n next trip."

The older man grunted disdain for the hunches of Kit, even while his
eyes smiled response to the ever-living call of youth. To Rhodes there
was ever a "next time." He was young enough to deal in futures, and
had a way with him by which friends were to be found for even unstable
venturings with no backing more substantial than a "hunch."

Not that Kit was gifted with any great degree of fatal beauty--men are
not often pretty on the trail, unwashed, unshaven, and unshorn--added
to which their equipment had reached the point where his most
pretentious garment was a square of an Indian _serape_ with a hole in
the middle worn as a poncho, and adopted to save his coat and other
shirt on the hard trail.

Cap Pike growled that he looked like a Mexican peon in that raiment,
which troubled Kit not at all. He was red bronze from the desert days,
and his blue eyes, with the long black lashes of some Celtic ancestor,
looked out on the world with direct mild approval. They matched the
boyish voice much given to trolling old-time ditties and sentimental
foolishness.

He led the dappled roan over the wild dry "wash" where the sand was
deep and slippery, and the white crust of alkali over all. Before him
swayed the pack mules, and back of him Captain Pike sagged on the
little gray burro, named in derision and affection, the Baby Bunting
of the outfit.

The jauntiness was temporarily eliminated from the old prospector. Two
months of fruitless scratching gravel when he had expected to walk
without special delay to the great legendary deposit, had taken the
sparkle of hope from the blue eyes, and he glanced perfunctorily at
the walls of that which had once been a river bed.

"What in time do you reckon became of all the water that used to fill
these dry gullies?" he asked querulously. "Why, it took a thousand
years of floods to wash these boulders round, and then leave them high
and dry when nicely polished. That's a waste in nature I can't figure
out, and this godforsaken territory is full of them."

"Well, you grouch, if we didn't have this dry bed to skip along, we
would be bucking the greasewood and cactus on the mesa above. So we
get some favors coming our way."

"Skip along,--me eye!" grunted Pike, as the burro toiled laboriously
through the sand, and Kit shifted and stumbled over treacherous,
half-buried boulders. "Say, Kit, don't you reckon it's time for Billie
to answer my letter? It's over eight weeks now