“Well, now,” said Pete, “I didn’t file them papers.  Something real curious happened on the way in—­and I reckon I’m the most superstitious man you ever see.  So I tried a little experiment.  Instead, I wrote out a notice for that little old ledge we found over on the Gavilan a month back.  I filed that, just to see if any one was keeping cases on us—­and I filed it the very last thing before I left Tucson:  You see what’s happened.”  He waved his empty coffee-cup at the campfires.  “I come right back and we rode straight to Ironspring.  But there’s been people ridin’ faster than us—­ridin’ day and night.  Son, if our copper claims had really been in the Gavilan, instead of a-hundred-and-then-some long miles in another-guess direction—­then what?”

“We’d have found our claim jumped and a bunch to swear they’d been working there before the date of our notices; that they didn’t find the scratch of a pick on the claim, no papers and no monument—­that’s what we’d have found.”

“Correct!  Pass the meat.”

“But we haven’t told a soul,” protested Stanley.  “How could any one know?  We all but died of thirst getting back across the desert—­the wind rubbed out our tracks; we laid up at Soledad Springs a week before any one saw us; when we finally went in to Cobre no one knew where we had been, that we had found anything, or even that we’d been looking for anything.  How could any one know?”

“This breakfast is getting cold,” said Pete Johnson.  “Good grub hurts no one.  Let’s eat it.  Then I’ll let a little ray of intelligence filter into your darkened mind.”

Breakfast finished, Stan piled the tin dishes with a clatter.  “Now then, old Greedy!  Break the news to me.”

Pete considered young Stan through half-closed lids—­a tanned, smooth-faced, laughing, curly-headed, broad-shouldered young giant.

“You got any enemies, pardner?”

“Not one in the world that I know of,” declared Stan cheerfully.

“Back in New York, maybe?”

“Not a one.  No reason to have one.”

Pete shook his head reflectively.

“You’re dreadful dumb, you know.  Think again.  Think hard.  Take some one’s girl away from him, maybe?”

“Not a girl.  Never had but one Annie,” said Stanley.  “I’m her Joe.”

“Ya-as.  Back in New York.  I’ve posted letters to her:  Abingdon P.O.  Name of Selden.”

Stanley went brick red.

“That’s her.  I’m her Joe.  And when we get this little old bonanza of ours to grinding she won’t be in New York any more.  Come again, old-timer.  What’s all this piffle got to do with our mine?”

“If you only had a little brains,” sighed Johnson disconsolately, “I’d soon find out who had it in for you, and why.  It’s dreadful inconvenient to have a pardner like that.  Why, you poor, credulous baa-lamb of a trustful idiot, when you let me go off to file them papers, don’t you see you give me the chance to rob you of a mine worth, just as she stands, ’most any amount of money you chance to mention?  Not you!  You let me ride off without a misgivin’.”