s one look, one only, to the blue
canoncita where the alisal tree was growing, and water from the gold
of the rose washed the roots of that tree."

"Good God!" muttered Rhodes staring at the old lady who sat nodding
her head in emphasis until her jet and gold earrings were all
a-twinkle. "It was as easy as _that_,--yet no one found it?"

"But senor,"--and it was plain to be seen that Dona Luz was enjoying
herself hugely as the center of all attention, "the two padres who
made that writing met their death at that place--and it was said the
_barbaros_ at last killed also the grandfather of Dario, anyway he did
die, and the women were afraid to tell even a new padre of that
buried writing for the cause that it must have been accursed when it
killed all people. That is how it was, and that mission was forsaken
after that time. A Spaniard came up from Sinaloa and hunted gold and
built Soledad hacienda where that mission had been in that old time,
but no one ever found any more of gold than the chickens always are
picking, a little here, a little there with a gravel in the craw. No
senor, only once the red gold--red as flame--went out of Altar on a
mule to the viceroy in Mexico, and the padres never lived to send any
more, or see their brothers again. The men who dug that gold dug also
their grave. Death goes with it."

"Ugh!" and Billie shivered slightly, and looked at Rhodes, "don't you
go digging it!"

His eyes met hers across the table. It was only for an instant, and
then Billie got very busy with her coffee which she had forgotten.

"Oh, I'd travel with a mascot to ward off evil," he said. "Would you
give me a bead from your string?"

She nodded her head, but did not speak. No one noticed them, for Cap
Pike was telling of the old native superstition that the man who first
found an ore bed found no good luck for himself, though the next man
might make a fortune from it.

"Why," he continued in evidence, "an Indian who finds even a vein of
special clay for pottery doesn't blaze a trail to it for anyone else.
He uses it if he wants it, because his own special guardian god
uncovered it for him, but if it is meant for any other man, that other
man's god will lead him to it when the time comes. That is how they
reason it out for all the things covered by old Mother Earth. And I
reckon the redder the gold the more secret the old _barbaros_ would be
about it, for gold is their sun-god medicine, or symbol, or
something.