Sid’s laughter pealed out. “Well, we’ll hunt up old Scotty just the same and then go get some one to translate this Latin. Scotty’ll just go crazy over this tablet, and he needs the money, John. We can come back here for the Indian relics some other time. Scotty and Niltci are prospecting down in the Santa Catalinas for mineral, right now, you know----” “An’ they won’t find nawthin’ down thar thet ain’t been found long ago, jest as I told him,” interjected Big John. “Sure! We’ll ride down there and give him this tablet. It will be a life-saver for old Scotty! Red Mesa or bust! John--how’s that for a new motto?” “Looks handsome, but she ain’t edible,” said Big John, enigmatically. But Sid just couldn’t get over his enthusiasm for his chum Scotty’s sake about this Latin tablet. What a find for good old Les! That mine would be his big chance! Friendship was sweet; to be able to do something for a chum was keen pleasure. He sat down and went on studying over the tablet, balking at strange Latin words, digging up more of them out of his memories of his school Cæsar. The old pottery plaque fascinated him. He kept speculating about it, how it came to be made, where the old fra had got his information about the mine. What an ancient old story this was! “This fra used to live with the cavate dwellers here, John, I tell you! He made this plaque and had them fire it when they baked their own pottery. Imperishable record, you see. It’s a real find, I tell you! One of those lost Spanish mines that really _is_ so! ‘_In regione Papagoii_’ that’s the Papago country of Pinacate, all right. ‘_XXI milia S-O ab Pinacate_’ plain as shootin’, twenty-one miles northeast from Pinacate, ‘_Mesa Rubra_’--there’s a hill that looks like a red mesa down there--that’s the dope! Gee! What a start for good old Scotty! Le’s go! We’ll ride straight for his camp in the Catalinas!” Big John grinned saturnine grins as he deposited the pottery plaque in the small rucksack without which he never left his horse. Then he got up and followed the eager Sid down the long, dark ascent of steps up which they had come. CHAPTER II THE LURE OF THE MINE “It’s panning out mighty low-grade stuff!--Dog-gone it!” The young man who made this ejaculation, and in a most discouraged tone, too, was slender and wiry, with sandy reddish hair surmounting a Scotch cast of features. His face was freckled and sunburned. The inextinguishable hope of youth still flickered in his blue eyes, but there was worry, anxiety, there, too--the sign of that nagging, cankering care that keeps a fellow thin. He shook his head as he held up a test tube in its wooden holder to the sunlight. “Won’t do!” he muttered. “Anybody can find _a_ mine in Arizona--but few can find a paying one.”