"Did you notice that _coup_ I made--asking him if he was a Spaniard? There's nothing in the world makes a Spaniard so mad as to take him for a Mexican--on the other hand, nothing makes him your friend for life like recognizing him for a blue-blooded Castilian. Now maybe our old friend Don Juan has got a few drops of Moorish blood in his veins--to put it politely, but--" he raised his tenor voice and improvised-- "Jest because my hair is curly Dat's no reason to call me 'Shine'!" "No," agreed Bud, feeling cautiously of the walls, "and jest because you're happy is no reason for singing so loud, neither. These here partitions are made of inch boards, covered with paper--do you get that? Well, then, considering who's probably listening, it strikes me that Mr. Brachamonte is the real thing in Spanish gentlemen; and I've heard that all genuwine Spaniards have their hair curly, jest like a--huh?" But De Lancey, made suddenly aware of his indiscretion, was making all kinds of exaggerated signs for silence, and Bud stopped with a slow, good-natured smile. "S-s-st!" hissed De Lancey, touching his finger to his lips. "Don't say it--somebody might hear you!" "All right," agreed Bud; "and don't you say it, either. I hate to knock, Phil," he added, "but sometimes I think the old man was right when he said you talk too much." "Psst!" chided De Lancey, shaking his finger like a Mexican. Tiptoeing softly over to Bud, he whispered in his ear: "S-s-st, I can hear the feller in the next room--shaving himself!" Laughing heartily at this joke, they went downstairs for supper. VI If the Eagle Tail mine had been located in Arizona--or even farther down in Old Mexico--the method of jumping the claim would have been delightfully simple. The title had lapsed, and the land had reverted to the government. All it needed in Arizona was a new set of monuments, a location notice at the discovery shaft, a pick and shovel thrown into the hole, and a few legal formalities. But in Mexico it is different. Not that the legal formalities are lacking--far from it--but the whole theory of mines and mining is different. In Mexico a mining title is, in a way, a lease, a concession from the general government giving the _concessionaire_ the right to work a certain piece of ground and to hold it as long as he pays a mining tax of three dollars an acre per year. But no final papers or patents are ever issued, the possession of the surface of the ground does not go with the right to mine beneath it, and in certain parts of Mexico no foreigner can hold title to either mines or land. A prohibited or frontier zone, eighty kilometers in width, lies along the international boundary line, and in that neutral zone no foreigner can denounce a mining claim and no foreign corporation can acquire a title to one. The Eagle Tail was just inside the zone.