sprang to his
side again, entreating:

"Just one five minutes more, Pedro. Your blanket. You must have a new
one."

He hesitated and sighed. Then shook his head sadly. That which he had
torn, to bind the dwarf, had been a Navajo weave, so fine and
faultless that even he, the wonderful weaver, knew it for a marvel.
There could not be its mate in all that country, nor had been since
the old padres went and took with them, as he believed, all the wisdom
of the world.

Before he had caught and bridled the horse, Jessica was back, and
playfully enveloped in a wonderful piece of cloth that made the Indian
stare. If it were not the mate to his lost treasure, it was quite as
fine and soft, as generous in size, and far cleaner.

"See, dear old fellow. This was my father's. My mother sends it to you
with her love. Put it on, so I may see how fine you look. Oh, grand!
When the children play 'Indian' why can't they copy you, and not
those dirty Diggers, that Ferd teaches them to be like! Pedro, you are
splendid, and--I love you! I love you!"

All at once, as she gazed upon him, there returned to her a memory of
that dark time in the cavern's pit, where he had found her, and which,
in the general rejoicing over her safety she had, for the present,
almost forgotten. By now, save for this old man, she might have been
dead.

He received the onslaught of her embrace exactly as he had accepted
the gift of the blanket--in silence. There was a momentary lighting of
his somber eyes, but no word, as, putting her quietly down upon the
ground, he mounted the barebacked Prince and loped swiftly away into
the darkness and solitude.

Brighter by contrast was the room to which the little captain
returned, after Prince and his rider had vanished into the night, and
the circle of lamp-lighted faces gleamed with excitement. Everybody
seemed trying to outtalk his neighbor, and only one glowering
countenance showed dark by contrast; the face of Elsa Winkler, with
its eyes angrily fixed upon the basket which Mrs. Trent held on her
lap, quite forgetting what it contained in her listening to the
others' words.

Suddenly, Samson brought his fist down upon the table, enforcing a
brief silence, while demanding:

"What's amiss with using the capital on hand? There sits our
'admiral,' with money enough in that basket to start the whole
business. Set Wolfgang to manage, and the rest of us to dig and
delve. More'n one here has tried mining for a ye