He looked about him at the silent and colorful mountains surrounding him, hopeless misery in his eyes. They had no answer for him! The brush sunshade that he and the Indian boy who was his companion had established was Scotty Henderson’s base camp for mine prospecting. Our readers may have met him before--on the trip for the Ring-necked Grizzly in Montana or when after the Black Panther of the Painted Desert country of Arizona. Leslie Henderson--Scotty’s real name--had a heavy load to carry, for a youth of nineteen. It weighed nothing physically but mentally it was a burden far beyond his years. And the letter from his mother that he was now carrying in a hip pocket of his riding breeches had added a sickening load upon a mind already worn with anxiety. It had told him, as gently and self-sacrificingly as possible, of his mother’s decision to sell the old Henderson place back east. The cost of living had gradually come to exceed Major Henderson’s pension, which was all the Great War had left them of his father, the good old Doctor. To a woman used to comforts and a roof over her head as a matter of course, to say nothing of the ancestral associations of that homestead, that decision of Scotty’s mother was a far heavier blow to her than her words would admit. Delicately put, it meant in plain words that Scotty would either have to strike a paying mine claim _soon_ or else give up his heritage of independence, that heritage that every real man claims as his birthright, and take a position somewhere in some great mining corporation. And the outlook was pretty black, now. “No go, Niltci!” groaned Scotty, emptying the green fluid in the test tube with a gesture of discouragement, “we’ll have to break camp and move on.” With that decision the hopelessness of all this endless prospecting surged over Scotty in an overwhelming wave. Arizona had been combed all over for mines! There was plenty of this sort of thing, this scanty and scattered deposit of copper carbonate, poor in per cent of metal, all through its mountains. The real thing was far different. Not impossible to locate; for each year, even now, sees some new and fabulous lode opened up. But the scattered, thin deposit of this gulch would take a mountain railroad to develop it and the most expensive of electric process works to reduce it to metal. Take this ore back east and men could make money out of it, but that “take,” that train-haul which would cost more than the ore was worth, was the rub! For a moment a gorgeous vista of temptation opened up before Scotty. All he really needed to do to become rich was to go east with some of these picked specimens and float a “paper” copper mine, the kind that robs thousands of poor people of their earnings by false and visionary “literature”; that were never intended to do more than line the pockets of those scoundrels who make their living cheating the public that way.