Just as I turned to retrace my steps, my eyes fell on a group of low bushes, which would have taken the palm in any collection of those horribly dead-looking things that ladies call phantom-flowers. So pitilessly had the sun bleached and whitened the tiny branches, that not a drop of life or substance seemed left; yet they were perfect, and phantom-bushes, if ever I saw any. How well they would look on those graves below, I thought, as I approached to break a twig in remembrance of the strange sight. But how came the red berries on this one? I stooped, and picked up--a rosary; the beads of red-stained wood, the links and crucifix of some white metal, and inscribed on the cross the words, "_Souvenir de la Mission_." How had it come there? Had ever the foot of devout Catholic pressed this rocky, thorny ground? Of what mission was it a gift of love and remembrance? Surely it had not lain here a hundred years--the gift of love from one of the Spanish _padres_ of the Arizona Missions to an Indian child of the church! Or had it come from one of those California Missions, where the priests to this day read masses to the descendants of the Mission Indians? Yonder, in the west, with the purplish mists deepening into darkness in its cleft sides, was the mountain which to-morrow would show us "Montezuma's face," and here lay the emblem of peace, of devotion to the one living God. Perhaps the station-keeper could solve the mystery; so I hastened back through the gloom that was settling on the earth, unbroken by any sound save the distant yelping of a _coyote_, who had spied me out, and followed me, as though to see if I were the only one of my kind who had come to invade his dominion. "See what I have found!" I cried exultingly, when barely within speaking distance of the station-keeper, who stood within the doorway. In a moment he was beside me, calling out something in his Indian-Spanish, which seemed to electrify the woman, who still sat by the _adobe_ wall. Springing up with the agility of a panther, she was by my side, pointing eagerly to my hand holding the rosary. "What does she want?" I asked, in utter consternation. "The rosary; give her the rosary"--the barefooted man was speaking almost imperiously--"it's hers; she has the best right to it." "Gladly," I said; but she had already clutched it, and turned tottering back to the mud-wall, against which she crouched, as though afraid of being robbed of her new-found treasure. The man turned to me in evident excitement: "And you found it! Where? She has been hunting for it these years--day after day--in the blazing sun and streaming rain; and _you_ found it. Well, old Screetah's eyes are getting blind--she's old--old." "But her son might have found it, if he had looked; for I found it just up on the hill there," I suggested.