word of the title; but they seemed to Rita to be in her own brain
more than on the paper.

It was a hard moment for Rita.

"He made me say them one word at a time. He was so good to me! Yes, I
can say them now! I know what they mean! Oh, so long ago! so long
ago!"

There was no longer any doubt about it. Rita could read English.

Not very easily or rapidly at first, and many of the words she came to
puzzled her exceedingly. Perhaps some of them also would come back to
her after a while. Some of them had always been strangers, for the
very brightest little girls of seven or eight, even when they read well
and have their fathers to help them, are but at the beginning of their
acquaintance with "hard words."

"I shall know what the pictures mean now. But I will not tell anybody
a word about it--only Ni-ha-be."

CHAPTER VI

Steve Harrison rose to his feet, and looked curiously along the ledge
in both directions.

It was not the first ore he had seen during his three years and more of
wandering with Murray and the Lipans, but never before had he tumbled
down upon anything precisely like it.

"Mine!" he said to himself, aloud--"mine! But what can I do with it?"

"Do with it? What can you do with it?"

Murray was still kneeling upon the precious quartz, and fingering spot
after spot where the yellow metal showed itself; and the strange fire
in his eyes was deeper than ever.

"Steve!"

"What, Murray?"

"I thought it was all gone, but it isn't."

"Thought what was all gone?"

"The gold-fever. I used to have it when I was younger. It isn't a
love of money. It's just a love of digging up gold."

"Can you feel it now?"

"Dreadfully. It burns all over me every time I touch one of those
nuggets."

"Let it burn, then."

"Why? What's the good of it?"

"Maybe it'll get strong enough to keep you from wasting the rest of
your days among the Lipans."

"Among the Lipans? You don't know, Steve. Didn't I tell you what
keeps me? No, I don't think I did--not all of it. You're only a boy,
Steve."

"You're a wonderfully strong man for your age."

"My age? How old do you think I am?"

"I never guessed. Maybe you're not much over sixty."

"Sixty?" He said that with a sort of low laugh.

"Why, my dear boy, I'm hardly turned of forty-five--white hair and all.
The white came to my hair the day I spent in hunting among the ruins
the Apaches left behind them for my wife and my little girl