ost mission tales and lost mine lies;
dream them by the dozen to delude just such innocent yaps as you and
me. They've nothing else to do between crops. We should have stuck to
a white man's land, north into Arizona where the Three Hills of Gold
are waiting, to say nothing of the Lost Stone Cabin mine, lost not
twenty miles from Quartzite, and in plain sight of Castle Dome. Now
there is nothing visionary about _that_, Kit! Why, I knew an old-timer
who freighted rich ore out of that mine thirty years ago, and even the
road to it has been lost for years! We know things once did exist up
in that country, Kit, and down here we are all tangled up with
Mexican-Indian stories of ghosts and enchantments, and such vagaries.
I'm fed up with them to the limit, for everyone of them we listen to
is different from the last. We'll head up into the Castle Dome country
next time, hear me?"

"Sure, I hear," agreed Kit cheerfully. "Perhaps we do lose, but it's
not so bad. Since Whitely sent his family north, he has intimated that
Mesa Blanca is a single man's job, and I reckon I can have it when he
goes--as he will. Then in the month we have scouted free of Whitelys,
we have dry washed enough dust to put you on velvet till things come
our way. Say, what will you bet that a month of comfort around Nogales
won't make you hungry for the trail again?"

"A gold trail?" queried the weary and dejected Pike.

"Any old trail to any old place just so we keep ambling on. You can't
live contented under cover, and you know it."

"Well," decided Pike after a rod or two of tramping along the shaly,
hot bed of a dry arroya. "I won't bet, for you may be among the
prophets. But while you are about it, I'd be thankful if you'd
prophesy me a wet trail next time instead of skimpy mud holes where
springs ought to be. I'm sick of dry camps, and so is Baby Buntin'."

"_'Oh, there was a frog lived in the spring!'_" chanted Kit
derisively. "Cheer up, Cap, the worst is yet to come, for I've an idea
that the gang of Mexican vaqueros we glimpsed from the butte at noon
will just about muss up the water hole in Yaqui canon until it will be
us for a sleep there before the fluid is fit for a water bottle. _'Oh,
there was a frog lived in the spring!'_ Buntin' Baby, we'll fish the
frog out, and let you wallow in it instead, you game little dusty rat!
Say, Pike, when we load up with grub again we'll keep further west to
the Cerrado Pintado. I'll follow a hunch of my ow