ear done."

"Plenty meat!" she said nodding her head wisely. "Burro, big burro,
wild burro! I see track."

"Wild burro? Sure, that makes it simple till we rest up. You are one
great little commissary sergeant."

He noted that the pitch of the roof towards the face of the mountain
carried the smoke in a sort of funnel to be sifted through high
unseen crannies of shattered rock above. All was dark in the end of
the gallery, but a perceptible draught from the portal bore the smoke
upward.

"It's too good to be true," he decided, looking it over. "I'm chewing
bacon and it tastes natural, but I'm betting with myself that this is
a dream, and I'll wake up in the dope pond with my mouth full of
sulphur water."

The girl watched him gravely, and ate sparingly, though parched corn
had been her only sustenance through the trail of the dreadful night.
Her poor sandals were almost cut from her feet, and even while jesting
at the unreality of it all, Kit was making mental note of her
needs--the wild burro would at least provide green hide sandals for
her until better could be found, and she had earned the best.

He was amazed at her keenness. She did not seem to think, but
instinctively to feel her way to required knowledge, caring for
herself in the desert as a fledgling bird tossed by some storm from
the home nest. He remembered there were wild burros in the Sonora
hills, but that she should have already located one on this most
barren of mountains was but another unbelievable touch to the trail of
enchantment, and after a century of lost lives and treasure in the
search for the Indian mine, to think that this Indian stray, picked up
on a desolate trail, should have been the one to know that secret and
lead him to it!

"Other times you have been here?" he asked as he poured coffee in a
tin for Miguel, and dug out the last box of crackers from the grub
pack.

"Once I come, one time, and it was to make prayer here. It is mine to
know, but not my mother, not other peoples, only the father of me and
me. If I die then he show the trail to other one, not if I live. That
is how."

"He surely picked the right member of his honorable family," decided
Kit. "Only once over the trail, once?"

"I knowing it long before I see it," she explained gravely. "The
father of me make that trail in the sand for my eyes when I am only
little. I make the same for him in a game to play. When I make every
turn right, and name the place, and n