old
Moses stops right here. Many a time I thought I would never get out of
the mountains alive, and that my grave would be unmarked by so much as
a boulder with a red cross upon it. But now, before night, I'll be
back in the States, and in three more days at home on the ranch. I
promised to return in a year, and I'll make good to the hour. I sure
did hate to leave that strike, though, after all the hard luck I had
been having. Sixty dollars a day, and growing richer. But the last
horn was blowing. No tobacco, six matches, and nothing left of the
bacon but rinds. Well, the gold is there and the claim'll bring
whatever I choose to ask for it. And Echo shall have a home as good as
Allen Hacienda, and a ranch as fine as Bar One--yes, by God, it'll be
Bar None, my ranch!"

Out of the sea of molten air that stretched before him, that nebulous
chaos of quivering bars and belts of heated atmosphere which remains
above the desert as a memorial of the first stage of the entire
planet's existence, the imagination of the prospector created a
paradise of his own. There took shape before his eyes a Mexican
hacienda, larger and more beautiful even than that of Echo's father,
the beau-ideal of a home to his limited fancy. And on the piazza in
front, covered with flowering vines, there stood awaiting him the
slender figure of a woman, with outstretched arms and dark eyes, tender
with yearning love.

"Echo--Echo Allen!" he murmured, fondly repeating the name. "No, not
Echo Allen, but Echo Lane, for Dick Lane has redeemed his promise, and
returns to claim you as his own."

As he gazed upon the shimmering heat waves which distorted and
displaced the objects within and beneath them, a group of horsemen
suddenly appeared to him in the distance, and as suddenly vanished in
thin air.

"Rurales!" ejaculated Lane. "I wonder if they are chasing Apaches?
That infernal mirage gives you no idea of distance or direction. If
the red devils have got away from Crook and slipped by these Greaser
rangers over the border, they'll sure be making straight for the Ghost
Range, and by this very trail. If so, I'm at the best place on it to
meet them, and here I stay till the coast is clear." Turning to the
red cross on the rock, he reflected: "Perhaps, after all, it's a case
of 'Nebo's lonely mountain.'"

Lane had hardly reached this conclusion before he found it justified by
the sight of a mounted Apache in the regalia of war emerging fr