A mountain range is not at all like a garden fence. You do not just climb up one side of it and drop down into another garden beyond.
The one which arose before the Lipans that day, and through which the Apaches before them had driven their long lines of ponies, loaded with buffalo-meat and all the baggage of an Indian hunting-camp, was really a wide strip of very rough country, full of mountains and rising to a high range in the centre. The Lipans were not very well acquainted with it, except by what they had heard from others, and there had been some murmuring among them at first, when their leader announced his intention of following his "war-path" to the other side of such a barrier as that.
His speech had settled it all, however, and his warriors were ready to go with him no matter where he should lead them. Anything rather than go back empty-handed to be laughed at.
The moment luncheon was over every man was on horseback. It was absolutely necessary to find "grass" before night, if their horses were to be good for anything the next day.
They knew that the particular band of Apaches they were pursuing must be two or three days' march ahead of them; but they also knew that every mountain range has its deep, green valleys, and that the trail left by their enemies would surely lead through the best of these.
Up, up, up, through rugged ravines and gorges for nearly an hour, and then down again almost as far, and then, sooner than they had expected, they came upon the very thing they were looking for. It was not so large or so beautiful a valley as the one in which Many Bears and his men were encamped, miles and miles beyond. It did not widen like that at its lower end into a broad and undulating plain, with a river and a forest far away; but there was plenty of grass in it for tired and hungry horses, and To-la-go-to-de at once decided that there they should halt for the night.
It was little beyond the middle of the afternoon, and a war-party of Lipans has neither tents to pitch nor much baggage to care for. Little time was lost in mere "going into camp," and even before that was done every fifth brave was ordered out to look for game. Not only would fresh meat be better than dry, if they could get any, but it would save their somewhat slender stock of provisions for another day.
"Steve! Steve Harrison!"
"What is it, Murray?"
"I've spoken to old Two Knives. You and I are to hunt."
"Hurrah for that! Which way are you going?"
"Most of the others seem to be setting out southerly. I guess they're right, so far as game is concerned. You and I'll try that gap to the north-west. There's no telling where it may lead to."
The "gap" he pointed at was a sombre-looking chasm, the mouth of which opened into the little valley where they were, at a distance of about half a mile.
Nobody could tell, indeed, where it might lead to, nor could any one have guessed, until he was actually in it, what a very remarkable gap it was.
The two white hunters, little as they looked like white men, had chosen to go on foot, and not one of their Lipan friends had accompanied them. If they were men to be "watched" at any other time, even the sharp eyes of Indian suspicion saw no need for it among the desolate solitudes of those "sierras."
They did not hear To-la-go-to-de say to some of the red hunters:
"No Tongue great hunter. Bring in more antelope than anybody else. Yellow Head good, too. You beat them? Ugh!"
They would try beyond doubt, but more than one Lipan shook his head. The reputation of Murray as a slayer of game was too high to be questioned, and he had taught Steve Harrison like a father.
"Murray," said Steve, "do you mean that such a gap as that offers me a chance?"
"To get away?"
"Yes. That's what I'm thinking of."
"Can't say about that, my boy. Probably not. I don't believe it comes out on the western slope of the mountains."
"What do you want to try it for, then?"
"I don't exactly know. Game, perhaps. Then I want to teach you something more about mountains and finding your way among them. More than that, I don't want to go the same way with any of the rest."
"I like that, anyhow. Seems as if I had ever so many questions to ask that I never felt like asking before."
"I never cared to answer any, Steve, when you did ask 'em. Not so long as you and I were to be together. Now you're going away from me, pretty soon, I don't mind telling some things."
"Going away? Do you mean to say you won't go too? Shall you stay and be a Lipan?"
"You'll go alone, Steve, when you go. That's all."
"Why won't you go with me?"
"That's one of the questions I don't mean to answer. You've told me all about your family and people. I'll know where to look for you if I ever come out into the settlements."
"I wish you'd come. You're a white man. You're not a Mexican either. You're American."
"No, I'm not."
"Not an American?"
"No, Steve, I'm an Englishman. I never told you that before. One reason I don't want to go back is the very thing that sent me down into Mexico to settle years and years ago."
"I didn't ask about that."
"No good if you did."
"But you've been a sort of father to me ever since you bought me from the Lipans, after they cleaned out my uncle's hunting-party, and I can't bear the thought of leaving you here."
If it had not been for his war-paint, and its contrast with his Saxon hair and eyes, Steve would have been a handsome, pleasant-looking boy—tall and strong for his years, but still a good deal of a boy—and his voice was now trembling in a very un-Indian sort of way. No true Lipan would have dreamed of betraying any emotion at parting from even so good a friend as Murray.
"Yes," said the latter, dryly, "they cleaned out the hunting-party. Your uncle and his men must have run pretty well, for not one of them lost his scalp or drew a bead on a Lipan. That's one reason they didn't knock you on the head. They came home laughing, and sold you to me for six ponies and a pipe."
"I never blamed my uncle. I've always wondered, though, what sort of a story he told my father and mother."
"Guess he doesn't amount to a great deal."
"He's rich enough, and he's fond of hunting, but there isn't a great deal of fight in him. He wouldn't make a good Lipan."
The circumstances of Steve's capture were evidently not very creditable to some of those who were concerned in it, and Murray's tone, in speaking of the "uncle" who had brought him out into the Texas plains to lose him so easily, was bitterly contemptuous.
At that moment they were entering the mouth of the gap, and Murray suddenly dropped all other subjects to exclaim,
"We've struck it, Steve!"
"Struck what?"
"A regular cañon. See, the walls are almost perpendicular, and the bottom comes down, from ledge to ledge, like a flight of stairs!"
Steve had been among mountains before, but he had never seen anything precisely like that.
In some places the vast chasm before him was hardly more than a hundred feet wide, while its walls of gray granite and glittering white quartz rock arose in varying heights of from three hundred to five hundred feet.
"Come on, Steve!"
"You won't find any game in here. A rabbit couldn't get enough to live on among such rocks as these."
"Come right along! I want to get a look at the ledges up there. There's no telling what we may stumble upon."
Steve's young eyes were fully occupied, as they pushed forward, with the strange beauty and grandeur of the scenery above, beyond, and behind him. The air was clear and almost cool, and there was plenty of light in the shadiest nooks of the chasm.
"What torrents of water must pour down through here at some seasons of the year," he was saying to himself, when his companion suddenly stopped, with a sharp, "Hist! Look there!" and raised his rifle.
Steve looked.
Away up on the edge of the beetling white crag at their right, the first "game" they had seen that day was calmly gazing down upon them.
A "big-horn antelope" has the best nerves in the world, and it is nothing to him how high may be the precipice on the edge of which he is standing. His head never gets dizzy, and his feet never slip, for he was made to live in that kind of country, and feels entirely at home in spots where no other living thing cares to follow him.
That was a splendid specimen of what the first settlers called the "Rocky Mountain sheep," until they found that it was not a sheep at all, but an "antelope." His strong, wide, curling horns were of the largest size, and gave him an expression of dignity and wisdom as he peered down upon the hunters who had intruded upon his solitudes. He would have shown more wisdom by not looking at all, for in a moment more the sharp crack of Murray's rifle awoke the echoes of the cañon, and then, with a great bound, the big-horn came tumbling down among the rocks, almost at Steve Harrison's feet.
"He's a little battered by his fall," said Murray, "that's a fact. But he'll be just as good eating. Let's hoist him on that bowlder and go ahead."
"He's as much as we'd like to carry in."
"That's so; but we may bag something more, and then we could bring a pony up almost as far as this. I don't mean to do any too much carrying."
His broad, muscular frame looked as if it had been built expressly for that purpose, and he could have picked up at least one big-horn with perfect ease; but he had been among the Indians a good while, and they never lift a pound more than they are compelled to.
"Give me the next shot, Murray."
"I will, if it's all right; but you must use your own eyes. It won't do to throw away any chances."
The game was quickly lifted to the bowlder pointed out by Murray, and he and Steve pressed on up the great beautiful gate-way, deeper and deeper into the secrets of the mountain range.
Every such range has its secrets, and one by one they are found out from time to time; but there seemed to be little use in the discovery of any just then and there. It was a very useless sort of secret.
What was it?
Well, it was one that had been kept by that deep chasm for nobody could guess how many thousands of years, until Steve Harrison stumbled a little as he climbed one of the broken "stairs" of quartz, and came down upon his hands and knees.
Before him the cañon widened into a sort of table-land, with crags and peaks around it, and Murray saw trees here and there, and a good many other things, but Steve exclaimed,
"Murray! Murray! Gold!"
"What! A vein?"
"I fell right down upon it. Just look there!"
Murray looked, half carelessly at first, like a man who had before that day discovered plenty of such things; but then he sprung forward.
"We're in the gold country," he said; "it's all gold-bearing quartz hereaway. Steve! Steve! I declare I never saw such a vein as that. The metal stands out in nuggets."
So it did. A strip of rock nearly five feet wide was dotted and spangled with bits of dull yellow. It seemed to run right across the cañon at the edge of that level, and disappear in the solid cliffs on either side.
"Oh, what a vein!"
"It's really gold, then?"
"Gold? Of course it is. But it isn't of any use."
"Why not?"
"Who could mine for it away down here in the Apache country? How could they get machinery down here? Why, a regiment of soldiers couldn't keep off the redskins, and every pound of gold would cost two pounds before you could get it to a mint."
For all that, Murray gazed and gazed at the glittering rock, with its scattered jewels of yellow, and a strange light began to glow in his sunken eyes.
"No, Steve, I'm too old for it now. Gold's nothing to me any more! But that ledge is yours, now you've found it. Some day you may come back for it."
"I will if I live, Murray."
"Well, if you ever do, I'll tell you one thing more."
"What's that?"
"Dig and wash in the sand and gravel of that cañon below for all the loose gold that's been washed down there from this ledge since the world was made. There must be bushels of it."
The lodge of tanned buffalo-skins in which Ni-ha-be and Rita were sitting with Mother Dolores, was large and commodious. It was a round tent, upheld by strong, slender poles, that came together at the top so as to leave a small opening. On the outside the covering was painted in bright colors with a great many rude figures of men and animals. There was no furniture; but some buffalo and bear skins and some blankets were spread upon the ground, and it was a very comfortable lodge for any weather that was likely to come in that region.
In such a bright day as that all the light needed came through the open door, for the "flap" was still thrown back.
The two girls, therefore, could see every change on the dark face of the great chiefs Mexican squaw.
A good many changes came, for Dolores was very busily "remembering," and it was full five minutes before the thoughts brought to her by that picture of the "Way-side Shrine" began to fade away, so that she was again an Indian.
"Rita," whispered Ni-ha-be, "did it say anything to you?"
"Yes. A little. I saw something like it long ago. But I don't know what it means."
"Rita! Ni-ha-be!"
"What is it, Dolores?"
"Go. You will be in my way. I must cook supper for the chief. He is hungry. You must not go beyond the camp."
"What did the talking leaf say to you?" asked Ni-ha-be.
"Nothing. It is a great medicine leaf. I shall keep it. Perhaps it will say more to Rita by-and-by. Go."
The Apaches, like other Indians, know very little about cookery. They can roast meat and broil it, after a fashion, and they have several ways of cooking fish. They know how to boil when they are rich enough to have kettles, and they can make a miserable kind of corn-bread with Indian corn, dried or parched and pounded fine.
The one strong point in the character of Dolores, so far as the good opinion of old Many Bears went, was that she was the best cook in his band. She had not quite forgotten some things of that kind that she had learned before she became a squaw. Nobody else, therefore, was permitted to cook supper for the hungry chief.
It was a source of many jealousies among his other squaws, but then he was almost always hungry, and none of them knew how to cook as she did.
She was proud of it too, and neither Ni-ha-be nor her adopted sister dreamed of disputing with her after she had uttered the word "supper."
They hurried out of the lodge, therefore, and Dolores was left alone. She had no fire to kindle.
That would be lighted in the open air by other female members of the family.
There were no pots and saucepans to be washed, although the one round, shallow, sheet-iron "fryer," such as soldiers sometimes use in camp, which she dragged from under a buffalo-skin in the corner, would have been none the worse for a little scrubbing.
She brought it out, and then she dropped it and sat down to take another look at that wonderful "talking leaf."
"What made me kneel down and shut my eyes? I could remember then. It is all gone now. It went away as soon as I got up again."
She folded the leaf carefully, and hid it in the folds of her deer-skin dress, but she was evidently a good deal puzzled.
"Maria Santissima—yes, I do remember that. It will all come back to me by-and-by. No! I don't want it to. It makes me afraid. I will cook supper and forget all about it."
A Mexican woman of the lower class, unable to read, ignorant of almost everything but a little plain cookery, has less to forget than have most American children of six years old. But why should it frighten her if the little she knew and had lost began to come back to her mind?
She did not stop to answer any such questions as that, but poured some pounded corn, a coarse, uneven meal, into a battered tin pan. To this was added a little salt, some water was stirred in till a thick paste was made, and then the best cook of the Apaches was ready to carry her batter to the fire. Envious black eyes watched her while she heated her saucepan on the coals she raked out. Then she melted a carefully measured piece of buffalo tallow, and began to fry for her husband and master the cakes no other of his squaws could so well prepare.
When the cakes were done brown, the same fryer and a little water would serve to take the toughness out of some strips of dried venison before she broiled them, and the great chief would be the best-fed man in camp until the hunters should return from the valley below with fresh game.
They were quite likely to do that before night, but Many Bears was a man who never waited long for something to eat after a hard day's march.
If Dolores had been a little alarmed at the prospect of being forced to "remember," a very different feeling had entered the mind of Rita when she and her sister came out of the lodge.
"What shall we do, Ni-ha-be?"
"Red Wolf told me he had something to say to me. There he is now. He beckons me to come. He does not want you."
"I am glad of it. There are trees and bushes down there beyond the corral. I will go and be alone."
"You will tell me all the talking leaves say to you?"
"Yes, but they will talk very slowly, I'm afraid."
Even the harsher sounds of the Apache tongue had a pleasant ring in the sweet, clear voices of the two girls, and the softer syllables, of which there were many, rippled after each other like water in a brook. It seemed, too, as if they said quite as much to each other by signs as by words. That is always so among people who live a great deal out-of-doors, or in narrow quarters, where other people can easily hear ordinary conversation.
The one peculiar thing about the signs used by the American Indians is that they mean so much and express it so clearly. Men of different tribes, not able to understand a word of each other's spoken tongue, will meet and talk together by the hour in "sign language" as intelligently as two well-trained deaf mutes among the whites.
Perhaps one reason more for so much "sign talking" is that there are so many tribes, each with a very rough tongue of its own, that is not easy for other tribes to pick up.
Red Wolf was again beckoning to Ni-ha-be, and there was an impatient look on his dark, self-willed face. It was time for her to make haste, therefore, and Rita put the three magazines under the light folds of her broad antelope-skin cap and tripped away toward the bit of bushy grove just beyond the "corral."
What is that?
In the language of the very "far West" it is any spot or place where horses are gathered and kept, outside of a stable.
The great Apache nation does not own a single stable or barn, although it does own multitudes of horses, ponies, mules, and even horned cattle. All these, therefore, have to be "corralled," except when they are running loose among their unfenced pastures. There are no fences in that part of the world any more than barns.
Immediately on going into camp the long train of pack mules and ponies had been relieved of their burdens, and they and most of the saddle-horses had been sent off, under the care of mounted herders, to pick their dinners for themselves in the rich green grass of the valley.
Chiefs and warriors, however, never walk if they can help it, and so, as some one of them might wish to go here or there at any moment, several dozens of the freshest animals were kept on the spot between the camp and the grove, tethered by long hide lariats, and compelled to wait their turn for something to eat.
There was a warrior on guard at the "corral," as a matter of course, but he hardly gave a glance to the pretty adopted daughter of Many Bears as she tripped hurriedly past him.
It was his business to look out for the horses and not for giddy young squaws who might find "talking leaves."
Rita could not have told him, if he had asked her, why it was that her prizes were making her heart beat so fast, as she held them against it.
She was not frightened. She knew that very well. But she was glad to be alone, without even the company of Ni-ha-be.
The bushes were very thick around the spot where she at last threw herself upon the grass. She had never lived in any lodge where there were doors to shut behind her, or if she had, all those houses and their doors were alike forgotten; but she knew that her quick ears would give her notice of any approaching footsteps.
There they lay now before her, the three magazines, and it seemed to Rita as if they had come on purpose to see her, and were looking at her.
No two of them were alike.
They did not even belong to the same family. She could tell that by their faces.
Slowly and half-timidly she turned the first leaf; it was the cover-leaf of the nearest.
A sharp exclamation sprung to her lips.
"I have seen her! Oh, so long ago! It is me, Rita. I wore a dress like that once. And the tall squaw behind her, with the robe that drags on the ground, I remember her, too. How did they know she was my mother?"
Rita's face had been growing very white, and now she covered it with both her hands and began to cry. The picture was one of a fine-looking lady and a little girl of, it might be, seven or eight years. Not Rita and her mother, surely, for the lady wore a coronet upon her head and carried a sceptre in her hand; but the little girl looked very much as Rita must have looked at her age. It was a picture of some Spanish princess and her daughter, but like many pictures of such people that are printed, it would have served as well for a portrait of almost anybody else—particularly, as it seemed, of Rita and her mother.
"He is not there. Why did they not put him in? I love him best. Oh, he was so good to me! He had plenty of talking leaves, too, and he taught them to speak to me. I will look and see if he is here."
Rita was talking aloud to herself, but her own voice sounded strange to her, with its Indian words and ways of expression. She was listening, without knowing it, for another voice—for several of them—and none of them spoke Apache.
She turned leaf after leaf with fluttering haste, in her eager search for that other face she had spoken of.
In a moment more she paused, as the full-length picture of a man gazed at her from the paper.
"No; not him. He is too old. My father was not old; and he was handsome, and he was not dark at all."
She shut the book for a moment, and her face was full of puzzle and of pain.
"I said it. I was not talking Apache then. And I understood what I was saying."
She had indeed, when she mentioned her father, spoken pretty clearly in English.
Was it her mother-tongue? and had it come back to her?
She turned over the leaves more eagerly than ever now, and she found in that and the two other magazines many pictured faces of men of all ages, but each one brought her a fresh disappointment.
"He is not here," she said, mournfully; "and it was he who taught me to—to—to read—read books."
She had found two words now that were like little windows, for through them she could see a world of wonderful things that she had not seen before.
"Read" and "books."
The three magazines were no longer "talking leaves" to her, although they were really beginning to talk. Her head ached, and her eyes were burning hot, as she gazed so intently at word after word of the page which happened to be open before her. It was not printed like the rest—less closely, and not in such a thronging mass of little black spots of letters. It was a piece of very simple poetry, in short lines and brief stanzas, and Rita was staring at its title.
The letters slowly came to her one by one, bringing behind them the first word of the title; but they seemed to Rita to be in her own brain more than on the paper.
It was a hard moment for Rita.
"He made me say them one word at a time. He was so good to me! Yes, I can say them now! I know what they mean! Oh, so long ago! so long ago!"
There was no longer any doubt about it. Rita could read English.
Not very easily or rapidly at first, and many of the words she came to puzzled her exceedingly. Perhaps some of them also would come back to her after a while. Some of them had always been strangers, for the very brightest little girls of seven or eight, even when they read well and have their fathers to help them, are but at the beginning of their acquaintance with "hard words."
"I shall know what the pictures mean now. But I will not tell anybody a word about it—only Ni-ha-be."
Steve Harrison rose to his feet, and looked curiously along the ledge in both directions.
It was not the first ore he had seen during his three years and more of wandering with Murray and the Lipans, but never before had he tumbled down upon anything precisely like it.
"Mine!" he said to himself, aloud—"mine! But what can I do with it?"
"Do with it? What can you do with it?"
Murray was still kneeling upon the precious quartz, and fingering spot after spot where the yellow metal showed itself; and the strange fire in his eyes was deeper than ever.
"Steve!"
"What, Murray?"
"I thought it was all gone, but it isn't."
"Thought what was all gone?"
"The gold-fever. I used to have it when I was younger. It isn't a love of money. It's just a love of digging up gold."
"Can you feel it now?"
"Dreadfully. It burns all over me every time I touch one of those nuggets."
"Let it burn, then."
"Why? What's the good of it?"
"Maybe it'll get strong enough to keep you from wasting the rest of your days among the Lipans."
"Among the Lipans? You don't know, Steve. Didn't I tell you what keeps me? No, I don't think I did—not all of it. You're only a boy, Steve."
"You're a wonderfully strong man for your age."
"My age? How old do you think I am?"
"I never guessed. Maybe you're not much over sixty."
"Sixty?" He said that with a sort of low laugh.
"Why, my dear boy, I'm hardly turned of forty-five—white hair and all. The white came to my hair the day I spent in hunting among the ruins the Apaches left behind them for my wife and my little girl."
"Only forty-five! Why, Murray, you're young yet. And you know all about mines."
"And all about Indians too. Come on, Steve; we must look a little farther before we set out for the camp."
Steve would willingly have stayed to look at all that useless ledge of gold ore; but his friend was on his feet again, now resolutely turning his wrinkled face away from it all, and there was nothing to be gained be mere gazing. A gold-mine cannot be worked by a person's eyes, even if they are as good and bright a pair as were those of Steve Harrison.
Before them lay the broken level of the table-land, and it was clearer and clearer, as they walked on, that it was not at all a desert.
It was greater in extent, too, than appeared at first sight, and it was not long before their march brought them to quite a grove of trees.
"Oak and maple, I declare," said Murray. "I'd hardly have thought of finding them here. There's good grass too, beyond, and running water."
"Halloo, Murray, what's that? Look! Are they houses?"
"Steve! Steve!"
It was no wonder at all that they both broke into a clean run, and that they did not halt again until they stood in the edge of a second grove not far from the margin of the full-banked stream of water which wound down from the mountains and ran across that plateau.
Trees, groves, grass, in all directions, and a herd of deer were feeding at no great distance, but it was not at any of these that the two "pale-faced Lipans" were gazing.
"Houses, Murray!—houses!"
"They were houses once, Steve. Good ones, too. I've heard of such before. These are not like what I've seen in Mexico."
"They're all in ruins. Some one has started a settlement here and had to give it up. Maybe they came to work my mine."
It was less than half an hour since he had stumbled over it, and yet Steve was already thinking of that ledge as "my mine."
It does not take us a great while to acquire a feeling of ownership for anything we take a great liking to.
"Settlement! Work your mine!" exclaimed Murray. "Why, Steve, the people that built those houses were all dead and gone before even the Apaches came here. Nobody knows who they were. Not even the wisest men in the world."
That was a great relief to Steve, for if they had been forgotten so completely as that they were sure not to interfere with him and his mine.
The two friends walked forward again until they stood in the shadow of the nearest ruin.
It must have been a pretty large building before its walls began to topple over with age and decay. Some parts that were yet standing were three stories high, and all was built of rudely shaped and roughly fitted stone. There was no mortar to be seen anywhere. If there had ever been any it was all washed away.
"There must have been quite a town here once," said Murray, "up and down both banks of the run of water. It was a good place for one. It looks as if there was plenty of good land beyond, and there's a great bend in the line of the mountains."
"I wish I knew where it led to. I'd follow it."
"What for?"
"It might give me a chance to get away."
"It might. And then again it might not. There's a gap that seems to open off there to the west, but then it won't do."
"Why won't it do? Couldn't I try it?"
"Try it? Yes, but you won't. I must look out for you, Steve. You're more of a boy than I thought for."
"I'm man enough, Murray. I dare try anything."
"That's boy, Steve. Stop a minute. Have you any horse to carry you across country?"
Steve looked down at the nearest pile of ruined masonry with a saddening face.
"You have no horse, no blanket, no provisions, no supply of ammunition except what you brought along for to-day's hunt. Why, Steve, I'm ashamed of you. There isn't a young Lipan brave in the whole band that would set off in such a fashion as that—sure to make a failure. You ought to have learned something from the Indians, it seems to me."
Steve blushed scarlet as he listened, for he had been ready the moment before to have shouldered his rifle and set off at once toward that vague and unknown western "gap." It must be that the glimpse he had taken of that golden ledge had stirred up all the "boy" in him.
"I guess I wouldn't have gone far," he said, "before I'd have run clean out of cartridges. I've less than two dozen with me."
"When you do start, my boy, I'll see to it that you get a good ready. Now let's try for one of those deer. It's a long shot. See if you can make it."
A fine buck with branching antlers, followed by two does, had been feeding in the open space beyond the ruins. The wind was brisk just then from that direction, and they had not scented the two hunters. They had slowly drawn nearer and nearer until they were now about three hundred yards away. That is a greater distance than is at all safe shooting for any but the best marksmen, and sometimes even they will lose their game at it.
The stories so often told of "long shots" at deer and tigers and geese and other terrible wild beasts are, for the greater part, of the kind that are known as "fish stories," and Steve would have been glad if that buck had been a few rods nearer.
He knew his rifle was a good one, however, for it was a seven-shooting repeater of the latest and best pattern, and had been selected for him by Murray himself out of a lot the Lipans had brought in, nobody knew from where.
"Steady, Steve! Think of the deer, not of the gold-mine."
"I'll aim at him as if he were a gold-mine," replied Steve, as he raised his rifle.
"I'll try for one of the does at the same time," said Murray.
Crack! crack! Both rifles were discharged almost at the same instant; but while the antlered buck gave a great bound and then fell motionless upon the grass, his two pretty companions sprung away unhurt.
"I aimed too high," said Murray; "I must lower my sights a little."
"I've got him," exclaimed Steve—"gold-mine and all; but he'll be a big load to carry to camp."
They found him so. They were compelled to take more than one breathing-spell before they reached the head of the ravine, and there they took a long one—right on the gold-bearing ledge.
"Splendid pair of horns he has—" began Murray, but Steve interrupted him with,
"That's it! That's the name of this mine when I come for it!"
"What's that, Steve?"
"It's the Buckhorn Mine. They always give them a name."
"That'll do as well as any. The ledge'll stay here till you come for it. Nobody around here is likely to steal it away from you. But there's more ledge than mine just now."
So there was, and Steve's countenance fell a little as he and Murray again took up their burden and began to toil under it from "stair to stair" down the rocky terraces of the grand chasm.
"We won't go any farther than we can help without a horse," said Murray at last. "And there's the big-horn to carry in."
"Murray, that big-horn! Just look yonder!"
It was not far to look, and the buck they were carrying seemed to come to the ground of his own accord.
"Cougar!" exclaimed Murray.
"The biggest painter I ever saw," said Steve, "and he is getting ready to spring."
The American panther, or, as Murray called him, cougar, is not so common among the mountains as he is in some parts of the forest-covered lowlands, but the vicinity of the table-land above, with its herds of deer, might account for this one. There he was now, at all events, preparing to take possession of the game on the top of that bowlder without asking leave of anybody.
"Quick, Steve! Forward, while he's got his eyes on the antelope. We may get a shot at him."
Almost recklessly they darted down the cañon, slipping swiftly along from bowlder to bowlder, but before they had covered half the distance the panther made his spring.
He made it magnificently. He had scented the blood of that antelope from far away, and he may have suspected that it was not a living one, but his instincts had forbidden him to approach it otherwise than with caution. He would not have been a cougar if he had not made a spring in seizing upon his prey.
They are nothing in the world but giant cats, after all, and they catch their game precisely as our house-cats catch their mice. If anybody wants to know how even a lion or a tiger does his hunting, "puss in the corner" can teach him all about it.
"He will tear it all to pieces!"
"No, he won't, Steve. We can get a bead on him from behind that rock yonder. He'll be too busy to be looking out for us for a minute or so."
That was true, and it was a bad thing for the great "cat of the mountains" that it was so, for the two hunters got within a hundred yards of him before he had done smelling of the big-horn, in which he had buried his sharp, terrible claws.
"Now, Steve, I won't miss my shot this time. See that you don't."
Steve took even too much care with his aim, and Murray fired first.
He did not miss; but a cougar is not like a deer, and it takes a good deal more to kill him. Murray's bullet struck a vital part, and the fierce beast sprung from the bowlder with a ferocious growl of sudden pain and anger.
"I hit him! Quick, Steve!"
The panther was crouching on the gravel at the bottom of the ravine, and searching with furious eyes for the enemies who had wounded him.
The report of Steve's rifle rung through the chasm.
"I aimed at his head—"
"And you only cut off one of his ears. Here he comes. I'm ready. What a good thing a repeating-rifle is!"
It was well for them, indeed, that they did not have to stop and load just then. It did not seem any time at all before the dangerous beast was crouching for another spring within twenty feet of them.
It would not do to miss this time, but neither Steve nor Murray made any remarks about it. They were too much absorbed in looking along their rifle-barrels to do any talking. Both reports came together, almost like one.
They were not followed by any spring from the cougar. Only by a growl and an angry tearing at the gravel, and then there was no danger that any more big-horns, living or dead, would ever be stolen by that panther.
"Well, Steve, if this isn't the biggest kind of sport! Never saw anything better in all my life."
"A buck, a big-horn, and a painter before sundown!"
"It'll be sundown before we get them all in. We'd better start for some ponies and some help. Tell you what, Steve, I don't care much for it myself, but the Lipans would rather eat that cougar than the best venison ever was killed."
"I suppose they would; but I ain't quite Indian enough for that, war-paint or no war-paint."
So, indeed, it proved; and To-la-go-to-de indulged in more than one sarcastic gibe at his less successful hunters over the manner in which they had been beaten by "No Tongue and the Yellow Head—an old pale-face and a boy." He even went so far as to say to Steve Harrison, "Good shot. The Yellow Head will be a chief some day. He must kill many Apaches. Ugh!"
When Steve Harrison and his friend left the ruins of the ancient town behind them, they had good reason to suppose that they were going away from a complete solitude—a place where even wild Indians did not very often come.
It looked desolate enough with its scattered enclosures of rough stone, not one of them with any roof on, or any sign that people had lived in them for a hundred years at least. The windows in the tumbling walls had probably never had either sash or glass in them, and the furniture, whatever it may have been, used by the people who built the village had long since disappeared.
It could never have been a very large or populous town, but it could hardly at any time have had a wilder-looking set of inhabitants than were the party of men who drew near it at about the time when Steve and Murray were killing their cougar.
Two tilted wagons, a good deal the worse for wear, apparently pretty heavily laden, and drawn by six mules each, were accompanied by about two dozen men on horseback. Their portraits would have made the fortune of any picture-gallery in the world. Everybody would have gone to look at such a collection of bearded desperadoes.
They were not Indians, nor were they dressed as such. They were dressed in every way that could be thought of, except well and cleanly.
If the odds and ends of several clothing-stores had been picked up after a fire, and then about worn out, and patched and mended with bits of blankets and greasy buckskin, something like those twenty odd suits of clothes might have been produced; that is, if the man who tried to do it could have had these for a pattern. If not, he would have failed.
The men themselves were as much out of the common way as were the clothes they wore, but they had somehow managed to keep their horses and mules in pretty good condition.
Horses and mules are of more importance than clothing to men who are far away from tailors and civilization as were these new-comers in the neighborhood of Steve's mine.
If Steve had seen them he would probably have trembled for the "Buckhorn," for Murray would at once have told him that these men were miners.
That was nothing against them, certainly, and they must have been daring fellows to push their hunt for gold so far beyond any region known to such hunters.
One look at their hard, reckless faces would have convinced anybody about their "daring." They looked as if they were ready for anything.
So they were, indeed; and it is quite probable a man of Murray's experience would have guessed at once that they were ready for a good many other things besides mining.
Just now, certainly, they were thinking something else.
"Bill," said the foremost rider to a man a little behind him, "we were wrong to leave the trail of them army fellers. We're stuck and lost in here among the mountains."
"It looks like It. We'll hev to go into camp and scout around till we find a pass. But it wasn't any use follerin' the cavalry arter we found they was bound west."
"That's so. It won't do for us to come out on the Pacific slope. It's Mexico or Texas for us."
"We'd better say Santa Fé."
"They'd make us give too close an account of ourselves there. Some of the boys might let out somethin'."
"Guess it's Mexico, then. That isn't far away now. But I wish I knew the way down out of this."
The ruins, strange and wonderful as they were, did not seem to excite any great degree of curiosity among those men.
They talked about them, to be sure, but in a way which showed that they had all seen the same sort of thing before during their wild rovings among the mountains and valleys of the great South-west.
Just such ruins are to be found in a great many places. We do not even know how many, and nobody has been able yet to more than guess by whom they were built or when.
Mere ravines and gorges and cañons would not do for this party. They must find a regular "pass," down which they could manage to take their horses and mules and wagons. Even before they halted, several of them had been looking and pointing toward what Murray had spoken of as "the western gap."
That was the opening through the ranges which had been for a moment such a temptation to Steve Harrison.
"It's west'ard, Bill, but it may hev to do for us."
"It may take us down to some lower level, or it may show us a way south."
"The great Southern Pass is down hereaway, somewhar."
"Farther east than this. We ort to strike it, though, before we cross the border."
"Mexico ain't a country I'd choose to go inter, ef I hed my own way; but we've got to go for it this time."
But whatever may have been their reason for seeking Mexico, they were just now a good deal puzzled as to the precise path by means of which they might reach it. It was getting late in the day, too, for any kind of exploration, and the mule-teams looked as if they had done about enough.
So it came to pass that the ruined village of the forgotten people was once more occupied.
Did they go into the houses? No, it was the man called Bill who said it, but all the rest of them seemed to feel just as he did, when he remarked:
"Sleep in one of them things? No, I guess not. Not even if it was roofed in. They were set up too long ago to suit me."
That stamped him as an American, for there is no other people in the world that hate old houses. No real American was ever known to use an old building of any kind a day longer than he could help. He would as soon think of wearing old clothes just because they were old.
The ground near the ruins was covered with fragments of stone and fallen masonry, but there was a good camping-ground between that and the trees from which Murray and Steve had fired at the buck.
"It's the loneliest kind of a place, Captain Skinner," said Bill, just after he had helped turn the mules loose on the grass.
"I wish I knew just how lonely it is. I kind o' smell something."
"Do ye, Cap?"
Every such band of men has its "Captain" of some kind, and sometimes very good discipline and order is kept up. But Captain Skinner was hardly the man anybody would have picked out for a leader, before seeing how the rest listened to what he said, and how readily they seemed to obey him.
He was the shortest, thinnest, ugliest, and most ragged man in the whole party; and just at this moment he did not appear to be carrying any arms except the knife and pistol in his belt.
"If I don't smell it, I can see it. Look yonder, Bill."
"That's so! Blood!"
It was the spot on which the buck had fallen, and in a moment more than half a dozen men were looking around in all directions.
They understood all they saw, too, as well as any Indians in the world, for in less than five minutes Captain Skinner said,
"That'll do, boys. We must follow that trail. Two white hunters. They killed the buck. Both wore moccasins. So they ain't fresh from the settlements. There's something queer about it. They were on foot, and they carried off their game."
It was, indeed, very queer, and it would not do to let any such puzzle as that go by unsolved.
So, while several men were ordered out after game, and several more were left to guard the camp, Captain Skinner himself, with Bill and five others, armed to the teeth, set out at once on the trail of Murray and Steve Harrison.
It was easy enough to follow those two pairs of footprints as long as they were made in the grass. After they got upon rocky ground it was not so easy, and the miners did not get ahead so fast, but they did not lose the trail for a moment. Indeed, it was about as straight in one direction as the nature of the ground would permit.
"Two fellers out yer among these 'ere mountains all by themselves," growled Bill, as they drew near the ledge at the head of the deep cañon.
"We don't know that they're all alone yet," said Captain Skinner. "They carried that deer somewhere."
"Right down yonder, Captain. They stopped here to rest from kerryin' of it, and I don't blame 'em, if they'd got to tote it down through that thar cañon."
"It's a deep one, no mistake."
"Captain, look yer!" suddenly exclaimed one of the men. "We've lit on it this time."
"The ledge? I wasn't looking at that."
A perfect storm of exclamations followed from every pair of lips in the party. Such a ledge as that they had never seen before, old mine-hunters as they were; but each one seemed inclined to ask, just as Murray had asked of Steve, what could be done with it?
Gold enough, but nothing to get it out of the rock with, and nowhere to carry it to.
It was a sad problem for men who cared for nothing in the wide world but just such ledges and just such gold. What was the use of it?
Steve Harrison never knew it, but his mine was of a good deal of use to him and Murray just then. It kept Captain Skinner and his men looking at it long enough for them to get nearly back to the camp of the Lipans.
"It won't do, boys," said Captain Skinner, at last; "we're wasting time. Come on."
They followed him, every man turning his head as he did so to take another look at the yellow spots that shone here and there in the quartz.
Their way down the ravine was made with care and circumspection, for they did not know at what moment they might come in sight of "those two fellers and their deer."
It was well for them, probably, that they were cautious, for after a good deal of steep climbing, just as they were about to clamber down one of the rocky "stairs," the man called Bill exclaimed,
"Captain, thar it is—"
"The deer? They've left it. I see it."
"More'n that farther down."
"A big-horn! And if that ain't a painter lying beside it!"
"More'n that, Cap. They didn't give up that thar game for nothin'."
"Lay low, boys! Git to cover right away! Red-skins!"
There was no difficulty in hiding among so many rocks and bowlders, and the miners were out of sight in a moment.
They could see, though, even if they were not seen, and they were soon able to count a dozen Indian warriors leading three pack-ponies as far up the ravine as four-footed beasts could be led.
"Wonder if they've wiped out the two fellers?" said Bill.
"Looks like it. Or they may have captured 'em. Lost their game, if they haven't lost their scalps. Wonder what tribe of redskins they are, anyhow?"
There was a better reason than that why No Tongue and Yellow Head did not come back with their friends, but it was just as well that Captain Skinner and his miners did not understand it.
"Captain," whispered one of the men near him, "shall we let drive at 'em? We could pick off half of 'em first fire."
"Not a shot. All we want just now is to be let alone. I don't mind killing a few redskins."
"Mebbe they killed the two fellers."
"Likely as not. I'm kind o' glad they did. That there ledge is ours now. Let 'em carry off their game, and then we'll climb back. I reckon I know now how we'd best work our way down to the level those Indians came from."
The Lipans made short work of loading their ponies, and the moment they were out of sight the miners began their climb out of that cañon. There was no good reason why they should follow the Lipans.