de fair time with them, after all.

The mule, Casey said, was just plain damn mule, sloughed off from the
army, blase beyond words,--any words at Casey's command, at least. A
lopeared buckskin mule with a hanging lower lip and a chronic
tail-switching, that shacked along hour after hour and saved Casey's legs
and, more particularly, a bunion that had developed in the past year.

Casey knew the country better than he had known it on his first
unprofitable trip into the Tippipahs. He avoided Furnace Lake, keeping
well around the Southern rim of it and making straight for Loco Canyon and
the spring there while his water cans still had a pleasant slosh. There he
rested his longears for a day, and disinterred certain tenderfoot luxuries
which he had cached when he was there last time. And when he set out again
he went straight on to the old stone hut where Injun Jim had camped. The
tepee was gone, burned down according to Indian custom after a death, as
he had expected. The herd of Indian ponies were nowhere in sight.
Hahnaga's brother, he guessed, had driven them off long ago.

Casey had worked out a theory, bit by bit, and with characteristic
optimism he had full faith that it would prove a fact later on. He wanted
to start his search from the point where Injun Jim had started, and he had
rather a plausible reason for doing so.

Injun Jim was an Indian of the old school, and the old school did a great
deal of its talking by signs. Casey had watched Jim with that pale,
unwinking stare that misses nothing within range, and he had read the
significance of Jim's unconscious gestures while he talked. It had been
purely subconscious; Casey had expected the exact location of the mine in
words, and perhaps with a crudely accurate map of Jim's making. But now he
remembered Jim's words, certain motions made by the skinny hands, and from
them he laid his course.

"He was layin' right here--facin' south," Casey told himself, squatting on
his heels within the rock circle that marked the walls of the tepee. "He
said, 'Got heap big gol' mine, me--' and he turned his hand that way."
Casey squinted at the distant blue ridge that was an unnamed spur of the
Tippipahs. "It's far enough so an old buck like him couldn't make it very
well. Fifteen mile, anyway--mebby twenty or twenty-five. And from the sign
talk he made whilst he was talkin', I'd guess it's nearer twenty than
fifteen. There's that two-peak butte--looks like that would be abou