o herding cattle."

Just as long as they talked the hard-headed old frontiersman always came
to this advice, and Elam always dismissed it with a laugh. Finally he
said, with more seriousness than I had ever seen him assume before:

"I will tell you what I'll do, Uncle Ezra: I will follow this thing up,
and if nothing comes of it, I will take your advice. But I will go to
Texas. I can't stay around where that nugget is without making an effort
to find it. If you had had it dinged at you for years, you would feel
the same way."

And I could swear that that was the truth, for Uncle Ezra had often said
to me that if he had had the nugget preached at him from the time he was
old enough to remember anything, he would have been as hot after it as
Elam was. Nothing would have turned him away from it. Uncle Ezra knew
that Elam was in earnest when he said this, and reached over and shook
hands with him; and after that the subject was dropped. In the meantime
Ben and Tom were getting acquainted, and especially was Ben deeply
interested whenever the other spoke of the Red Ghost. Tom had seen it,
had a fair shot at it, and could not imagine what had taken it off in
such a hurry, if it had been a flesh-eating animal; but it was not, and
so it uttered a scream and went into the bushes. It must have been a
camel, because that was the only thing that Tom knew of that had a hump
on its back.

"But camels don't run wild in this country," said Ben.

"Now, wait till I tell you," put in Uncle Ezra, who had got through
talking with Elam. "A good many years ago the government brought over
some camels thinking that they could make them useful in carrying
supplies across the desert; but, somehow or other, it turned out a
failure, and, seeing that they couldn't sell them, they turned them
loose to shift for themselves. And that's the way they come to be wild
here."

"Well, that bangs me!" exclaimed Ben, who was profoundly astonished.
"But supposing they did turn them out to become wild, they wouldn't
pitch into horses, would they?"

"I don't know anything about that," returned Uncle Ezra. "I do know that
there is a camel around here, that he is red in color, that he has
frightened the lives out of half a dozen people, and that he has been
shot at numberless times. He does pitch into every horse and mule that
he gets a chance at, and I don't know what makes him."

"Well, I never heard of a camel doing that before," said Ben, settling
bac