In religion Morning was neither an accepter nor an agnostic. His reading taught him that all religions inculcate the righteousness of truth, honesty, and unselfishness, and that any form of faith in the hereafter is better for the world than no faith at all. The Persian who bowed devoutly to the highest material sign of Deity, the sun, was thereby filled with a spirit which made him readier to relieve the misery of his brother. The Egyptian who brought tribute to the priests of Isis and Osiris, was the better for his self-denial. The Greek who believed in Minerva was a closer student. Odin’s followers scorned a lie. Confucius taught love of home and kindred. Mahomet prescribed temperance, and the pure and gentle faith of Buddha in its benefactions to the human race has been exceeded only by the benign power of the religion of Jesus. Skeptics strengthen their scoffings by recounting the wars and cruelties—in bygone centuries—of zealots insane with fervor. But these are only spots upon the sun. The rusty thumbscrews of the Inquisition, and the ashes of the fires amid which Servetus perished—fires unkindled and dead for three hundred years—may be forgotten when one considers the hospitals, and schools, and houses of shelter which now link their shadows across continents. A few days before, while attending the locomotive races in Chicago, Morning had met an old mining friend, at whose earnest insistence he had been induced to visit and examine, with a view of purchasing, a large and promising ledge of copper in the Santa Catalina Mountains. It was the pursuit of this purpose that had brought him to Tucson. From his seat on the hotel piazza David Morning gazed into the little triangular garden beneath, with its splashing fountain guarded by fragrant honey locust trees, its close-knit, dark green lawn of Australian grass, and its collection of weird and ugly cacti, transplanted from their native sand for the edification of passing tourists. Then, raising his eyes, he beheld the ancient adobe pueblo, with a few belated saloon lights blinking through the murk, which was now slowly changing into ashen dawn. In the east a pencil line of light was beginning to glow, and to the northward the blackish purple of the Santa Catalina Range upreared itself against the night sky. In yonder mountains, as tenantless, as forbidding, as inaccessible, and almost as unexplored as when they were first upheaved from the tortured breast of chaos, there reposed the golden power which, in the hands of David Morning, was to change the economic and social relations of mankind, and, possibly, the governments, the boundaries, and the history of nations.