that occasion, but, when floggings were subsequently
due the little fellow, laid on the rod less heavily out of regard for
the loyalty to his brother he had then displayed.

This attack also won the admiration of Polly Hope, who was something of
a spitfire herself. A little jealous of Dick for the chief place he
held in Bud's affection, she openly claimed the younger brother as her
sweetheart, and attempted to constitute him her knight--though with
repeated discouragements, for Bud was a bashful lad, and, though he had
a true affection for the girl, boylike concealed it by a show of
indifference.

The tender relations of these boys and girls persisted naturally into
young manhood and womanhood. No word of love passed between Dick and
Echo until that time when the "nesting impulse," the desire to have a
home of his own, prompted the young man to go out into the world and
win his fortune. For a year he had acted as foreman of the Allen
ranch, working in neighborly cooperation with Jack Payson, of
Sweetwater Ranch, a man of about his own age. The two young men became
the closest of comrades. When the fever of adventure seized upon Lane,
and he became dissatisfied with the plodding career of a wage-earner,
Payson insisted on mortgaging Sweetwater Ranch for three thousand
dollars and in lending Dick the money for a year's prospecting in the
mountains of Sonora, Mexico, in search of a fabulous rich "Lost Mine of
the Aztecs."

Traditions of lost mines are plentiful in Arizona and northern Mexico.
First taken up by the Spanish invaders of three hundred years ago from
the native Indians, they have been passed down to each subsequent
influx of white men. The directions are always vague. The inquirer
cannot pin his informant down to any definite data. Over the mountains
always lies the road. Hundreds of lives have been sacrificed, and
cruelty unparalleled practised upon innocent men women, and children,
by gold-seekers in their lust for conquest. Prosperous Indian villages
have been laid waste, and whole bands of adventurers have gone into the
desert in the search of these mines, never to return.

When the time for Lane's departure came Echo wept at the thought of
losing for so long a time the close companion of her childhood and the
sympathetic confidant of her youthful thoughts and aspirations. Dick,
in whom friendship for Echo had long before ripened into conscious
love, took her tears as evidence that she was si