les across their saddles, wearing the
cartridge-belts athwart their naked bodies. All of them moved their
thin brown legs ceaselessly; their moccasined shanks kept up a
constant drumming against the ponies' sides.

The afternoon was old when they reached the dry wash. They left two or
three of their number behind in charge of the ponies. The others came
on afoot. Two leaders went well in advance, one of them on each bank,
creeping from rock to tufted yucca and from yucca to mesquite clump,
watching the sun-flayed land before them for some sign of their game.
A squad of trackers slipped in and out among the dagger-plants and
boulders in the bottom of the gulch.

One of the trackers held up his hand and moved it swiftly. To the
signal the others gathered about him. He pointed to the outcropping of
high-grade ore. They saw the traces left by a prospector's pick. For
some minutes their voices mingled in low gutturals. Then they
scattered to pick up the trail, found it, and resumed their progress
down the arroyo.

Evening came on them when they reached the river-bottom; and with the
deepening shadows, fear. Night with the Apache was the time of the
dead. They made their camp. But when the sun was coloring the eastern
sky the next morning they were crawling through the bear-grass on the
first low mesa above the stream, silent as snakes about to strike.

The prospectors awoke with the growing light. They crept forth from
their blankets. Two or three rifles cracked. And then the stillness
came again.

The Apaches stripped the clothing from the dead men and left them to
the Arizona sun. They took away with them what loot they found. They
never noticed the little heap of specimens from the outcropping. Or if
they noticed it they thought it of no importance. A few handfuls of
rock fragments meant nothing to them. And so the ore remained there
near the bodies of the prospectors.

The old-timers go on to tell how Jim Shea came riding down the dry
wash one day late in the summer with his rifle across his saddle-horn
and a little troop of grim horsemen about him. Of that incident few
details remain in the verbal chronicle which has come down through
four decades. It is like a picture whose background has been blurred
by age.

Somewhere ahead of these dusty, sunburned riders a band of Apaches
were urging their wearied ponies onward under the hot sun. They herded
a bunch of stolen horses before them as they fled.

The chase h