Chapter 21 - Page 2

restively in his lap while she said her prayers, and told her a story while he rocked her to sleep--it was a funny, Caseyish story about a bear, but we haven't time for it now--before he attempted to ask the Little Woman again what she meant by her mysterious curiosity concerning Injun Jim. Then, when he had his pipe going and the stove filled with piñon wood, he turned to her with the question in his eyes.

The Little Woman laughed. "Now, if that terrible child will kindly consent to sleep for fifteen minutes, I'll tell you what I meant," she said. "It had slipped my mind altogether, and it was only to-day, when Babe was scratching out a snake's track--so the snake couldn't find the way back home, she said--that I chanced to remember. Just a small thing, you know, that may or may not mean something very large and important--like a gold mine, for instance."

"I don't have to go to work 'til sunup," Casey hinted broadly, "and I've set up many a night when I wasn't havin' half as much fun as I git listenin' to you talk."

Again the Little Woman laughed. I think she had been rambling along just to bait Casey into something like that."

"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