news, "Gone!"

"Gone where?" crisply demanded the Sheriff.

"Don't stand there starin'; do something," scolded Mrs. Allen.

"He gave me his word to stay and face this thing out," shouted the
bewildered Slim.

"It's all my fault. I sent him away." Echo seized Slim's hand as she
spoke.

"You sent him away?"

She fell on her knees before him. Lifting her hands as in prayer, she
implored: "I never thought of his promise to you. He never thought of
it. Go find him--bring him back to me!"

"Bring him back?" howled the excited Sheriff, his eyes bulging, his
cheeks swelling, his red hair bristling, and his voice ringing in its
highest key. "Bring him back? You just bet I will. That's why I'm
sheriff of Pinal County."

Slim whirled out of the door as if propelled by a gigantic blast. Echo
fell fainting at her mother's feet.

CHAPTER XII

The Land of Dead Things

Forth to the land of dead things, through the cities that are
forgotten, fared Dick Lane. Tricked by his friend, with the woman he
loved lost to him, he wandered onward.

Automatically he took up again his quest for buried treasure. That
which in the flush of youthful enthusiasm and roseate prospects of life
and love had seized him as a passion was now a settled habit. And
fortunately so, for it kept him from going mad. He had no thought of
gain--only the achievement of a purpose, a monomania.

With this impulse was conjoined a more volitional motive--he wished to
revenge himself upon the Apaches, and chiefly upon the renegade McKee,
whom he supposed still to be with them. Somehow he blamed him, rather
than Jack Payson, as being the chief cause of his miseries. "If he had
not stolen the buried gold, I would have returned in time," he
muttered. "He is at the bottom of all this. As I walked away from Jack
in the garden, I felt as if it was McKee that was following me with his
black, snaky eyes."

Accordingly, Dick directed his way to a region reputed to be both rich
in buried treasure and infested by hostile Indians.

The fable of the Quivira, the golden city marked now by the ruins of
the Piro pueblo of Tabiri, south of the salt-deposits of the Manzano,
is still potent in Arizona and New Mexico to lure the treasure-seeker.
Three hundred and fifty years ago it inspired a march across the plains
that dwarfs the famous march of the Greeks to the sea. It led to the
exploration of the Southwest and California before the Anglo-Saxon
settl