As they left the broad plain and clambered up over the back of a mountain they passed Indian houses, brush-built and thatched with long, coarse grasses, and by the fires the women ground corn on stone _metates_ as their ancestors had done before the fall. For in Mexico there are two peoples, the Spaniards and the natives, and the Indians still remember the days when they were free. It was through such a land that Phil and Hooker rode on their gallant ponies, leading a pack-animal well loaded with supplies from the north, and as the people gazed from their miserable hovels and saw their outfit they wondered at their wealth. But if they were moved to envy, the bulk of a heavy pistol, showing through the swell of each coat, discouraged them from going further; and the cold, searching look of the tall cowboy as he ambled past stayed in their memory long after the pleasant "_Adios!_" of De Lancey had been forgotten. Americans were scarce in those days, and what few came by were riding to the north. How bold, then, must this big man be who rode in front--and certainly he had some great reward before him to risk such a horse among the _revoltosos_! So reasoned the simple-minded natives of the mountains, gazing in admiration at Copper Bottom, and for that look in their eyes Bud returned his forbidding stare. There is something about a good horse that fascinates the average Mexican--perhaps because they breed the finest themselves and are in a position to judge--but Hooker had developed a romantic attachment for his trim little chestnut mount and he resented their wide-eyed gapings as a lover resents glances at his lady. This, and a frontier education, rendered him short-spoken and gruff with the _paisanos_ and it was left to the cavalier De Lancey to do the courtesies of the road. As the second day wore on they dipped down into a rocky cañon, with huge cliffs of red and yellow sandstone glowing in the slanting sun, and soon they broke out into a narrow valley, well wooded with sycamores and mesquits and giant hackberry-trees. The shrill toots of a dummy engine came suddenly from down below and a mantle of black smoke rose majestically against the sky--then, at a turn of the trail, they topped the last hill and Fortuna lay before them. In that one moment they were set back again fifty miles--clear back across the line--for Fortuna was American, from the power-house on the creek-bank to the mammoth concentrator on the hill. All the buildings were of stone, square and uniform. First a central plaza, flanked with offices and warehouses; then behind them barracks and lodging-houses and trim cottages in orderly rows; and over across the cañon loomed the huge bulk of the mill and the concentrator with its aërial tramway and endless row of gliding buckets.