But the mute reproach of the silent mountains to that temptation was enough for Scotty. Even the poor prospector with burro and pick who had come this way before had been too honest for that! He, some one of him, had without doubt explored this very valley long before Scotty; he had looked over this ore and gone on, knowing well that in practice it would never pay. “Nothing doing!” said Scotty to himself, his honest soul recoiling in horror before the gilded prospect of a wildcat mine floated back east. “But, while there’s life there’s dope!” he grinned. “Where next? Dashed if I know! Le’s break camp anyhow, Niltci.” The Indian youth grunted inquiringly from where he squatted, with the stoic patience of the Indian, under their brush shade. He pointed a coppery finger out at a lariat rope stretched between two mesquites in the sunlight of the hill slope. On it hung a ragged collection of meat strips, like stockings on a clothesline. They still glistened, raw and red, in the hot blaze of the cloudless sky overhead. “_Charqui_ no done,” he demurred, shaking his head. “Three sleeps yet.” He was referring to their store of dried venison; “jerky” as the cowmen call it, only he used the original Spanish name for it, _charqui_--dried meat. “Gee, I’d forgot about our grub stake! Hope,” observed Scotty, “springs infernal in the human breast, Niltci! Grub’s our real problem, now. Let’s let the mine wait and play hunters a bit, eh?” As if to answer him the musical notes of a hound belled down from a distant mountain flank. There was sparse, dry-soil timber all over these hills, piñon, spruce, stunted western yellow pine and the inevitable aspens. The hills were bare and bony, and they blazed with orange and lavender color, for it was November, but there was game in the valley timber, lots of it, deer, cougar, bobcat, and an occasional cinnamon bear. Wild turkey inhabited the depths of the cañons, so plentiful that they formed the daily fresh meat of their camp in addition to the abundant trout which the Apaches disdained to catch and eat. Scotty listened a moment to the musical notes floating down through the valley. “There goes Ruler!” he cried. “Let’s get the horses and see what he’s after!”