He didn't want to break up the old associations.

He and the others hung around for a year, waiting for something to turn up, and when your mother died it wasn't long before I was back with them.

I left you in care of Jane Connor--her husband, Dave, owned the Diamond Dot ranch, which adjoined mine.
"During the year the boys had been knocking around without me they'd fallen in with an Indian from Yucatan, from the tribe called the Toltecs.

This Indian called himself Queza--he'd been exiled because he was too lazy to work.

The boys got him drunk one night, and he blabbed everything he knew about his tribe--how rich it was; how they'd discovered a diamond mine, and that gold was so common that they used it to make household ornaments.