the first one I've found in months,"
he exclaimed, going over to the edge of the cliff, above the level of
which peered the fat head of a cactus covered with spines that were
barbed like a fish-hook. Its short tap-root was fixed in a crevice a
few feet below the parapet. Lying on the edge of the cliff, the man
sliced off the top of the cactus, and began jabbing into its interior,
breaking down the fibrous walls of the water-cells, of which the
top-heavy plant is almost entirely composed. In a few moments he arose.

"Now I can empty my canteen in the coffee-pot, sure of a fresh supply
of water by the time I am ready to mosey along."

He filled the pot, set it on the fire, and then pressed the uncorked
and empty canteen down into the macerated interior of the bisnaga.

While his coffee was boiling, the prospector continued his examination
of the fortification, beginning, in the manner of his kind, with the
more minute "signs," and ending with what, to a tourist, would have
been the first and only subject of observation--the view. On the inner
side of the large boulder in the wall he discerned, the faint outline
of a cross, painted with red ochre.

Scraping with his pick beneath the rock, to see if the emblem was the
sign of hidden treasure or relic, he unearthed a rattlesnake.

Before it could strike, with a quick fling of his tool he sent the
reptile whirling high in the air toward the precipice. But from the
clump of cactus growth along the parapet arose a sahuaro, with
branching arms, and against this the snake was flung. Wrapped around
the thorny top by the momentum of the cast, it hung, hissing and
rattling with pain and hatred.

The prospector looked up at the impaled rattlesnake with a smile.

Reminiscences of Sunday-school flashed across his mind.

"Gee, I'm a regular Moses," he ejaculated. "First I bring water from
the face of the rock, and then I lift up the serpent in the wilderness.
The year I've spent in the mountains and desert seem like forty to me,
and now, at last, I have a sight of the Promised Land. God, what a
magnificent view!"

Dropping his pick, he stretched out his arms with instinctive
symbolization of the wide prospect, and expression of an exile's
yearning for his native land.

"Over there is God's country, sure enough," he continued, giving the
trite phrase a reverential tone, which he had not used in his first
expression of the name of Deity. "Thank Him, the parallel with