With a green-wood poker he lifted the lid from the bake-oven. The biscuit were not browned to his taste; he dumped the blackening coals from the lid and slid it into the glowing heart of the fire; he raked out a new bed of coals and lifted the little three-legged bake-oven over them; with his poker he skillfully flirted fresh coals on the rimmed lid and put it back on the oven. He placed the skillet of venison on a flat rock at his elbow and poured coffee into two battered tin cups. Breakfast was now ready, and Pete raised his voice in the traditional dinner call of the ranges: "Come and get it or I'll throw it out!" Stanley came back from a brisk toilet at Ironspring. He took a preliminary sip of coffee, speared a juicy steak, and eyed his companion darkly. Mr. Johnson plied knife and fork assiduously, with eyes downcast and demure. Stanley Mitchell's smooth young face lined with suspicion. "When you've been up to some deviltry I can always tell it on you--you look so incredibly meek and meechin', like a cat eatin' the canary," he remarked severely. "Thank you for a biscuit. And the sugar! Now what warlockry is this?" He jerked a thumb at the far-off fires. "What's the merry prank?" Mr. Johnson sighed again. "Deception. Treachery. Mine." He looked out across the desert to the Gavilan Hills with a complacent eye. "And breach of trust. Mine, again." "Who you been betrayin' now?" "Just you. You and your pardner; the last bein' myself. You know them location papers of ours I was to get recorded at Tucson?" Stanley nodded. "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?"