that the owners were doing assessment work. The
fragments on the dump, however, were only country rock. In later years
gorgeous tales of rich ore at the bottom of the shallow shaft resulted
in a series of claim-jumpings which in their turn netted no less than
eleven murders, but the slayers only wasted their powder, for the
ground here never yielded anything more interesting than dead men's
bones. And at the time when Schiefflin was abiding at the Bruncknow
house the inmates were letting their mining tools rust, the while they
kept their firearms well oiled.

For the mine was nothing more nor less than a blind, and the adobe was
simply a rendezvous for Mexican smugglers.

In that era, when a man practised pistol-shooting from the hip,--as a
man practises his morning calisthenics in this peaceful age, for the
sake of his body's health,--the written statutes were one thing and
local conceptions of proper conduct another. Here, where the San
Pedro valley came straight northward across the boundary, affording a
good route for pack-trains, smuggling American wares into the southern
republic was nearly a recognized industry. As long as a man could
bring his contraband to market past marauding Apaches and the bands of
renegade whites who had drifted to the border, he was entitled to the
profit he made--and no questions asked.

So the men at the Bruncknow house accepted Schiefflin's presence
without any fear of ill consequences. Had their calling been more
stealthy they would not have worried about him; prospectors went
unquestioned among all sorts of law breakers then, owning something of
the same immunity which simple-minded persons always got from the
Indians. He came in at evening and rolled up in his blankets after
cooking his supper; and in the morning he went forth again into the
hills. No one minded him.

Now and again a cavalcade came out of the flaming desert to the south,
appearing first as a thin dust-cloud down on the flat, as it drew
nearer resolving itself into pack burros and men on mule-back; then
jingling and clattering up the stony slope and into the corral. And
when they had dismounted, the swarthy riders in their serapes and
steep-crowned sombreros trooped into the adobe, their enormous spurs
tinkling in a faint chorus upon the hard earthen floor.

Then the men of the house got out the calicoes and hardware which they
had brought over the hot hills and through the forests of giant cacti
from Tucson. T