His greeting of his half-brother was a bit shy, though wholly glad, and the padre served to bridge over the first few awkward moments. Both men recognized the fact of a change in each since the Los Angeles days. Teddy thought it due only to his clandestine marriage, and Keith felt guilty as he realized how little, how very little, Teddy's marriage meant to him now. While the padre was getting acquainted with the Mexican, the two brothers walked apart, and talked of the chances of the mine's success, and the failure of the backers to see the necessity of using money more freely on the enterprise. "It's there, you know," insisted Teddy; "all this district is flooded with stories of the ore taken out of it in the first days of the Spaniards; then the Indians descended upon them, and there was a slaughter, and no Spaniard dared venture into these hills for a century." "Yes. We put in a good many fruitless days trailing those old legends," assented Keith, "but only the Indian superstition tends to show that this is the real mine of that history. The rich one may not have been on this side of the mountain, since you have not yet struck the lode." "Don't let's talk about it, if you feel that way," suggested Teddy, "I hear plenty of that from the others; and you didn't really come all the way down here to talk mines. Say, old chap, you acted like a prince over the--well, the wedding. I felt pretty nearly three inches higher when I got your letter. I--I know I acted like a kid, but Angela wanted it arranged so; and--as she about filled the whole horizon--" "Cut out the explanation, Teddy. A man is never sure of himself until the right woman crosses his trail--or the wrong one. God knows I'm not fit for alcalde in the case. At least, you married your wife." Teddy stared at him an instant, and then shouted with laughter. "Married my wife? Well, rather! How else could she be my wife?" Keith avoided the frank boyish blue eyes of Teddy, and turned away, seating himself on a great bowlder and staring across the little semicircle of the canyon basin, to where gnarled century-old trees reached grotesque arms above some old stone ruins and fragments of marble. Teddy looked at him an instant, and then whistled softly. "If it were any other man than you, Keith, I'd think--but it's too ridiculous!" "Say it," suggested Keith. "Well, I'd say the wrong woman had crossed _your_ trail." "Not the wrong one." "Good Lord! you don't mean that by any chance it is at last the right one?" "At last--the right woman." "And you sit there looking as solemn over it as a wooden Mexican god! Wake up, old fellow, and tell about her." "There is nothing to tell. She is the right woman, and I shall never see her again." "Keith!" "And I've come back here to tell myself so," continued Keith, doggedly; "to say it over and over, and beat it into my brain, if I have any left. The desert didn't help me--I thought this might." "This?" "These hills, and--speaking of it."