“The whole thing’s bad, Scotty,” replied Sid. “This fellow knows now what’s written on the tablet. Nothing can take that knowledge away from him, either. We’ve got the plaque; but _he_ has the knowledge it contains--and I’ll bet it’s indelible in his mind! They’ll never catch us with those Indian ponies, but what’s to prevent his reporting this Red Mesa mine to friends of his down in Mexico? What then?--you can have my shirt if a squad of their guerrillas doesn’t cross the border, pronto, and get to Red Mesa first! See it? That’s where we get off. I doubt if this fellow will follow us very hard. He knows all he needs to know right now.” Scotty rode on in silence. Indeed this business _had_ been bungled! Far better would it have been for them to have ridden into Tucson and gotten some scientist whom Sid knew and could trust to read the Latin for them. The very word “Gold” is bad medicine to let get abroad among the sons of men! Many a miner’s stampede has been started on less. As the trail reached the foothills they drew rein and looked back. Far across the plain that little knot of horsemen was still coming on in the tireless lope of the Indian pony. Give them twenty miles of it and their own horses would be run off their feet! “Here’s where we’ve got to step light and easy, old-timer!” grinned Sid. “The Indians will be in their own country in these hills, and they know every short cut to head us off. I wish Big John and Niltci were here.” Scotty growled assent abstractedly as they rode up a bare and rocky arroyo. He was thinking of all that this Red Mesa mine meant to him. If it really existed, its nearness to the sea made the engineering problems of it so simple that it would be easy to get capital invested in it. Las Pintas mines, only thirty miles south of Pinacate, had already established a successful precedent for that, for it now had a little railroad of its own and a ship base, just as the young engineer had dreamed for Red Mesa. But now that Red Mesa’s location was known to outsiders--and after being buried two hundred years, too!--the whole thing was a mess, and of his own naïve making. The curse of trustful youth! There was just one point of hope. According to government regulations, whoever got there first and staked out a claim owned Red Mesa, now matter how discovered. Scotty raged inwardly over it, driving his mare hard under that maddening goad of chagrin. Sid, who was less interested, followed phlegmatically behind. As the trail reached up high on the flanks of the mountains and headed up over a “saddle” into the next valley, Scotty rode ahead, dismounted and began climbing rapidly up toward the saw-teeth ridges that hung low in the sky above him. A persistent suspicion had haunted him ever since this ride had begun, and now he wanted that suspicion verified or dispelled.