Mr. Peter Johnson's arrival in Morning Gate Pass was coincident with
that of a very bright and businesslike sun. Mr. Johnson had made a night
ride from the Gavilan country, where he had spent the better part of a
pleasant week, during which he had contrived to commingle a minimum of
labor with a joyous maximum of innocent amusement. The essence of these
diversions consisted of attempts--purposely clumsy--to elude the
vigilance of such conspirator prospectors as yet remained to neighbor
him; sudden furtive sallies and excursions, beginning at all unreasonable
and unexpected hours, ending always in the nothing they set out for,
followed always by the frantic espionage of his mystified and bedeviled
guardians--on whom the need fell that some of them must always watch
while their charge reposed from his labors.

Tiring at last of this pastime, observing also that his playfellows grew
irritable and desperate, Mr. Johnson had sagely concluded that his
entertainment palled. Caching most of his plunder and making a light pack
of the remainder, he departed, yawning, taking trail for Cobre in the
late afternoon of the day preceding his advent in Morning Gate.

He perched on the saddle, with a leg curled round the horn; he whistled
the vivacious air of Tule, Tule Pan, a gay fanfaronade of roistering
notes, the Mexican words for which are, for considerations of high
morality, best unsung.

The pack-horses paced down the trail, far ahead, with snatched nibblings
at convenient wayside tufts of grass.

Jackson Carr, freighter, was still camped at Hospital Springs. He lifted
up his eyes as this careless procession sauntered down the hills; and,