“For the mine, you mean?”

“Sure!  Start right from the jail door at midnight and ride west.  Zurich & Company won’t be expecting that—­seein’ as how I left you in the lurch, this-a-way.”

“But my cousin will never be able to stand that ride.  It’s a hundred and sixty miles—­more too.”

“Your cousin can join us later—­or whoever ever comes along with development money.  There’ll be about four or five of us—­picked men.  I’m goin’ this afternoon to see an old friend—­Joe Benavides—­and have him make all arrangements and be all ready to start whenever we get back, without any delay.  I won’t take the sheriff, because we might have negotiations to transact that would be highly indecorous in a sheriff.  But he’s to share my share, because he put up a lot more money for the mine to-day.  I sent it on to Yuma, where an old friend of mine and the sheriff’s is to buy a six-horse load of supplies and carry ’em down to join us, startin’ when I telegraph him.

“Got it all worked out.  You do as I tell you and you’ll wear diamonds on your stripes.  Give me a note for that girl of yours, too.”

CHAPTER VIII

The hills send down a buttress to the north; against it the Susquehanna flows swift and straight for a little space, vainly chafing.  Just where the high ridge breaks sharp and steep to the river’s edge there is a grassy level, lulled by the sound of pleasant waters; there sleep the dead of Abingdon.

Here is a fair and noble prospect, which in Italy or in California had been world-famed; a beauty generous and gracious—­valley, upland and hill and curving river.  The hills are checkered to squares, cleared fields and green-black woods; inevitably the mind goes out to those who wrought here when the forest was unbroken, and so comes back to read on the headstones the names of the quiet dead:  Hill, Barton, Clark, Green, Camp, Hunt, Catlin, Giles, Sherwood, Tracy, Jewett, Lane, Gibson, Holmes, Yates, Hopkins, Goodenow, Griswold, Steele.  Something stirs at your hair-roots—­these are the names of the English.  A few sturdy Dutch names—­Boyce, Steenburg, Van Lear—­and a lonely French Mercereau; the rest are unmixed English.

Not unnaturally you look next for an Episcopalian Church, finding none in Abingdon; Abingdon is given over to fiery Dissenters—­the Old-World word comes unbidden into your mouth.  But you were not so far wrong; in prosperous Vesper, to westward, every one who pretends to be any one attends services at Saint Adalbert’s, a church noted for its gracious and satisfying architecture.  In Vesper the name of Henry VIII is revered and his example followed.

But the inquiring mind, seeking among the living bearers of these old names, suffers check and disillusion.  There are no traditions.  Their title deeds trace back to Coxe’s Manor, Nichols Patent, the Barton Tract, the Flint Purchase, Boston Ten Townships; but in-dwellers of the land know nothing of who or why was Coxe, or where stood his Manor House; have no memory of the Bostonians.