the chief place he held in Bud's affection, she openly claimed
the younger brother as her sweetheart, and attempted to
constitute him her knight--though with repeated discouragements,
for Bud was a bashful lad, and, though he had a true affection
for the girl, boylike concealed it by a show of indifference.

The tender relations of these boys and girls persisted naturally
into young manhood and womanhood. No word of love passed between
Dick and Echo until that time when the "nesting impulse," the
desire to have a home of his own, prompted the young man to go
out into the world and win his fortune. For a year he had acted
as foreman of the Allen ranch, working in neighborly cooperation
with Jack Payson, of Sweetwater Ranch, a man of about his own
age. The two young men became the closest of comrades. When the
fever of adventure seized upon Lane, and he became dissatisfied
with the plodding career of a wage-earner, Payson insisted on
mortgaging Sweetwater Ranch for three thousand dollars and in
lending Dick the money for a year's prospecting in the mountains
of Sonora, Mexico, in search of a fabulous rich "Lost Mine of the
Aztecs."

Traditions of lost mines are plentiful in Arizona and northern
Mexico. First taken up by the Spanish invaders of three hundred
years ago from the native Indians, they have been passed down to
each subsequent influx of white men. The directions are always
vague. The inquirer cannot pin his informant down to any
definite data. Over the mountains always lies the road. Hundreds
of lives have been sacrificed, and cruelty unparalleled practised
upon innocent men women, and children, by gold-seekers in their
lust for conquest. Prosperous Indian villages have been laid