But the landlord was too dumfounded even to speak for a minute.  His face grew as purple as a plum.  He appeared to be about to burst.

“He’s locoed,” he burst forth at last, “locoed as a horn toad, by the ’tarnal hills.”

Then, holding a hand to his eye, he reentered the hotel and could be heard shouting for hot water to bathe his injury.

Zeb, who had been out looking for a trustworthy man to take their effects out to a spot along the river where they could put the Wondership together without exciting undue curiosity, returned shortly before supper with news that he had been successful in his search, an old, wrinkled prospector named Pete McGee, who had learned the secret of silence during the long years he had spent on the desert.

After the evening meal old McGee put in an appearance and a bargain was struck.  But if he was, as Zeb put it, “close-mouthed” on some subjects, he was not on others.

“So yer are a’goin’ out inter the desert, hey?” he asked the boys.

“That’s our intention,” said Dick.

The old man shook his head.

“The desert’s a tough place,” he said.  “A mighty tough place.  Reckon it’s likely yer are er goin’ prospectin’, maybe?”

The boys returned an evasive answer.  But old McGee rambled on with the crisscross wrinkles forming and fading round his washed-out blue eyes.

“Wa’al, I had my share on it, ain’t I, Zeb?” said the old man to Zeb, who had just strolled up, smoking a short, black pipe.  The professor, after adjusting his difficulties with the landlord, was sorting and labeling specimens in his room.

“Reckon you have, Pete,” responded the yellow-bearded miner.  “You didn’t never find that thar lost Peg-leg Smith mine, did yer?”

“No; but I will some day,” declared the old man, a fanatic gleam shining in his faded optics.  “I’ll find it some day, Zeb.  I never got to it, but I come mighty close—­yes, sir, ole Pete he come mighty close.”

“Tell the boys about Peg-leg Smith’s lost mine,” suggested Zeb.

“Give me the fillin’s, then, an’ I will,” said old Pete, holding out a blackened and empty corncob, “though I’m surprised they ain’t never heard on it.  Thought everybody had heard of Peg-leg’s mine.”

“Wa’al, you see they come frum ther East,” explained Zeb apologetically.

“Ah, that accounts fer it,” said old Pete indulgently.  “You couldn’t ‘spec Easterners ter know nuthin’ ’bout it.  ’Wa’al, young sirs, somewheres out on the desert ter the east uv here thar is three buttes a stickin’ up, and right thar is Peg-leg Smith’s lost mine whar they say the very sands is uv gold.

“Who was Peg-leg?  Wa’al, that’s in a way not very well known.  Anyhow, his name was Smith, and he was shy an off leg, and so he gets his name.  Back in 1836 Peg-leg he blows inter Yuma with a party of trappers that hed worked down ther Colorado.