n you tell that?"

"No fresh sign of animals going this way. Must have been dry for weeks.
Our mining friends have taken what little water there was and left young
Hoff to die of thirst," said the other grimly. "Well, that explains the
empty canteen all right."

He turned and renewed his quick progress, leaping from boulder to
boulder, between narrowing walls of gray-white rock. Just as Average
Jones was spent and almost ready to collapse the leader checked.

"Hark!" he whispered.

Above the beating of the blood in his ears, Jones heard an irregular,
insistent scuffing sound. He crouched in silence while the captain crept
up to a ledge and cautiously peered over, then went forward in response
to the other's urgent beckoning. They looked down into a rock-basin
of wild and curious beauty. To this day Average Jones remembers the
luminous grace and splendor of a Matilija poppy, which, rooted between
two boulders, swayed gently in the white moonlight above a figure of
dread. The figure, naked from the waist up, huddled upon the hard-baked
mud, digging madly at the earth. A sharp exclamation broke from Average
Jones. The digger half-rose, turned, collapsed to his knees, and pointed
with bleeding fingers to his open mouth, in which the tongue showed
black and swollen.

They went down to him.

An hour later, "Rickey" Hoff was sleeping the sleep of utter exhaustion
in camp. Average Jones felt amply qualified to join him. But it was not
in the Ad-Visor's character to quit an enterprise before it was wholly
completed. So long as the two bandits were on their way to cash the
young spendthrift's checks--Jones had heard from the victim a brief
account of the extortion--success was not fully won.

"We've got to get that money back," he said to Captain Funcke with
conviction.

The hunter made no reply in words. He merely leaned his shotgun against
his thigh, reached around beneath his coat and produced a forty-five
caliber revolver. This he held out toward Jones.

"Good thing to have," conceded the other. "But--well, no; not in this
case. They got the booty with a show of legality, since Hoff signed the
copartnership agreement and turned over the checks. It was under duress
and threats, it's true, but who's to prove that, they being two to one,
and this being Mexico? No; they're within the law, and I've a notion
that we can get the swag back by straight sale and barter. Provided,
always, we can catch them in time."

"They'