t--some connection between the Leap and his mines; he waited,
and the secret popped out.

"Say," said Big Boy after a long minute of silence, "do you believe in
fortune-tellers?"

"Sure thing!" spoke up Bunker, suddenly taking a deep breath and
swallowing his Adam's apple solemnly, "I believe in them phenomena
implicitly. And, as I was about to say, you can have any claim I've got
for eight hundred dollars--cash."

CHAPTER V

MOTHER TRIGEDGO

"Well, I'll tell you," confided Big Boy, moving closer to Old Bunk and
lowering his voice mysteriously, "I know you'll think I'm crazy, but
there's something to that stuff. Maybe we don't understand it, and of
course there's a lot of fakes, but I got this from Mother Trigedgo.
She's that Cornish seeress, that predicted the big cave in the stope of
the Last Chance mine, and now I _know_ she's good. She tells
fortunes by cards and by pouring water in your hand and going into a
trance. Then she looks into the water and sees a kind of vision of all
that is going to happen. Well, here's what she said for me--and she
wrote it down on a paper.

"'You will soon make a journey to the west and there, in the shadow of a
place of death, you will find two treasures, one of silver and the other
of gold. Choose well between the two and----"

"By grab, that's right, boy!" exclaimed Old Bunk enthusiastically, "she
described this place down to a hickey. You came west from Globe and when
you went by here the shadow was still on those hills; and as for a place
of death, Apache Leap got its name from the Indians that jumped over
that cliff. Say, you could hunt all over Arizona and not find another
place that came within a mile of it!"

"That's right," mused Big Boy, "but I was thinking all the time that
that place of death would be a graveyard."

"Sure, but how could a graveyard cast a shadow--they're always on level
ground. No, I'm telling you, boy, that there cliff is the place--lemme
tell you how it got its name. A long time ago when the Indians were bad
they had a soldiers' post right here where this town stands, and they
kept a lookout up on the Picket Post butte, where they could heliograph
clear down to Tucson. Well, every time a bunch of Indians would go down
out of the hills to raid some wagon-train on the trail this lookout
would see them and signal Tucson and the soldiers would do the rest. It
got so bymeby the Indians couldn't do anything and at last Old Cochise
got toge