Sid watched them awhile, a feeling of melancholy growing on him. These people were happy, free, and independent. Under Honanta’s leadership they were living life simply and nobly, as the early Indians did. To match it, you had to go back two hundred years to the time when religion was everything in an Indian’s life, when warfare was an incentive to chivalry similar to our own warfare of the middle ages; when there were no white men to set one tribe against another, to teach them to scalp one another by offering a bounty for the hair of a fellow red man, or to sell them whisky and weapons far more deadly than any they naturally used. Sid felt himself playing traitor to his best instincts when he thought of what the coming of Scotty and Big John would mean to these people. Scotty had come to the Pinacate region to find the Red Mesa mine. Well he, Sid, had found it for him! But he had not dreamed to find it also the home of a happy and peaceful band of red men--that race with which Sid was becoming more and more in sympathy. But now look what would happen! Scotty would claim the mine, stake it out, ask him and Big John to sign as witnesses, and then file the claim with the government. And then, with the publishing of that claim, would come the inevitable stampede to this region. White men, hundreds of them; ships, rails, ore cars, burros, rough and sweating white miners--a rabble that would sweep Honanta and his people away like chaff. It did Sid little good to tell himself that he had sent Hano to bring his friends so that they could defend Red Mesa against the Mexicans. That would be a mere incident in the march of progress. Vasquez and his guerrillas would surely come here, riding along the border from Nogales. They would find the pony tracks, climb the mountain and discover Red Mesa. After that, no doubt Vasquez would fight for it. But even if defeated and driven off, there was Scotty to be reckoned with, for his heart was set on this mine, his whole future depended on it. That he would insist on providing for these Indians, of course, would be his natural instincts for right and justice. But he would insist, too, on the mine being developed. Sid doubted whether it could be done, in the nature of his race, without first bringing about the destruction of these Apaches. Honanta would never give this place up without a fight for it against all comers.