“Very well, then, I’ll come to the point.  Though it is such a luxury to talk, sometimes!  For a woman, that is.

“Three years ago we had two burros to pack water from your gulch, where there were too many snakes, to this gulch where there never seemed to be so many.  We hadn’t developed this spring then.  One night something or other frightened the burros and they disappeared, and I started out to find them, leaving Babe of course with her father at the tunnel.

“I trailed those burros along the mountain for about four miles, I should think.  And by that time I was wishing I had taken a canteen with me, though when I started out from camp I hated the thought of being burdened with the weight of it.  I thought I could find water in some of the gulches, however, so I climbed a certain ridge and sat down to rest and examine the canyon beneath with that old telescope Babe plays with.  It has been dropped so many times it’s worthless now, but three years ago you could see a lizard run across a rock a mile away.  Don’t you believe that?” she stopped to demand sternly.

“Say!  You couldn’t tell me nothin’ I wouldn’t believe!” Casey retorted, fussing with his pipe to hide the grin on his face.

“This is the truth, as it happens.  I merely speak of the lizard to convince you that a man’s features would show very distinctly in the telescope.  And please observe, Casey Ryan, that I am very serious at the moment.  This may be important to you, remember.

“I was sitting among a heap of boulders that capped the ridge, and it happened that I was pretty well concealed from view because I was keeping in the shade of a huge rock and had crouched down so that I could steady the telescope across a flat rock in front of me.  So I was not discovered by a man down in the canyon whom I picked up with the telescope while I was searching the canyon side for a spring.

“The man was suddenly revealed to me as he parted the branches of a large greasewood and peered out.  I think it was the stealthiness of his manner that impressed me most.  He looked up and down and across, but he did not see me.  After a short wait, while he seemed to be listening, he crept out from behind the bush, turned and lifted forward a bag which hadn’t much in it, yet appeared quite heavy.  He went down into the canyon, picking his way carefully and stepping on rocks, mostly.  But in one place where he must cross a wash of deep sand, he went backward and with a dead branch he had picked up among the rocks he scratched out each track as he made it.  Babe reminded me of that to-day when she scratched out the snake’s track in the sand up by the mine.”

Casey was leaning toward her, listening avidly, his pipe going cold in his hand.  “Was he—?”

“He was an Indian, and very old, and he walked with that bent, tottery walk of old age.  He had one eye and—­”