Midnight mused over his youthful days--the dust, the flashing horns, the shouting and the excitement of old round-ups.
It is a true telling that thoughts in no way unlike these buzzed in the rider's head as a usual thing.

But to-day he had other things to think of.
With Kid Mitchell, his partner, Pete had lately stumbled upon a secret of fortune--a copper hill; a warty, snubby little gray hill in an insignificant cluster of little gray hills.

But this one, and this one only, precariously crusted over with a thin layer of earth and windblown sand, was copper, upthrust by central fires; rich ore, crumbling, soft; a hill to be loaded, every yard of it, into cars yet unbuilt, on a railroad yet undreamed-of, save by these two lucky adventurers.
They had blundered upon their rich find by pure chance.

For in the southwest, close upon the Mexican border, in the most lonesome corner of the most lonesome county of thinly settled Arizona, turning back from a long and fruitless prospecting trip, they had paused for one last, half-hearted venture.

One idle stroke of the pick in a windworn bare patch had turned up--this! So Pete Johnson's thoughts were of millions; not without a queer feeling that he wouldn't have the least idea what to do with them, and that he was parting with something in his past, priceless, vaguely indefinable: a sharing and acceptance of the common lot, a brotherhood with the not fortunate.
Riding to the northwest, Pete's broad gray sombrero was tilted aside to shelter from the noonday sun a russet face, crinkled rather than wrinkled, and dusty.