that seemed to prove that he thought a lot of me. He didn't like it
a little bit when I married your mother--her name was Mary Lannon, and
I'd got acquainted with her while riding for a few months for her
father, who owned a ranch near Eagle Pass, close to the Rio Grande.
She was white, boy, and so were her folks, and you can be proud of her.
And if she had lived you could be proud of me--she'd have kept on
making me a man.

"Taggart didn't like the idea of me getting hooked up. He didn't want
to break up the old associations. He and the others hung around for a
year, waiting for something to turn up, and when your mother died it
wasn't long before I was back with them. I left you in care of Jane
Connor--her husband, Dave, owned the Diamond Dot ranch, which adjoined
mine.

"During the year the boys had been knocking around without me they'd
fallen in with an Indian from Yucatan, from the tribe called the
Toltecs. This Indian called himself Queza--he'd been exiled because he
was too lazy to work. The boys got him drunk one night, and he blabbed
everything he knew about his tribe--how rich it was; how they'd
discovered a diamond mine, and that gold was so common that they used
it to make household ornaments. His story got the boys excited and
they pumped him dry. They found out where his tribe lived, how to get
there, and all that.

"Queza told them that the diamonds wouldn't be hard to get, that there
were altar idols and ornaments in a big cave which was hollowed out of
the face of a rock cliff, and that there was a bridge over to it, and
that the cave wasn't guarded because the tribe had a superstitious fear
of the priests who had charge of the idols and things, and that the
people didn't care for gold and diamonds, anyway, because they were so
common.

"The boys had got all this out of Queza about a month before I sold out
and joined them, and they'd rustled some money somewhere, and had
everything fixed up to go to Yucatan to bring home some of that gold
and diamonds. They wanted me to go along. I was in that frame of mind
in which I didn't care much about what happened to me, and they didn't
have to argue long. We dropped down the Rio Grande to a little place
on the Gulf coast near where Brownsville is now. We bought a little
boat from a fisherman--she wasn't more than thirty feet long and didn't
look like she could stand much weather; but Nebraska, who'd told us
that he'd done a little sailing on t