up his God. He was one of the stepchildren of Fortune, and he had very
little to show for all his hard work; the other fellow always got the
best of it. He had come in too late, or too early, on several schemes
that had made money. He brought with him from all his wanderings a good
deal of information (more or less correct in itself, but unrelated, and
therefore misleading), a high standard of personal honor, a sentimental
veneration for all women, bad as well as good, and a bitter hatred of
Englishmen. Thea often thought that the nicest thing about Ray was his
love for Mexico and the Mexicans, who had been kind to him when he
drifted, a homeless boy, over the border. In Mexico, Ray was Senor
Ken-ay-dy, and when he answered to that name he was somehow a different
fellow. He spoke Spanish fluently, and the sunny warmth of that tongue
kept him from being quite as hard as his chin, or as narrow as his
popular science.
While Ray was smoking his cigar, he and Johnny fell to talking about the
great fortunes that had been made in the Southwest, and about fellows
they knew who had “struck it rich.”
“I guess you been in on some big deals down there?” Johnny asked
trustfully.
Ray smiled and shook his head. “I’ve been out on some, John. I’ve never
been exactly in on any. So far, I’ve either held on too long or let go
too soon. But mine’s coming to me, all right.” Ray looked reflective. He
leaned back in the shadow and dug out a rest for his elbow in the sand.
“The narrowest escape I ever had, was in the Bridal Chamber. If I hadn’t
let go there, it would have made me rich. That was a close call.”
Johnny looked delighted. “You don’ say! She was silver mine, I guess?”
“I guess she was! Down at Lake Valley. I put up a few hundred for the
prospector, and he gave me a bunch of stock. Before we’d got anything
out of it, my brother-in-law died of the fever in Cuba. My sister was
beside herself to get his body back to Colorado to bury him. Seemed
foolish to me, but she’s the only sister I got. It’s expensive for dead
folks to travel, and I had to sell my stock in the mine to raise the
money to get Elmer on the move. Two months afterward, the boys struck
that big pocket in the rock, full of virgin silver. They named her the
Bridal Chamber. It wasn’t ore, you remember. It was pure, soft metal you
could have melted right down into dollars. The boys cut it out with
chisels. If old Elmer hadn’t played that trick on me, I’d have been in
for about fifty thousand. That was a close call, Spanish.”
“I recollec’. When the pocket gone, the town go bust.”
“You bet. Higher’n a kite. There was no vein, just a pocket in the rock
that had sometime or another got filled up with molten silver. You’d
think there would be more somewhere about, but NADA. There’s fools
digging holes in that mountain yet.”
When Ray had finished his cigar, Johnny took his mandolin and began
Kennedy’s favorite, “Ultimo Amor.” It was now three o’clock in the
afternoon, the hottest hour in the day. The narrow shelf of shadow had
widened until the floor of the amphitheater was marked off in two
halves, one glittering yellow, and one purple. The little boys had come
back and were making a robbers’ cave to enact the bold deeds of Pedro
