But I ain’t havin’ no truck with him myself. This here’s a white man’s country, I say.”
A chorus of “You bet!” “That’s what!” and “You’re a-shoutin’!” approved the Lizard’s sentiments.
Then another voice said:
“Do you reckon this here Natachee really knows anything about that old lost mine in the cañon, like some folks seem to think?”
The Lizard wagged his head in solemn and portentous silence, signifying that, however ready he might be to talk about the Pardners’ girl, the Mine with the Iron Door was not a subject to be lightly discussed in the presence of a stranger.{13}
{13}
CHAPTER III THE PARDNERS’ GIRL
“Marta is bound to know, when she stops to think about it, that she jest can’t have two fathers.”
THE house in the Cañon of Gold where the Pardners and their girl lived was little more than a cabin of rough, unpainted boards. But there was a wide porch overrun with vines, and a vegetable garden with flowers. Beyond the garden there was a rude barn or shelter, built as the Indians build, of sahuaro poles and mud, with a small corra made of thorny ocotillo, and the place as a whole was roughly inclosed by an old fence of mesquite posts and barbed wire. On every side the mountains rose—ridge and dome and peak—into the sky, and night and day, through summer droughts and winter rains, the cañon creek murmured or sang or roared on its way from the woodsy heart of the Catalinas to lose itself in the sandy wastes of the desert below. The little mine where the Pardners worked was across the creek a hundred yards or more from the kitchen door.
T
It was that time of the year when, if the rain gods of the Indians have been kind, the deserts and mountains of Arizona riot in a blaze of color. On the mountain sides, silvery white Apache plumes{14} and graceful wands of brilliant scarlet mallow were nodding amid the lilac of the loco-weed, while, in every glade and damp depression, the gold of the buck-bean shone in settings of brightest green. And on the cañon floor, the pink white bloom of cañon anemone, with yellow primroses and whispering bells, made points and patches of light in the shadow of the rocky walls.
{14}
It is not enough to say that the Pardners’ girl fully justified the Lizard’s
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