WHO FOUND IT Concho was so impatient to reach the camp and deliver his good news to his companions that more than once the stranger was obliged to command him to slacken his pace.

"Is it not enough, you infernal Greaser, that you lame your own mule, but you must try your hand on mine?
Or am I to put Jinny down among the expenses ?" he added with a grin and a slight lifting of his baleful eyelid.
When they had ridden a mile along the ridge, they began to descend again toward the valley.

Vegetation now sparingly bordered the trail, clumps of chemisal, an occasional manzanita bush, and one or two dwarfed "buckeyes" rooted their way between the interstices of the black-gray rock.

Now and then, in crossing some dry gully, worn by the overflow of winter torrents from above, the grayish rock gloom was relieved by dull red and brown masses of color, and almost every overhanging rock bore the mark of a miner's pick.

Presently, as they rounded the curving flank of the mountain, from a rocky bench below them, a thin ghost-like stream of smoke seemed to be steadily drawn by invisible hands into the invisible ether.