pinewood pastures. Even if it was pretty dull for a good cow-horse
after the Free Range, it was easier on old bones. And though Midnight was
not insensible to the compliment Pete had paid him by picking him from
the bunch for these long excursions to the Southland deserts, he missed
the bunch.

They had been together a long time, the bunch; Pete had brought them from
the Block Ranch, over in New Mexico. They were getting on in years, and
so was Pete. Midnight mused over his youthful days--the dust, the
flashing horns, the shouting and the excitement of old round-ups.

It is a true telling that thoughts in no way unlike these buzzed in the
rider's head as a usual thing. But to-day he had other things to think
of.

With Kid Mitchell, his partner, Pete had lately stumbled upon a secret
of fortune--a copper hill; a warty, snubby little gray hill in an
insignificant cluster of little gray hills. But this one, and this one
only, precariously crusted over with a thin layer of earth and windblown
sand, was copper, upthrust by central fires; rich ore, crumbling, soft; a
hill to be loaded, every yard of it, into cars yet unbuilt, on a railroad
yet undreamed-of, save by these two lucky adventurers.

They had blundered upon their rich find by pure chance. For in the
southwest, close upon the Mexican border, in the most lonesome corner
of the most lonesome county of thinly settled Arizona, turning back from
a long and fruitless prospecting trip, they had paused for one last,
half-hearted venture. One idle stroke of the pick in a windworn bare
patch had turned up--this!

So Pete Johnson's thoughts were of millions; not without a queer feeling
that he wouldn't have the least idea what to do with them, and that he
was parting with something in his past, priceless, vaguely indefinable: a
sharing and acceptance of the common lot, a brotherhood with the not
fortunate.

Riding to the northwest, Pete's broad gray sombrero was tilted aside
to shelter from the noonday sun a russet face, crinkled rather than
wrinkled, and dusty. His hair, thinning at the temples, vigorous at the
ears, was crisply white. A short and lately trimmed mustache held a smile
in ambush; above it towered such a nose as Wellington loved.

It was broad at the base; deep creases ran from the corners of it,
flanking the white mustache, to a mouth strong, full-lipped and
undeniably large, ready alike for laughter or for sternness.

The nose--to follow the creases