affection and womanly thoughtfulness that the two old men grinned with sheepish delight and pride.

“You will find your dinner all ready for you,” she said, while Nugget tossed his head, impatient to be off. “It is on the table, covered with a cloth. I’ll be home in time for supper. Adios.” She lifted the bridle rein and the pinto loped away.

The Pardners stood watching while she opened and closed the gate, cowboy fashion, without dismounting. With a wave of her hand she rode on up the cañon while the two old men followed her with their eyes until she passed from sight around a turn in the cañon wall.

Thad spoke slowly:

“You’re plumb right, Bob. The gal has mighty nigh growed into a woman, ain’t she? It don’t seem more’n a month or two neither, does it?”

“It sure don’t,” returned the other softly. “An’ ain’t she a wonder, Thad—ain’t she jest a nateral-born wonder?”

“She’s all of that,” agreed Thad, “an’ then some. It plumb scares me though, when I think of her findin’ out about herself an’ her all educated up by Saint Jimmy an’ his mother like she is. Holy Cats, Bob! What’ll we do?”

“She’s bound to know some day,” said Bob.

“She’s bound to, sure,” echoed Thad with a groan. “But my God a’mighty ain’t either of us got nerve to tell her now. If she hadn’t been goin’ to school to Saint Jimmy these last five years—I mean if she was like she would a-been with jest me an’ you to bring her up, it might not a-mattered. But now—now it’s goin’ to be plain hell for her when she finds out.”

Bob murmured softly:

“Won’t even let us work on Sundays ’cause it ain’t the right way for Christians like us to do. We’d ought to a-told long ago, that’s what we ought to a-done.”

“Sure, we ought to told her,” cried Thad, “jest like we’d ought to done a lot of things we ain’t. But mournin’ over what ought to been done ain’t payin’ us nothin’. What’re we goin’ to do, that’s what we got to figger out. The gal’s got to be told.”

“Yes,” returned Bob. “An’ she’s got to be told ’fore some sneakin’ varmint beats us to it an’ tells her for true what me an’ you are only suspicionin’. How’ll you ever do it?”

“How’ll I ever do it?” shrilled Thad. “Holy Cats! I can’t—How’ll you ever do it yourself?”

Bob answered helplessly:

“I can’t neither—an’ by smoke, I won’t.”

“She’s got to be told,” insisted Thad.

“She sure has,” said Bob.

CHAPTER IV
SAINT JIMMY

Wise Mother Burton came to wonder, sometimes, if Saint Jimmy’s teaching was not more a matter of love than even he perhaps realized.

DOCTOR JIMMY BURTON and his mother spent their first year in Arizona at Tucson and Oracle. But when they were satisfied that Jimmy could live if he gave up his too strenuous professional work and remained in the Southwest, and that if he did not follow that course he would as surely die, they built the little white house on the mountain side at Juniper Springs, above the Cañada del Oro. As Jimmy explained, “it was quite necessary, under the circumstances, that they live where they could see out.”

It was during that first summer in Oracle that the neighbors began to speak of his tender care of his mother, for, even in those days when he was too ill to do more than think, his thoughts were all for her. And so lovingly did he try to shield her from the pain of his suffering, so cheerfully did he accustom her to the thought of the utter hopelessness of his professional future, and so courageously, for her sake, did he accept the pitifully small portion that life offered him, that the people marveled at the spirit of the man. It was a question, they sometimes said, with a touch of sincere reverence in their voices, if Doctor Burton needed his mother as much as the doctor’s mother needed him. But Jimmy and his mother knew that the truth of the matter was they needed each other.

And so in their mutual need both mother and son found compensation for their dreams that now could never come true. In place of the professional honors that were predicted with such confidence for her boy, and toward which she had looked with such pride, the mother saw her son honored by the love of the unpretentious country folk. From plans that had failed and hopes that were buried, Jimmy himself turned to the grandeur of the mountains and the beauty of tree and bush and flower—to the limitless spaces of the desert and the peace of the quiet stars. The life of the great eastern city, with its hunger for fame, its struggle for riches, its endless tumult and its restless longings, faded farther and farther away. The simple, more primitive, more peaceful life of God’s great unimproved world became every day more satisfying.

To the roaming cowboys and miners and their kind, and to the people of the little mountain village, that tiny white house on the hill was known. And many a man, when things were going wrong, came to spend an hour with this friend whose understanding was so clear and whose counsel was so true. Many a girl or woman in need of comfort, strength or courage came to sit a while with Mrs. Burton. And sometimes a tired rider of the range would hear in the twilight dusk the clear, sweet song of Jimmy’s flute and, hearing, would smile and lift his wide-brimmed hat; or perhaps a lonely prospector, camped for the night in some gulch or wash would hear, and, hearing, would think again of things that in his search for gold he had forgotten. And this is how Doctor James Burton became Saint Jimmy and Saint Jimmy’s mother became Mother Burton to them all.

It was natural that the good doctor should become Marta Hillgrove’s teacher, and that Mrs. Burton should mother the girl who, until her fathers brought her to the Cañada del Oro, had never known a woman’s guiding love. Indeed, it was Saint Jimmy and his mother and all that their friendship meant to Marta that had kept the Pardners in that neighborhood. Never before since the beginning of their partnership had those wanderers stayed so long in one place. For four—nearly five—years Marta had been studying under Saint Jimmy; a fair equivalent of the usual college course. With this textbook education she had received from Mother Burton the kind of training that such a woman would have given a daughter of her own. And yet these most excellent teachers knew no more of their pupil’s history than did those thoughtless ones who so freely discussed the girl and looked at her askance for what they thought her parentage might be.

It should be said, too, that this schooling which Marta had received from Saint Jimmy and his mother was wholly a matter of love. As Doctor Burton explained to the Pardners, when they insisted that he should be paid “same as a reg’lar teacher,” the work was really a blessing to him in that his pupil contributed more to his life than he could possibly give to hers; while Mother Burton warned the anxious fathers, gently but firmly, that if they ever said another word about pay they would ruin everything.

But as the years passed and she watched the amazing development of the girl’s mind, and saw the unfolding of her richly endowed womanhood, wise Mother Burton came to wonder sometimes if Saint Jimmy’s teaching was not more a matter of love than even he perhaps realized.

On that spring morning when Marta rode to Oracle and her fathers discussed the problem that so troubled them, Saint Jimmy sat in the yard before the cottage door. On every side he saw the Mariposa tulips lifting their lovely orange cups, and sweet pea blossoms swinging like pink and white fairies above a lilac carpet of wild verbena and purple fragrant hyptis, while against the rocks that were stained with splashes of gray and orange and red and yellow lichens stood the purple pentstemon. The mountain sides below were wondrous with the scarlet glory of the ocotillo and the indescribable beauty of the chollas and opuntias with their crowns and diadems of red and salmon and orange and pink. The slopes and benches of the lower levels were bright with great fields of golden brittle-bush; and beyond these, on the wide spaces of the mesa, he could see the yuccas (our Lord’s candles) in countless thousands, raising their stately shafts with eight-foot clusters of creamy-white bloom.

Mrs. Burton, leaving her housework for a moment, came to stand in the doorway. When they had spoken of the beautiful sight that never failed to move them—calling each other’s attention to different favorite views—Saint Jimmy said:

“Mother, doesn’t it all make you sort of hungry for something—something that can’t be told in words?” he laughed in boyish embarrassment.

His mother smiled.

“Marta will be coming from Oracle with the mail, I suppose—this is Saturday, you know.”

“Yes, I know,” said Jimmy softly, and wondered if his mother guessed what it really was that he hungered for and could not talk about even to her.

Mrs. Burton was turning back into the house when they heard some one coming up the trail from the cañon. A moment later the Pardners appeared. Saint Jimmy and his mother knew at once that the old prospectors had come on business of greater moment than to make a mere neighborly call.

When they had exchanged the customary greetings and Marta’s fathers had assured their friends that the girl was well, Thad and Bob sat looking at each other in troubled silence.

“Wal,” said Bob, at last, “why don’t you go ahead? She’s your gal this week. Bein’ her daddy makes it your play, don’t it?”

Thad, rubbing his bald head desperately, made several ineffectual attempts to speak. At last, with a recklessness born of this inner struggle, he addressed Mrs. Burton:

“‘You see, ma’am, me an’ my pardner here has been takin’ notice lately how my gal Marta is due, first thing we know, to be a growed-up woman.”

“She is, indeed!” replied Jimmy’s mother with an encouraging smile.

“Yes, ma’am, that’s what me an’ Bob here took notice. An’ we’ve been figgerin’ up that mebby it was time she knowed what we know about her. You an’ your son knows the same as everybody does, I reckon, that we ain’t Marta’s real honest-to-God daddies.”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Burton, “but we have never, in any way, mentioned the matter to Marta.”

“No, ma’am,” said Thad, “an’ we ain’t neither.”

“An’ that’s jest what’s the matter now,” put in Bob. “The gal ain’t never been told nothin’.”

Mrs. Burton looked at her son.

“I am sure that you men are right,” said Saint Jimmy. “I have been wanting to talk with you about it. You ought to tell Marta everything you know of her and her people—how she came to you—everything.”

The Pardners consulted each other silently. Then Thad turned to Marta’s teacher; the old prospector’s faded blue eyes were fixed on the younger man’s face with a steady, searching gaze that permitted no evasion, even if Saint Jimmy had been disposed to parry the question.

“Is there, to your thinkin’, any perticler reason why my gal ought to be told at this perticler time?”

Saint Jimmy smiled reassuringly.

“No particular reason, so far as I know,” he said. “Of course you realize that there has always been more or less talk. Sooner or later the girl is bound to hear it. She should be fortified with the truth.”

Again Bob and Thad looked at each other helplessly.

“An’ if the truth ain’t jest what you might call fortifyin’—what then?” said Thad at last.

“Yes,” echoed Bob. “What then? What if my pardner an’ me can’t say that all the gossips is talkin’ ain’t so?”

Saint Jimmy did not answer. Mother Burton looked away. Old Thad rubbed his bald head in mournful meditation.

“Doctor Burton,” said Bob slowly, as one feeling his way amid conversational dangers, “Thad an’ me ain’t to say blind, if we be gittin’ old. We can still tell ‘color’ when we run across it.” He consulted his pardner with a look and Thad nodded his head in approval. Bob continued: “We’re almighty proud of what you been doin’ for our gal,” he caught himself quickly. “Excuse me, Pardner—for your gal, I mean.”

Thad raised his hand—a gesture which signified that, in the stress of the situation, he waived the fine point of their usual courtesy, and for this crucial occasion acknowledged their joint fatherhood.

Old Bob swallowed, with difficulty, something that seemed to obstruct his usual freedom of speech.

“An’ I reckon you understand, sir, that we ain’t noways lackin’ in appreciation an’ gratitude to you an’ your ma for helpin’ Marta to grow up into the young woman she is. My pardner an’ me, we sure done what we could, an’ we’d been glad to a-done more if it had a-been possible, but it wasn’t, not for us, an’ we’re sensible to what it all means to our gal. If she wasn’t trained up an’ all educated like you an’ your ma has made her, it wouldn’t much matter what her own folks was or how she first come to us.”

“I understand,” said Saint Jimmy gently, “and I know that the girl could not love you men more if you were, in fact, her own fathers. I know, too, that nothing could make her love you less. But I am convinced that she should know all that you know about her.”

“We would a-told her the story long ago,” said Thad, “if only we’d a-knowed a little more than we do, or mebby, if we hadn’t knowed as much, or if what little we do know didn’t look so almighty bad.”

“It will look a heap worse to her now than it ever did to us,” said Bob.

“It sure will,” agreed Thad, “an’ so, you see, we’ve been waitin’ an’ puttin’ it off, hopin’ that we would mebby, somehow, find out something that, as it is, is lackin’.” He appealed to Mrs. Burton: “You can see how it is, can’t you, ma’am?”

“I understand,” said the good woman, gently, “but I agree with my son. Whatever it is, the story will make no difference in Marta’s love for you, just as it has made no difference in your love for her.”

“Yes,” said Thad, “but how about the difference it might make to—“ he paused and looked at his pardner helplessly. “Ahem—to—I mean——“

Bob spoke quickly:

“To you an’ Saint Jimmy, ma’am. What difference will it make to you folks?”

Thad drew a deep breath of relief and rubbed his bald head with satisfaction.

Mother Burton met them bravely with:

“Nothing that you have to tell can change our feeling for Marta. I could not love her more if she were my own daughter.”

The two old men looked at Saint Jimmy eagerly.

“You dead sure that nothin’ would make you change toward our gal?” demanded Bob.

“You plumb certain, be you, sir?” said old Thad.

Saint Jimmy smiled reassuringly.

“As certain as I am of death,” he answered.

With an air of excited relief Thad faced his pardner.

“That bein’ the case I move, Pardner, that we tell Doctor Burton here what we know, an’ he can tell our gal or not as he sees fit, and when he sees fit.”

“Jest what I was about to offer myself,” returned Bob. “You go ahead.”

CHAPTER V
THE PROSPECTOR’S STORY

“No, sir, take it anyway you like, it jest naterally looks bad; an’ that’s all me an’ my pardner knows about it.”

“IT was about sixteen year ago,” Thad began at last.

“Seventeen, the middle of next month,” said Bob.

Thad continued:

“Me an’ my pardner here was comin’ in to Tucson from the Santa Rosa Mountains, which is down close to the Mexican line. We’d been out for about three months an’ was needin’ supplies. ’Long late in the afternoon of the second day from where we’d been workin’, we stopped at a little ranch house about three mile this side of the line for water. We knowed the old Mexican man an’ woman what lived there all right—’most everybody did—everybody like us old desert rats, that is—an’ didn’t nobody know any good of ’em either.”

“Some claim that the old woman was Sonora Jack’s mother,” said Bob. “Sonora Jack, you know, is half Mex, and a mighty bad citizen, too. He’s somewheres across the line right now, hidin’ out for a killin’ he an’ his crowd made in a holdup’ bout the same time that we’re tellin’ you of.”

Thad took up the story.

“Well, sir, we’d filled our water bags an’ was standin’ talkin’ with the old woman who’d come to watch us—the man, he was away it appeared—when all at once a little boy come trottin’ ’round the corner of the cabin from behind somewheres.”

“About three or four, he was,” said Bob.

“About that,” agreed Thad. “An’ when he seen us he jest stopped short, kind of scared like, an’ stood there cryin’.

“Well, sir, me an’ Bob tumbled in a holy minute that he didn’t belong there. We knowed them old Mexicans didn’t have no kid that wasn’t growed up long ago. An’ this little chap didn’t look like a Mexican youngster nohow. The old woman acted kind of rattled at us lookin’ at the kid so sharp, an’ started in tellin’ us that the muchachito was one of her grandsons. That sounded fair enough at first, but when she turned an’ yelled at the kid in Mex, givin’ him the devil for not stayin’ behind the house like she’d told him to, we seed that somethin’ was wrong. He didn’t savvy Mex no more than we do Chinee.

“While the poor little cuss was standin’ there scared stiff an’ cryin’—not knowin’ what the old woman wanted, Bob here went down on one knee an’ held out his hands invitin’ like. ‘Come here, sonny,’ says he to the kid in English, ‘come on over here an’ let’s have a look at you.’

“Well, sir, that youngster gave a funny little laugh, right out through his tears, an’ come runnin’.

“The old woman didn’t know what to do; but I was keepin’ one eye on her so she didn’t dare try to start anything much.

“Bob, he asked the youngster, ‘What’s your name, sonny?’ an’ the little feller answered back, bright as a dollar: ‘My name’s Marta.’

“‘Marta?’ says Bob, lookin’ up at me puzzled like. ‘That’s a funny name for a boy.’

“‘I ain’t no boy,’ said the kid, quick as a flash, ‘I’m a girl, I am.’”

“An’ by smoke! she was,” ejaculated Bob.

“Yes,” continued Thad, “an’ when the old woman seen that the little gal was talkin’ to us—the old woman she didn’t savvy a word of anything but Mex, but she could tell what was goin’ on—when she see it, she jest naterally grabbed the youngster an’ yanked her into the house an’ shut the door.

“Me an’ Bob made camp not far away that night, an’ after supper, an’ it had got good an’ dark, we was settin’ by the fire talkin’ things over, when all at once we heard the sound of a wagon an’ a child screamin’—sort of choked like. You can believe we wasn’t long gettin’ to where the sound come from. Them Mexicans was lightin’ out with that little gal for across the border.

“By that time, me and my pardner was so plumb sure that there was somethin’ wrong that we didn’t waste no more strength in foolishness. We jest proceeded to give that hombre the third degree ’til he ups an’ confesses that the baby was left with them by some white folks who was on a huntin’ trip, an’ that they was only keepin’ the youngster ’til her daddy an’ mammy come back for her.

“You can guess how quick me an’ Bob was to believe any such yarn as that; so we figured the safest thing to do was to take the baby ourselves into Tucson; which we done.

“Well, sir, by the time we struck town the little gal had made such a hit with us both that we couldn’t near think of givin’ her up.”

“Darndest affectionate kid that ever was,” put in Bob. “Started right off first thing lovin’ us two old rapscallions like we’d always belonged to her, an’ callin’ us both ‘daddy.’”

“We sure done our best to find her real folks, though,” said Thad. “We stayed in Tucson for more’n a month. But the authorities nor nobody couldn’t get no hint nowhere about any kid bein’ lost, nor stole, nor nothin’. Things was movin’ pretty fast in this country them days, an’ the sheriff always had his hands full; so it wasn’t long ’til everybody got busy with some fresh excitement, an’ me an’ Bob was left with the baby on our hands. There didn’t appear to be nothin’ else we could do, so we jest decided that Providence, or good luck, or somethin’, had fixed it so’s us two old mavericks was blessed with a offspring whether we was regularly entitled to one or not. Then pretty soon we moved on over into the Graham Mountains, an’ jest naterally took her along.

“We both was lovin’ her so by now that we was about to fight to see which one was to be her daddy, when we compromised by agreein’ to take turn an’ turn about—week by week. An’ that’s how we come to give her both our names—Hillgrove. Her first name is Martha, we suppose; but Marta was the best she could ever tell us. An’ that’s about all there is of it up to the time we fetched her here an’ you started in teachin’ her.”

“You see, ma’am,” said Bob, “this here is the way me an’ Thad has got it figgered: The baby must have been left with them Mexicans where we found her, ’cause she ain’t Mexican nor any part Mexican herself. Wal, what kind of white folks do you reckon would go away an’ leave a little gal like that, with such an outfit? They couldn’t a-left her accidental like, ’cause if they had they’d a-come back for her, an’ then they’d been huntin’ us. With all the fuss we made about it in Tucson, somebody would a-knowed somethin’ about her sure, if her people hadn’t wanted to get shet of her on account of them bein’ the sort they was. An’ there ain’t been no time since then that me an’ Thad has been hard to find. Don’t you see, her folks couldn’t a-been decent even if her father an’ mother was—was—I mean, even if she was borned all regular an’ right—which don’t look no way likely. Any way you take it, they must a-been a bad sort to throw away a baby like her.”

“You can bet they was,” added Thad mournfully, “for it’s a dead immortal cinch that them old Mexicans couldn’t a-come by her no other way; ’cause they never went anywhere an’ if they had stole her it sure would a-raised enough interest in the country for somebody to a-heard about it. No, sir, take it any way you like, it jest naterally looks bad. An’,” the old prospector finished with an air of relief, “that’s all me an’ my pardner knows about it.”

Saint Jimmy did not speak. He was evidently deeply moved by the strange story. Mrs. Burton was drying her eyes. The Pardners waited, with no little anxiety.

At last Bob asked timidly:

“Be you still thinkin’, sir, as how our gal ought to be told?”

Reluctantly, Saint Jimmy answered:

“I am afraid that Marta must know.”

He looked at his mother.

“I am sure she must know,” said Mrs. Burton with quiet decision. “And you, my son, are the one to tell her. It will come to her easier from you, her teacher, than from any one else.”

“Yes, ma’am,” cried Thad eagerly. “That’s the way me an’ Bob figgered it.”

“Will you do it, sir?” asked Bob.

“Yes,” said Saint Jimmy, “I will tell her.”

The Pardners sighed with relief.

“That sure lets us out of a mighty bad hole,” said Thad. “It’ll be a heap easier on our gal, too.”

“It sure will,” echoed Bob. “Ain’t nobody can tell what kind of a God-awful mess us old fools would a-made of it. We’re almighty grateful to you, sir, for helpin’ us out.”

“We are that,” came from Thad with pathetic earnestness.

Bob said hurriedly:

“An’ now that it’s all settled, Pardner, I move that me an’ you pulls out of here before our gal happens along. I wouldn’t be ketched by her right now for all the money we’re goin’ to have when we strike that big vein we’re tunnelin’ for.”

“Which ain’t so much as it might be at that,” retorted Thad.

“You can’t never tell,” returned Bob with his usual cheery optimism, “gold is where you find it.”

When Bob and Thad were gone, Saint Jimmy and his mother, discussing the matter, were forced to agree with the Pardners. It certainly did look bad. In fact it looked so bad that Saint Jimmy was not at all happy under the burden of the responsibility which the old prospectors had shifted from their own shoulders to his. He foresaw that it would not be easy to tell this young woman whom he had educated, and whose fine, sensitive pride he knew so well, this story that he had just heard from her two foster fathers.

When Marta stopped at the Burtons’ on her way home from Oracle, later in the day, neither Saint Jimmy nor his mother mentioned the Pardners’ visit, and there seemed to be no opportunity for the girl’s teacher to tell her the story he was so sure she should know. Some other time, he told himself, it would be easier, perhaps.

While the Pardners’ daughter was riding home from the Burtons’ that afternoon, and the Pardners were at work in their little mine, Natachee the Indian stood on a point of rock, high on the mountain side—so high that he could look beyond the Cañon of Gold and afar off, over the brown desert that, from the foothills of the Catalinas, stretches away, weary mile after weary mile, until, in the shadowy blue distance, it is lost in the sky.

To those of us who are accustomed to the present-day Indian in his white man’s garb, doing the white man’s work on the white man’s roads and ranches, Natachee would have aroused peculiar, not to say amusing, interest. From the single feather in the headband which bound his long, raven-black hair to his beaded moccasins, he was dressed in the picturesque costume of his savage fathers. Save for a broad hunting knife, he was armed only with the primitive bow and arrows. He was in the best years of his manhood and his face and bearing would have graced the hero of a Fenimore Cooper Indian tale.

But however much he seemed out of step with the times, that lone figure, standing sentinel-like on the rocky point, fitted his wild surroundings. So, indeed, might one of his ancestors have stood to watch the strange new human life when it first began to move along those trails that, until then, had known only the sandaled and moccasined feet of prehistoric peoples.

An hour passed. The Indian held his place as motionless as the rock against which he leaned, while his somber gaze ranged over those mighty reaches of desert and mountain and sky. High over Rice Peak a golden eagle wheeled on guard before the nest of his royal mate. But Natachee seemed not to see. From a dead oak on Samaniego Ridge a red-tailed hawk screamed his shrill challenge. The Indian apparently did not hear. A company of buzzards circled above a dark object in the wash below the Wheeler Ranch corrals. Natachee gave no heed. A ground squirrel leaped to a near-by rock to sit bolt upright with bright eyes fixed upon the red man, the while he sounded a chirping note of inquiry. But the Indian’s gaze remained steadfastly fixed on that distant landscape where he could see a cloud of dust that was raised by a swiftly moving automobile on the Oracle road. On the Bankhead Highway there were two similar clouds. In the purple haze beyond the point of the Tortollita Mountains, a streamer of smoke marked the position of a Southern Pacific Overland train that was approaching Tucson from the western coast. The face of the red watchman on the mountain side was set stern and grim. In his somber eyes there was a gleam of savage meaning.

The sun was just touching the tops of the Tucson hills when the Indian started and leaned forward with suddenly quickened interest.

No ordinary power of human vision would have noticed that black speck in the vast stretch of country, much less could the ordinary observer have said exactly what it was that had attracted the Indian’s attention. But Natachee saw that the tiny dot, moving so slowly on the old road into the Cañada del Oro, was a man. His interest was excited to an unusual degree because the man was walking, unaccompanied even by a pack burro.

And now the evening wind from the desert, fragrant with the smell of greasewood, mesquite and cat-claw, swept along the mountain side. The Tucson hills were massed dark blue with their outlines sharply cut against the colors of the sunset. Natachee, watching, saw that lone figure on the trail below enter the Cañon of Gold and lose itself in the gathering dusk.

As the shadows thickened, the night prowlers on padded feet crept from their dark retreats into the gloom. Owls and bats on silent wings swept by. Old ghosts of the dead past stirred again on the old desert and mountain ways. In the deeper dusk that now filled the cañon, voices awoke—strange, murmuring, whispering, phantom voices that seemed to come from an innumerable company of dreary, hopeless souls. The light went out of the western sky. Details of plant and rock and bush were lost. Weird and wild, like a mysterious spirit brooding over the scene, the dark figure of the Indian on the rocky point above the Cañon of Gold was silhouetted against the starlit sky.

In the little white house on the mountain side, Saint Jimmy was thinking of the strange story that the Pardners had told.

In their home beside the cañon creek, the old prospectors and their partnership daughter were sleeping, with no dreams of the strange leading of the tangled threads of lives to the Cañon of Gold.

Far away to the south, in old Mexico, two men sat in a cantina. Between them, on a table, with glasses and a bottle of mescal, lay a crudely drawn map. As they talked together in low tones, they referred often to the rude sketch which bore in poorly written words “La mina con la puerta de fierro en la Cañada del Oro”—The mine with the door of iron in the Cañon of the Gold.

CHAPTER VI
NIGHT

Night skies are kind to those who love the stars; to others they are heavy with brooding fears.

THE man who was following the old road up the Cañon of Gold had made his way a mile or more from the point where he was last seen by the Indian, when the deepening twilight warned him of the nearness of the night. It was evident, from the pedestrian’s irresolute movements and from his manner of nervous doubt in selecting a spot for his camp, that not only was he a stranger in the Cañada del Oro, but as well that he was unaccustomed to such surroundings.

He was a young man of about twenty-two or twenty-three years—tall, but rather slender, with a face habitually clean shaven but covered, just now, with a stubby beard of several days’ growth. His skin, where it was exposed, was sunburned rather than tanned that deep color so marked in the out-of-doors men of the West. On the whole, he gave the impression, somehow, of one but recently recovered from a serious illness; and yet he did not appear overfatigued, though the pack which he carried was not light and he had evidently been many hours on the road. In spite of his rude dress and unkempt appearance due to his mode of traveling there was, in his bearing, the unmistakable air of a man of business. But he was that type of business man that knows something more than the daily grind of money-making machines. His world, apparently, was not wholly a world of factories and banks and institutions of commerce.

Forced, at last, by the approaching darkness, to decide upon some place to spend the night, the traveler selected a spot beside the cañon creek, a hundred yards from the road. But even after he had lowered his heavy pack to the ground, he stood for some minutes looking anxiously about, as if still uncertain as to the wisdom of his selection.

Nor was the man’s manner wholly that of inexperience. Suddenly, without thought of his evening meal, or any preparation for his comfort until the morning, he climbed again up the steep bank to the road, where he gazed back along the way he had come and studied the mountain sides with eyes of dread. The man was in an agony of fear. Not until it was too dark to distinguish objects at any distance did he return to the place where he had left his pack and set about the necessary work of preparing his supper and making his bed.

Hurriedly, as best he could in the failing light, he gathered a supply of wood and, after several awkward failures, succeeded in kindling a fire. From his pack he took a small frying pan, a coffeepot, a tin cup, and a meager supply of food. With these, and with water from the creek, he made shift to prepare an unaccustomed meal. Several times he paused, to stand gazing into the fire as if lost in thought. Again and again he turned his head quickly to listen. Often with a shuddering start he whirled to search the darkness beyond the flickering shadows, as if in fear of what the light of his fire might bring upon him. When he had eaten his poorly prepared supper, he spread his blankets and lay down.

There was something pitiful in the trivial and puny details of this lone stranger’s camp in the wild Cañada del Oro. There was something sinister in the night life that crept and crawled in the darkness about him. There was something pathetic in the man’s lying down to sleep, unprotected, amid such surroundings.

The mountains are very friendly to those who know them; to those who know them not, they are grim and dreadful—when the day is gone. Night skies are kind to those who love the stars; to others they are heavy with brooding fears. The timid life of the wild places is good company for those who know each voice and sound; to others every movement is a menace, every call a voice of danger—when the sun is down.

Cowering in his blankets the man listened for a while to the strange and fearful things that stirred in the near-by bushes, on the rocky ledges, and on the mountain sides above. He heard the cañon voices whispering, murmuring, moaning. The night deepened. The boisterous song of the creek became a sullen growl. The mountain walls seemed to close in. The stars above the peaks and ridges were lonely and far away. The camp fire, so tiny in the gloom, burned low.

The sleeping man groaned and stirred uneasily as if in pain, and a fox that had crept too close slipped away in startled flight. The man cried out in his sleep, and a coyote that was following the scent of the camp up the wind turned aside to slink into the thicket of mesquite. The man awoke and springing to his feet stood as if at bay, and a buck that was feeding not far away lifted his antlered head to listen with wary alertness. From somewhere on the heights came the cry of a mountain lion, and at the sound the night was suddenly as still as death. The man shuddered and quickly threw more wood on the dying fire. Again he lay down to cower in his blankets—to sleep restlessly—and to dream his troubled dreams.

In the first faint light of the morning, a dark form might have been seen moving stealthily down the mountain above the stranger’s camp. The buck, with a snort of fear, leaped away, crashing through the brush. The prowling coyote fled down the cañon. On every side the wild creatures of the night slunk into the dense covers of manzanita and buckthorn and cat-claw.

Silently, as the gray shadows through which he crept, Natachee the Indian drew near the place where the white man lay. From behind a near-by bush the Indian observed every detail of the camp. When the form wrapped in the blanket did not stir, the Indian stole from his sheltering screen and with soft-footed, noiseless movements, inspected the stranger’s outfit. He even bent over the sleeping man to see his face. The man moved—tossing an arm and muttering. Swift as a fox the Indian slipped away; silent as a ghost he disappeared among the bushes.

The gray of the morning sky changed to saffron and rose and flaming red. The shadowy trees and bushes assumed definite shapes. The detail of the rocks emerged from the gloom. The man awoke.

He had just finished breakfast when he heard the sound of horse’s hoofs on the road. With a startled cry he leaped to his feet. The Lizard was riding toward him.

Like a hunted creature the man drew back, half crouching, as if to escape. But it was too late. Pale and trembling he stood waiting as the horseman drew up beside the road, on the bank above the creek, and sat looking down upon him and his camp.

CHAPTER VII
THE STRANGER’S QUEST

“What’s yer name? Whar ye from? What’re you a-doin’ here?”

THE Lizard’s preliminary inspection of the stranger and his camp might or might not have been prompted by a habit of caution. When it was finished he called a loose-mouthed “Howdy” and, without waiting for a response to his greeting, spurred his mount, slipping and sliding with rolling stones and a cloud of dust, down to the edge of the creek.

Dismounting and throwing the bridle rein over his horse’s head, he slouched forward—a vapid grin on his sallow, weasel-like face.

“I seed yer smoke an’ ’lowed as how I’d drop along an’ take a look at who’s here; bein’ as I war aimin’ t’ ride t’ Oracle sometime t’-day anyhow. Not as I’ve got anythin’ perticler t’ go thar fer nuther, ’cept t’ jist set in front of th’ store a spell an’ gas with th’ fellers. Thar’s allus a bunch hangin’ ’round of a Sunday.”

He looked curiously at the stranger’s outfit and, ignoring the fact that the camper had not spoken, seated himself with the air of one taking his welcome for granted.

The stranger smiled. The fear that had so shaken him a few moments before was gone, and there was relief in his voice as he bade his visitor a quite unnecessary welcome.

“Ye’r a-footin’ hit, be ye?” the Lizard continued with garrulous ease. “Wal, that’s one way of goin’; but I’ll take a good hoss fer mine. A feller’ll jist naterally wear out quick ernough no matter how keerful he’d be. Never ’lowed I had ary call t’ take an’ plumb walk myse’f t’ death on purpose. Them’s good blankets you’ve got thar. Need ’em, too, these nights, if ’tis spring. That thar coffeepot ain’t no ’count, though—not fer me, that is—wouldn’t hold half what I’d take three times a day, reg’lar.” He laughed loudly as if a good joke were hidden somewhere in his remarks if only the other were clever enough to find it.

“You live in this neighborhood, do you?” the stranger asked.

“What, me? Oh shore. My name’s Bill Janson—live down th’ cañon a piece, jist below whar th’ road comes in. Paw an’ maw an’ me live thar t’gether. We drifted in from Arkansaw eight year ago come this fall. What’s yer name? Whar ye from? What’re you a-doin’ here?”

The stranger hesitated before he answered slowly:

“My name is—Edwards—Hugh Edwards. I came here from Tucson. I want to prospect—look for gold, you know. I heard there were some—ah—placers, I think you call them, in this cañon.”

The Lizard grinned, a wide-mouthed grin of superior knowledge. “Hit’s plumb easy t’ see y’ know all about prospectin’. Y’r some edicated, I jedge. Ben t’ school an’ them thar college places a right smart lot, ain’t y’ now?”

The other replied with some sharpness:

“I suppose it is not impossible for one to learn how to dig for gold, even if one has learned to read and write, is it?”

The Lizard responded heartily, but with tolerant superiority:

“Larn—shore—ain’t nothin’ t’ pannin’ gold ’cept a lot of hard work an’ mighty pore pay. Anybody’ll larn ye. Take the Pardners up yonder—old Bob Hill an’ Thad Grove—they’d—“ he checked himself suddenly and slapped a lean thigh. “By Glory! I’ll bet a pretty you’ve done come t’ find that thar old lost Mine with th’ Iron Door, heh? Ain’t ye now?” He leered at the stranger with shifty, close-set eyes, his long head with its narrow sloping brow cocked sidewise with what was meant to be a very knowing, “I-have-you-now-sir” sort of air.

The man who had given his name as Hugh Edwards laughed.

“Really I can’t say that I would object to finding any old mine if it was a good one, would you?”

The Lizard shook his head solemnly and with a voice and manner that was nicely calculated to invite confidence, replied:

“Thar’s been a lot of people, one time an’ another, a-huntin’ this Mine with th’ Iron Door. Thar was one bunch that come clean from Spain; an’ they had a map an’ everythin’. You ain’t got no map ner writin’ of any sort, now, have you?”

“No,” returned the stranger. “But I suppose it is true that there is gold to be found here?”

The Lizard was plainly disappointed but evidently deemed it unwise to press his inquiry.

“Oh, shore, thar’s gold here—some—fer them what likes t’ work fer hit. They’ve allus been a-diggin’ in this here cañon an’ in these here mountains, as ye kin see by their old prospect holes everywhar. But nobody ain’t never made no big strikes yet. Thar’s one feller a-livin’ in these hills what don’t dig no gold though; an’ they do say, too, as how he knows more ’bout th’ ol’ lost mine than ary other man a-livin’. Some says he even knows whar hits at.” The Lizard shook his head solemnly. “You shore want t’ watch out fer him, too. He’s plumb bad—that’s what I’m a-tellin’ you.”

“Yes?” said Hugh Edwards, encouragingly.

“Uh-huh, he ain’t no white man neither. He’s Injun—calls hisse’f Natachee, whatever that is. He’s one of these here school Injuns gone wild agin—lives all ’lone way in the upper part of th’ cañon somewhar, whar hits so blamed rough a goat couldn’t get ’round; an’ togs hisse’f up with th’ sort of things them old-time Injuns used to wear—won’t even use a gun, jist packs a bow an’ arrers. I ain’t got no use fer an Injun nohow. This here’s a white man’s country, I say, an’ this here Natachee he’s the worst I ever did see. He’d plunk one of them thar arrers of hisn inter you, er slit yer throat any old time if he dast. I can’t say fer shore whether he knows about this Mine with th’ Iron Door er not, but hit’s certain shore you got t’ watch him. Hit’s all right fer that thar Saint Jimmy an’ them old Pardners t’ be friends with him if they like hit, but I know what I know.”

Hugh Edwards did not overlook this opportunity to learn something of the people who lived in the Cañon of Gold; and the Lizard was more than willing to tell all he knew, perhaps even to add something for good measure. When at last the Lizard arose reluctantly, the stranger had heard every current version of the history and relationship of the two old prospectors and their partnership daughter, with copious comments on their characters, sidelights on their personal affairs, their intercourse with their neighbors, their business, and every possible theory explaining them.

“Not that thar’s anybody what really knows anythin’,”—the Lizard was careful to make this clear—“’cept of course that old story ’bout them a-findin’ th’ gal somewhars when she warn’t much more’n a baby; which, as I say, ain’t no way nateral enough fer anybody t’ believe—’cause babies like her ain’t jist found—picked up anywhar, as you may say, without no paw ner maw ner nothin’. An’ if thar warn’t somethin’ wrong about hit, what would them two old devils be so close-mouthed fer? Why, sir, one time when I asked ’em about hit—jist sort of interested an’ neighborly like—they ris up like they was a-fixin’ t’ climb all over me. Yes, they did—ye kin see yerself hit ain’t all straight, whatever ’tis. Even a feller like you can’t help puttin’ two an’ two together if he’s got any sense a-tall.

“Wal,” he concluded regretfully, “I shore got t’ be gittin’ on t’ Oracle er hit won’t be no use fer me t’ go, nohow.” He moved slowly toward his horse. “Better come along,” he added. “This here trail t’ Oracle goes right past the Pardners’ place, an’ Saint Jimmy’s an’ George Wheeler’s. Best come along an’ see th’ country an’ git acquainted.”

“Thanks,” said Edwards, “but really I can’t go to-day. I want to get settled somewhere before I take much time for purely social matters, you see.”

“Huh,” grunted the Lizard, “gettin’ settled ain’t nothin’; hit’s all day ’til t’morrer ain’t hit?” Then, as if suddenly inspired with the possibilities of having a friend at the very source of so much interesting, if speculative, information, the Lizard added: “I’ll tell ye what ye do, you come along with me as fer as th’ Pardners’ place. They’ll he’p ye t’ get located. They’re all right that a-way, an’ there ain’t nothin’ them two old-timers don’t know about th’ prospectin’ game. An’ right up th’ cañon, not more’n a half a quarter from them, is an old cabin you could take. Hit war built by some prospector long time ago. George Wheeler, he told me. Seems th’ feller lived thar fer two er three year an’ then went away an’ didn’t never come back. You might have t’ fix th’ shack up a bit, but that wouldn’t be no work; an’ thar’s allus some gold t’ be found up an’ down th’ creek. Th’ Pardners they’ll larn ye how, an’ mebby you kin larn somethin’ ’bout them an’ that thar gal of theirn.”

“Thank you,” returned Edwards, “but I really can’t go now. I am not packed yet, you see.”

But the Lizard was not to be deprived of the advantage of his opportunity. “Aw, shucks—what’s th’ matter with ye? Grab yer stuff an’ come along. Ye can’t be stand-offish with me.”

Because there seemed to be no way of refusing the invitation, the stranger hastily threw his things together and, with his pack on his back, set out up the cañon in company with the Lizard.

On the steep side of the mountain above, Natachee, creeping like a dark shadow among the rocks and bushes, followed the two men.

Saint Jimmy, that Sunday morning, was sitting with a book by the window. But Mother Burton, looking through the door from their tiny kitchen where she was busy with her household work, could see that her son was not reading. Jimmy’s book was open, but his eyes were fixed upon the far distant horizon where the desert, with its dreamy maze of colors, becomes a faint blue shadow against the sky. And Jimmy’s mother knew that his thoughts were as far from the printed page as that shadowy sky-line was distant from the window where he sat.

Often she had seen him in those moods—sitting so still that the spirit seemed to have gone out from its temporary dwelling place to visit for a little those places which lie so far beyond the horizon of all fleshly vision and earthly hopes and aspirations. Of what was he thinking, she wondered, if indeed it could be said at such times that he was thinking at all. What was he seeing, with that far-away look in his eyes, as of one whose vision had been trained in the schools of suffering, of disappointments, and failures, and disillusions, to a more than physical strength. Was he communing with some one over there in that world beyond the sky-line of material things? Was he merely dreaming of what might have been? Or was he living in what might be? Wise Mother Burton, to know that there were certain rooms in her son’s being that even her mother love could not unlock. Wise Mother Burton, to understand, to know, when to speak and when to be still.

Saint Jimmy was aroused at last by the clatter of iron-shod hoofs on the cañon trail. An instant later, Nugget, running with glorious strength and ease, dashed into view, and Marta’s joyous self came between the man at the window and the distant sky-line. Another moment and the girl stood in the open doorway.

CHAPTER VIII
THE NEW NEIGHBOR

But what a man is, that is a matter of concern to every one who is called by circumstance to associate with him.

WITH a merry greeting to Saint Jimmy, Marta ran straight to the welcoming arms of Mother Burton.

“Goodness me, child,” the older woman exclaimed when she had kissed her and held her close for a moment as such mothers do, “you look as if—as if you were going to jump right out of your skin; I do declare!”

And Saint Jimmy, watching them, silently agreed with his mother, thinking that he had never seen the girl quite so animated. Her vivid, flamelike beauty seemed to fill the house with joyous warmth and light, while her laughter, in quick response to Mrs. Burton’s words, rang with such happy abandon, and thrilled with such tingling excitement, that her teacher knew something unusual must have happened.

“What is it?” cried Mother Burton, shaking the girl playfully, and laughing with her. “What is the matter with you? What are you so excited about? Have Thad and Bob struck it rich at last?”

Marta shook her head.

“No, but it is something almost as good. We have a new neighbor.”

Mother Burton looked from Marta to her son inquiringly, as if mildly puzzled to know why the mere arrival of a newcomer in the neighborhood, unusual as it was, should cause such manifestations.

Saint Jimmy, smiling, asked:

“What is his name? Where is he from? And what is he like?”

The girl’s face was glowing with color and her eyes were bright as she answered:

“His name is Hugh Edwards. He came here from Tucson. I didn’t quite understand where he lived before he went to Tucson.” She paused and the ghost of a troubled frown fell across her brow. “But it was somewhere,” she finished brightly.

“Quite likely you are right,” said Jimmy, grave as a judge on the bench.

“Yes,” she continued, “and he has come here to stay. He is awfully poor—poorer than any of us. Why, he hasn’t even a burro to pack his outfit—had to pack it himself on his back, and he has been sick too, but he doesn’t look a bit sick now.” She laughed a little laugh of charming confusion. “He looks as if—as if—oh, as if he could do just anything—you know what I mean.”

“You make it very clear,” murmured Saint Jimmy.

Mother Burton made a curious little noise in her throat.

Marta looked from one to the other suspiciously. Then a bit defiantly she said:

“I don’t care, he does. And he is different from anybody that ever came to the Cañada del Oro before—for that matter, he is different from anybody that I have ever seen anywhere.”

“Dear me,” murmured Mother Burton, “how interesting! But how is he different, dear?”

The girl answered honestly:

“I can’t exactly tell what it is. For one thing, it is easy to see that he is educated. But of course Jimmy is too, so it can’t be that. I am sure, too, that he has lived in a big city somewhere and has known lots of nice people, but so has Jimmy. I don’t know what it is.”

“I judge he is not, then, one of our typical old prospectors,” said Saint Jimmy.

Again the girl’s joyous, unaffected laughter bubbled forth.

“Old! He is no older than you are; I suspect not quite so old, and he has the nicest eyes, almost as nice as you, Jimmy—only, only different, somehow—nice in another way, I mean. And he knows absolutely nothing about prospecting. He is so green it is funny. But he’s going to live in the old Dalton cabin right next door to us and we’re going to teach him.”

“Fine,” said Saint Jimmy with proper enthusiasm, and managed somehow to hide the queer, sinking pain that made itself felt suddenly down deep inside of him. Saint Jimmy was skilled by long practice in hiding pain.

“Dear me!” exclaimed Mother Burton. “This is interesting. But I must finish my morning work,” she added, moving toward the kitchen.

“I’ll help,” volunteered Marta quickly, and started after the older woman.

But Mother Burton answered:

“No, no, I was almost finished when you came.” Then catching the girl in her arms impulsively, and looking toward her son whose face was turned again to the far-off horizon, she added in a hurried whisper: “Get him out of doors, dear, he has been sitting like that all this blessed morning—make him go for a walk.”

Marta led her teacher straight to their favorite spot on the mountain side, some distance from the house. Here, in the shade of a gnarled and twisted cedar that for a century or more had looked down upon the varied life that moved through the Cañon of Gold below, they had spent many an hour over the girl’s studies. Against the bole of the tree they had contrived a rude shelf and pegs for hats and wraps. Mrs. Burton had contributed an old kitchen table and two chairs that neither rain nor sun could injure, and there was a large, flat-topped rock that served as bookcase and desk, or for a variety of other purposes, as it might happen.

On this occasion, Marta converted the rock into a couch by throwing herself full length upon it with the unconscious freedom of a schoolboy. Saint Jimmy seated himself in a chair and, in defiance of all schoolmaster propriety, elevated his feet to the table top.

They talked a while, as neighbors will, of the small affairs of the country side. But Doctor Burton could see that Marta’s thoughts were not of the things they were saying; and so, presently, from her rocky couch, the girl spoke again of the stranger who had come to be her nearest neighbor. She described him now in fuller detail—his eyes, his voice, his smile. She contrasted him with the Pardners, the Lizard, and with other men whom she had seen. She imagined fanciful stories for his past and invented for him various wonderful futures. And always she came back to the curious assertion that he was like her teacher, only different.

And Saint Jimmy, as he listened, asked an occasional encouraging question and studied her as in his old professional days he might have studied a patient. Never before had he seen the girl in such a mood. It was as if something deep-buried in her inner self was striving to break its way through to the surface of her being, as a deep-buried seed, when its time comes, forces its way through the dark earth to the light and sun.

Then for some time the girl was silent. With her head pillowed on one arm, and her eyes half closed, she lay as if she had drifted with the currents of her wandering thoughts into the quietude of dreams—dreams that were as intangible, yet as real, as the blue haze and purple shadows through which she saw the distant desert and mountains.

And Saint Jimmy, too, was still; while his face was turned away toward the far-off horizon, as if he saw there things which he might not talk about.

On the pine-clad heights of Mount Lemmon there were a few scattered patches of snow that had not yet yielded to the spring; but the air was soft and fragrant with the perfumes of warm earth and growing plants and opening blossoms. There was the low hum of the bees that were mining in the fragrant cat-claw bushes for the gold they stored in their wild treasure-houses in the cliffs. Not far away a gambrel partridge gallantly assured his plump gray mate, who sat on the nest in the shelter of a tall mescal plant, that there was no danger. A Sonora pigeon, from the top of a lone sahuaro, called his soft, deep-throated mating call. And a vermilion flycatcher sprang into the air from his perch near-by and climbed higher and higher into the blue and then, after holding himself aloft for a moment, puffed out his red feathers, and, twittering in a mad love ecstasy, came drifting back like a brilliant-colored thistle bloom, or an oversized and fiery-tinted dandelion tuft.

Marta’s teacher had not forgotten that the Pardners had trusted him to tell their girl the things that they—Saint Jimmy and his mother—were agreed she should know. And Saint Jimmy meant to tell her. But somehow this did not seem to be the time. He stole a look at the girl lying on the rocks. No, this was not the time. He could not tell her just now. He would wait. Some other time, perhaps, it would be easier.

“Jimmy,” said the girl at last, and her words came slowly as if she spoke out of the haze of her dreams, “when you went to school—I don’t mean when you were just a little boy, but when you were almost a man—was it a big school?”

Saint Jimmy did not answer at once, then, without taking his eyes from what ever it was that he was looking at in the distance, he said:

“Why, yes, it was a fairly large school.”

“And were there both men and women students?”

“Yes, there were a good many women in the University, and a few in the medical school, where I finally finished.”

“I expect you had lots of friends, didn’t you, Jimmy? I should think you would—men and women friends both. And I suppose there were all kinds of good times—parties and dances and picnics.”

Doctor Burton turned suddenly to look at her. “What in the world are you driving at now?”

“Please, Jimmy,” she said wistfully, “I want to know.”

And something made him look away again.

“I suppose I had my share of friends,” he answered. “And there was a reasonable amount of fun, as there always is at school, you know. But we—most of us—worked hard, too.”

“Yes,” she returned quickly, “and you dreamed and planned the great things you would do in the world when your school days should be over, and, in spite of all your friends and the good times, you could hardly wait to begin—yes, I am sure that is the way it would be.”

Saint Jimmy did not speak.

“And when your school days were finished, and you were actually a doctor in a big city, you still had lots of men and women friends, and you found a little time, now and then, for parties and—and dinners and such things, didn’t you, Jimmy?”

Saint Jimmy smiled, a patient, shadowy smile as he answered:

“My practice at first certainly left me plenty of time for other things.”

The girl did not notice the smile, because she was not looking at her companion.

“You lived in a nice house, too, with books and pictures and—and carpets on the floors. Do you know, I think I have wanted more than anything else in the world to live in a house with carpets on the floors. That is, I mean, I have wanted it ever since I knew there were such things. Do you know, Jimmy, I never saw a house with carpets until that first day I came to see you and Mother Burton?”

She laughed a little.

“That was a long, long time ago, wasn’t it? And I couldn’t much more than read then. Gee! how scared I was of you and Mother Burton.”

“You have made wonderful progress in your studies and in every way,” said Jimmy, proudly.

“Yes,” she returned. “The carpets did it—the carpets and you and Mother Burton. I don’t see how you ever managed to teach me, though. I guess you just learned by doctoring so many sick people. It must be a wonderful, satisfying work—helping people, I mean, like a doctor, or a teacher, or any work like that. It’s not like just finding gold in the ground. Even though you do have to work so hard to get the gold, it’s not like—like working for people—or with people. Getting gold out of the ground seems to take you away from people. You don’t seem to be doing anything for anybody—but only just for yourself. Prospectors and workers like that ’most always live alone, I have noticed. I don’t think many of them are very happy either. I have seen quite a lot of prospectors in my time, you know, Jimmy. In fact, except for you, prospectors and that sort are the only kind of men I have ever known—until now.”

Saint Jimmy was watching her closely.

“Yes,” he said softly, as if he did not wish to disturb her mood.

“I suspect it was pretty hard, wasn’t it, Jimmy, when you got sick yourself and had to give up your work and all your plans and leave your nice home and all your friends and everything and come away out here to get well, and then to find that you never could go back but must stay here always—poor Jimmy! It must have been mighty hard.”

“It wasn’t exactly easy,” he said slowly, “not at first. I fought a good deal until I learned better. After that it was not so hard—only at times, perhaps. Even now, I rebel occasionally, but not for long.”

Which was as near a complaint as any one had ever heard from Doctor Jimmy Burton.

“Jimmy,” said Marta earnestly, “I think that you are the most wonderful man that ever was—that ever could be.”

Saint Jimmy shrugged his shoulders, and waved a protesting hand.

“But you are,” she insisted, “and you know how I love you, don’t you? Not merely because you have helped me as you have, but because you are you. You do know, don’t you, Jimmy?”

There was an odd note in Jimmy’s voice now—it might have been gladness—it might have been protest—or perhaps it was both—with a hint of pain.

“Marta! I——“

He stopped as if he found himself suddenly unable to finish whatever it was that he had started to say. It may be that this was one of the times when Saint Jimmy was not wholly reconciled to the part that life had assigned to him.

Apparently Marta did not notice her teacher’s manner. Her thoughts must have been centered elsewhere because she said, quite as if she had been considering it all the time:

“I feel sure that Mr. Edwards has been hurt some way, just as you have, Jimmy. I mean that he has been to school, and had a world of nice friends and good times, and then started his real work and all that, and, now for some reason, has had to give up his work and home and friends and everything, and come out here. He didn’t tell us much, but you could sort of feel that he was that kind of a man. You can feel those things about men, can’t you, Jimmy?”

Jimmy nodded:

“I suppose so.”

“I don’t know why he didn’t tell us more about himself—about before he came to Tucson, I mean. Perhaps he will some day; but he acts as if he didn’t like to think about it now. You know what I mean, don’t you?”

“Yes, I know.”

“It is rather important that one have a past, isn’t it, Jimmy?” She smiled as she added: “Rather important that one have the right kind of a past, I mean.”

“To my mind it is quite important,” answered Jimmy soberly. And suddenly he remembered again the story that the Pardners had told.

She nodded thoughtfully.

“You have talked to me a lot about heredity and breeding and good blood and early environment and those things. I suspect it is your being a doctor that makes you consider them as you do. And Mother Burton, she has told me a lot, too, about your ancestors, away back. And so I can see that it is your past and the things you have to remember that make you the kind of a man you are. If you didn’t have the father and mother that you had, and the fathers and mothers that they had, and if you hadn’t had the schools and the friends and the home with carpets and the work of helping people that you have had, why, you wouldn’t be you at all, would you, Jimmy?”

Saint Jimmy moved uneasily. He wished now, in the light of the Pardners’ story and their conclusion as to the birth and parentage of this girl, that he had not included some subjects in his pupil’s course of study.

Marta continued as if, scarcely conscious of her companion’s presence, she were thinking aloud.

“And so if—if any one else did have the same kind of things to remember that you have, he would be the same kind of a man that you are—not exactly, of course. He might not be a doctor, or might not be sick, but on the whole—well—you see what I mean, don’t you, Jimmy?”

Saint Jimmy was quite sure that he saw her meaning. In fact, Doctor Burton was fast being convinced that he realized, more clearly than Marta herself, the real meaning of her unusual mood. Her next words confirmed his fast-growing suspicion that, however scientifically right he had been in his teaching, he had not been altogether kind in stressing certain truths.

“It’s funny that I never really thought of it before,” she said, “but I don’t seem to have any past at all. All I can remember is just moving around with my two fathers, who, of course, are not my fathers at all—at least not both of them. And, if it were not for you and Mother Burton, we wouldn’t have stayed here any longer than we did the other places. I think I must have been born while my real father and mother were moving somewhere. I never cared much about it before, Jimmy, but somehow I wish—now—that I—that I knew who I am. I wish—I wish—I had things to remember—such as you and Mr. Edwards have—schools and friends and good times and a home with carpets—I mean.”

There was a suspicious brightness in the frank eyes and her lips were trembling a little; a state of affairs very unusual to the Pardners’ daughter.

Saint Jimmy realized that it was going to be even harder than he had foreseen to make known to this girl the things he had promised to tell her. Certainly he could not tell her just now.

His voice was gentle as he finally said:

“I wouldn’t worry about all that, if I were you, dear. You see, it doesn’t really matter so much whether you know or not—your people must have been the best kind of people because you are what you are, and after all, it is what you are right now that counts. It is your own dear self, and not what you might have been that matters, don’t you see? Why, you have a better education already than most girls of your age. As for the rest—the friends and all that—those will come in time, I am sure.”

She smiled her gratitude bravely, then:

“Jimmy, may I ask you something more—something real personal?”

“As personal as you like,” he answered gravely.

“Well, among all your friends at school, and among all the people you met and knew afterwards, was there ever—was there ever one who was more than all the others—one girl or woman, I mean?”

Jimmy considered, then deliberately:

“You mean, in my school days and before I was forced to give up my work?”

She nodded.

“No,” said Jimmy readily. “Once or twice I thought there might be, but I soon found out that I was mistaken—of course I am glad now that I found it out.”

“But didn’t you, in all of your plans and dreams for your life and work—didn’t you ever include some one, didn’t you ever plan for a—for—well, for”—she finished triumphantly—“for two little boys like the Wheelers have?”

“I looked forward in a general way to a home and children, as I think every man does,” he answered.

She caught him up eagerly:

“You really think that every man includes such things in his plans?”

“At least,” he replied, “I fail to see how any normal, right-thinking man can ignore such things in his life plans.”

“I wonder if that could be it?” said Marta.

“You wonder what?”

“If Mr. Edwards came to the Cañada del Oro because his plans included some one who refused to be included.”

“Good Lord!” ejaculated Saint Jimmy under his breath.

“No,” she continued, “I don’t believe that is it. He doesn’t act as though that was the reason.”

Suddenly her mood changed. She seemed to awaken to some hitherto unrealized possibilities of her life, and to grasp with startled fierceness a defiant truth.

“Jimmy,” she cried, “just because I have no past is no reason why I should not have a future, is it?”

Before he could find an answer she went on, and her words came rushing, tumbling, hurrying out, as if the floodgate of her emotions were suddenly lifted and the passionate spirit of her released.

“I can see now that I have always been like our cañon creek in summer, just playing along any old way, taking things as they are, without even caring whether I stopped or not, but now—now I feel like the creek is to-day, with its springtime life, boiling and roaring and leaping—I won’t—I won’t be like the creek though—that for all its strength and fuss and fury just fades away at last into nothing, out there in the desert. I want to keep on going and going and going—I don’t know where. I don’t care where, just on, and on, and on!”

She sprang to her feet and stood before him in all the radiant, vigorous beauty of her young womanhood, and with reckless abandon challenged:

“Jimmy, let’s run away. Let’s go away off somewhere beyond the farthest line yonder that you are always looking at; and then let’s keep on going, just you and I. Wouldn’t it be fun if we were to be married? Why shouldn’t we? You’re not too old—I’m not too young. We could live in a little house somewhere—a house with carpets, Jimmy—and books and pictures, and you could make music, and I would take care of you—Oh, such good care of you, Jimmy. I’d cook all the things you like and ought to eat, and wash for you, and mend your things, and you could go on teaching me, and scolding me when I forgot to use the right words, and—and—wouldn’t it be fun, Jimmy? Of course after a while Mother Burton would come too—and perhaps there would be a place somewhere near for my daddies to prospect—Oh, Jimmy, Jimmy, let’s go!”

Doctor Burton laughed, and it was well for the girl that she was still too much of a child to know how often grim tragedy wears a mask of mirth.

When the stranger had told the Pardners and their daughter his simple story—how he had been ill and could find no work in Tucson, and so had come to the Cañada del Oro with the hope of finding enough gold to live by, and Marta had ridden away to spend the Sunday with Saint Jimmy and Mother Burton, Thad said doubtfully:

“I don’t see as there’s much we can do. We can’t learn nobody to find gold whar it ain’t, an’ if we knowed whar it was we certain sure would stake out some claims for ourselves, wouldn’t we? I don’t take no stock in there bein’ anythin’ more than a color mebby, round that old Dalton cabin yonder.”

“Gold is where you find it,” remarked Bob cheerfully. “You can’t never tell when or where you’re going to strike it rich.”

“That’s all right,” retorted Thad. “But it stands to reason that if the feller what built that cabin hadn’t of worked out his claim, he’d be there workin’ on it yet, wouldn’t he? He quit and vamoosed because he’d worked it out, I’m tellin’ you.”

Bob returned with energy:

“And I’m maintainin’ that no claim or mine or nothin’ else was ever worked out. Folks jest quit workin’ on ’em, that’s all. There’s many and many a mine been abandoned when three hours more—or one more shot, mebby, would a-opened up a bonanza. This young man may go right up there in the creek and stick in his pick a foot from where the other feller took out his last shovel of dirt an’ turn up a reg’lar glory-hole. Don’t you let him give you the dumps, Mr. Edwards, he’s the worst old pessimist you ever see. There’s enough gold in this neighborhood to buy all the bacon an’ beans you’ll need, long as you live, if you’re willin’ to scratch around for it; an’ you’ve got jest as good a chance as there is to strike a real mine an’ make your everlastin’ fortune, too.”

“If you want my honest opinion, Mr. Edwards,” said Thad solemnly, as if his pardner had not spoken, “you’ll be a fool to spend any time here.”

The younger man smiled:

“But you see, Mr. Grove, I am rather forced to do something right now. As I told you, I’m not in a position to spend much time tramping about the country looking for what might be a better place. All my capital—all my worldly possessions, in fact—are in that pack there. After all, you know the old saying,” he finished laughingly, “‘It takes a fool for luck.’”

“That ain’t so,” growled Thad, “’cause if it was, my pardner there would be as rich as Rockefeller and Morgan an’ the rest of them billionaires all rolled into one.”

Bob grinned at Edwards reassuringly. Then he said to Thad:

“Now that you’ve got that off your mind, suppose we jest turn in an’ do what we can for the boy here.”

“This here’s Sunday, ain’t it?” returned Thad, doubtfully. “Didn’t my gal tell us yesterday that we couldn’t——“

“Your gal,” interrupted Bob, fiercely. “Your gal—huh. I’m here to tell you that you’d best keep within your rights, Thad Grove, even if me an’ you be pardners. She’s my gal this week beginnin’ at sun-up this mornin’, an’ you know it; an’ besides, there’s good scripture for us helpin’ Mr. Edwards here to get located, even if ’tis Sunday.”

“Scripture!” said Thad scornfully. “What scripture?”

“It’s that there part where the Lord is linin’ ’em up about what they did an’ what they didn’t do,” explained Bob. “Says He to one bunch, ‘When I was dead broke an’ hungry an’ thirsty an’ all but petered out, you ornary skunks wouldn’t turn a hand to give me a lift, an’ so you don’t need to figger that you’re goin’ to git in on the ground floor with me now that I’ve struck pay dirt’—or words to that effect. An’ then to the other bunch He says: ‘You’re all right, Pardners; come on in an’ make your pile along with me, ’cause I ain’t forgot how when I was a stranger you took me in. You grubstaked me when I was down and out, an’ for that, all I’ve got now is yourn’—leastways, that’s the general meanin’ of it.”

Whereupon Thad conceded that while it would be wrong actually to work on the day of rest, it might be safe for them to show the stranger around and sort of talk things over.

And all that day, while the two old prospectors were conducting him to the cabin that, for the following months, was to be his home, while they were showing him about the neighborhood and advising him in a general way about his work, and as they sat at the dinner which Marta had left prepared for them, Hugh Edwards felt that he was being weighed, measured, analyzed. Nor did he in any way attempt to avoid or shirk the ordeal. Fairly and squarely, with neither hesitation nor evasion, he met those keen old eyes that for so many years had searched for the precious metal that is hidden in the sands and rocks and gravel of desert wastes, and lonely cañons, and those mountain places that are far remote from the haunts of less hardy and courageous men.

They did not ask many questions about his past, for it is not the way of such men to pry into another’s past. By their code a man’s personal history is his own most private affair, to be given or withheld as he himself elects. But what a man is, that is a matter of concern to every one who is called by circumstance to associate with him. They were not particularly interested in what this man who had given his name as Hugh Edwards had been. They were mightily interested in discerning what sort of a man Hugh Edwards, at that moment, was.

“Well, Pardner,” said Bob, later in the afternoon when Edwards, with sincere expression of his gratitude, had left them to go to the cabin which by common consent they now called his, “what do you make of him?”

Old Thad, rubbing his bald head, answered in—for him—an unusual vein:

“He’s a right likable chap, ain’t he, Bob? If I’d ever had a boy of my own—that is, supposin’, first, I’d ever had a wife—I think I’d like him to be jest about what I sense this lad is.” Then, as if alarmed at this betrayal of what might be considered sentiment, the old prospector suddenly stiffened, and added in his usual manner: “You can’t tell what he is—some sort of a sneakin’ coyote, like as not, a-tryin’ to pass hisself off as a harmless little cottontail. I’m for layin’ low an’ watchin’ his smoke mighty careful.”

“He’ll assay purty high-grade ore, I’m a-thinkin’,” said Bob.

“Time enough to invest when said assay has been made,” retorted Thad. “It looks funny to me that a man of his eddication would be a-comin’ up here in this old cañon to waste his time tryin’ to do somethin’ that he don’t know no more about than a baby. Hard work, too; an’ anybody can see he ain’t never done much of that.”

“He’s been sick,” returned Bob.

Thad grunted:

“Huh! If he was, it was a long time ago. Did you notice the weight of that pack—He’s a totin’ it like it warn’t nothin’ at all.”

“He looks kind of pale when his hat is off,” said Bob.

To which Thad returned:

“He’s mighty perticler about where he was an’ what he was doin’ for a livin’ before he blew into Tucson.”

“As for that,” returned Bob, “there’s been some things happen since me an’ you was first pardners that we ain’t jest exactly a-wavin’ in the wind—an’ look at us now.”

Thad’s dry retort was inevitable:

“Yes, jest look at us!”

Bob chuckled.

“You ain’t so mighty much to look at, I admit.”

“Well,” said Thad, “as long as my gal thinks I’m all right, you——“

“My gal—my gal,” snapped Bob. “Why have you allus got to be a-tryin’ to do me out of my rights. You know well as I do this is my week.”

“Excuse me, Pard,” the other apologized in all seriousness. “And that leads me to remark that your gal didn’t appear altogether indifferent an’ uninterested in this young prospectin’ neighbor of ours. You took notice, too, I reckon.”

“I ain’t blind, be I?” answered Bob. “An’ why wouldn’t she take notice? My gal ain’t no wizened-up old mummy like me an’ you. Why wouldn’t she take notice of a fine, up-standin’ clean-eyed, straight-limbed, fair-spoken youngster like him, heh? It’s nateral enough—an’ right enough too, I reckon.”

Old Thad, with sudden rage, shook his long finger at his pardner and, in a voice that was high pitched and trembling with emotion, cried:

“Nateral enough, you poor old, thick-headed, ossified, wreck of manhood, you. Nateral enough! Holy Cats! It’s too nateral, that’s what I’m a meanin’, it’s too nateral—whether it’s all right or all wrong—it’s too almighty nateral—that’s what it is.”

Later, when Marta had returned to her home in the Cañon of Gold—when the sun was down and the shadow of the approaching night was deepening over desert and mesa and mountain—a cowboy on his way to the home ranch stopped to listen as the music of Saint Jimmy’s flute came soft and clear through the quiet of the evening, from that spot beneath the old cedar tree, high on the mountain side. A wandering Mexican, camped near Juniper Spring below, heard and crossed himself. Natachee the Indian who was following a faint trail toward the wild upper cañon heard and smiled. Jimmy’s mother heard, and her eyes filled with tears.

CHAPTER IX
“GOLD IS WHERE YOU FIND IT”

“As the ocean calls the water of the rivers, and the rivers call the creeks and springs, so this story, of a treasure hidden in a mine that is lost, has called many people to the Cañon of Gold.”

THE Cañon of Gold was still in the shadow of the mountains the next morning when the Pardners went to give their new neighbor his first lesson in the work that was to occupy him for months to come.

Hugh Edwards greeted them without a trace of the hesitating fear that he had shown during the first moments of their meeting, the day before. His eyes now met theirs fairly, with no hint of questioning dread. It was as if the restful peace and strengthening quiet of that retreat which was hidden so far from the overcrowded highways of life had begun already to effect, in the troubled spirit of this stranger, a magic healing.

“Well,” said Thad gruffly, “we’re here—where’s your pick an’ shovel an’ pan?”

When the younger man had produced those implements which were so new and strange to him, Bob asked kindly if he had had a good night’s sleep, if he found the cabin comfortable, and if he had fortified himself for the day’s work with a proper breakfast.

Hugh Edwards laughed, and, with his face lifted to the mountain heights that towered above them, squared his shoulders and drew a long deep breath.

“I haven’t had such a sleep since I can remember. As for breakfast, well, if I eat like this every day, I will exhaust my supplies before I even learn to know gold when I see it. I feel as if I could move that hill over there into the cañon.”

Bob chuckled.

“You’ll find you’ve got to move a lot of it, son, before you make enough at this gold-huntin’ game to buy your grub.”

“That’s the trouble with prospectin’ in this here Cañada del Oro country,” said Thad. “The harder you work the more you eat, and the more you eat the harder you got to work. Come on, let’s get a-goin’.”

For several hours the old Pardners labored with their pupil beside the creek, then, with hearty assurance of further help from time to time as he made progress, they left him and went to their own little mine, some five hundred yards down the cañon.

The afternoon was nearly gone when Edwards, who was kneeling over the gravel and sand in his pan at the edge of the stream, looked up.

On a bowlder, not more than five steps from the amateur prospector, sat an Indian.

With an exclamation, the white man sprang to his feet.

The Indian did not move. Dressed as he was in the wild fashion of his fathers and with his primitive bow and arrows, he seemed more like some sculptured bit of the past than a creature of living flesh.

Hugh Edwards, standing as one ready to run at the crack of the starter’s pistol, swiftly surveyed the immediate vicinity. His face was white and he was trembling with fear.

With grave interest the red man silently observed the perturbed stranger. Then, as Edwards again turned his frightened eyes toward him, the Indian raised his hand in the old-time peace sign and in a deep, musical voice spoke the one word of the old-time greeting:

“How.”

Edwards broke into a short, nervous laugh.

“How-do-you-do—By George! but you gave me a start.”

Some small animal—a pack rat or a ground squirrel—made a rustling sound in the bushes on the bank above, and with a low cry the frightened man wheeled, and again started as if to escape.

The Indian, watching, saw the meaning in every move the stranger made, and read every expression of his face.

With an effort Edwards controlled himself.

“Are you alone?” he asked. “I mean”—he caught himself up quickly—“that is—have you no horse?”

“I am always alone,” the Indian answered calmly. Then, as if to put the other more at ease, he continued in excellent English: “Night before last, when the sun went down, I was up there on Samaniego Ridge,” he pointed with singular grace. “There on that rock near the dead sahuaro, and I saw you as you came up the old road into the cañon.”

Hugh Edwards again betrayed himself by the eagerness of his next question:

“Did you see any one else?”

“There was no one on your trail,” returned the Indian.

At this the stranger seemed to realize suddenly that he was permitting his fears to reveal too much, and, as one will, he sought to amend his error with a half-laughing excuse.

“Really, you know, I didn’t suppose there was any one following me.” He indicated his work with a gesture. “I am not exactly used to this sort of life, you see, and—well—I confess the loneliness, the strangeness of my surroundings, and all, have rather got on my nerves—quite natural, I suppose.”

The Indian bowed assent.

As if determined to correct any impression he might have made by his unguarded manner, Edwards abruptly dropped the subject, and with an air of enthusiastic delight spoke of his surroundings, finishing with the courteous question:

“You live in this neighborhood, do you?”

There was a quick gleam of savage light in the dark eyes that were fixed with bold pride upon the questioning white man, and the Indian answered more in the manner of his people:

“In the years that are past my fathers came to these mountains to hunt and to make war like men. They come now with the squaws to gather acorns, when the white man gives them permission. I live here, yes, as a homeless dog lives in one of your cities. My name is Natachee.”

The deep, musical voice of the red man revealed such bitter feeling that Hugh Edwards was moved to pity. And then, as he stood there in the silence that had fallen upon them, a strange thing happened. It was as if the spirit of the Indian had somehow touched the inner self of the stranger and had quickened in him a kindred savage lusting for revenge upon some enemy who had brought upon him, too, humiliation and shame and suffering beyond expression. The white man’s hands were clenched, his breast heaved with labored breathing, his face was black with passion, his eyes were dreadful with the scowling light of anger and hate.

A faint smile came like a swift shadow over the face of the watching Indian; then he spoke with deliberate meaning:

“And why have you come to the Cañada del Oro? Why should a man like you wish to live here, in the Cañon of Gold?”

Hugh Edwards gained control of himself with an effort.

“I came to look for gold; as you see,” he said at last.

Again that faint smile like a quick shadow touched the face of the red man.

And this time the other saw it. Looking straight into the eyes of the Indian, he said coldly:

“And you, what do you do for a living?”

Natachee, returning look for look, answered simply:

“I live as my fathers lived.”

“I have heard about you, I think,” said Edwards.

The Indian’s deep voice was charged with scorn.

“Yes, the Lizard called at your camp—you would hear about every one from the Lizard.”

“He told me that you were educated.”

Natachee answered sadly:

“It is true, I attended the white man’s school. What I learned there made me return to the desert and the mountains to live as my fathers lived; and to die as my people must die.”

When the white man, seemingly, could find no words with which to reply, the Indian spoke again.

“If it is gold that brought you here to the Cañada del Oro, why do you not search for the Lost Mine with the Iron Door?”

Hugh Edwards, remembering what the Lizard had said, smiled.

“And is there, really, such a mine?”

“There is a story of such a mine.”

“Do many people come to look for it?”

Natachee answered gravely and with that dignity so characteristic of a red man, while his words, though spoken in English, were the words of an Indian:

“Too many people come. As the ocean calls the water of the rivers, and the rivers call the creeks and springs; so this story of a treasure hidden in a mine that is lost has called many people to the Cañon of Gold. For many years they have been coming—for many years they will continue to come. The white people say they do not believe there ever was such a mine and they laugh about it. They look for it just the same. Even the Pardners, who dig for gold in their own little hole down there, laugh, but I know that they, too, believe even as they laugh. That is always the white man’s way—always he is searching for the thing which he says does not exist, and at which he laughs.”

“But what about you?” asked Hugh Edwards. “Do you believe in this lost mine?”

The Indian’s face was a bronze mask as he answered:

“Of what importance is an Indian’s belief to a white man? When the winds heed the dead leaves they toss and scatter, when the fire heeds the dry grass in its path, then will a white man heed the words of an Indian.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t say it was as bad as that,” returned Edwards easily, and as he spoke he went to bend over his pan again. “Mine or no mine,” he continued, as he examined the sand and gravel he had been washing, “I think I have some real gold here.”

When there was no answer he said:

“You must know gold when you see it. Will you look at this and tell me what you think?”

Still there was no answer.

With the gold pan in his hand, the white man turned to face his visitor. The Indian had disappeared.

In amazement, Hugh Edwards stood staring at the spot where the Indian had been sitting but a moment before. Then, while his eyes searched the vicinity for some movement in the brush, he listened for a sound. Not a leaf or twig or blossom stirred—not a sound betrayed the way the red man had gone.

With an odd feeling that the whole incident of the Indian’s visit was as unreal as a dream, the man had again turned his attention to the contents of his gold pan when a gay voice came from the top of the bank.

“Well, neighbor, have you struck it rich?”

Looking up, he saw Marta.

“I have struck something all right, or rather something struck me,” he laughed, as she joined him beside the creek. Then he told her about the Indian.

“Yes,” she said, “that was Natachee. He always comes and goes like that. Everybody says he is harmless. He and Saint Jimmy are quite good friends; but he gives me the creeps.” She shrugged her shoulders. “Ugh! I always feel as if he were wishing that he could scalp every one of us.”

“To tell the truth,” returned Edwards, “I feel a little that way myself.”

That evening as Hugh Edwards sat with the Pardners and their girl on the porch, he asked the old prospectors about the Mine with the Iron Door.

They laughed, as Natachee had said, but Edwards caught an odd note of wistfulness in their merriment. Thad answered his question, with a brave pretense of scorn:

“There’s lost mines all over Arizona, son. Better stick to your pick and shovel if you want to eat reg’lar. You won’t pan out so mighty much, mebby, but what you do get will be real.”

“But this here Mine with the Iron Door is different some ways from all them others,” said Bob.

And again Edwards caught that wistful note in the old-timer’s voice.

“You mean that you believe there is such a mine?” he said.

“Holy Cats—No!” growled Thad. “We don’t believe in nothin’ ’til we got it where we can cash it in.”

Bob was thoughtfully refilling his pipe. “They say it was made by the old padres, away back, a hundred years before any of us prospectors ever hit this country. I know one thing that you can see for yourself, easy—there’s the ruins of a mighty old settlement or camp or somethin’ on the side of the mountain up above the Steam Pump Ranch. They say it was there that the Papagos, what worked the mine for the priests, lived. The Papagos and the padres always was friendly, you know. The padres have got a big mission, San Xavier, down in the Papago country, right now—built somethin’ like three hundred years ago, it was. I ain’t never been able myself to jest figger their idea in fixin’ up the mine with that iron door. Mebby it was on account of them only workin’ it by spells, like when they was needin’ somethin’ extra for their mission or for their church back home in Spain, where they all come from, and so wanted to shut it up when they was gone away. Then one time, the story goes, along come one of these here earthquakes, and tumbled a whole blamed mountain down on top of the works. The old priests and their Papago miners figgered it out that the landslide was an act of God—Him bein’ displeased with the way they was runnin’ things er somethin’, an’ so they was scared ever even to try to dig her up again. An’ so you see, after all these years, the trees and brush growed over the mountain again and the old mine got to be plumb lost for certain sure.”

“An’ so far as we’re consarned,” added the other pardner emphatically, “it’s goin’ to stay lost. This ain’t no country for a big mine nohow. Mineralized all right, but look at the way she’s all shot to pieces; busted forty ways for Sunday—ain’t nothin’ reg’lar nowhere, unless you was to go down a thousand or two feet, mebby, and that ain’t no prospect for a poor man, I’m a-tellin’ you. Find a little placer dirt, yes, and you might strike a good pocket once in a lifetime or so, but that ain’t to say real minin’. Take my advice, son, and don’t let this lost mine get to workin’ on you or you’ll go hungry.”

“That’s all true enough, Pardner,” said Bob, “but you know how ’tis, you can’t never tell—Gold is where you find it.”

CHAPTER X
SUMMER

“Daddy,” says she, “Hugh has changed a lot since he come to us, ain’t he?”

THE weeks of the spring passed. The gleaming snow fields vanished from the dark pine heights of Mount Lemmon. The creek, which ran through the Cañon of Gold with such boisterous strength that day when the stranger came and Marta talked with Saint Jimmy under the old cedar on the mountain side, crept lazily now, with scarce a murmur, pausing often to rest in the shady quiet of an overhanging rock or to sleep, half hidden, among the roots of a giant sycamore.

The Sonora pigeon, his mission accomplished, had long since ceased to give his mating call. The nest in the mesquite thicket had been filled and was empty again. The partridge was leading her half-grown covey far from the mescal plant where they were born. The vermilion flycatcher was too busy, with his exacting parental duties, even to think of indulging in those fantastic exhibitions which ultimately had placed the burdens of fatherhood upon his shoulders.

There was not a day of those passing months that the Pardners and their girl did not in some way come in touch with their neighbor. Sometimes Edwards would go to counsel with the two old prospectors as they worked in their little mine. Again, they would go over to his place to advise him, with their years of experience, in his small operations. Often he would spend the evening with them on the porch in neighborly fashion, or they would go to smoke with him before the door of his tiny cabin. Occasionally, it was no more than a shout of greeting across the three hundred or more yards that separated the two places; but always the contact that had been established that day when the Lizard brought the stranger to the Pardners’ door was maintained.

Hugh Edwards might have gone from the place where he labored to the Pardners’ mine, along the creek under the high bank, without passing their house at all, but he never did. That is, he never both went and returned by the creek route. Either going or coming, he would always climb out of the deep cut made by the stream to the level of the main floor of the cañon where the house stood—except, of course, when Marta had gone to the store at Oracle or to see Saint Jimmy and Mother Burton.

The girl was always included, too, in those evenings on the porch or before his cabin door. Always, on her way to the store, she stopped to see if she could bring anything for him. And often, with the freedom of the rude environment she had known since she could remember, and with the frank innocence of her boyish nature, Marta would run over to give him a lesson in the arts of the kitchen; or, perhaps, to contribute something of her own cooking—a pie or cake or pudding—that would be quite beyond the range of his poor culinary skill. It was indeed all very natural—perhaps, as Thad had said that first day, it was too darned natural.

To the Pardners, Hugh Edwards was an object of continued speculative interest, a subject of endless and somewhat violent arguments; and, it must be added, a never-failing source of amusement and delight. The genuineness and depth of this friendship for their young neighbor was evidenced at last by their telling him the story of their partnership daughter as they had told it to Saint Jimmy and Mother Burton. It was not long after this mark of their confidence that the old prospectors were led into a characteristic discussion of their observations.

Hugh had gone to them at their mine with a bit of quartz which he had picked up in the bed of the creek. The consultation was over and the two old prospectors were sitting in the shade of the tunnel opening watching the younger man as he climbed up the steep bank toward the house. Old Bob was grinning.

“He sure thought he had found somethin’ good this time, didn’t he? The boy’s all right, don’t never show a sign of bein’ sore when his rich rocks turn out to be jest nothin’ but rock—jest keeps right on tryin’. Don’t seem to care a cuss how many blanks he draws.”

Thad chuckled:

“If hard work will get him anything, he’s sure due to strike it rich. Hits it up from crack of day ’til plumb dark an’ acts like he hated even to think of sleepin’ or eatin’.”

“It’s funny, too,” said Bob, “’cause you remember at first he didn’t ’pear to take no interest a-tall. Jest poked along in a come-day, go-day, God-send-Sunday sort of a gait, as if all he wanted was to git his powder back with what frijoles, bacon, and coffee he had to have. He’s sure come alive, though. I wonder——“

Thad was rubbing his bald head with a slow, speculative movement.

“Had you took notice how he allus goes up to the house when he brings them pieces of fool rock to us? My gal, she says to me the other evenin’——“

“Your gal! Your gal!” Marta’s father shouted. “This here’s my week, and you know it blamed well, you old love pirate, you. Can’t you never be satisfied with your share? Have you got to be allus tryin’ to euchre me out of my rights?”

“I apologize, Pardner, I forgot, I apologize plenty,” said Thad hurriedly. “As I was meanin’ to say, that gal of yourn, she says to me, ‘Daddy’—last Saturday it was, so she had a right to call me daddy—‘Daddy,’ says she, ‘Hugh has changed a lot since he come to us, ain’t he?’”

“Well,” returned Bob, “what if my daughter did make such a remark, it——“

“She was my daughter then,” interrupted Thad sternly.

“She’s mine right now,” retorted Bob with equal force. “What if she did say it? I maintain it only goes to show what a smart, observin’ gal she’s growed up to be.”

Thad grunted disgustedly.

“It’s almighty plain that she didn’t inherit none of her observin’ powers from you.”

Bob glared at him.

“Wal, what are you seein’ that I ain’t?” he demanded. “Somethin’ that’s wrong, I’ll bet—By smoke! Thad, if you was to happen to get into Heaven by any hook or crook so ever, you’d set yourself first off to suspicionin’ them there angels of high gradin’ the gold they say the streets up there is paved with.”

The other returned with withering contempt:

“You’ve said it! But don’t it signify nothin’ to you when your gal—when any gal takes notice of how a feller is lookin’ different from what he did when she first met up with him? Ain’t it got no meanin’ for you when she says, ‘Since he come to us’? Come to us—to us—can’t you see nothin’? If I was as dumb as you be, I’d set off a stick of powder under myself to see if I couldn’t get some sort of, what I heard Doctor Jimmy once call, a re-action.”

Bob laughed.

“I figger on gettin’ all the reactions I need from you, without wastin’ any powder. Hugh did come to us, didn’t he? Even if that measly Lizard did fetch him far as the gate.”

“Oh, sure,” grumbled the other with fine sarcasm. “Hugh, he didn’t come to this here Cañada del Oro—not a-tall—he jest come to us.”

Bob continued as if the other had not spoken:

“As far as his not bein’ the same as when he come, well, he ain’t—anybody can see that. ’Tain’t only that he’s started in to workin’, all at once, like he jest naterally had to get rich. He’s different in a lot of ways. Take his looks, for instance—he used to be kind of white like—you remember, and now he’s tanned as black as any of us old desert rats. He’s sturdier and heavier like, every way. Hard work agrees with him, ’pears like.”

“’Tain’t only that,” said Thad.

“Sure—his hair ain’t so short no more.”

“There’s more than hair an’ bein’ tanned,” said Thad.

“Yep, there is,” agreed Bob. “Do you mind how, when he first come, he acted sort of scared like—right at the very first, I mean.”

“That’s it,” returned Thad, “his eyes was like he was expectin’ one or t’other, or both of us, to throw down a gun on him. An’ yet I sensed somehow, after the first minute, that it wasn’t us he was afraid of. He sure walks up to a man now, though, like he could jump down his throat if he had to.”

“I’ll bet my pile he would, too, if he was called,” chuckled Bob. “And have you noticed how easy he laughs, an’ the way he sings and whistles over there when he’s fussin’ ’round his shack of a mornin’ or evenin’?”

“He sure seems contented enough,” said Thad, “an’ that’s another thing I’ve noticed, too,” he added slowly. “The boy ain’t been out of the cañon since he come.”

“Ain’t no reason for him to go,” said Bob. “We take out what little gold he pans with ourn, don’t we? An’ it’s easy for Marta to buy his supplies for him while she’s buyin’ for us. There ain’t nobody at Oracle that he’d be wantin’ to see.”

“Mebby that’s it,” said Thad.

“Mebby what’s it?” demanded Bob.

“That there ain’t nobody at Oracle that he wants to see—or that he don’t want to see him—whichever way you like to say it.”

“There you go again,” said Bob. “Can’t talk more’n a minute on any subject without hintin’ that somethin’ is wrong. The boy is all right, I tell you.”

“Well, Holy Cats! who said he wasn’t?” cried Thad. “I wouldn’t hold it against him much if he never went to Oracle or nowhere else; jest stuck in this here cañon ’til he died, hidin’ out in the brush somewhere every time anybody strange showed up nearer than George Wheeler’s. You an’ me has both suffered from the same sort of sickness more’n once, or I’m a-losin’ my memory. You’re allus makin’ out that I’m thinkin’ evil when I’m only jest tryin’ to look at things as they actually are. If I’d intimated that the boy was a hoss-thief or a claim-jumper or somethin’ like that, you’d have reason to climb on to me, but I’m likin’ him an’ believin’ in him as much as ever you or anybody else ever dared to.”

Bob grinned.

“It’s funny how we’re all agreed on that, ain’t it? He is sure a likable cuss. I was a-warnin’ him the other day about handlin’ his powder. ‘You don’t want to forgit, son,’ says I, ‘that there’s enough in one of them sticks to blow you so high that you’d think you was one of them heavenly bodies up yonder.’ He laughed an’ says, says he, ‘That bein’ the case, it would be mighty comfortin’ to know there was no one to dock me for the time I was up in the air, wouldn’t it?’”

“Huh!” grunted Thad, “that’s an old one.”

“Sure it’s an old one,” retorted Bob, “but nobody can’t say it ain’t a good one; and I’m here to maintain that you can tell a heap more about a man by the jokes he laughs at than you can by the religions he claims to believe in.”

“Yes,” retorted Thad grimly, “I’ve allus took notice, too, that them that’s all the time seein’ evil in whatever anybody does is dead immortal certain to be havin’ a lot of their own doin’s that need to be kept in the dark. As for this game of lookin’ for some sort of insinuations in everything a body says, it’s like a lookin’ glass—what you see is mostly yourself. That’s what I’m meanin’.”

“Hugh is a good boy all right,” said Bob.

“He’s all of that and then some,” said Thad.

The truth of the matter is, Hugh Edwards had found, in the Cañada del Oro, something more than the gold for which he worked so laboriously through the long days, and which he had come to hoard with such miserly care. In the Cañon of Gold, he had found more than rugged health; more than a sanctuary from whatever it was that had driven him from the world to which he belonged into the lonely seclusion of that wild country. Into his loneliness had come a sweet companionship that had grown every day more dear. In this new joy and gladness, bitterness and pain had ceased to darken his hours with hatred and with useless and vengeful longings. Crushed and beaten, humiliated and shamed, his every hour an hour of dread, he had found inspiration and spirit to plan his life anew. Out of his hopelessness, a glorious new hope had come. He had learned again to dream; and he had gained strength to labor for his dreams.

But he had not told Marta what it was that he had found. He could not tell her yet. Before he could tell her, he must have gold. And he must have, not merely an amount that would satisfy the bare necessities of life—he must have much more than that. He was not so foolish as to feel that he must be in a position to offer this girl the extravagant luxuries of life. But his need was born of a dire necessity—a necessity as vital as the need of food. Without gold, the realization of his dream was an impossibility. His only hope of happiness was in the possibility of his success in finding a quantity of the yellow metal for which, through the centuries, so many men had labored, as he was laboring now, in the Cañon del Oro. He could not explain to Marta—he could only dream and hope and work, as those others before him had dreamed and hoped and worked in the Cañon of Gold. And so, with a strength that was like the strength of Saint Jimmy, this man was resolutely hiding the love that had re-created him. Marta must not know—not now.

But Marta knew—knew and yet did not know. The girl, whose womanhood had developed in the peculiarly sexless environment that had been hers since she could remember, had formed no habit of self-analysis. She was wholly inexperienced in those innocent but emotionally instructive friendships which girls and young women normally have with boys and men of their own age. Except for her fathers and Saint Jimmy, she had had no contact with men. In her childlike ignorance she asked of herself no questions. She gave no more thought to the meaning of her interest in Hugh Edwards than a wild bird gives to its mating instinct. But as their friendship grew and ripened, this girl of the desert and mountains knew that she was happy as she had never been happy before. She felt a kinship with the wild life about her that thrilled her with its poignant mystery. The flowers had never before bloomed in such passionate profusion. The birds had never voiced such melodies. The very winds were freighted with perfumes that filled her with strange delight. The days, indeed, flew by on wings of sunshine—the nights were haunted with shadowy promises as vague and intangible as they were sweet.

Natachee, as the weeks passed, seemed to develop a strange interest in the man who was so obviously from a world that is far indeed from the haunts of the lonely red man. Frequently the Indian called at the little cabin to spend an hour or more. Always he appeared suddenly, at the most unexpected moments, as if he were a spirit materialized that instant from an invisible world, and always he disappeared in the same startling fashion.

Sometimes, when he was with Edwards and the Pardners, he would discuss matters of general interest with the speech and manner of any well-bred college man. Save for his savage costume, his dusky countenance, and a certain touch of poetic feeling in his choice of words and figures of speech, there would be nothing, on these occasions, to mark him as different, in any way, from his white companions. But on other occasions, when Natachee and Edwards were alone, the red man would, for the moment, cast aside every mark of his training in the schools, and, with the voice, words, and gestures peculiar to his race, express thoughts and emotions that were purely Indian. Much of the time, however, he would sit silently watching the white man at his work. Often he would come and go without a word. He would sometimes appear, too, when Marta and Edwards were together, and on these occasions, save for a courteous greeting, he was rarely more than a silent observer.

The Lizard had at first endeavored to cultivate the stranger’s friendship, but, receiving no encouragement, had soon limited his attentions to a sullen “Howdy” when he passed on his way to or from Oracle.

But Saint Jimmy had not yet met the man who was living next door to Marta. Often the girl begged her teacher to go with her to call on the new neighbor. Mother Burton frequently scolded him, gently, for his discourtesy to the stranger. And Saint Jimmy promised many times that he would call, but he invariably postponed the date of his visit. He would set out on his social mission in all good faith, but invariably, when he came within sight of the cabin so near to Marta’s home, he would stop and, instead of going on, would spend the hours alone on the mountain side looking out over the desert. Had Saint Jimmy been other than the gentle spirit he was, he might have said that he heard quite enough about Hugh Edwards from Marta without going to visit him.

Many times, too, Saint Jimmy thought to tell Marta the story her fathers had intrusted to him, but for some reason he always found it as difficult to talk to his pupil about the mystery of her early childhood as he found it hard to call on this man in whom she was so interested.

Often he said to his mother that he would delay no longer—that he would tell the girl the next time she came to see them; but each time he put it off. The girl was always so radiantly happy, so overflowing with the joy of life. Perhaps, Saint Jimmy told himself, perhaps, it might never be necessary for her to know.

The dry season of the summer passed—the summer rains came; and again the desert, the foothills and mountain sides were bright with blossoms. It was during this “Little Spring,” as the Indians call this second blossoming time of the year, that Saint Jimmy finally called on Hugh Edwards.

And—it was the Lizard who brought it about.

CHAPTER XI
THE LIZARD

“No,” said Doctor Burton, slowly, “I have heard nothing about Mr. Edwards. Nothing wrong, I mean.”

THE Lizard was on his way to Oracle that day when he turned aside from the more direct trail to take the path that led past the little white house on the mountain side. Approaching the Burton home, he pulled his horse down to a walk, and, as he rode slowly up the winding way, his shifty eyes searched the vicinity on every side. It was not long before he saw Doctor Burton, who was seated, with his back comfortably against a rock in the shade of a Juniper tree, reading.

As the Lizard left the trail and rode toward him, Saint Jimmy glanced up from his book. With a look of mild interest, he watched as the horse with its rider climbed the steep side of the mountain.

When he had come quite near, the Lizard stopped, and slouching down in the saddle looked at the man seated on the ground with a wide grin, while the horse with a long breath of relief dropped his head and settled himself sleepily, as if understanding from long experience that his master would have no further use for him for some time to come.

“How do you do?” said Jimmy, smiling.

“’Bout as usual,” returned the horseman. “I’m eatin’ reg’lar. ’Lowed hit war time I rode by to see how you was a makin’ hit these days. I see ye’re still alive,” he laughed, in his loose-mouthed way.

“I am doing very well,” returned Saint Jimmy, wondering what the real object of the fellow’s call might be.

“Yer maw’s well too, I reckon?”

“Yes, thank you.”

“Been over t’ Oracle lately?”

“I was there yesterday.”

“Uh-huh! I was up t’ the store myself day before. Hear anythin’ new, did ye?”

“Nothing startling,” smiled Saint Jimmy. “Your father and mother are well, are they?”

“’Bout as usual. Ain’t seed George Wheeler lately, have ye—er any of his folks?”

“George was at our house a few days ago,” returned Jimmy. “Stopped in a few minutes on his way home from the upper ranch.”

“Uh-huh!—George say anything, did he?”

“No. Nothing in particular.”

The Lizard shifted his slouching weight in the saddle. “I met up with one of George’s punchers t’other day. Bud Gordon, hit war. He says as how th’ lions is a-gettin’ ’bout all of George’s mule colts up ’round his place above.”

“So George was telling us. It’s too bad. You ranchers will be planning another hunt soon, I suppose.”

The Lizard shook his head solemnly, then leered at Saint Jimmy with an evil grin.

“Thar’s varmints in this here neighborhood what needs a-huntin’ a mighty sight more’n lions an’ coyotes an’ sich.”

Jimmy waited.

“You say you ain’t heerd nothin’?” demanded the Lizard.

“About what?”

“’Bout that there new prospector, what’s located in th’ old cabin down thar by th’ Pardners’ place.”

“No,” said Doctor Burton slowly. “I have heard nothing about Mr. Edwards—nothing wrong, I mean.”

“Wal, if ye ain’t, hit’s ’cause ye ain’t been ’round much, er ’cause ye ain’t listened very close. Mebby, though, folks would be kind o’ slow-like sayin’ anythin’ t’ you—seein’s how you’d likely be more interested ’n anybody else.”

Saint Jimmy was not smiling now.

“I think you are mistaken about my interest,” he said curtly. “I have no desire to listen to you or to any one else on the subject.”

“Oh, ye ain’t, heh?” the man on the horse returned with a sneer. “I ’lowed as how ye’d be mighty quick t’ listen, seein’ ’s how this new feller’s cut you out with th’ gal, like he has.”

When Saint Jimmy did not speak, the Lizard continued with virtuous indignation:

“Things was bad enough as they was, but now since this new feller’s come, she’s a-carryin’ on past all reason. You kin find ’em t’gether at his shack er down in th’ creek whar he’s a-pretendin’ t’ work, er out in the brush somewhar ’most any time. An’ when she ain’t over t’ his place er out with him somewhar, he’s dead certain t’ be at her house. I seed them t’gether when I passed on my way up here. She’s too good t’ speak to me, what’s been neighbor t’ her ever since she come into this country, but she kin take up with this stranger quick enough.”

Doctor Burton was on his feet.

“That’s enough,” he said sharply. “You might as well go on your way now. You have evidently said what you came to say.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” returned the Lizard with insolent superiority. “There ain’t no use in yer tryin’ t’ be so high an’ mighty with me. She’s throwd me down fer you often enough. Now that yer gettin’ th’ same thing, ye ought t’ be a grain more friendly, ’pears t’ me. As fer this other feller, he’ll sure get what’s a-comin’ t’ him, an’ so will she.”

Jimmy caught his breath.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that folks ’re a-talkin’, an’ that they’ll likely do more than talk this time. We’ve allus had our doubts about th’ gal—who wouldn’t have—her bein’ raised by them two old mavericks like she war an’ bein’ named fer both an’ both claimin’ t’ be her daddy—an’ nobody knowin’ a foreign thing ’bout who her real paw an’ maw was, er even whether she ever had any. But folks has put up with her an’ you ’cause you was supposed to’ be a-teachin’ her an’ cause yer Saint Jimmy.” He laughed. “Saint Jimmy—mighty pretty, heh? But this new feller that’s got her now—Edwards, he calls hisself—he ain’t pretendin’ nothin’. Him an’ her, they——“

Doctor Burton started forward, his eyes were blazing and his voice rang:

“Shut up—if you open your foul mouth again, I’ll drag you from that horse and choke the dirty life out of you.”

The Lizard, amazed at the usually gentle-mannered Saint Jimmy, straightened himself in the saddle and caught up the reins.

“Get out!” continued the man on the ground. “Go find some filthy-minded scandalmonger like yourself to listen to your vile rot. I’ve had enough.”

The Lizard snarled down at him:

“If you warn’t a poor lunger, I’d——“

But as Saint Jimmy reached for him, he touched his horse with the spur, and the animal leaped away.

Twenty minutes later, Doctor Burton was on his way to the cabin in the cañon.

Marta was at home, sitting on the porch with her sewing, when her teacher rode down into the Cañon of Gold. She saw him as he turned aside toward the neighboring cabin, and was on the ground in time to introduce the two men.

CHAPTER XII
GHOSTS

“The Cañon of Gold is haunted by the ghosts of these disappointed ones. I, Natachee, know these things because I am an Indian.”

MARTA could not have explained, even to herself, why she was so anxious to see Saint Jimmy and Hugh Edwards together. Certainly she made no effort to find an explanation.

Through the years that he had been her teacher, Saint Jimmy had come to personify, as it were, her spiritual or intellectual ideal.

Any why not, since it was Saint Jimmy who had helped her form her spiritual and intellectual ideals? Their daily association, their friendship, their love—for she did love Saint Jimmy—had all been grounded and developed in an atmosphere of books and study that was purely Platonic. In her teacher she had come to see embodied the essential truths which he had taught. She had never for a moment thought of Doctor Burton and herself as a man and a woman. He was simply Saint Jimmy. She was his grateful pupil who loved him dearly because he was Saint Jimmy.

But from the very first moment of their meeting Marta was conscious that the appeal of Hugh Edwards’ personality was an appeal that to her was new and strange—she was conscious that he had made an impression upon her such as no man had ever before made. For that matter, she had never before met such a man. As she had said so many times, he made her think of Saint Jimmy and yet he was different. And because the experience was so foreign to anything that she had ever known, she did not understand.

Because Hugh Edwards made her think so often of Saint Jimmy, and because he was so different from Saint Jimmy, she was anxious to see the two men together. Nor could the girl understand her teacher’s persistent failure to call on their new neighbor. It was not at all like Saint Jimmy. Nothing, perhaps, revealed quite so fully Marta’s lack of experience in such things as her failure to understand why Saint Jimmy was so slow in making the acquaintance of Hugh Edwards.

And now at last her wish to see these two men together was gratified. The girl’s radiant face revealed her excitement. Her voice was jubilant, her laughter rang out with delicious abandon. She was tingling with animation and lively interest. Her two friends could no more resist the impulse to laugh with her than one could refrain from smiling at the glee of a winsome child.

As they shook hands she watched them, looking from one to the other with an expression of such eager, anxious inquiry on her glowing countenance that the men were just a little embarrassed.

“I really should have come to see you long ago,” said Saint Jimmy. “The right sort of neighbors are not so plentiful in the Cañada del Oro that we can afford to neglect them. I have heard so much about you, though, that I feel as if you were really an old-timer whom I have known for years.”

He looked smilingly at Marta.

Hugh Edwards did not appear at all displeased at the suggestion that the girl had been talking about him.

“And I,” he returned with an equally significant glance at Marta, “have heard so much about Doctor Burton that if there was ever a time when I didn’t know him I have forgotten it.”

Marta was delighted. She could not mistake the fact that the two men, as it sometimes happens, liked each other instantly. They seemed to know and understand each other instinctively. The truth is that the men themselves were just a little relieved to find this to be the fact.

Doctor Burton saw in Marta’s neighbor a man of more than ordinary personality. That one of such character and education should choose to live as Edwards was living, amid surroundings so foreign to the environment in which he had so evidently been born and reared, and should be content to occupy himself with such menial labor, was to Saint Jimmy a puzzling thing. But Saint Jimmy was too broad in his sympathies—too big in his understanding of life to be suspicious of everything that puzzled him. It would, indeed, have been difficult for any healthy-minded, clean-thinking person to be suspicious of Hugh Edwards.

And Hugh Edwards recognized instantly in Marta’s teacher that quality which led all men, except such poor characterless creatures as the Lizard, to speak in his presence with instinctive gentleness and deference.

When they were seated in the shade of the cabin and the two men, who were to her so like and yet so unlike, were exchanging the usual small talk with which all friendships, however close and enduring, commonly begin, Marta watched and listened.

She was right, she thought proudly; they were alike, and yet they were different. What was it? Too frank to dissemble, too untrained in such things to deceive, too natural and innocent to hide her interest, she compared, contrasted, analyzed. But while she was seeking an answer to the thing that puzzled her, there was in her mind and heart not the faintest shadow of a suggestion that she was choosing.

There was no occasion for choice. Indeed, she was not in reality thinking—she was feeling.

And the men, while more apt in hiding their emotions, were scarcely less conscious of the situation.

Suddenly Doctor Burton saw the girl’s face change. She was looking past them as they sat facing her, toward the corner of the cabin. Her expression of eager animation vanished and in its stead came a look of almost fear. In the same instant, Jimmy was conscious that Edwards, too, had noticed the girl’s change of countenance, and that a quick shadow of dread and apprehension had fallen upon him. The two men turned quickly.

Natachee was standing at the corner of the cabin.

For a long moment no one spoke. Then with a suggestion of a smile, as if for some reason he was pleased with the situation, the Indian raised his hand and uttered his customary word of greeting:

“How.”

They returned his salutation and he came forward to accept the chair offered by Edwards. And though his dress, as usual, was that of a primitive savage, his manner, at the moment, was in no way different from the bearing of any white man with a background of educational and social advantages. As he seated himself, he smiled again, as if finding these three people together gave him a peculiar satisfaction.

Doctor Burton spoke with the easy familiarity of an old friend:

“Natachee, why on earth can’t you act more like a human being and less like a disembodied spirit? You always come and go as silently as a ghost.”

“I am as God made me,” the Indian returned lightly, then he added with mocking deference to the three white people: “Except for a few improvements added by your civilization. It is odd, is it not,” he continued, “how the noble red man of your so highly civilized writers and painters and uplifters of various sorts becomes so often an ignoble vagabond once you have subjected him to those same civilizing influences?”

“Certainly no one would accuse you of having acquired too much civilization,” retorted Jimmy.

“I hope not, I am sure,” returned the Indian quietly. Then turning to the others, he said graciously, “You will pardon us for this little exchange of compliments. We are not really being rude to each other, just friendly, that is all. With me, Saint Jimmy always drops his mask of saintliness and becomes a savage, and I cease being a savage and become, if not a saint, at least an imitator of the white man’s virtues. It is the privilege of our friendship.”

“You are an old fraud,” declared Saint Jimmy.

“You flatter me,” returned Natachee. “My white teachers would be proud of the honor you confer. They tried so hard, you know, to educate me.”

Edwards was amazed. He had never before heard Natachee talk in this bantering vein. With him the Indian had always spoken gravely. He had seldom smiled and had never laughed. The white man felt, too, that underlying the playfulness of the Indian’s words and the seeming pleasant humor of his mood, there was a savage interest—a cruel certainty in the final outcome of some game in which he was taking a grim part. He seemed to be playing as a cat plays with the victim of its brutal and superior cunning.

While Edwards was thinking these things and watching the red man with an odd feeling of dread which made him recall Marta’s saying that the Indian always gave her the creeps, Natachee addressed the girl with grave courtesy:

“It is really time that your teacher called upon your good neighbor, isn’t it? I was beginning to fear that our Saint was harboring some hidden grievance that provoked him to forget the social obligations of his exalted position.”

Marta made no reply save a nervous laugh of embarrassment.

Doctor Burton flushed and said hurriedly:

“I was just asking Mr. Edwards, Natachee, when you materialized so unexpectedly, how he liked living in the Cañada del Oro.”

“And I was about to reply,” said Edwards with enthusiasm, “that it is the most beautiful, the most wonderfully satisfying place, I have ever known.”

The Indian smiled, and his dark eyes glanced from Marta to Saint Jimmy, as he said:

“Our cañon is being very good to Mr. Edwards, I think. It is giving him health, gold enough for the necessities of life, and that peace which passeth all understanding, with the possibility of acquiring great wealth. It delights him with the beauty and the grandeur of nature. It bestows upon him the blessings of a charming and delightful companionship. And last, but not least, it affords him a sanctuary from his enemies—if he has any. What more could any man ask of any place?”

Hugh Edwards moved uneasily.

The expression of Marta’s face was that of a wondering, half-frightened child.

Saint Jimmy looked at the Indian intently, as if he, too, had caught the feeling of a hidden, sinister meaning beneath the red man’s courteous manner and half-jesting words.

“Natachee,” he said slowly, “I have often wondered—just what does the Cañada del Oro mean to you?”

At the Doctor’s simple question or, perhaps, at the tone of his voice, the countenance of the Indian suddenly became as cold and impassive as a face of iron. Sitting there before them, clothed in the wild dress of his savage ancestors, with his dark features framed in the jet-black hair with that single drooping feather, he seemed, all at once, to have thrown off every vestige of his contact with the schools of civilization. When he had been speaking in the manner of a white man, there had been something pathetic in his appearance. Only his native dignity had saved him from being ridiculous. But now he was the living spirit of the untamed deserts and mountains that on every side shut in the Cañon of Gold. His dark eyes, filled with the brooding memories of a vanishing race, turned slowly from face to face.

The three white people waited, with a strange feeling of uneasiness, for him to speak.

“You say that I, Natachee, come and go as a ghost. Well, perhaps I am a ghost. Why not? It would not be held beyond the belief of some of your philosophers that the spirit of one who once, long ago, dwelt amid these scenes, should return again in this body that you call me, Natachee the Indian. The Cañada del Oro is peopled with ghosts. Those who, in the years that are gone, lived here in the Cañon of Gold were as the blossoms on the mountain sides in spring. In the summer months when there was no rain, the blossoms disappeared. Then the rains came—the ‘Little Spring’ is here—and look, the flowers are everywhere.

“In this Cañon from the desert below to the pines above, there are holes by the thousands where men have dug for gold. Climb the mountains and go among the cliffs and crags and there are more and more of these holes that were made by those who sought the yellow wealth. Walk the ridges and make your way into the hidden ravines and gorges—everywhere you will find them—these holes that men have dug in their search for treasure. And every hole—every stroke of a pick—every shovel of dirt—every pan of gravel—was a dream that did not come true; a hope that was not fulfilled.

“The Cañon of Gold is haunted by the ghosts of these disappointed ones. They are the shadows that move upon the mountain sides when the sun is down and the timid stars creep forth in the lonely sky. They are the lights that come and go in the cañon depths when the frightened moon tries to hide in the pines of Mount Lemmon. They are the voices that we hear in the nighttime, whispering, murmuring, moaning. Weary spirits that cannot rest, troubled souls that find no peace—the disappointed ones.

“And you who dare to dream and hope and labor here in the Cañon of Gold to-day as those thousands who dared to dream and hope and labor here before you—what are you but living ghosts among these restless spirits of the dead? What are you to-day but shadows among the shades of yesterday?

“You, Doctor Burton, are only a memory of dreams that did not come true. You, Mr. Edwards, are but the ghost of the man you once planned to be. You, Miss Hillgrove, are but the living embodiment of hopes that were never fulfilled.

“As the shadow of an eagle passes, you came and you shall go. As the trail of the eagle in the air so shall your dreams, your hopes and your labor, be.

“I, Natachee, know these things. But because I am an Indian, I dream no dreams—I have no hopes.” He arose and for a moment stood silent before them. Then he said: “Natachee the Indian lives among the ghosts in the Cañon of Gold.”

Before they could speak, he was gone; as silently as he had come he disappeared around the corner of the cabin.

The two men and the girl sat as if under a spell and in the heart of each there was a strange sadness and a shadow of fear.

As Doctor Burton made his way homeward, he wished more than ever that he had told Marta the things that the Pardners had related to him.

Ever since that day when she had first talked to him of the stranger, Saint Jimmy had watched carefully the girl’s growing interest in her new neighbor. And, while Marta herself had been wholly unconscious of the true meaning of those emotions which so disturbed her, her teacher had understood that the womanhood of his child pupil was beginning to assert itself. He was too wise not to know also that the time was approaching when Marta herself would understand.

Through all her girlhood she had been no more conscious of herself than were the wild creatures that she knew so much better than she knew her own humankind. She had lived and accepted life without a thought of the part that, as a woman, she would some day be called upon to play in it. Because of this freedom from self, she had not been deeply concerned about the beginnings of her life. But with the arousing of those instincts that were to her so strange would come inevitably a tremendous quickening of her interest in herself. This new and vital interest in herself would as surely force her to inquire with determined and fearful persistency into her past. Who was she? Who were her parents? Under what circumstances was she born?

Doctor Burton knew the fine pride and the sensitive nature of his pupil too well not to realize that, when the time did come for the girl to ask these questions, her happiness might well depend upon the answers.

The Lizard’s loose-mouthed gossip had brought him suddenly face to face with a situation which was to his mind filled with real danger to Marta’s future. His meeting with Hugh Edwards, his quick observation of the comradeship that had developed between Marta and her neighbor, the uneasy forebodings aroused by the Indian’s words, all combined now to make him resolve that, at any cost to himself, he no longer would put off telling the girl what she ought to know. If Hugh Edwards were not the type of man he was, or if Marta were not the kind of girl she was, it would not, perhaps, make so much difference. To-morrow Marta was going to Oracle. She would stop at the little white house on the mountain side on her way home. Saint Jimmy promised himself that he would surely tell her then.

CHAPTER XIII
THE AWAKENING

She understood now why the old prospectors had never talked to her of her parents or told her how she happened to be their partnership daughter.

MARTA began that day with such buoyant happiness that even her fathers, accustomed as they were to her habitually joyous nature, commented on it.

The air was tingling with the fresh and vigorous sweetness of the early morning. From the kitchen door, as she prepared breakfast, she saw the mountain tops, golden in the first waves of the sunshine flood that a few hours later would fill the sky from rim to rim and cover the earth from horizon to horizon with its dazzling beauty. From some shelf on the cañon wall, a cañon wren loosed a flood of joyous silvery music, gracing his song with runs and flourishes, rich and vibrant, as if the very spirit of the hour was in his melody, and while the cañon echoed and reëchoed to the wondrous, ringing music of the tiny minstrel and the girl, with happy eyes and smiling lips, listened, she saw a thin column of smoke rise from that neighboring cabin and knew that her neighbor, too, was beginning his day.

Like the puff of air that stirred the yellow blossom of the whispering bells beside the creek, the thought came: Was he enjoying with her the beauty and the sweetness of the morning? Was he sharing her happiness in the new day? Then, as she watched, Hugh appeared in the cabin doorway with a bucket in his hand. He was going for water to make his coffee. She saw him pause and look toward her, and her face was radiant with gladness as her voice rang out in merry greeting.

All that forenoon she went about her household work with a singing heart. When the midday meal was over, her fathers saddled Nugget and, as soon as she had washed the dishes, she set out for Oracle to purchase some needed supplies.

When the girl stopped at his cabin, as she always did, to ask if she could bring anything for him from the store, Edwards thought she had never looked so radiantly beautiful. Glowing with the color of her superb health and rich vitality—animated and eager with the fervor of her joyous spirit—she was so alluring that the man was sorely tempted to say to her those things that he had sternly forbidden himself even to think. Lest his eyes betray the feeling he had sentenced himself to suppress, he made pretext of giving some small attention to her horse’s bridle, so that from the saddle she could not see his face.

As she rode on up the trail, he stood there watching her. When she had passed from sight around a sharp angle of the cañon wall, he went slowly to the place where through the long days he labored in his search for the grains of yellow metal that had come to mean so much more to him than mere daily bread.

Where the trail to the little white house on the hill branches off from the main road to Oracle, Marta checked her horse. She wanted to go to Saint Jimmy and Mother Burton. She wanted them to know and share her happiness. She wanted to tell them how grateful she was for their love—for all that they had done to save her from the ignorant, undisciplined and dangerously impulsive creature she would have been but for their patient teaching. In the fullness of her heart she told herself that without Saint Jimmy and his mother she could never have known the joy and gladness that had come to her. Without conscious reasoning, she realized that it was their teaching, their love, their understanding of her needs, that had fitted her for that time of her awakening to the glad call of those deeper emotions that now moved her young womanhood. But above Mount Lemmon and back of Rice Peak, huge cumulus clouds were rolling up, and the girl knew that she must continue on the more direct way if she would finish her errand at the store and return before the storm that might come later in the day. On her way back, she could stop at the Burtons, for then, if the storm came, it would not so much matter.

Through narrow, rocky ravines and tree-shaded draws and sandy washes, up the steep sides of mountain spurs and along the ridges, Nugget carried her, out of the Cañon of Gold to the higher levels. And everywhere about her as she rode, the mountain sides were bright with the blossoms of the “Little Spring.” Sego lilies and sulphur flowers, wild buckwheat, thistle poppies and bee plant, and, most exquisitely beautiful of all, perhaps, the violet-tinted blue larkspur—Espuela del caballero—Cavalier’s spur—the early Spaniards called it.

In George Wheeler’s pasture, not far from the corrals with the windmill and the water tank, she met the sturdy, red-cheeked Wheeler boys and Turquoise, one of the ranch dogs, playing Indian. From their ambush behind a granite rock, they shot at her with their make-believe guns, and charged with such savage fury and fierce war whoops that Nugget danced in quick excitement. While she was laughing with them and they were courteously opening the big gate for her, their father shouted a genial greeting from the barn, and Mrs. Wheeler from the front porch called a cheery invitation for her to stop awhile. But she answered that it looked as if it were going to rain, and that she must be home in time for supper, and rode on her way to the little mountain village.

In the wide space in front of the store, a group of saddle horses stood with heads down and hanging bridle reins, waiting with sleepy patience for their riders who were lounging on the high platform that, with steps at either end, was built across the front of the building. As she drew near, Marta recognized the Lizard. Then, as they watched her approaching, she saw the Lizard say something to his companions, and the company of idlers broke into loud laughter. The girl’s face flushed with the uncomfortable feeling that she was the victim of the fellow’s uncouth wit. Two of the men arose and stood a little apart from the Lizard and his fellow loungers.

When the girl stopped her horse, a sudden hush fell over the group, and as she dismounted she was conscious that every eye was fixed upon her. With burning cheeks and every nerve in her body smarting with indignant embarrassment, the girl went quickly up the steps and into the store. As she passed them, the two cowboys who stood apart lifted their hats.

The girl was just inside the open doorway when the Lizard spoke again, and again his companions roared with unclean mirth at the vulgar jest—and this time Marta heard. She stopped as if some one had struck her. Stunned with the shock, she stood hesitating, trembling, not knowing what to do. For the first time in her life the girl was frightened and ashamed.

Two women of the village who were buying groceries regarded her coldly for a moment, then, turning their backs, whispered together. Timidly the girl went to the farther end of the room where, to hide her emotions until she could gain control of herself, she pretended an interest in the contents of a show case.

Before the laughter of the Lizard’s crowd had ceased, one of the cowboys who had raised his hat walked up to them. With an expression of unspeakable disgust and contempt upon his bronzed face, the rider looked the Lizard up and down. Those who had laughed sat motionless and silent. Slowly the man from Arkansas got to his feet.

The cowboy spoke in a low voice, as if not wishing his words to be heard in the store.

“That’ll be about all from you—you stinkin’ son of a polecat. Never mind yer gun,” he added sharply as the Lizard’s hand crept toward the leg of his chaps. “Thar ain’t goin’ to be no trouble—not here and now. I’m jest tellin’ you this time that such remarks are out of order a heap, here in Arizona. They may be customary back where you come from, but they won’t make you popular in this country—except, mebby, with varmints of your own sort.”

He included the Lizard’s friends in his look of cool readiness.

Not a man moved. The cowboy carefully rolled a cigarette. Calmly he lighted a match, and with the first deep inhalation of smoke, flipped the burnt bit of wood at the Lizard. To the others he said:

“I notice you hombres are thinkin’ it over. You’d best keep right on thinkin’. As for you——“

He again looked the man from Arkansas up and down with slow, contemptuous eyes. Then, without another word, he deliberately turned his back upon the Lizard and his friends and walked leisurely to his horse.

As the cowboy and his companion rode away another chorus of laughter came from the group of idlers and this time their merriment was caused, not by anything the Lizard said, but was directed at the Lizard himself.

“Better not let Steve Brodie catch you again,” advised one.

“He’ll sure climb your frame if he does,” said another.

“Steve’s a-ridin’ fer the Three C now, ain’t he?” asked another, seemingly anxious to change the subject.

“Uh-huh—Good man, Steve,” came from another.

With an oath, the Lizard slouched away to his horse and, mounting, rode off in the direction of his home.

In the store, Marta struggled desperately to regain at least a semblance of composure.

The two women, when they had made their purchases, were in no haste to go, and, under the pretext of taking advantage of their meeting for a friendly chat, furtively watched the Pardners’ girl.

Marta, pretending to examine some dress goods displayed on a table behind the stove, tried to hide herself. When the kindly clerk came to wait on her she started and blushed. Trembling and confused, she could not remember what it was that she had come to buy.

The clerk looked at her curiously. The women whispered again and tittered.

At last, in desperation, the girl stammered that she did not want anything—that she must go—that she would come in again before she started home. With downcast eyes and burning cheeks, she fled.

As she passed the men on the platform and walked swiftly to her horse she kept her eyes on the ground. She was so weak that she could scarcely raise herself to the saddle.

But the men were not watching her now. With their faces turned away they were, with one accord, interested in something that held their gaze in another direction.

Perplexed and troubled, Marta made her way slowly back toward the cañon. When Nugget, thinking quite likely of his supper, or perhaps observing the dark storm clouds that now hid the mountain tops, would have broken into a swifter pace, she pulled him down to a walk. Annoyed at the unusual restraint, the little horse fretted, tossed his head, and tugged at the bit. But she would not let him go. The girl wanted to think. She felt that she must think.

What was the meaning of that incident at the store? Why did those men laugh in just that way when they first saw her? Why had they watched her like that when she dismounted? Why had they looked at her so as she passed them? Why did those women refuse to speak to her?—they knew her. And what had they whispered after turning their backs upon her? She had never before been conscious of anything like this. All her life she had met rough men. She had not been unaccustomed to rude jests. She had been, in the presence of men, like a young boy—unconscious of her sex. The only close association with men she had ever known was with Saint Jimmy and her fathers—until Edwards came. It could not be that these people were any different to-day than on other days when she had gone to the store. It must be that she herself was different.

“Yes,” she told herself at last, “she was different.”

Just as she had found a deeper happiness than she had ever before known, she had found a new consciousness—a new capacity for feeling—that had made her blush when the men looked at her—that had made her ashamed when she had heard the Lizard’s jest.

And then her mind went back to consider things which she had always accepted as a matter of course, without question or particular thought—as she had accepted her two fathers.

Why had she never been invited to the parties and dances at Oracle? Why was it that, except for Mother Burton and good Mrs. Wheeler, she had no women friends? Only men had attempted to be friendly with her, and they had approached her only when she met them by chance, alone. She knew them all—they all knew her. Suddenly she remembered how Saint Jimmy had warned her once—long before Hugh Edwards had come to the Cañada del Oro:

“You must be always very careful in your friendships, dear. Before you permit an acquaintance with any man to develop into anything like intimacy, you must know about his past. And by past, I mean parentage—family—ancestors, as well as his own personal record. For let me tell you that no one can escape these things. We are all what the past has made us.”

The inevitable question came in a flash. What was her own past—her parentage—her family? The conclusion came as quickly. She understood now why the old prospectors had never talked to her of her own parents, nor told her how she happened to be their partnership daughter. She understood now the significance of her name, Hillgrove—her two fathers had given her their names because she had no name of her own. Nothing else could so clearly explain the attitude of the people which had been so forcefully impressed upon her by her new consciousness.

Just as the young woman reached this point in her reasoning, her horse stopped of his own volition. The girl had been so engrossed with her thoughts that she had not seen the Lizard ride from behind a thick screen of low cedars beside the trail and check his horse directly across the path. She was not at all frightened when she looked up and saw him waiting there, barring her way. Indeed, she regarded the fellow with a new interest. It was as if one factor in her sad problem had suddenly presented itself in a very definite and tangible form.

“Well,” she said at last, “what do you want?”

The Lizard’s wide-mouthed, leering grin was not in the least reassuring.

“I knowed ye’d be a-comin’ along directly,” he said, “an’ ’lowed we’d ride t’gether.”

“But what if I do not care to ride with you?” she returned curiously.

“Oh, that ain’t a-botherin’ me none. I ain’t noways thin-skinned,” he returned, reining his horse aside from the trail to make room for her. “Come along—ye might as well be sociable like. I know I can’t make much of a-showin’ in eddication an’ fine school talk like you been used to, but I’m jist as good as that lunger Saint Jimmy, er that there fancy neighbor of yourn any day.”

Something in the fellow’s face, or some quality in his tone, brought the blood to Marta’s cheeks.

“Thank you,” she said curtly, “but I prefer to ride alone.”

She lifted the bridle rein and Nugget started forward.

But the Lizard again pulled his mount across the trail and the man’s ratlike face was twisted now, with sudden rage.

“Oh, you do, do you? Wall, let me tell you I’ve stood all I’m a-goin’ t’ stand on your account to-day.”

“Why, what do you mean?” she demanded, amazed.

“Never you mind what I mean, my lady. You jist listen to what I got t’ say. You’ve been a-playin’ th’ high an’ mighty with me long enough. D’ ye think I don’t know what you are? D’ ye think I don’t know all about your carryin’ on. My Gawd a’mighty, hit’s a disgrace t’ any decent neighborhood. A pretty one you are t’ be a-puttin’ on airs with me. Why, you poor little fool, everybody knows what you are. Who’s yer father? Who’s yer mother? Decent people has got decent folks, an’ you—you ain’t got none. You ain’t even got a name of yer own—Hillgrove—two fathers. Yer jist low-down trash an’ nobody that’s decent won’t have nothin’ t’ do with you. You prefer t’ ride alone, do you? All right, my fine lady, you needn’t worry none, you’re goin’ t’ ride alone all right. I wouldn’t be seen within a mile of you.”

With the last brutal word, he whirled his horse about and set off down the trail as fast as the animal could run.

The girl, with her head bowed low over the saddlehorn, sat very still. Her trembling fingers nervously twisted a lock of Nugget’s mane. Here was confirmation, indeed, of all the doubts and fears to which she had been led by her own painful thoughts. Here was the answer to all her questions. Here at last was the explanation of those emotions which were to her so new and strange.

CHAPTER XIV
THE STORM

“There ain’t a God almighty thing that we can do ’til th’ mornin’.”

THE old Pardners, when their day’s work was finished, climbed slowly down from the mouth of the tunnel to the creek and, crossing the little stream, climbed as slowly up to the level above. As his head and shoulders came above the top of the steep bank, Thad, who was in the lead, stopped.

“What’s the matter?” called Bob, who was close behind in the narrow path with his head on a level with his pardner’s feet. “Gittin’ so old you can’t make the grade without takin’ a rest, be you?”

“Whar’s the little pinto hoss?” demanded Thad in an injured tone, as if the absence of Nugget was a personal grievance.

Bob climbed to his pardner’s side.

“Looks like Marta ain’t back yet.”

“She ought to be,” said Thad with an anxious eye on the threatening clouds that now hung dark and heavy over the upper cañon.

“Stopped at Saint Jimmy’s, I reckon,” returned Bob, who was also studying the angry sky. “Goin’ to storm some, ain’t it?”

“The gal sure can’t miss seein’ that,” returned the other, “an’ she ought to know that when we do get a storm this time of the year, it’s always a buster. I wish she was home.”

“Mebby she’s over to Edwards’,” said Bob hopefully.

They went on toward the house until they gained an unobstructed view of the neighboring cabin and premises.

“Her hoss ain’t there neither,” said Thad, and again he looked up at the dark, rolling clouds.

“Oh, she’ll be comin’ along in a minute or two,” offered Bob soothingly, but his voice betrayed the anxiety his words were meant to hide.

Marta was no novice in the mountains, and the old Pardners knew that it was not like their girl to ignore the near approach of a storm that would in a few moments change the murmuring cañon creek into a wild, roaring flood that no living horse could ford or swim. The trail, on its course from her home to the Burtons, and to Oracle, crossed and recrossed the creek many times, and should the storm break in the upper cañon at the right moment, it would easily be possible for the girl to be trapped at some point between the cañon walls and the bends of the stream, and forced to spend at least the night there. More than this, there was a place where the trail followed for some distance up the narrow, sandy bed of the creek itself, between sheer cliffs. The Pardners and Marta had more than once seen a rolling, plunging, raging wall of water come thundering down the cañon from a storm above, with a mad force that no power on earth could check or face, and with a swiftness that no horse could outrun.

A few scattered drops of rain came pattering down. The Pardners without another word hurried over to Edwards’ cabin.

The younger man, who was coming up the path from his work, greeted them with a cheery, “Hello, neighbors—looks like we’re going to have a shower.” Then as he came closer and saw their faces, his own countenance changed and the old look of fear came into his eyes. “Why, what’s the matter—what has happened?” He glanced quickly around, as if half expecting to see some one else near-by.

“Marta ain’t come home,” said Thad.

And in the same instant Bob asked:

“Did she say anythin’ to you about bein’ specially late gettin’ back to-day?”

Edwards drew a long breath of relief.

“No, she said nothing to me about her plans. But really, there is no cause for worry, is there? She always stops at the Burtons’ with the mail on her way back, you know. Perhaps she stayed longer than she realized. Come on in out of the wet,” he added, as the pattering drops of rain grew more plentiful. “She will be along presently, I am sure.”

With a glance at the fast-approaching storm, Thad said quickly:

“You don’t understand, son, we ain’t worried about the gal gettin’ wet.” And then in a few words he explained the grave possibilities of the situation. “If she stops at Saint Jimmy’s, it’ll be all right, but if she’s a-tryin’ to make it home and gets caught in the cañon——“

A gust of wind and a swirling dash of rain punctuated his words.

Old Bob started for the cañon trail. The others followed at his heels. When they reached the narrow road a short distance away they halted for a second.

“There’s fresh hoss tracks,” said Bob. “Somebody’s been ridin’ this way. ’Tain’t the pinto, though.”

“It’s the Lizard probably,” said Edwards. “I saw him pass on his way up the cañon this forenoon.”

Half running, they hurried on. Before they reached the first turn in the cañon, a fierce downpour drenched them to the skin. The falling flood of water, driven by the blast that swept down from the mountain heights and swirled around the cliffs and angles of the cañon walls, hissed and roared with fury.

“There goes any chance of strikin’ her trail,” shouted Thad grimly.

The three men bent their heads and broke into a run.

At the beginning of that stretch of the trail which follows the bed of the creek, Bob stopped abruptly.

“Look here,” he said to the others, “we’ve got to use some sense an’ go at this thing right. If we all of us go ahead like this, we’ll all be caught on t’other side of the creek when the rise gets here. If she ain’t already in the cañon, she might be at Saint Jimmy’s, and she might not. There’s a chance that the gal got started home from the store late an’ was afraid to try comin’ this way, and so left Oracle by the Tucson highway, figurin’ to cut across the hills somewheres to the old cañon road an’ try crossin’ the creek lower down, like we do sometimes. It’ll be plumb dark pretty quick an’ if she ain’t at Saint Jimmy’s, there ought to two of us cover both trails—the one by Burtons’ an’ the one that goes direct, an’ there ought to one of us stay on this side of the creek in case she has made it the other way ’round. You won’t be much good nohow, son,” he continued to Edwards, “if it comes to huntin’ the hills out, ’cause you don’t know the country like we do. Suppose you go back down to the lower crossin’ where the old road comes into the cañon, you know—the way you come. If she don’t show up there in another hour or two, you’ll know she didn’t go that way. There ain’t another thing that you can do ’til daylight.”

“You men know best,” said Edwards and turned to go.

Thad caught the younger man by the arm.

“Wait.” For a second he paused, then spoke slowly: “It might not be a bad idea while you’re down that way to drop in on the Lizard.”

“Come on,” cried Bob. “We sure got to run for it if we beat the rise into this cut.”

The Pardners disappeared in the gray, swirling downpour. Edwards, with a new fear in his heart, ran with all his strength down the cañon. But it was not alone the thought of the coming flood that made his heart sink with sickening dread—it was the memory of the Lizard’s face that day when the fellow had first told him of Marta.

By the time he reached the cabin, Hugh heard the roaring thunder of the flood. For an instant he paused. Had the two old prospectors gained the higher ground beyond the stretch of trail in the creek bottom in time? He turned as if to go back, then came the thought he could not now retrace his steps beyond the first crossing. Whether the Pardners were safe or were caught by the flood, it was too late now for human aid to reach them.

Again he hurried on down the cañon. When he came to the place where he had made his camp that first night in the Cañon of Gold, it was almost dark, but over the spot where he had built his fire and spread his blanket bed he could see a leaping, racing torrent that filled the channel of the creek from bank to bank.

For nearly three hours he waited where the old road crossed the stream. Convinced at last that Marta had not come that way, he went on down the cañon, to the adobe house where the Lizard lived with his parents.

It was late now but there was a light in the window. The dogs filled the night with their clamor as he approached and he stopped at the dilapidated gate to shout:

“Hello—Hello!”

The door opened and a long lane of light cut through the darkness. The Lizard’s voice followed the light:

“Hello yourself—what do you want—who be you?”

“I’m Edwards from up the cañon—call off your dogs, will you?”

From the gate, he could see the fellow in the doorway turn to consult with some one inside. Then the Lizard called to the dogs and shouted:

“Come on in, neighbor. Little late fer you t’ be out, ain’t it?” he added as Edwards approached, then: “Who you got with you?”

“There is no one with me,” returned Edwards as he paused in the light before the door.

“Come in—yer welcome—come right in an’ set by the fire. Yer some wet, I reckon.” As the Lizard spoke, he drew aside from the doorway and as Edwards entered he saw the man place a rifle, which he had held, against the wall.

An old woman sat beside the open fire smoking a cob pipe. The Lizard’s father stood with his back to the wall at the far end of the room. They greeted the visitor with a brief, “Howdy.” The Lizard offered a broken-backed chair.

“Thank you,” said Edwards, “but I can’t stop to sit down. I came to ask if you have seen Miss Hillgrove this afternoon.”

The Lizard and his father looked at each other. The old mother answered:

“What’s the matter, come up missin’, has she?”

Edwards told them in a few words.

The old woman spat in the fire and laughed.

“She’s most likely out in the brush somewheres with some no-account feller like herself. Sarves her right if she gits caught by the creek. Sich triflin’ hussies ought ter git drowned, I say—allus a-tryin’ t’ coax decent folks inter meanness. Best not waste yer time a-huntin’ sich as her, young man.”

Edwards spoke sharply to the Lizard, who was grinning with satisfaction.

“Did you see Miss Hillgrove this afternoon, anywhere on the trail between here and Oracle?”

The father answered in a voice shrill with vicious anger.

“Wal, an’ what ef he did—who be you to be a-comin’ here at this time o’ the night wantin’ t’ know ef my boy has or hain’t seed nobody?”

Hugh Edwards forced himself to speak calmly.

“I am asking a civil question which your son should be glad to answer.” He again faced the Lizard. “Did you see her?”

An insolent, wide-mouthed grin was the Lizard’s only reply.

The old woman by the fire looked over her shoulder.

“Tell him, boy, tell him,” she croaked. “You ain’t got no call to be skeered o’ sich as him.”

“Shucks, maw,” said the son. “I ain’t skeered o’ nothin’. I’m jist a-havin’ a little fun, that’s all.”

He addressed Edwards:

“You bet yer life I seed her ’bout a mile this side o’ Wheeler’s pasture it was. We shore had a nice little visit too. You an’ that thar Saint Jimmy needn’t t’ think you’re th’ only ones.”

Before Edwards could speak, the old woman cried again:

“Tell him, son—why don’t ye tell him what ye said?”

The Lizard grinned.

“I shore told her enough. I’d been a-aimin’ t’ lay her out first chanct I got. When I got through with her, you can bet she knowed more ’bout herself than she’d ever knowed before. She shore knows now what she is an’ what folks is a-thinkin’ ’bout her an’ her carryin’ on with that there lunger an’ you.” His voice rose and his rat eyes glistened with triumph. “She wouldn’t ride with me—Oh, no!—‘prefer t’ ride alone,’ says she. An’ I says, says I—when I’d finished a-tellin’ her what she was an’ how she didn’t have no folks, ner name, ner nothin’—‘You needn’t t’ worry none, there wouldn’t no decent man be seen within a mile of you.’ An’ then I left her settin’ thar like she’d been whipped.”

Hugh Edwards moved a step nearer. It seemed impossible to him that any man could do a thing so vile.

“Are you in earnest?” he asked. “Did you really say such things to Miss Hillgrove?”

“I shore did,” returned the Lizard proudly. “I believe in lettin’ sech people know whar they stand. She’s been a-playin’ th’ high an’ mighty with me long enough.”

Then Edwards struck. With every ounce of his strength behind it, the blow landed fair on the point of the Lizard’s chin. The loose mouth was open at the instant, the slack jaw received the impact with no resistance. The effect was terrific. The fellow’s head snapped back as if his neck were broken—he fell limp and senseless halfway across the room.

The old woman screeched to her man:

“Git him, Jole, git him!”

The Lizard’s father started forward and Edwards saw a knife.

A quick leap and Hugh caught up the rifle that the Lizard had placed against the wall. Covering the man with the knife, the visitor said coolly to the woman:

“Not to-night, madam. I’m sorry to disappoint you, but he isn’t going to get any one just now.”

He backed to the door and opened it with his face toward them and his weapon ready.

“I will leave this gun at the gate,” he said. “If you are as wise as I think you are, you will not leave this room until you are sure that I am gone.”

He pulled the door shut as he backed across the threshold.

As Hugh Edwards made his way back up the cañon he reflected on what the Lizard had said. One thing was certain, Marta had not started home by the highway. But where was she now? At Saint Jimmy’s? Edwards doubted that the girl would go to her friends after such an experience. Nor did he believe that she would come directly home. He knew too well the sensitive pride that was under all the frank boyishness of her nature. No one was better fitted than he to appreciate the possible effects of the Lizard’s cruelty.

Hugh Edwards knew the dreadful power of humiliation and shame. He knew the burning, withering torture of unexpected and unjust public exposure and of undeserved popular condemnation. He knew the horror and despair of innocence subjected to the unspeakable cruelty of those evil-minded gossips whose one hope is that the venomous news they spread may be true, so that they will not be deprived of their vicious pleasure. Better than any one, Hugh Edwards knew why Marta had not come home after meeting the Lizard.

Like a hunted creature, wounded and spent, this man had come, as so many had come before him, to the Cañada del Oro. He had come to the Cañon of Gold to forget and to be forgotten—and he had found Marta. In the frankness and fearlessness of her innocence, the girl had not known how to keep her love from him. And seeing her love, hungering for that love as a starving man hungers for food, as a soul in torment hungers for peace, he had resolutely forbidden himself to speak the words that would make her his.

When he had first come to the cañon, he had hoped only to find gold enough to secure the bare necessities of life. And when out of their daily companionship his love had come with such distracting power, he had been the more miserable. But when he had heard from the Pardners their story of how they found the girl, he had seen that there was no reason save his own ill-starred past why, if he could win freedom from that past, he might not claim her. That freedom—the freedom from the thing that had driven him to hide in the Cañada del Oro—the freedom to tell her his love, could only be had in the gold for which he toiled in the sand and gravel and rocks beside the cañon creek.

As men, through all the years, have sought gold for love, so he had worked in that place of broken hopes and vanished dreams. Every day when she was with him he had sternly forced himself to wait. Every night he had dreamed, in his lonely cabin, of the time when he should be free. Every morning he had gone to his work at sunrise, buoyed with the hope that before dark his pick and shovel would uncover a rich pocket of the yellow metal. Every evening at sunset, as he climbed up the steep path from the place of his labor, he had whispered to himself, “To-morrow.” And now it had all come to this. With the knowledge of what the Lizard had done, and the full realization of all that might so easily result, the man’s control of himself was broken. He was beside himself with anxiety. If Marta was not safe with her friends in the little white house on the mountain side, where was she? Had the Pardners found her? Was she wandering half insane with shame and despair through the storm and darkness? Had she been caught in that plunging flood that was roaring with such wild fury down the cañon? Was her beautiful body, that had been so vivid, so radiant with life, at that moment being crushed and torn by the grinding bowlders and jagged walls of rocks? Perhaps the Pardners, too, had been met by that rushing wall of water before they could escape from the trap into which he had seen them disappear. As these thoughts crowded upon him, the man broke into a run. There must be something—something that he could do. The sense of his utter uselessness was maddening.

At the gate to Marta’s home he stopped, and in the agony of his fears he shouted her name. Again and again he called, until the loneliness of the dark house and the sullen grinding, crashing roar of the creek drove him on. At the first crossing above his own cabin, the stream barred his way. Again he cried with all his might, “Marta! Marta! Thad! Bob!” But the sound of his voice was lost, beaten down, overwhelmed by the wild tumult of the plunging torrent. At last, weary and spent with his efforts, and realizing dully the foolishness of such a useless waste of his strength, he returned to Marta’s home.

He did not stop at his own cabin. Something seemed to lead him on to that house to which he had drifted months before, as a broken and battered ship drifts into a safe harbor from the storm that has left it nearly a wreck. Since the first hour of his coming, that home had been his refuge. Every morning from his own cabin door he had looked for the chimney smoke as a wretched castaway watches for a signal of hope and cheer. Every night in his loneliness he had looked for the lights as one lost in the desert looks at a guiding star. He could not bear the thought now of those dark windows and empty rooms.

As the Pardners were climbing out of the creek bed where the trail leaves the cañon for the higher levels they heard the thundering roar of the coming flood.

“Thank God, we know that won’t git her anyhow,” gasped old Thad. “That there run jest about winded me.”

Bob, panting heavily, managed a sickly grin.

“Like as not we’ll find her safe an’ dry eatin’ supper at Saint Jimmy’s, an’ ready to laugh at us for a pair of old fools gettin’ ourselves so worked up over nothin’.”

“Here’s hopin’,” returned the other. “But it’s bound to be a bad night for the boy back there. Pity there won’t be no way to get word to him ’til mornin’.”

They could not go very fast, and it was pitch dark before they reached the little white house. But at the sight of the lighted windows they hurried as best they could, stumbling over the loose rocks and slipping in the mud up the narrow, zigzag trail.

In less than ten minutes from the time Saint Jimmy opened the door in answer to their knock they were again starting out into the night. And this time they separated. Thad returned to the point where the path that leads by the Burton place branches off from the main trail to make his way from there on, while Bob continued on the path from the white house which joins again the main trail at Wheeler’s pasture gate.

Another hour, and the storm was past. Through the ragged clouds, the stars peered timidly. But every ravine and draw and wash was a channel for a roaring freshet.

A little way from Wheeler’s corral, in the pasture, Thad met his pardner coming back. He was riding and leading another horse saddled.

“She didn’t start home on the highway,” said Bob.

“They seen her at Wheeler’s, did they?”

“Yes, George saw her himself when she was goin’, an’ when she come back. George, he’s saddled up an’ gone on into Oracle to pass the word. He’ll be out with a bunch of riders at sun-up.”

Thad climbed stiffly into the saddle and for some minutes the two old prospectors sat on their horses without speaking, while over their heads the windtorn clouds swept past as if hurrying to some meeting place beyond the distant hills.

“There ain’t a God almighty thing that we can do ’til th’ mornin’,” said Bob at last.

Slowly and in silence they rode back to the little white house on the mountain side, there to wait with Saint Jimmy and Mother Burton for the coming of the day.

The two old prospectors, who had spent the greater part of their lives amid scenes of hardship and danger and whose years had been years of disappointment and failure in their vain search for treasure of gold, had given themselves without reserve to the child that chance had so strangely placed in their keeping. Lacking the home love and the fatherhood that spurs the millions of toiling men to their tasks, and glorifies the burden of their labors, Bob and Thad had spent themselves in their love for their partnership daughter. But, because these men had been schooled in silence by the deserts and the mountains, they made no outward show of their anxiety and fear. They did not cry out in wild protest and vain regrets and idle conjectures. They did not walk the floor or wring their hands. They sat motionless in stolid silence—waiting.

Mother Burton, in the seclusion of her own room, found relief for her overwrought nerves in quiet tears and carried the burden of her anxious, aching mother-heart to the God of motherhood.

Saint Jimmy paced the floor with slow, measured steps, pausing now and then to look from the window into the night or to stand in the open doorway with his face lifted to the wind-swept sky, listening—listening for a voice in the darkness.

In Marta’s home beside the roaring creek—alone amid the dear intimate things of her daily life—the man who had been made to live again in her love waited—waited for the eternity of the night to lift from the Cañon of Gold.

CHAPTER XV
MARTA’S FLIGHT

She did not know where she was going. She did not care. What did it matter where she went?

THE victim of the Lizard’s unspeakable brutality was as one dazed by an unexpected blow. Coming, as the fellow’s vicious attack did, so close upon her own uneasy thoughts, it seemed to answer all her troubled questions and she accepted every cruel word as the truth.

Nugget, wondering, perhaps, why his rider remained so motionless when the other horse and rider had gone on, essayed an inquiring step or two forward. When his mistress gave no heed to his movement, he tossed his head and pulled at the slack bridle rein invitingly. “What’s the matter?” he seemed to say. “Come on—why don’t we go?” But still she gave no sign of life. Slowly, as if still wondering and a bit doubtful, the little horse moved on down the familiar way toward home. At the pasture gate, the pinto, without a sign from his rider, placed himself so that she could reach the latch. Mechanically she opened the gate and the knowing animal helped her close it from the other side.

But when Nugget would have taken the trail which goes past that white house on the mountain side by which they always went home from Oracle, Marta reined him back with a sudden start. She could not go that way now. She remembered with a wave of hot shame how she had proposed to Saint Jimmy that they be married and run away somewhere—and how she had pictured their home. She understood now why he had laughed in that queer, strained way. It would have seemed funny to any man like Doctor Burton, with such a family name and birth and breeding, that a girl like her—born as she was without a name, with no right to be born at all, even—would dare to suggest such a thing.

Saint Jimmy and Mother Burton had been good to her—yes, they would be good to any one like that. They had pitied her and had wanted to help her. But of course Saint Jimmy had laughed when she asked him to marry her. She would love those dear friends always, but at the thought of ever meeting them again she shook with terror. She felt that she would die with shame.

As she rode on, the girl gave no heed to the heavy storm clouds that were massing above the upper cañon. At any other time she would have seen and would have pushed her horse to his utmost speed in a race with the coming flood. But now she was too occupied to think of the approaching danger. In fact, her thoughts of Saint Jimmy and Mother Burton were only momentary. When her horse had turned into the direct trail to the cañon, she was fighting to keep herself from thinking of the man who lived in the cabin so close to her home. She was telling herself over and over that she must not think of him. And yet she did, and her thoughts burned like coals of fire.

Marta knew now with terrifying certainty that she loved Hugh Edwards—not, indeed, with the love that she gave Saint Jimmy and, which, until Edwards came, was the only kind of love she knew, but with that other love—the love that a woman gives to the one man she chooses above all others to be her man for all time to come, in the lives of her children—their children. Her happiness that morning had been born of the certainty that the man she had chosen wanted her. He had never spoken a word of love to her but she knew. In a thousand ways he had told her. His very efforts to keep from speaking had made her more sure in her happiness.

She had not understood. She had not even realized why she had wanted him to speak. She had only felt instinctively that she belonged to him, and that he wanted her, but that for some reason he hesitated. But now the Lizard had explained it all. She knew now that her love for Edwards was an evil love. She knew that her instinctive answer to him was a wicked thing. She knew that the emotions stirred by him were vile. She understood at last why he had not spoken the words she hungered to hear. He would never speak. He was like Saint Jimmy. The mother of Hugh Edwards’ sons must not be a nameless nobody—a creature of shameful birth and evil desires—a woman upon whom decent women turn their backs and at whom men like the Lizard laughed in scorn.

The girl was almost in sight of Hugh’s cabin when, with sudden energy, she sat erect and again checked her horse. Around that next turn in the cañon wall he would be waiting. She could not go on. A barrier, invisible but mightier than any mountain wall, had fallen across her way. She was separated—shut out. She was unclean. She must not go near the one she loved.

Wheeling her horse, the girl rode away up the cañon, straight toward the storm that was gathering in the mountains above. She did not know where she was going. She did not care. What did it matter where she went? She would go anywhere but there where he was waiting.

Blindly she rode into that stretch of the trail that lies in the channel of the creek between the sheer walls. But when, at the end of the hall-like passage, her horse would have followed the trail out of the cañon, she pulled him back. The pinto fretted and tried to turn once more toward home, but she forced him to leave the trail and go on up the creek.

For some time the little horse labored through the sand and gravel or picked his way, as a mountain horse will, around bowlders and over the rocks. So that when those first few drops of rain came pattering down, the girl was already a considerable distance up the cañon. Again Nugget protested, and again she forced him on.

She had reached a point beyond where the cañon turns back toward the south when the storm broke and the rain came swirling down the mountain in torrents. The fierce downpour, driven by the heavy gusts of wind, forced her to bend low in the saddle. On every side the dense gray curtain enveloped her. Her horse broke in open rebellion. Nugget knew, if his rider had forgotten, the grave danger of their position in the creek bed, and he proceeded to take such action as would at least insure their immediate safety.

There were a few preliminary bounds, then a scrambling rush with flying gravel and rolling rocks and tearing brush, with plunging leaps and straining heavy lifts, during which the girl rider could do little more than cling to the saddle. When her horse finally consented again to the control of the bit, and stood trembling, with heaving flanks, on the steep side of the mountain, Marta had lost all sense of direction. In the terrific downpour, she could not see a hundred yards. Wrapped in the gray folds of that wind-blown curtain, every detail of the landscape save the near-by bushes was obscured beyond recognition. No familiar peak or sky-line could be seen.

Suddenly Nugget threw up his head—his ears pointed inquiringly. The girl, too, looked and listened. Then above the hiss of the rain on the rocks and bushes, and the roar of the wind along the mountain slope, she heard the thunder of the coming flood. Nearer and louder came the sound until presently that rolling crest of the flood, freighted with crushing, grinding bowlders, swept past and the gray depths of the cañon below her horse’s feet were filled with the wild uproar.

Marta knew that to go back the way she had come was impossible. She realized dully that Nugget had saved both her life and his. It did not much matter, but she was glad that the little horse was not down there in the bed of the creek. They might as well go on somewhere, she thought; perhaps Nugget could find some place where he at least would be more comfortable.

Giving her horse the signal to start, she dropped the bridle rein on his neck, thus permitting him to choose his own course. With sure-footed care, the little horse picked his way along the mountain side, always climbing a little higher until finally they reached what the girl knew must be the top of a ridge or spur of the main range. Following this ridge, which led always upward but at an easy grade, the pinto moved with greater freedom. They came at last to a low gap through which Nugget went without a sign of hesitation, and again he was making his way along the steep side of the mountain.

It was nearly dark when the girl became aware that her horse was following a faint trail. She did not know when they had come into this trail. It was so faintly marked that it could scarcely be distinguished, if at all. But Nugget seemed perfectly content and confident, and because there was no reason for doing otherwise, and because she did not care, she let the horse go the way he had chosen.

The night came swiftly down. The gray curtain deepened to black. The girl did not even try to guess where she was except that she knew she must be somewhere on one of the mountain slopes that form the upper part of Cañada del Oro—the wildest and most remote section of the Santa Catalina range.

She was exhausted with the stress of her emotions and numb with her rain-soaked clothing in the cool air of the altitude to which they had climbed. As the light failed and the black wall of the night closed in about her, she swayed, half fainting, in her saddle. Nugget stopped and the girl slipped to the ground, clinging to the saddle for support. Peering into the gloom she could barely distinguish the mass of a mountain cedar a little farther on.

Wearily she stumbled and crept forward until she could crawl beneath the low sodden branches.

The girl felt herself sinking into a thick darkness that was not the darkness of the night.

CHAPTER XVI
NATACHEE

“My gifts are only the gifts of an Indian, Miss Hillgrove; I see with the eyes of a red man, that is all.”

AS consciousness returned to Marta, her first sensation was that of physical comfort. She thought that she was in her own bed at home, awakening from a dream. Slowly she opened her eyes. Instead of her own familiar room she saw the rough, unhewn rafters, the log walls, and the rude furnishings of an apartment that was strange.

Wonderingly, without moving, she looked at the unfamiliar details—at the fireplace of uncut rocks with a generous fire blazing on the hearth—the lighted lamp on the table—the rough board cupboard in the far corner—the cooking utensils hanging beside the fireplace—and at the skins of mountain lion and lynx and fox and wolf and bear that hung upon the walls. It all seemed real enough, and yet she felt that it must be a part of her dream. She would awaken presently she thought—how curious—how real it was.

She put a hand and arm out from under the covers and touched, not the familiar blankets of her own bed, but a fur robe. The effect was as if she had come in contact with an electric wire. In the same instant she saw the sleeve of her jacket, and realized that she was not in her own bed at all, but was lying fully dressed on a rude couch—that her clothing was still wet from a storm that was not a dream storm, and that everything else was as real.

But where was she? Who had brought her to this strange place? Fully awake now, the girl made a more careful survey of the room, and this time saw hanging on a peg in the log wall near the fireplace a bow with a sheaf of arrows, and on the floor beneath a pair of moccasins.

“Natachee!”

With a shudder, as if from a sudden chill, Marta threw back the fur robe and sat up. She was not frightened. It is doubtful if Marta had ever in her life known real fear. But there was something about the Indian that always, as she had expressed it, “gave her the creeps.”

Swiftly her mind reviewed the hours that had passed since she left her home to go to Oracle. Her good-by to Edwards, her happiness as she rode over the familiar trail, her meeting with the Wheeler children and their parents, the incident at the store, her troubled thoughts as she started homeward, and then, the crushing shame—the horror of the things that the Lizard had made known to her. Of her actual movements after the Lizard left her, she remembered almost nothing clearly. That part of her experience remained to her still as a dream. But that one dominant necessity which had driven her into the storm and the night; that stood clear in all its naked and hideous reality. She could not, with the burning certainty of her shame, she could not see Saint Jimmy nor Hugh Edwards again.

Rising, she went to the fireplace and stood before the blaze to dry her still damp clothing. She was calmer now. The wild uncontrolled storm of her emotions had passed. With her physical exhaustion had come a sort of relief from her emotional strain. She could think now. As she stood looking down into the fire she told herself, with a degree of calmness, that she must think. She must plan—she must decide—what should she do?

She was standing there, with her eyes fixed on the blazing logs in the fireplace, when she became aware that she was not alone. As clearly as if she had seen it, she felt a presence in the room. She turned to look over her shoulder. Natachee stood just inside the closed door of the cabin. He had entered, opening and closing the heavy door without a sound.

As she whirled to face him, the Indian bowed with grave courtesy.

“I beg your pardon, Miss Hillgrove, I did not mean to startle you but I thought you might be sleeping.”

There was nothing either in the Indian’s face or in his manner to alarm her. Save for his savage dress he might have been any well-bred college or university man. Nor did the girl in the least fear him. She only felt that curious creepy feeling that she always experienced in his presence.

As if to put her more at ease, Natachee went to bring a rustic chair from the other end of the room, saying in a matter-of-fact tone:

“I have been out taking care of your little horse. He will be comfortable for the night, I think.” He placed the chair before the fire and drew back. “Won’t you be seated? You can dry your boots so much better.”

Marta sat down and, holding her wet feet to the blaze, looked again into the ruddy flames. The Indian, standing at the other side of the room, waited, motionless as a graven image, for her to speak.

“Thank you,” she said at last.

At her words, or rather at her air of utter hopelessness, a flash of cruel satisfaction gleamed for an instant in the somber eyes of the red man.

But Marta did not see.

“It is nothing,” said the Indian and his deep voice gave no hint of the fire that had, for the instant, blazed in his dark impassive countenance. “It is a pleasure to be of any service.” And then with a smile which again the girl did not see, he added, “I was caught in the storm myself.”

Without raising her eyes Marta said wearily, as if it did not in the least matter:

“It was you who found me and brought me here?”

“I was on my way home from the cañon below when I chanced to catch a glimpse of you and your horse against the sky. Naturally I was curious to know who it was that rode in these unfrequented mountains through such a storm and at such an hour. I managed to follow you and so found your horse. Then I found you and brought you here.”

When the girl was silent he continued:

“My poor little hut is not much, I know, but it is a shelter at least, and I assure you you are as welcome as if it were the home of your dreams.”

At this the girl threw up her head with a start. Staring at him with wide questioning eyes she said wonderingly:

“The home of my dreams? What do you know of my dreams?”

Natachee bowed his head.

“I beg your pardon. My choice of words was unfortunate but unintentional, I assure you. And yet,” he finished with quiet dignity, “it would be difficult for any one to imagine a woman like you being without a dream home.”

With a shudder the girl turned back to the fire.

Again that gleam of savage pleasure flashed in the eyes of the Indian.

“But I am forgetting,” he said, “you have had nothing to eat since noon and it is now past midnight. This is a poor sort of hospitality indeed.”

As he spoke he went to the cupboard and began putting dishes and food on the table.

The girl watched him curiously—his every movement was so sure, so complete and positive. There was no show of haste and yet every motion was as quick as the movements of a deer. He gave the impression of tremendous strength and energy, yet his touch was as light as the hand of a child, and his step as noiseless as the step of that great cat, the cougar. Indeed, as he went to and fro between the table, the cupboard and the fireplace, Marta thought of a mountain lion.

“And how do you know that I have had nothing to eat since noon?” she asked presently.

Without looking up from the venison steak he was preparing, he answered:

“You went to Oracle early in the afternoon—you did not stop at the Wheeler ranch on your way back—you did not go to Saint Jimmy’s—you did not go to Hugh Edwards’—you did not go home.”

The girl’s cheeks flushed as she persisted:

“But how do you know? Have you some supernatural gift that enables you to see what people are doing no matter where you are?”

Natachee laughed.

“My gifts are only the gifts of an Indian, Miss Hillgrove; I see with the eyes of a red man, that is all.”

The girl looked again into the fire.

“I wish you did have the gift of second sight,” she said, speaking half to herself.

The Indian flashed a look at her that would have startled her had she seen it.

“Why?”

“Because,” she answered slowly, “because then perhaps you could tell me something that I want very much to know.”

The Indian, who was behind her, smiled.

“Dinner is served,” he said.

“Really I—I don’t think I can eat a thing,” she faltered, looking up at him.

“I know,” he returned gravely, “but perhaps if you try—“ he placed a chair for her and stood expectantly.

And Marta felt herself compelled to obey his unspoken will. Perhaps because of the strange effect of the Indian’s personality upon her, or perhaps because she sought relief from the pain of thoughts which she could not express, the girl encouraged the red man to talk of his life in the mountains. And Natachee, as if courteously willing to serve her purpose, followed her conversational leadings with no mention of her own life in the Cañada del Oro or of her friends. Over their simple meal, of which Marta managed to partake because she felt she must, he told her of his hunting experiences and drew from his seemingly inexhaustible store of desert and mountain lore many strange and interesting things. Nor was there, in anything that he said or in his way of speaking, the slightest hint of his Indian nature.

As they left the table, and Marta resumed her seat before the fire, she said:

“But I do not understand how a man educated as you are can be satisfied to live like—“ she hesitated.

“Like an Indian?” he finished for her.

“Well, yes.”

There was a long moment of silence before he replied with a marked change in his voice:

“I live like an Indian because I am an Indian. Because if I would I could not be anything else.”