rth there beyond the Rio Gila. I've seen it. A prospecting engineer
in Mazatlan took me along with him to help look after the waggons.
A sailor's a handy chap to have about you anyhow. It's all a
desert: cracks in the earth that you can't see the bottom of; and
mountains--sheer rocks standing up high like walls and church spires,
only a hundred times bigger. The valleys are full of boulders and black
stones. There's not a blade of grass to see; and the sun sets more red
over that country than I have seen it anywhere--blood-red and angry. It
_is_ fine."

"You do not want to go back there again?" she stammered out.

He laughed a little. "No. That's the blamed gold country. It gave me the
shivers sometimes to look at it--and we were a big lot of men together,
mind; but these Gambucinos wandered alone. They knew that country before
anybody had ever heard of it. They had a sort of gift for prospecting,
and the fever of it was on them too; and they did not seem to want the
gold very much. They would find some rich spot, and then turn their
backs on it; pick up perhaps a little--enough for a spree--and then be
off again, looking for more. They never stopped long where there were
houses; they had no wife, no chick, no home, never a chum. You couldn't
be friends with a Gambucino; they were too restless--here to-day, and
gone, God knows where, to-morrow. They told no one of their finds, and
there has never been a Gambucino well off. It was not for the gold they
cared; it was the wandering about looking for it in the stony country
that got into them and wouldn't let them rest; so that no woman yet born
could hold a Gambucino for more than a week. That's what the song says.
It's all about a pretty girl that tried hard to keep hold of a Gambucino
lover, so that he should bring her lots of gold. No fear! Off he went,
and she never saw him again."

"What became of her?" she breathed out.

"The song don't tell. Cried a bit, I daresay. They were the fellows:
kiss and go. But it's the looking for a thing--a something...
Sometimes I think I am a sort of Gambucino myself."

"No woman can hold you, then," she began in a brazen voice, which
quavered suddenly before the end.

"No longer than a week," he joked, playing upon her very heartstrings
with the gay, tender note of his laugh; "and yet I am fond of them all.
Anything for a woman of the right sort. The scrapes they got me into,
and the scrapes they got me out of! I love them at fi