ine. If I'd a-gone along with no bad luck, I wouldn't never
a-found that tenderfoot camp, would I? It was keepin' the light at my back
done that--and William not likin' the look of it, either. And you gotta
admit it was the light mostly that scared them young dudes off and left me
the things. And if you'd of saw Injun Jim, you'd of known same as I that
it was the jam and the silk shirts that loosened him up. Nothin' in my
own pack coulda won him over,--"

"It's all right that far," I cut in. "But then he died, and you were set
afoot and all but married by as venomous a creature as I ever heard of,
and the thing stops right there, Casey, where it shouldn't."

"And that's what I'm kickin' about! Casey Ryan ain't the man to let it
stop there. I been thinkin' it over sence that devil's lantern showed up
again, and went and set over there on Tippipah. Mebby I misjudged the
dog-gone thing. Mebby it's settin' somewheres around that gold mine. Funny
it never showed up no other time and no other place. I been travelin' the
desert off'n on all my life, and I never seen anything like it before.
And I can tell yuh this much: I been wanting that mine too darn long to
give up now. If you don't feel like stakin' me for the trip, I'll go back
to Lund and have a talk with Bill. Bill's a good old scout and he'll
stake me to an outfit, anyway."

That was merely Casey's inborn optimism speaking. Bill was a good old
scout, all right, but if he would grubstake Casey to go hunting the Injun
Jim mine, then Bill had changed considerably.

The upshot of it was that we left Starvation the next morning, headed for
town. And two days after that I had pulled myself out of bed at daybreak
to walk down to his camp under the mesquite grove just outside of town. I
drank a cup of coffee with him and wished him luck. Casey did not talk
much. His mind was all taken up with the details of his starting,--whether
to trust his water cans on the brown burro or the gray, and whether he had
taken enough "cold" shoes along for the mule. And he set down his cup of
coffee to go rummaging in a kyack just to make sure that he had the hoof
rasp and shoeing hammer safe.

He was packed and moving up the little hill out of the grove before the
sun had more than painted a cloud or two in the east. A dreamer once more
gone to find the end of his particular rainbow, I told myself, as I
watched him out of sight. I must admit that I hoped, down deep in the
heart of