RED MESA
[Illustration: NILTCI GOT ONE GLIMPSE OF VASQUEZ, STANDING WITH HIS
RIFLE POISED.]
RED MESA
A TALE OF THE SOUTHWEST
BY
WARREN H. MILLER
AUTHOR OF
“THE BLACK PANTHER OF THE NAVAHO,”
“THE RING-NECKED GRIZZLY,” ETC.
[Illustration]
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
NEW YORK :: 1923 :: LONDON
COPYRIGHT, 1923, BY
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. CAÑON HONANKI 1
II. THE LURE OF THE MINE 25
III. VASQUEZ 47
IV. PINACATE 70
V. RED MESA 95
VI. THE SOUL OF THE INDIAN 119
VII. BLAZE 143
VIII. HANO 166
IX. THE SUN DANCE 187
X. THE DEFENSE OF RED MESA 208
XI. GOLD VERSUS NATURE 226
XII. OUT OF THE DESERT 244
RED MESA
CHAPTER I
CAÑON HONANKI
Above a timbered valley in the southwest rises a towering wall of
gorgeous cliffs such as only Arizona can produce. Their rock pinnacles
are banded with color--red strata, ochre, blue, green, and white--all
in wavy horizontal lines like layer cake. These long walls were scoured
clean and smooth long ago by prehistoric water action. They were broken
with deep fissures--fissures that now cleave the cliff from top to
bottom--“chimneys” that mean seven hundred feet of sheer ascent to him
who would dare scale these heights.
Two riders sat gazing up, searching this cliff face, while an Airedale
dog of huge and leonine aspect prowled about in the creek bottom near
them, investigating this and that with snuffing nose.
“That cliff dwelling is up here somewhere, according to Doctor Fewkes’
map, John,” said the smaller and rangier of the pair, his puckered-up
black eyes never leaving off their scrutiny of the cliff face. “Think
we’ll find her?”
The older man, a great, bony and leathery cowman, who might have
hailed from anywhere in the west from Montana to Arizona, took off his
sombrero and mopped a sweaty brow with the loose end of his bandanna.
“Search me!” he grinned. “I’m a cowman, not no prophet--as the
greenhorn axman said when the lumber boss as’t him which way his tree
was goin’ to fall.” He looked lugubriously up at the cliff, shaking his
head solemnly. “It’d take a horned toad with suckers on his feet to
bust her, Siddy son.”
The youth tugged determinedly at the fine fuzz of black mustache that
adorned his upper lip. “Honanki Ruins or bust--that’s our motto, John!”
he retorted, his black eyes twinkling merrily at the reluctant cowman.
“Here’s Fewkes’ map, with the ruins marked ‘Inaccessible’ on it, and,
by jerry, _we’re_ here, if the map’s right. They’re somewhere above us,
and it’s up to us to bust ’em.”
“Yaas,” said Big John, shifting his weight to the nigh stirrup to give
the white horse under him a change of load. “Somethin’ hed orter be
done about it, thet’s shore! _You_ mosey up--an’ I’ll hold yore hoss!”
All of which preliminaries usually meant that Big John really meant
to take the lead in climbing himself once the ruins were found. Sid
knew that all this feigned reluctance about climbing cliffs was mere
camouflage on Big John’s part. He urged his pinto across the cañon so
as to get a better view of the cliff face. He wanted to size up that
cañon wall first, for he knew that the only way to keep Big John off
that cliff was to tie him down, which “ain’t done.” The two had been
boon comrades for a long time; first up in Montana on the hunt for the
Ring-Necked Grizzly, later in the Cañon de Chelly region where the
Black Panther of the Navaho had met his end. That expedition had been
Sid’s start in practical ethnology. Now they were down in the White
River reservation of the Apache, seeking out ruins that had been noted
by Dr. Fewkes of the Smithsonian but had been left unexplored for lack
of time and facilities.
“There it is!” rang out the youth’s voice excitedly from across Cañon
Honanki (Bear Cañon). “Come over here, John!”
The huge cowman trotted his white mustang over to where Sid had halted
his pinto under a big western pine. Far up, at least three hundred
feet above the floor of the valley, they saw holes like swallow’s
nests pierced in the cliff at irregular intervals. They seemed small
and round and black as ink, and near them were carved on the rock odd
circular spirals, lightning zigzags, primitive horses, apparently all
legs, and geometrical armed-and-legged designs intended to represent
men. Ragged holes further along on the cliff face showed that galleries
and passageways ran in behind the living rock up there. These natural
caves, common enough in Arizona, had been scoured out by water action
in geologic times.
But it was a fearful place for human beings to attempt to climb to!
Tall perpendicular folds in the cliff face cast their black shadows on
the surrounding stone, the cracks beginning and ending nowhere. There
were impracticable clefts, ledges that shaded off to flat precipice
faces, dents and scoriations not over two feet deep, yet they seemed to
be all the footholds for climbing that the place afforded.
“Gorry!--a cavate dwelling!” whooped Sid, overjoyed. “The kind that is
built in the solid rock instead of being made of stone slabs, John,”
he explained with the ethnologist’s enthusiasm.
Big John grinned. “Gawsh!” he exploded. “I s’pose that humans once
tried to live in such places--but eagles would know better! Nawthin’ll
do but we gotto bust her, eh?”
“Yep,” said Sid confidently. “A shaman or a pueblo priest lived up
there once. Sort of hermit, you know. Holy man. If that old scout
_lived_ there we ought to be able to climb up _once_.--What think?”
“He didn’t come pilgriming down to shoot up the gulch _muy_ plentiful,
I’m bettin’!” averred Big John sardonically. “I’ll tell ye, Sid; thar’s
only one way to bust her, and that’s to make a string of long ladders,
same as _he_ done. You don’t get me off this hoss on no fly-creepin’
climb without a-doin’ jest that--savvy?”
“Oh, thunder!” exclaimed Sid impatiently. “It’d take two days of
perishing work. Le’s try to get up this cleft here.” He pointed to the
beginnings of a practical ascent.
“No!” barked Big John, and his tone was final. “The Colonel, yore
pappy, he’d stake me out an’ build a fire on me tummy ef I let ye do
any sech thing. Thet halter’s still waitin’ for you, Sid, I’ll admit,
to save having it proved on me, but I ain’t aimin’ to cheat your
friends out of their necktie party none. We camps right here an’ does
the job proper, sabe, lil’ hombre?”
Sid acquiesced, after a little further study of the cliff. There was a
tall vertical cleft that led up to the swallow’s nest holes by a series
of breaks and rises. It was easy to reconstruct the old shaman’s route
by imagining the proper ladders set up so as to negotiate a number of
these vertical rises. They could be made of slender lodgepole pine,
with the branches left on for steps in place of the heavier logs with
notched steps which the aborigines had used. And not over half a dozen
of them would be needed altogether. It was worth doing, to “bust” an
“Inaccessible.”
Making camp in that rainless country was a simple matter. Sid simply
selected a pleasant site on a knoll down the cañon overlooking the
brook under a canopy of huge pines, while Big John unsaddled both
horses and took them to the nearest grass plot, staking them out and
leaving Blaze, his Airedale, on guard. The dog had been a present from
Colonel Colvin after the Black Panther trip. He had the noted sagacity
of his breed, and with a year’s hunting experience with Ruler, the
giant coonhound of that expedition, had become a most devoted and
dependable “pardner” on all their hunts. After merely piling the
sleeping and cooking gear and hanging up their food bags above the
rodent zone, Sid was ready to go ladder cutting.
The White Mountain region is pine forest, sparsely timbered, the trees
not crowded or packed so densely as in eastern forest growth. As a
result, the mountains, which resemble much the rounded and rolling
Alleghanies of the east, seem stippled with individual trees instead
of banked in mossy green as with closely growing timber. In the river
valleys, however, there are thickets as dense as in any well watered
clime, so Sid lost no time in getting into such a pine grove armed with
his light belt ax. That light, little long-handled ax of his was far
more efficient than any sort of hatchet. It would drop a four-inch pole
thirty feet high almost as quickly as a full ax.
Before the first tree crashed down Big John had joined him.
“This here _Pinus Contorta_ (sounds like Julius Seizher only it ain’t)
is the boy that will bust her quick, Siddy boy,” he laughed, rolling up
his sleeves and baring a forearm like a lean ham. “You give a leetle
feller like me elbowroom!” He took a full ax in one fist and smote a
tree with it like chopping with a hatchet. About two judgmatical cuts
sufficed to send it crashing down, whereat the giant cowman started
after another. Sid saw that he would have his hands full just trimming
the felled ones so he went for their boughs with his small ax.
“You cut off them tops whar’ there’s somethin’ substantial to it, Sid,”
rang out Big John’s voice from the timber as he sent another pine
tumbling about the youth’s ears. “Remember that I weigh a pound or two
more’n a straw hat, son!”
“Help me put up this first one, now, John, she’s ready,” announced Sid,
struggling to lift the trunk clear of the underbrush. Big John came
over and heaved the whole tree unceremoniously up on his shoulder. With
Sid guiding the lean end they made for the cliff. Pushing and panting
they up-ended it and stood it ladderwise in a vertical fissure which
gave on a ledge above. Sid swarmed up the short branch stubs, climbed
out on the ledge, and waved his arms down to Big John below.
“Looks like one of us’d have to shinny up and haul the next one with a
lariat,” he called down.
“Son, I got an idee--ef she don’t get away while I’m picketin’ her
down,” said Big John. “You git up thar and hang my lariat honda over
that point of rock, sabe, an’ then we’ll run yore lariat through the
honda and snake up the next pole by one of the hosses.”
He got both lariats up from camp while Sid waited. Presently he
returned, to cast it up with the sure whirling pitch of the born rope
artist. Sid snatched it in and hauled his own up by the end of the
other. Then he coiled both, attached them to his belt and started up
the next cleft. The very pockets in the rock where feet of the ancient
log ladders used to rest were easy to pick out as he climbed. What men
had done a man could do! By the time he had everything fixed and the
honda, or brass eye of the lariat, hung with the other rove through it,
Big John was below with a horse and a fresh pole. It came snaking up as
the cowman led the horse away, hauling on the lower end by the lariat
tied to a cinch strap above the pony’s back.
Sid set the pole and climbed higher to the next ledge so that they
could repeat the maneuver with a third pole. This was the limit for
that horse-hoisting stunt, however, for he was now up over eighty feet
and there was not rope enough in camp to double through the next honda.
Big John yelled up as he tied on the fourth pole and then he led the
horse back to graze again.
In a few minutes Sid saw him climbing up below him. He had no fear
of height himself. That all belongs to the tenderfoot aloft for the
first time. It attacks man in a sickening sort of stage fright at
first, whether on cliff, high building, or the upper rigging of a ship.
After a time familiarity wears it off and in its place there comes
a cheerfulness over the immense outlook, the height and the distant
scenery of it all; a joyous sense of freedom that must be part of the
bird’s outlook on life. He waited for Big John on the ledge, looking
about him interestedly. It was narrow but not dangerous up here. An
old woman might have wanted a rail fence or something, he thought, but
things were done on such a huge scale on this cliff that this very
ledge that looked from below like a mere trace proved up here to be
nearly three feet wide. Plenty!--Thousands! as the facetious Big John
would have said.
Presently that cheerful son of Montana arrived, breathing heavily but
entirely at ease. “Waal, son, it ain’t goin’ to freeze up an’ snow
on our scheme jest yit! Tail on to this yere lariat and we’ll yank up
another pole.”
They hauled away on the long rope which the cowman had tied to the
butt of the fourth pole while down there. It weighed perhaps fifty
pounds--nothing at all to mountain men! After a period of grunting
effort the butt end came up over the ledge and the pole was gathered
in and laid lengthwise. They then started on to prospect for the next
fissure.
“Gosh durn it, how come, son? Hyar be stone steps leadin’ up back hyar,
or you can steal my hoss!” came back Big John’s voice in the lead as
they rounded the face of the huge pinnacle of rock. Sid hurried to
catch up. That simplified matters a whole lot!
“Look yonder, John!” he cried excitedly, as they climbed up the row of
stone pockets, “one more pole finishes us! See that hole in the wall
across the crevasse?”
“Sho’ I do! But Sid, you ought to show some respect for the naked
truth, son--which-same means we’re _busted_! Yore hole’s across a
no-bottomed chasm, hombre, an’ we ain’t flies nor yit eagles, nohow!”
Sid climbed more notched steps that led up over a smooth billow of rock
and then eyed the hole opposite, measuring the distance carefully.
Here, evidently, began those scoured-out caves and tunnels in the
living rock which led up to the cavate dwelling. There had been a log
bridge across here once, but it had long since rotted through and
perished.
“Let’s drop our fourth pole across and then, we’ve got her,
John--that’s the answer!” declared Sid.
Big John shook his head solemnly. “Ef she breaks an’ lets this gent
down, they ain’t goin’ to be no come-back, that’s sartain! No sir,
nawthin’ stirring!”
“Oh, shucks--where’s that pole, John? Le’s get her up here and let her
fall over anyhow!” exclaimed Sid hopefully. “Maybe we can hit the hole
opposite with its other end.”
“I’ll try that much,” agreed Big John. “I ain’t purty but I’m shore
strong--as the bohunk said when they as’t him to tote a saw log.” And
without more ado he retraced his steps and picked up the pole. With it
on his shoulder he came teetering along the ledge.
“Thar, Sid--miss an’ out! We got jest one shot,” he grunted, standing
the pole up and aiming its fall carefully.
“Wait!” shouted Sid. “Tie the lariat to the middle of it! You’ll feel
better if you’ve got that to keep her from breaking,” he suggested.
“Center shot, son; plumb center! Shore you got almost human
intelligence!” grinned Big John, lowering the pole again. Sid seemed
to have an even better idea than that, now. He coiled the lariat and
cast it up, to fall around a rock pinnacle above them. Then he tied
its other end near the center of the pole and they let it fall slowly,
paying out rope while Big John guided it by main strength until its
other end rested square in the jagged black pit of the cave across the
chasm from where they were standing.
“Ain’t afraid of nawthin’, now, with that good old rawhide lariat
holdin’ her up,” declared Big John, beginning to climb across. Sid
followed him, once the heavy bulk of the cowman had left the pole on
the other side. Below him dropped away an endless shadowy chasm, with
the tiny pines and firs of the valley visible hot in the sunlight far
below. On both sides towered above him the huge smooth walls of the
chimney made by the pinnacle and its neighbors. Sid cast a mere glance
at the prospect below, and then climbed over swiftly and joined Big
John in the black depths of the tunnel.
It was some time before their eyes became accustomed to the dim light.
Up and up inside the living rock the narrow fissure climbed. Old steps,
cut in the rock or built of flat stone slabs, guided them. Here and
there light was let in by those irregular ragged holes in the cliff
wall which they had seen from below.
“No one but a shaman would live here,” declared Sid, speaking
ethnologically; “a basket of corn, some dried meat and a string of
peppers would last him a whole season. But there’s water up here
somewhere.”
“Hed orter be!” said Big John laconically. “This place’s as dry as the
professor’s book, whar the dust flewed out of the pages when you opened
it. Besides, that Indian’d grow a beard a mile long while he’s jest
gittin’ down out’n hyar fer a drink!”
There _was_ water up there. After a long climb, when their aching knees
positively refused to lift for another step, they came to a little
basin hollowed out of the rock by human hands. A thin trace of water
came weeping down from somewhere in the interior here, to lose itself
and evaporate on the outside cliff face. A spruce growing out of the
crevice, which they could see through the next window, showed that all
that water was being preëmpted by just that one tree. A spruce seed had
found it somehow. Nature leaves nothing unutilized.
A blaze of light now lit up the chasm ahead. The gallery in the rock
became more open and led upward to a wide door cut out of the rock.
Here the shaman of long ago had looked out on the frailties and
follies of the world below him, serene, indifferent, meditating on the
destinies of his people. Those times surely needed one wise man to sit
apart and do the thinking for them all, for in this pueblo country the
hostile and warlike Apaches had been fearsome invaders even before
the time of the Spaniards. How long before that they and the Navaho
had come down from the far north no man knows. But they found the
peaceful and sedentary pueblo Indians an easy prey, and gradually they
drove them all out of these cliff dwellings in the mountains to build
themselves defensive villages on the high mesas of the Painted Desert
to the north.
Sid and Big John stopped at that natural doorway to look out below.
Cañon Honanki lay a green-spired paradise below them. Bare, barren
cliffs, streaked with color, rose opposite. A short way down the valley
the horses could be picked out grazing placidly. The watchful Blaze
lay near them and he rose and barked at sight of his master, his faint
volleys echoing up the cliffs.
“Now for Mr. Inaccessible--the cavate dwelling!” exclaimed Sid
triumphantly. He led on upward until he came to a low door built in a
stone wall laid up without mortar. Entering it, they saw that a round
window cut through the cliff stone lit up the small cave room. Baskets,
finely woven, of a texture and quality seldom seen nowadays, greeted
Sid’s delighted eyes. There were shallow marriage and ceremonial
baskets; bottle-shaped ones waterproofed with piñon gum, the kind now
called _tus_ and used in medicine dances; large granary baskets still
filled with dry kernels of blue, black, red, and white corn. A few
black pottery jars, decorated with white lightning zigzags, stood in
the corners. Strings of corn ears, red peppers, and dried onions, all
musty and shriveled, hung from poles let into the roof of the cave.
“The old bird was a rain-maker, all right,” said Big John, pointing
irreverently at the zigzags on the jars and baskets. “Claimed he
invented the lightning, all-same as Benjamin Franklin.”
But Sid did not answer. Instead his eyes were riveted in sheer
astonishment on the smooth rock wall of the cave, and he grabbed Big
John’s sleeve and pointed, speechless with wonder.
“Gorry!--Look there, John!” he finally found breath to exclaim. “Here
is the _last_ place a fellow would expect to see the writing of a white
man, I’ll say!”
“Well, I’ll be durned!” growled Big John, peering at the letters with
Sid.
Written on the wall, in red earth letters and still as bright as the
day they were made, was--a name! a Spanish name!
FRA PEDRO DEL VACAS, 1680.
“Can you beat it!” cried Sid, breathlessly. “Gorry, what a find!--Le’s
see, John,” he went on excitedly, “1680 was the year of the big
massacre, wasn’t it?”
“Search me!” said Big John whimsically. “All I know about them
greasers is that you shore don’t have to oil yore bullets none to slip
’em through their feathers.”
“Sure it was 1680!” continued Sid, ignoring Big John’s observation upon
our Mexican neighbors. “That year all the tribes rose against their
Spanish friars. Most of them were murdered or martyred--especially
those that the Apaches got hold of. This Fra came up here to the old
shaman for refuge. _Why_ did he write that inscription then? Because
he was dying, of course! Escaped from the Apaches somehow, wounded
perhaps, and was carried up here by the pueblo people. The Spanish
missionaries did not carve their initials on every rock. He left his
name for the next missionary to find, if ever one should visit this
pueblo again. It means something, John. We’ll look for pueblo graves,
next, and maybe get some more light on it.”
Sid’s idea of searching for graves might seem astounding to any one but
an ethnologist. But the richest prehistoric relics are always obtained
from exhumed graves, usually located near some shaman’s cave. The body
was always mummied, and with it were buried most of the pueblo Indian’s
possessions. Here the early cotton blankets, yucca sandals, baskets,
pottery, and weapons are found in a tolerable state of preservation,
and they all show that the prehistoric pueblo dwellers lived very much
as their descendants do to-day.
Big John was used to Sid’s intense enthusiasms in ethnological matters
and was accustomed to following him around--to see that he “didn’t
break his fool neck an’ so cheat that rope that’s waitin’ fer him” as
he always put it. He bent his tall frame in pursuit as Sid dodged out
of the house and darted for a deep and dusty grotto that lay behind it.
A huge horizontal fissure, not over four feet high, had been worn out
here by the waters, undermining the cliffs above for a considerable
distance. A stratum of mud, long since dried to dust, covered the floor
of the fissure. Closely dotted over it were slabs of stone, under each
of which one would find a small stone kiva or dry well. The mummy
would be discovered sitting upright in it, swathed about with cotton
blanketing made long before the first wool from the first sheep that
gave it was stolen from the Spaniards by the Navaho. Generally also the
mummy was covered with ceremonial basketry. But Sid passed them all
by, for the present. What he was searching for now was a white man’s
grave. And, far back under the rock he found it, a long mound with a
rude cross set in the dust at its head. A single flat stone lay across
the center of the mound.
Raising it, the persistent Indian burial customs proved to have been
still adhered to. A long black robe, with a ghastly skull peeping from
the cowl, lay flat on the bottom of the niche, which was a sort of
stone coffin, its sides lined with stone slabs built in shallow walls
precisely like the Indian rivas. The top was roofed over with stone, on
which the earth had been mounded up as the white priest had evidently
directed it should be. There was nothing else in the grave. Nothing,
that is, but a _flat slab of pottery_, lying across the dead friar’s
chest!
Its square shape at once attracted Sid as unusual and not Indian. He
picked it up with queer thrills running all through him. A message from
that white man of long ago! For there was writing graven on the clay,
and the three letters “D. O. M.” stood at the head of the plaque.
“A Dominican friar, he was, John,” said Sid, reverently. He began to
read aloud the sonorous Latin written on the plaque, conjuring up his
forgotten Cæsar of high-school days.
“What’s that stuff, huh?” inquired Big John. “Sounds like spig talk,
but ’tain’t. I’m a hundred per cent American, Sid, I am, an’ I don’t
like it,” he growled, shaking his head sturdily.
“Can’t make it out myself,” confessed Sid, after reading it a little
farther. He found that he had forgotten his Latin so much that merely
to pronounce the words was an effort. “Here’s a few that I _do_
know, though, John: ‘_Aurum et Argentum_,’ that’s gold and silver;
‘_Pinacate_,’ ‘_Sonoyta_,’ those are places; ‘_Papagoii_’, the
Papagoes; ‘_Mesa Rubra_’ that’s Red Mesa----”
“Never heard tell of it,” declared Big John, promptly. “Thar’s a red
mesa up Zuñi way, but there’s no gold or silver thar; an’ Pinacate is
a long thirsty ride down over the lava country into Mexico. Ain’t no
mesas in that country nohow. She’s all red lava saw-teeth an’ spiny
choyas--if you asks me.”
“It’s an old Spanish _mine_--that’s what the plaque’s all about!”
shouted Sid, excitedly. “Some of the Papagoes must have told this old
fra about a gold and silver mine, located in Red Mesa down Pinacate
way--say, Scotty will have to hear of this John!” whooped Sid, carried
away by the enthusiasm of the moment.
Big John shook his head solemnly: “Son, folks has died of thirst _in
thousands_, chasing lost Spanish mines in that country! Santa Fé’s full
of old priest reports like this-yer. The Indians shore did stuff ’em
with gauzy tales! Thar’s mineral down thar, I’ll ’low; but after ye
find it, what ye got? Reminds me of the recipe for cookin’ a fish-duck.
Ye take an’ soaks him in three kinds of soup; bile him four days; stuff
him with an apple an’ a onion; tie a bunch of celery ’round his neck,
wrap him in a couple of slabs of bacon; stick in a hunk of garlic; add
salt, pepper, and a bottle of wine; bake him three hours--an’ presto,
the gosh-darn fish-duck is gone! That’s how a feller feels when he
finds a mine in that country, Sid; ye cayn’t git the miner’l out nohow!”
Sid’s laughter pealed out. “Well, we’ll hunt up old Scotty just the
same and then go get some one to translate this Latin. Scotty’ll just
go crazy over this tablet, and he needs the money, John. We can come
back here for the Indian relics some other time. Scotty and Niltci are
prospecting down in the Santa Catalinas for mineral, right now, you
know----”
“An’ they won’t find nawthin’ down thar thet ain’t been found long ago,
jest as I told him,” interjected Big John.
“Sure! We’ll ride down there and give him this tablet. It will be a
life-saver for old Scotty! Red Mesa or bust! John--how’s that for a new
motto?”
“Looks handsome, but she ain’t edible,” said Big John, enigmatically.
But Sid just couldn’t get over his enthusiasm for his chum Scotty’s
sake about this Latin tablet. What a find for good old Les! That
mine would be his big chance! Friendship was sweet; to be able to
do something for a chum was keen pleasure. He sat down and went on
studying over the tablet, balking at strange Latin words, digging up
more of them out of his memories of his school Cæsar. The old pottery
plaque fascinated him. He kept speculating about it, how it came to be
made, where the old fra had got his information about the mine. What an
ancient old story this was!
“This fra used to live with the cavate dwellers here, John, I tell
you! He made this plaque and had them fire it when they baked their
own pottery. Imperishable record, you see. It’s a real find, I tell
you! One of those lost Spanish mines that really _is_ so! ‘_In regione
Papagoii_’ that’s the Papago country of Pinacate, all right. ‘_XXI
milia S-O ab Pinacate_’ plain as shootin’, twenty-one miles northeast
from Pinacate, ‘_Mesa Rubra_’--there’s a hill that looks like a red
mesa down there--that’s the dope! Gee! What a start for good old
Scotty! Le’s go! We’ll ride straight for his camp in the Catalinas!”
Big John grinned saturnine grins as he deposited the pottery plaque in
the small rucksack without which he never left his horse. Then he got
up and followed the eager Sid down the long, dark ascent of steps up
which they had come.