“Dios sabe,” answered the clerk briefly, though his eyes glanced quickly away toward the purpling range to the south. “But we shall need our guards every moment we are here, sir, that's certain.” An hour later night had settled down upon the broad valley, black and forbidding. All day long the wind had been sighing about the corral, whirling clouds of dust from the loose, sandy soil and sifting it in through many a chink and crevice over the floor of Pedro's ranch. The great ranges to the northwest, the Sierras to the south, were whitecapped at their lofty summits, but all over the arid miles of surrounding desert the sun had been hotly blazing from noon to the dewless eve, and not until it sank behind the western wave did the wind sweep down untempered. Through its shallow bed the Gila rolled, a lazy, turbid current, not a rifle shot away. Quicksands and muddy pools flanked its course for miles and barred all attempts at crossing except at the point where thrifty Pedro had “corduroyed” the flats with boards that had formerly done duty at the agency building, and, having originally cost the paternal Government something in the neighborhood of $1 apiece, had now come down to the base uses of daily trampling under foot. The stage to the Gripsack Mines, the huge ox teams and triple-hitched wagons, the nimble pack mules, even the buckboard with the United States mail, paid reluctant tribute into Pedro's dingy palm, though the owners mentally damned him for a thief. Everybody in that part of Arizona well knew that in the unprecedented rise of the Gila, a few years back, two of the agency storehouses had been floated away down the stream, accompanied by a dense flotilla of joists, scantling and clapboards, which had been piled up on the river bank after weeks of laborious transportation from Plummer's saw mill in the San Gabriel. So, too, had sundry casks of bacon, barrels of beans and bales of Indian goods; and while portions of this flood-swept assortment were found stranded and scattered along the winding shores as far down as Pedro's bailiwick, not so much as a solitary shingle had passed beyond, and the laws of flotsam and jetsam had received at the hands of this shrewd “greaser” their most liberal construction. More than once had the Federal authorities been compelled to proceed to stringent measures with Pedro and arraign him before a jury of his peers on charges of having robbed and defrauded the General Government, and more than once with prompt and cheering unanimity had the jury pronounced him not guilty, a service which he never failed to requite in kind when Garcia, Gomez or Sancho came up for his turn. And now the old Mexican was proprietor of a goodly ranch, built mainly of adobe, it is true, as were his roomy corrals and storehouses, yet roofed, floored, partitioned, doored and menu for either breakfast, dinner or supper, at a charge of $1 a head for any and all travelers who sought to appease their appetite at his table.