"A party of emigrants gave it that name," said the chief quietly, "and to them its sinister title bore a grim meaning. They had passed through the desert, suffering incredible hardships and were greatly weakened when they arrived at the valley. Still they pluckily journeyed on till they reached those salt and borax flats, where the surface is rougher to travel on than can be imagined, the salt having formed in sharp spikes and jagged scales with their edges at every angle, and shallow pans filled with dreadfully salt water. But it was water, and many of the party sought thus to quench their thirst."

"Although it was salt!" cried Roger. "I should think it would have made them crazy."

"It did," responded the older man. "The torture of an unquenchable thirst with no means to allay it, led first to madness, then to death, and the valley claimed a fearful toll. Some died outright, others became maniacal, several indeed having to be shot by their comrades in an effort to save the lives of those that remained. Few animals and fewer men found their way to the scanty water of the Panamint, and the tale as told by the survivors made the words Death Valley a name of fear to the 'Forty-Niners' and other early travelers in what was then known as the 'Great American Desert.' Death Valley it was called, and Death Valley it will remain until all memory of America's pioneers is past."

"And is the Survey working in there, too?"

"I happen to know that there is a short reconnoissance trip to be made to look into the question of the borax deposits of the Valley and the Mohave Desert, and if you start right away, you ought to be able to get to Daggett a week before the party reaches there, or at the slowest, in plenty of time. The borax industry is large, and as it depends in a great measure on the information furnished by the Survey, it might be a good thing for you to know something about."

"And how shall I get there?"

"I will lend you Duke."

"Your own horse? And what will you do, Mr. Masseth?"

"Oh, I'll take Black's mare, and let him ride one of the mules over. I am none too anxious to take Duke through the Canyon any more than I have to."

"And the route?" queried the boy.

"You will not find any difficulty there, I think, because all you have to do is to follow the edge of the Canyon. You go west and then south, over the famous Hurricane Fault, and beside that mighty gate a mile high through which the Colorado runs, passing from the grandeur of the Canyon to the dismal torrid lower Sierra country. You will reach the Santa Fé at Needles, where you can take the train for Ludlow, and changing there go to Daggett, to await the arrival of the party. It is not such a great distance, and there are trails all the way to Needles. But remember, you are still under my direction, and all this is merely incidental to the main piece of work I require of you, and that is, the heliograph signal on October 21st."

"I'll be there, Mr. Masseth," said Roger quietly. "You can bank on me for that."

The boy was so silent on his way back to camp that Masseth rallied him a little on his unusual reserve.

"Don't you want to go into the Mohave country?" he said. "Because if you feel that way, I will try to arrange some other plan. Only I thought you might wish to see that sort of country and get an idea of what the work is like out there."

"Indeed I do," said Roger hastily. "What made you think I didn't?"

"You were so quiet about it. And quietness is not your strong point."

"It isn't that," said Roger, hastily, "but I was just wondering whether I would be able to remember all the scenes and incidents of the year."

"Not all of them, of course," said the older man, "but you will find that their variety in experience is invaluable. You told me you were going to Alaska with Rivers later on. Now, if you have seen the Death Valley work as well as triangulation in the Grand Canyon and surveying in the Minnesota swamps, you will have a fair idea of the immense range of the work of the Survey."

"It is a contrast, all right," said Roger. "From the flat, boggy country of Minnesota to the high dry peaks of the Canyon, and from the intense heat of the desert to the ice-bound ranges of Alaska is certainly quite a jump. But I'm very glad to have the chance, Mr. Masseth, though I shall be sorry to leave you and the rest of the party."

That evening in camp, the chief announced his intention of returning to the far side of the Canyon, and stated that Roger would be left to send a heliograph message a couple of months later, and that in the meantime he would visit the Mohave country for a few weeks.

"Why," commented the frontiersman, when this plan was unfolded, "I was figurin' myself how it mightn't be so worse an idea to prospect some in that Silverbow country, now that I'm 'way over here. My two boys are working a small claim of mine near Oak Springs Butte, an' I've a notion that there's a heap of gold in that Kawich country. Guess I'll go with you part of the way to Daggett, pard; that is, if you're agreeable."

Nothing could have suited the boy better, and his exuberant delight in the prospect of his friend's presence throughout the long ride was obviously pleasing to the old man.

"That's a go then, bub," he said; "if you want to stick to the old trail I'll help you keep it, and if you want to find a new one, why, I'll just follow right along."

"But when are you going to break camp, Mr. Masseth?" asked the boy, who was growing a little tired of the continual reference to his crossing of the Canyon.

"The day after to-morrow, I think," the chief of the party replied, "as the work should be done by that time; so you can start the same day, only in the opposite direction."

In spite of Roger's interest in going to a new field, however, and though he had beside him his grizzled friend, one of the keenest twinges of loneliness the boy had felt while on the Survey came over him a couple of days later, as he saw the party which he had so long considered as his own, ride away from the site of the camp, leaving the frontiersman and himself looking after them. He would much have preferred being the first to start, but as the main party had to cross the Canyon, movement at the earliest dawn was necessary. One consolation he had in the possession of Duke, the chief's horse and a great favorite with the boy.

As Roger and his friend started on their journey westward, the boy said:

"You were speaking of some mines out this way. Do you own gold mines?"

"No, bub, not gold. Wouldn't have 'em as a gift."

"Why not?" asked the lad, surprised.

"Cost too much to work, and there's no money in it. You know the old saying about gold mines, don't you?"

"No, what is it?"

"That 'A copper mine will bring you gold; silver, silver; but a gold mine will only bring you a few coppers!'"

"I never heard that before," replied the lad, "and it sounds queer, too."

"Well, it's true. I wouldn't mind betting," said the old pioneer, "that there's more gold been put into gold mines than ever was taken out of them."

"How's that?"

"Well, you take it all through. There's the time and money spent by the thousands of prospectors that spend all their lives wandering up and down the mountains trying to locate the gold. Then, when a vein is found, some fellow's got to put in a lot of capital to start to work it, and thousands have to be spent for machinery to crush it, before it is at all certain that the mine will pay. Then, in order to raise this money, brokers all over the United States are selling shares of these mines, and they make a good living out of it. And when you think how many tens of thousands of dollars are spent on each mine, and how many thousands of mines there are which have proved dead failures, and over and beyond this, how narrow the margin of profit is even on a successful strike, it doesn't look like much of a paying business, eh?"

The trail becoming too rough at this point for riding side by side, the boy dropped behind, thinking over the difference between the finding of gold as it really is, and as his adventurous ideas had supposed it to be. When the trail widened again the boy cantered up, and continued the former subject with the remark:

"Are your mines copper, then?"

"No, azurite."

"What's that?" asked the boy, who had never heard of it before.

"It's a sort of stone that they make up into all sorts of jewels that women wear. Of course it's not precious like sapphire and emerald and all that sort of thing, but that's perhaps because it is not as well known, nor as rare. It's just as pretty, I think. I'd rather have it than a gold mine or a copper mine, either, for that matter."

"Why?" asked Roger.

"Because it can be worked so easily. You see a small box of that stuff can be packed on a mule any distance and then shipped, and if a different point is used each time no one knows where it comes from and there is no competition. Now copper, you see, is only valuable in large quantities, and it needs a big industry to run it. And of this rarer sort of stuff, there's lots of it around for any one that wants to look for it."

"What sort of stuff?"

"All these rare mineral earths. The clay that's used in making gas mantles, for instance; or there's tungsten, which is worth a lot now for making the wires of incandescent light. I've a friend who's rich because he got hold of a deposit of tungsten from reading the Geological Survey bulletins. There's a lot more of it in the Snake Range of Nevada, just waiting for somebody who's got energy enough to go ahead and develop it."

Thus, throughout the entire trip, Roger found his interest in the work greatly whetted by this new view-point, looking at the Survey from the side of the shrewd Western man, seeking practical results, rather than the more professional and scientific aspect of the field worker himself. Indeed, it opened the boy's eyes immensely to the vastness of the importance of the department when he realized that there was scarcely a branch of manufacture that did not depend on some rare element, in some of its processes, and that these rare elements were brought to light in the very work that he had been doing. So it chanced that when Roger and his friend reached Daggett, he was as enthusiastic concerning the economic side of the work as he had been regarding its opportunities for adventure.

Masseth had estimated the time of the party which Roger was to join with close accuracy, for the boy had not been in the little settlement more than three days when the party rode up, all on mules. Roger introduced himself and presented Masseth's letter.

"Oh!" said his new leader in surprise. "So you're the boy who crossed the Grand Canyon alone! I heard of that in San Bernardino, some tourists were telling the story."

"Yes, Mr. Pedlar," said Roger with a flush. "But there wasn't so much to it, I just had to get across."

"Well, I'm glad to have you. Now what is your idea in joining us, because I see Mr. Masseth says that you are still on duty with him."

Roger explained the two months' signal that had been agreed upon, and Pedlar, tall and light of hue, as though the desert had bleached him, whistled softly.

"He's always taking long chances," he said, "but to do him justice they generally come out all right. As I understand it, then, you want to come along for a few weeks and then get back to Bright Angel Point in plenty of time."

"Yes, sir," the boy answered.

"Well, that will be about right, only it's not going to take as long as you think. It will be just a hurried reconnoissance. I suppose you know why we're going in?"

"Mr. Masseth said something about borax," the lad replied, "but he didn't say just what you were going to do."

"It's this way, Doughty," was the reply. "Borax, you know, was first obtained by evaporating the water of some lakes in California. Later, in the beds of some old dry lakes, the borax was found already evaporated by the sun, and for years these marsh crusts formed the whole supply of the country. Then the Geological Survey pointed out that before these lakes were dried up the borax must have flowed into them by means of some small streams or just the regular drainage of the rainfall."

"You mean," said Roger, interrupting, "that there must have been a lot of it near by somewhere, and that each rain just soaked away a little and brought it along."

"Exactly. Therefore it was up to the Survey to locate these large deposits, and this was done. A large bed was found at Borate, about twelve miles northeast of here, and this proved so valuable that more surveying was done, especially in the region about Death Valley, where one of the old salt marshes was located."

"Then it was the Survey that gave to the country all the borax it is now using."

"It was," replied Pedlar. "Now, you see, I am making a hasty trip to the known deposits, so that other related beds can be pointed out, as each new find adds to the resources of the country, or, in other words, makes the United States just that much richer."

"How is that?" asked the boy. "The government doesn't run the mines."

"No. But don't you see, the United States means the people of the United States, and if the money spent on borax goes to American producers in American fields instead of to Italy, where so much of it went before, the country is richer to that amount."

Then, putting the matter as simply as he could, Pedlar explained to the boy how greatly the commercial prosperity of the country is due to some of the lesser known government bureaus, and pointed out the wisdom of the fostering of American industries. Even so, it was not until the tangible discovery of a hitherto unknown bed of rock salt, fifty feet in thickness, that Roger realized how, every day in the year, the prosperity of the country was being advanced by this patient scientific investigation. The new salt deposit was found at the extreme south end of Death Valley, a few miles before the trail went through a gap in the Funeral Mountains. Skirting the Amargosa Desert, a furnace of cactus and alkali, the party reached Grapevine Peak, from which may be seen perhaps the most desolate and forbidding view in the Western Hemisphere.

"Behind you," broke in the voice of the chief, "beginning at that peak you see fifty miles away in the distance, and which is known as Oak Springs Butte, is a section of the country containing over 3,000 square miles, equal in size to the states of Delaware and Rhode Island together, which is absolutely waterless. In that appalling land of thirst there is not a river, stream, or brook; a spring is a thing unknown; no well has ever been sunk, and even the Indian waterhole exists only in imagination. At rare, very rare intervals, a cloudburst may come upon the parched land, but five minutes later there is no sign of moisture save for a cup in a ravine or a crevice in a rock, where water may lie for twenty-four hours. It is dryer and hotter than the Great Sahara Desert of Africa, and wild and rough beyond belief."

"And has that awful place been covered by the Survey, too?" asked the boy.

"I did one quadrangle," answered Pedlar, "and there's a party in there this season."

"But how do they manage for water?"

"They tote every drop. And," with a grim meaning, "they are not taking baths twice a day at that!"

"On this other side," continued the chief of the party after a pause, turning round, "is a place you know well by reputation."

"That is the famous Death Valley?" queried Roger.

"That," said the chief, putting his heels to the mule's side and starting down the slope, "is the infamous Death Valley."

Half-way down the slope Pedlar halted and pointed to a sign on a box lid, stuck into a pile of stone.

"Gruesome advertising, that!" he commented.

Roger read it. It was the signboard of a local undertaking company, and the implication of such a need for every one descending into the valley was to the boy more sinister than any of the stories he had heard about it. As they reached the valley, dunes twenty to thirty feet high surrounded them on every side, with a salt sand between, sometimes soft, sometimes with a treacherous crust through which the hoofs of the mules sank, often cutting their legs, into the wounds of which the alkaline dust penetrated, causing great pain. The boy tore his coat into strips to bind around the pasterns of Duke, but even so some slight scratches were unavoidable.

They journeyed on over this fearful traveling for many weary miles, till, suddenly, Roger's quick eyes, eagerly looking for new things, discerned at the entrance to a small rock-bound canyon a sliver of wood broken off and sticking upright in the sand. As wood in that country is as unusual as it would be to see a shaft of burnished silver protruding from the arid ground, Roger rode up to it. There, penciled apparently recently on the wood, were the following words:

The boy called to the chief. Pedlar came over and read the message, then quietly and with reverence removed his hat.

"Poor chap!" he said very softly. "There is no spring in that canyon."

He summoned the other members of the party and silently they rode up the narrow cleft. Roger and the chief were riding in advance, and after a few minutes' ride the latter pulled his mule in sharply, and pointed to the figure of a man lying near a rock in the full glare of the sun.

"Perhaps he isn't dead?" said the boy, his heart in his mouth.

"No use to hope that, my boy," was the grave reply. "See, he must have lain down in the afternoon, when that spot was shaded, and died before the next sun rose. No living man would lie exposed to such a sun as this."

They rode up. It was as the chief had said, and Titus's friend, whoever he might have been, would never see him more.

"Shall we make a grave?" asked Roger in an awed tone.

"Better in the little cemetery at Rhyolite," answered the other. "I will send word."

"But ought we not to make a pile of stones over him, or something?" suggested Roger, his mind full of thoughts running on the possibility of interference by wild beasts.

"Nothing can hurt him here," was the reply. "Not even a buzzard will haunt so desolate a spot as this. But still——" he paused. Then thinking that it might ease the boy's mind, as well as show respect for the dead, he gave orders to raise a cairn of stones over the body of "Titus."

The discovery cast a gloom over the party, and the penciled piece of wood, which was to be sent back to Rhyolite to be used instead of a headstone, seemed an uncanny thing to bear. The tragedy had given the boy a violent distaste for the bleak country, for he seemed to see a body lying under the lee of every cliff. He was glad when they reached civilization again, and he could turn his face away from the land of sage brush and alkali.

When he came to bid farewell to Mr. Pedlar, however, the latter looked at him a little keenly.

"I could see," the older man said, "that the Titus Canyon matter worked a little on your nerves. Now, I don't want you to feel that you must get hard, for you will find that the finest and most daring men in the world are often as tender as a woman, but it contains a most important lesson for you."

"And that is?" queried Roger.

"That it is only the fool who over-estimates his own strength."

CHAPTER IX
A FIRST-CLASS BUCKING MULE

The reconnoissance party had left him at Olancha, at the southern extremity of Owens Lake, a land of black volcanic lava and great beds of tuff. After the dazzling white of salt and borate deposits; the great sheets of black lava, and the heights of the Sierra Nevada behind, formed so strong a contrast that Roger could hardly believe that the two were but a couple of days' ride from each other. Towering over all, moreover, could be seen Mt. Whitney, the sentinel peak of the southern end of the Sierra, snow-capped and majestic, and Roger conceived the idea of riding thitherward to gain some idea of the life and scenery of the mountain-side.

A few hours' ride brought him to Lone Pine, where he put up for the night. In the course of casual conversation with some of the men in the little frame hotel, Roger mentioned that he was with the Geological Survey. This announcement he had found it necessary to make in a number of instances, for in that Western country a man's business is not regarded as a matter especially to be kept secret.

"Sho!" said one of the men, just in from a big cattle ranch. "I presoom, then, that you propose to hitch up with that peak-climbin' outfit?"

"Is there a geological reconnoissance party near here, then?" queried Roger interestedly.

"A what?"

"A geological reconnoissance party," repeated the boy, "a government survey."

"Geological reconnoissance is good!" exclaimed the Westerner. "If that salubrious phrase is a maverick, I reckon I'll brand it and inclood it in my string. But there was a bunch here the other day, with three-legged telescopes and barbers' poles, just like what you describe."

"How long ago?" asked the boy.

"'Bout a week, I surmise. An' they can't have got any thousand miles away, either, because, as I understood 'em, they was a-contemplatin' drawin' little picture-maps of the country as they went along."

Roger nodded understandingly.

"I know," he said, "that's just the delineation of the topographical contour."

The Westerner's jaw dropped for a moment, but he was game, and came right up to the scratch.

"Topographical contour I like!" he said. "This is our busy day on language. It may be a new sort of drink for all I know, but it sounds well. I presoom, partner, that you had better lend your valooable assistance to the delineation of the topographical contour on a geological reconnoissance!"

He looked round for the applause of the little gathering, which was readily and gleefully accorded him.

The boy laughed. "All right," he said, "I'll take my medicine. I hadn't noticed that it would seem like tall talk, but that's the way the men speak on the Survey."

"Which I've no objection, son," answered the other. "I'm allers willin' to rope and hog-tie a new bunch o' words, an' I has gratitood therefor."

"You all remember," broke in another speaker, "the time when Ginger Harry's gun-play was choked off by the vocab'lary Little Doc unloaded?"

And Roger, seeing the conversation pass into other hands, was glad to retire from the center of the stage in which he had unexpectedly found himself, and listened for all he was worth to the reminiscences of the days when cowboy life had not been spoiled by railroad tracks and barbed-wire fences.

Early the next morning, however, taking with him a few days' provisions, Roger started up the trail which had been pointed out to him as the one the survey party had taken a few days previously, and his now trained eye could easily detect where halts had been made and bench marks established for the mapping out of the contour of the country. At the same time he noticed that the party was pushing on rapidly, and by this he judged that the climbing of the peak was one of the objects of the expedition.

He had reached quite a sharp slope in the mountain, and was letting Duke take the trail slowly and quietly, when suddenly he heard above him a sharp blow, and then, far up the mountain-side a faint, "ting-ling-ling-ling" and a moment's pause, then louder, "crackety-crack-crack-crack" and then, with a tumult of crashes and whangs, a large tin pail went clattering down the mountain.

Roger looked up, and from the heights above him there floated down a vociferous and fluent torrent of language, which, even at that distance, sounded strange and barbarous to the boy's ears. Using his field-glasses, moreover, he could distinguish a figure leaning over a ledge some distance above, and by the long cue he could see it was a Chinaman. The sight gave him great encouragement, for he knew that the party he was following had with it a Chinese cook, named Ti Sing, well known in that region, and one of the most valued cooks in the Survey.

Realizing that he was near his goal the boy hurried on, and soon overtook the party beside a small river with a swollen stream, a recent cloudburst having filled to overflowing a creek usually fordable. The water would, of course, go down in a day or two, but the men did not want to wait. The building of a bridge seemed almost beyond feasibility, as the banks were flat and there was no way to get across with a rope even, for the first span.

"You see," said Roger, "it would seem like an intrusion if it came from me."

"Nothing o' the kind," said the other roughly. "I'm not going to steal another man's ideas and put them out as my own. What do you think I am? Here, boys," he continued, "this youngster has an idea that he says has been proved before. Let's try it. Tell us about it, son."

Roger flushed hot at being brought before a group of men he had never seen till that day, but he spoke up bravely.

"It doesn't seem right, I know," he said, "for me to do any talking, but I know of a scheme that might work here, if you thought it would go. Work it just like you do a canoe in tracking. You know with a rope from bow to stern, going against the current, if you pull on the bow, it will swerve in and on the stern it will sweep out?"

"That's right!" agreed several of the men.

"Well," went on the boy, "it would be pretty easy to get a tree half-way across, wouldn't it? Drop a tree in the river, fasten the butt end to shore, and then let the top sweep out into the stream, fastening the rope when it was out at a sharp angle up stream."

"Any fool can do that," said one of the party scornfully, "but you might just as well be on this side as only half-way across."

"Dry up, Hank, and don't get grouchy," said the first speaker, "the boy isn't through."

"I thought then," continued Roger, with a grateful glance at his ally, "that another tree could be cut down, away up the river, butt end first. Two ropes on, same as the other. Then, keeping the top down stream and checking off the ropes gradually, the current would sweep the tree to the other side of the stream. Let it float until the branches of the second tree interlocked with those of the first, held tight in the middle of the stream. Then slack up the butt end of the second tree, and as it swung round it would hit the bank on the further shore, and there is your bridge made."

"That would read all right in a book," grumbled the discontented one, "but a river like that isn't any child's kite business."

"But I didn't get it out of a book," replied the boy, a little hotly. "Mr. Herold, the geographer, told me that, and said that it had been done on some of the swollen streams of the Glacier National Park in Montana, where the streams are hard to cross."

His former friend also came to the boy's support.

"There is a lot of chance work in it," he said quietly, "but the plan sounds all right to me. Of course, if the second tree behaves like you say it should it would be all right, but there isn't any guaranty that it will. But it's worth the trying, and anything's better than standing here like a lot of dummies waiting for somebody to come along and tell us what to do."

One of the members of the party having been detailed to look up two suitable trees, and another to find out the narrowest and most convenient place in the river, it was not long before the two trees were down and dragged to their respective places on the bank. Roger's friend desired him to assume direction of the work, which Roger refused to do.

"It isn't my plan, anyway," he said. "As I told you it is only something I heard, and I wouldn't dream of thinking that I know as much about the way of going at it as any of you," a modest speech which won him favor, even with the disgruntled packer.

The launching of the first tree, however, proved so easy, the current carried it to its place with so much readiness that all were encouraged. It was securedly anchored at the shore and pointed up stream, with little difficulty. But the second tree, owing to having been too short, proved a failure at the first attempt, and it was not until a tree of just the right height had been secured that success was attained. The second time, the tree drifted quietly down, entangled in the branches of the other tree, according to programme, and the butt being slackened away it landed fair and true upon the other shore. Without delay one of the most active of the men crawled out and lashed the two trees together, then crawled over the second tree and stood on the further shore triumphant.

But it must be admitted that while the passage had been achieved, it was a perilous one at best. The current foamed over the trunks of the trees and fairly boiled through the intertwined branches. Bit by bit, all that the mules had carried in their packs was taken over, even the saddles being borne over this arboreal bridge. Great as had been the difficulty of making the bridge, scarcely less hard was it to make Ti Sing cross. He called on all his gods, in eighteen several and distinct dialects of Chinese, but the men were obdurate, and with one pulling him in front and another pushing him behind, he was at last brought over.

Then a rope was stretched from shore to shore, passing through a loose ring. This was fastened to the girth of a mule, one rope was tied to his head to keep him from drowning and another to his tail to make him keep his temper, for a mule can't get irritated with his tail tied, and thus, half-drowned and altogether weary, the mules were got across, just as the chief of the party came up. He said nothing until with his assistant he had crossed and seen the animals over safely, then turning to the packer:

"Whose idea?" he asked briefly.

The man pointed to Roger in reply, and the chief walked over to where he stood, watching the men chaff Ti Sing about the missing tin pail.

"That's an old trick of Herold's," he said, "but I never heard of any one else using it. Where did you get hold of the idea, boy?"

"From Mr. Herold, sir," answered Roger. "He told me about it before I started into the field."

"Oh, you're on the Survey, then. What party?"

"Mr. Masseth's."

"Then what in thunder are you doing up here?"

So Roger recounted to him his story, showing that he had to return to the Canyon in a few weeks, but that he couldn't see any fun in lying around waiting for the time to pass. He pointed out that he was especially anxious to fit himself for work in Alaska, and quoted Rivers' dictum as to the experience he would need.

"Well," replied Saracen, "I guess that's right enough. You've just come to see the Sierra country. We're not going to stay long on this side, and after I get through with this little bit of peak—which was the reason of the crossing that stream—we shall go to the other side of the mountain, where I can put you on the main trail. By that means you will have a couple of weeks up here, and still be able to get back to the Canyon to finish that bit of work you are pledged to do there."

Roger thanked him heartily, and began his ten days of mountain climbing, an experience utterly new, for even the scrambling up and down the terraced cliffs of the Colorado was a different matter from the scaling of apparently inaccessible crags, where the climber faced no little peril in making the ascent. Further, in order to do the drawing after he got up, he would have to be tied on and have the plane table tied, while working on a knife-blade ledge all day.

Some few days after his arrival, Roger had the unexpected opportunity of seeing a mule train possessed by fear, and watching a mule buck. Mules rarely buck, so the lad was conscious of the value of the experience. It happened on a fairly wide trail, but which sloped considerably to the side of the mountain, and Roger was riding beside the chief of the party. Suddenly a loud commotion was heard in the rear of the pack train, and Saracen and Roger reined up. Duke, always restive and nervous, began to prance about, showing evidence of real fear, and while Roger was a good horseman and kept his seat easily, he could not keep the beast on the trail, and the bay danced off to the side, where on the turf, three or four yards from the beaten track, he brought him, snorting and trembling, to a standstill.

Then he had time to look about him. On the trail immediately above him, the lead mule, bestridden by Saracen, was performing evolutions that would not have disgraced a trick circus beast, cavorting and pirouetting and bucking, evidently longing to bolt, but held down by the iron hand of his rider. Just as the beast was a little quieted and Roger thought of resuming the trail, there came a clattering of hoofs, and whish! a runaway mule flashed by, arousing Duke and the lead mule to a new exhibition of bucking. Roger soon had his mount pacified, but Saracen was getting angry, and was applying whip and spurs without stint, to no purpose, for a couple of minutes later another of the pack train's mules came down tearing up the dust, then two together in a panic of stampede.

All the while the lead mule, held to one place by a grip that never relaxed for an instant, plunged and reared and strained every nerve to unseat his rider. Next came a salvo of shouts and objurgations, and two of the packers hurtled along the trail, sawing at the mouths of their animals, but utterly unable to hold them in, and indeed, narrowly escaping being ridden over by the rest of the pack mules following. Saracen always declared that his mule counted each animal as it went by, but certain it is that no sooner had the last of the pack train vanished in the distance than the lead mule steadied down. No damage had been done save that the rider's hat, though strongly fastened on, had been bucked off. A few minutes later, back came the other men, who curiously enough were in similar case. The three hats were found close together on the trail.

When an investigation was made, no known cause could be found to account for the sudden bolt, except that a white mule, one of the last in the train, had become suddenly frightened, possibly because there was a bear in the neighborhood, and had started to run, bunting into the mule next in the lead, and thus communicating the fright all the way along the line. Fortunately no mishaps had occurred, and though some of the packs had shaken loose, none had been thrown and nothing was lost.

The very next day after this, the mule in question, which, by the way, was the only white mule in the party, quietly slipped off the side of a cliff with a drop of one hundred and forty feet, landed upside down on the pack-saddle, bounced twenty feet farther, and then quietly got up, shook himself, and began to graze. Being white, the mule was easily visible, and as it was seen that he was not hurt and in the pack were certain things almost indispensable, it was decided to go down and recover him.

When this was pointed out, Roger, thinking that it might take some time to recover the mule, felt that he would be wiser to start on his journey for the Canyon, and finding out the nearest trail from the chief of the party, he started back to fulfil his "engagement with the sun." Having plenty of time, he took the trip quietly, reaching Lone Pine a few days later, and making his way south to the railroad at Mohave.

With this comrade to while away the journey it seemed but little time to Roger until they reached Needles, where the lad took to the saddle again. It was all familiar ground to him now and no trouble was sustained in reaching the little camp on the north side of the Canyon where he had been bidden signal. He arrived three days before the appointed time, desiring rather to be sure than to run the risk of some accident delaying him. He found the provisions cached safely and knew where to go for water. After making sure that the little instrument and the glass had not been touched, the boy having carried the key about his neck the entire two months, he settled down for his three days' wait.

The night before the date appointed, having a vague fear lest he might oversleep himself, though it was a thing he had not done in all the time he had been on the Survey, the boy lay down in front of the little glass, wedging himself in so that he could not move, and having the glass pointed so that the rays of the rising sun would be directed immediately into his eyes. It was not a comfortable night's rest, but the plan operated like a charm, for the sun's rim had hardly more than appeared above the horizon when the reflected rays shone directly into his face and wakened him instantly.

He got up without delay, and though considerable time was to elapse, prepared all before his breakfast. That meal done, he sat beside his heliograph to await the time. There was a variation of a minute and a half between the two watches, and Roger thought it better to take the later time, for, he reasoned, if Masseth was there he would be sure to wait, while if he flashed too early, his chief might not be ready.

Promptly at the hour, therefore, the light shining equally about the edges of the quarter-inch hole, he raised the cloth shutter that had been in front of the aperture and three times let the strong light shine through. He almost fancied that he could see the reflection on the distant peak.

Five minutes elapsed, then he repeated the signal, three flashes of ten seconds' duration, as had been agreed upon. Then, suddenly and unexpectedly, he saw on the distant peak to which he was signaling, an answering triple flash. He waited the required time, five minutes, then gave the old signal, but followed it by three quick flashes of a second apiece. This was answered in the same manner, telling the boy that not only had his signal been seen, but also that his answer to the response had been observed and that everything was right.

Thus, across seven miles of the roughest country in the world, did Roger receive his official release and message of farewell from the Grand Canyon party he had served so faithfully.

CHAPTER X
AMERICANS THAT ARE FORGOTTEN

So when Roger had packed the little heliograph instrument in as small compass as possible, in order that it might not be ungainly in the saddle, and gone to the edge of the Canyon to look over, the scene struck him with loneliness. In precisely the same place, two months before, he had stood and made up his mind to risk the peril of that single-handed journey, and his courage began to revive as he remembered how well it had resulted. Down below him he could see Bright Angel Creek, and far away, the peak to which he had signaled, all redolent of the interest of the summer now fast waning. Even the trail upon which he set out to return was full of the memories of his frontiersman friend, who had lightened the way with anecdote and information on his first journey there.

But while Roger was inly conscious of a feeling of isolation in being thus cut off from all the Survey parties, and looked forward to his ride to Needles with little anticipation, that sense was not shared by Duke, who, having twice before with Roger traversed the high Kaibab plateau, remembered well the succulent long bunch-grass, the fragrant lupine and the toothsome wild oats. For the Kaibab plateau, lying high and therefore being moister than the surrounding territory, is a veritable garden. The gently declining ravines, instead of being filled with boulders at the bottom, are decked with flowers and their bases are avenues of smooth, rich lawn; on the banks rise spruces and pines, with the white trunks and pale foliage of the quivering aspen; and on the table-land above in wild profusion grow every sort of herb and plant and flower.

The desert lies to the north, the inaccessible Canyon to the south, an alkali waste to the westward, and the desolate cactus land to the east, but the Kaibab plateau, 8,000 feet above the sea, is a sylvan paradise. Yet there is no running water, and travel over it must be well within reach of trails. Here alone, in this vast arid tract, it rains frequently, but the rains form no streams, for the whole plateau is pitted with cups or depressions ten to twenty feet across, into which the water runs, and through which by some underground passages it disappears only to swell in some invisible manner the swollen torrent of the Colorado, 6,000 feet below.

Through this plateau Roger rode slowly, enjoying its peacefulness the while. No great hurry consumed him, his present work was done, and until he reached Prescott, he was his own master. Duke, moreover, had fared ill in the hard riding of the past few weeks, and so it was by very easy stages that the boy crossed the Kaibab, and indeed, loafed one whole week in the wonderful De La Motte Park, in the midst of the plateau, to give his horse a rest and to let him fill out his bones a little on the succulent grasses. A most beautiful country to enter—and a hard one to leave. No artificial maze is more confusing, for enticing as the ravines are, they are all exactly alike, no landmarks exist by which a direction may be followed, and the valleys themselves wind and double like a frightened hare.

Roger, however, had crossed this forest the first time with the frontiersman, who knew the trails like a book, and he had learned the general lie of the country from him. Besides, the lad had imbibed enough woodcraft since his appointment on the Survey to enable him to follow a trail, no matter how faint or tortuous, a thing which even the Mormon herders who follow the mazes of the wood with a keenness equal to that of the Indians, and with more intelligence, admit is a difficult thing to do.

But idleness was in no sense a characteristic of Roger's make-up, and he was glad when he reached Stewart's Canyon, where the main trail took a direct road northwards to round the Dragon and the Little Dragon and to skirt the Virgin Range still further to the northward. But as the trail descended into the valley and the altitude became less, it was seen that Paradise was left behind. Instead of pines and aspens, the ferocious and forbidding cactus took its place. The yuccas or Spanish bayonets, the prickly pear, the gaunt Sahaura and the spiny devil, together with other truculent barbarians of the vegetable kingdom convinced the boy that he had left behind all the attractive part of his trip.

To the west, Roger quickened his pace and passed over the Shewitz plateau, crossing stretches of lava, black and recent-looking, as though they had been erupted but a few years before. Then, coming to the famous geological break in the rocks known as the Hurricane Fault, he turned sharply to the south through the plain uninteresting territory of Eastern Nevada and California and reached the Needles again with little trouble to himself or Duke. By this time Roger felt quite at home in and about the Canyon, and he was conscious of boyish pride when the proprietor of El Garces, the big hotel at the Needles, welcomed him as an old traveler.

Changing at Prescott Junction, it was not long before Roger found himself in Prescott, a thriving and flourishing town of the Southwestern type. There Roger found a large packet of mail, letters from home, notes from former school friends to whom he had written at divers times throughout his trip, and which had been sent to Washington, his field address not being known. But the letter that was first opened bore no stamp, being franked with the seal of the United States Geological Survey.

As before, there was inclosed with the letter of instructions a personal letter from Mitchon, to the effect that favorable reports had been received and implying that his next party probably would be the last before his start on the Alaskan trip. The last few words made Roger almost leap with delight, for it was evidence to him that if he continued as well as he had begun, he would be accepted by Rivers, which throughout had been the goal of his ambition.

The letter of direction, moreover, was fairly pleasing, though couched in the usual dry official terms. It was to the effect that he should join the topographical party under the leadership of Mr. Gates, present post-office address being Aragon, County Presidio, Texas, and that the party was engaged in mapping the Shafter quadrangle. Borrowing a large atlas, the boy promptly proceeded to look up Aragon and Shafter, and found, to his delight, that it was near the boundary line of Mexico.

After scampering through the rest of his mail, Roger promptly went to the little depot and asked for a ticket to Aragon. Leisurely the agent went about filling his request, then, looking at him with half-shut eyes, said, with the easy familiarity of the West:

"Folks down there?"

"No," said Roger shortly, "going down on government business."

The agent's eyes opened slightly with a gleam of amusement in them.

"Ain't you pretty young for the Pecos country, son?" he said.

"Why?" asked the boy, quickly.

"Wa'al, it's pretty wild down there yet. It's nothing like what it used to be in the days when the Apaches used it as a sort o' Tom Tiddler's ground for picking up scalps, but I wouldn't go so fur as to call it an abode of peace, right now."

"But the Indians are all in reservations now!" said Roger, surprised at the suggestion of danger.

"That's right, son, so they are. But the Greasers ain't all dead yet, more's the pity."

"What's a Greaser?"

"Guess you don't know much about that saloobrious portion of the world if you ain't had the pleasure of a Greaser's company. Why, son, he's a varmint that's about one-fourth Mexican, one-fourth Spaniard, one-fourth Indian, and the other quarter just plain meanness. He's as venomous as a rattler, as sneaking as a coyote, as bad-tempered as a bob-cat, and just about as pretty to look at as a Gila monster."

Roger laughed.

"You don't seem to love them much," he said, "but I guess that description's coming it a little strong."

"Not a blamed bit!" answered the agent, handing the boy his ticket, "an' you'll find out that the rest of the people down there are just about as fond of 'em as me. I lived down in Tombstone for some years, and I wouldn't take the whole county of Cochise for a gift unless I could teetotally banish all those cusses. Prescott ain't any lily-fingered Eastern town, by a long shot, but it's a Sunday school compared to the Pecos country, you can bet on that!"

"Well," replied the boy, nodding, "I'll try to come out of there alive, just the same."

"Hope you do, son," was the reply, "an' I'll give you jest one piece of advice which may help that hope along a lot. It's this—don't let any Greaser who has a grudge agin you get within' knifin' distance, or your camp mates will be picking out a nice chaste headstone and sending your last lovin' messages to your friends."

"All right," replied the boy cheerfully, "I'll keep it in mind."

The day following, Roger, having regretfully bidden good-by to Duke, boarded the train for the Pecos country, but the trip was so replete with wonder that there was no time for lamenting even the absence of a favorite horse. Passing through Phœnix, which a few years ago was nothing but the desolate haunt of the dying consumptive, and which, through irrigation, has become one of the garden spots of the Southwest, they came to Casa Grande. Roger had never even heard of the place, but in the observation car an elderly man, who was traveling with his son, began speaking of the wonderful ruins that lay north of the road, and casually showed that he was going to stop off and visit them. After a moment's hesitation, Roger, who had been sitting close by, turned to him.

"I beg your pardon, sir," he said, "but I felt sure you would not mind my hearing what you said about the Casa Grande ruins."

"Not at all, my boy," was the ready reply, "I am only glad if I was able to interest you."

"Immensely," said Roger. He paused diffidently, then went on, "I am on the Geological Survey, sir," he said, "and on my way to join a new party, but have a day or two to spare, as the Director has been so kind as to give me opportunities to visit different fields of work to gain experience for a trip to Alaska next year. You said you were going to visit Casa Grande, and—I hope you won't mind my saying this—I should like to go with you if I might, and learn something about a place of which I know so little."

The elder man held out his hand.

"Glad to have you," he said, heartily, shaking hands. Then, turning, he introduced him to his son, Phil, a young fellow about Roger's age, and but very few minutes elapsed before the train stopped.

"Of course you know," said Roger's new friend, when they were in the stage and bowling through the plain, "that this part of the country is just full of evidences of a civilization far earlier than the Indians and earlier even than the Aztecs or Toltecs."

"But, father," said Phil, "I supposed the Aztecs were the first people in the country!"

"So do many people, Phil," was the reply, "but they were not. They were a wandering tribe, as Indians might be, who conquered a people older than themselves called the Nahoas, about whom we know very little. But the Aztecs achieved a good deal of skill in working in stone, and the fact that their monuments are not perishable, makes their civilization enduring in fame."

"Then the Nahoas were the first?" queried Roger.

But his informant shook his head, smiling slightly.

"They may have been," he answered, "but it seems very doubtful. I think we have to go back a great deal further when we start to look for early Americans."

"Why?"

"Because of the evident age of the remains. For example," he continued, "I don't suppose either of you has been noticing this road?"

"I've been wondering at it this last half hour," said Roger. "It isn't like any canyon that I ever saw, and by the way it cuts through different levels of strata it can't have been made by water. And if it's made by hand, why should they cut a road, when it could have been made on the level above with half the trouble?"

"You are observant, my boy, and your eye has been well trained," was the approving reply. "But you don't seem to realize that this may be artificial and yet not have been intended for a road, although it is so used now."

"Oh, I know," broke in Phil, "it must be a canal."

"Hardly big enough for a canal," said his father, "though you are on the right track. This was an irrigating ditch, and if you will notice, at almost regular intervals, smaller dry ditches fork from it. This desert through here is just honeycombed with works of irrigation, great aqueducts, canals and lateral ditches, which at one time must have made this barren waste a field of blossoms."

"It seems a shame, somehow," said Roger, "to think of all that work being abandoned."

"Abandoned indeed! This place once possibly was the New York or London of its time, but ruins represent all that is left of the cities, and a thousand different kinds of cactus have taken the place of the cornfield and the vineyard. And," he added, pointing ahead, "of all the palaces of those unknown emperors, ruins like these are all that remain."

The boys thought it rather a strain on the imagination to picture palaces in the dry square adobe walls, but as they walked up close to them, some lurking hint of former greatness became felt. The Casa Grande must have stood some four or five stories in height and the rooms were rarely less than twenty feet square, so that the idea was given not only of size but also of extreme age, this being due in part, of course, to the softness of the material of which they were built.

Only a hint of greatness, but when, standing beside the ruins, the boys looked over the country below them, the real magnitude of the work became apparent. Following the pointing forefinger of the elder man, Roger could see what ninety-nine out of every hundred would have overlooked, the regular relations of green defiles, which, though veiled by the hand of time, were evidently artificial work. One great canal could be traced tapping the Salt River on the south side, near the mouth of the Verde; this, for three miles and a half, formerly flowed through a bed cut by hand out of the naked rock in the Superstition Mountains to a depth of a hundred feet. This canal alone, with its four branches and the distributing ditches, irrigated 1,600 square miles of country, and the engineering would be no disgrace to modern times.

"And how long ago were these canals dug?" asked Roger.

"No one knows," was the truthful and unhesitating reply. "It is a puzzle that so far archæologists have tried in vain to solve. They must be older than the Aztlan civilizations——"

"What are those?" asked Phil.

"Aztecs, Toltecs, and that bunch, aren't they?" queried Roger, wanting to show his knowledge.

"Mayas, too," said the other, smiling assent, "and they must be older than the Nahoa empire, of which little is left except in the south of Peru. Just how old is impossible to say, and the only clew we have is that these canals and ditches are in part filled up with volcanic lava and debris from the Bradshaw mountains, and geologists are able to show that these eruptions cannot have taken place less than two thousand years ago."

"That's as old as Rome!" said Roger in surprise.

"That means that the end of it, at latest guess, was older than the beginning of Rome, practically. And, though this volcanic action has been later than these immense works of early man in America, there is left neither a tradition of the millions of people who lived then, nor even of the forces which led to the decay of the empire and the overwhelming volcanic disaster in which it may have closed."

On their way back to the train, the old traveler gave Roger a long account of the early settlement of that part of the country by the Spaniards, and pointed out, as they passed through Tucson a few hours later, the quaint mediæval architecture of a town which claims its beginning as far back as 1560, and in which many houses three centuries old are still standing; the oldest town in the Southwest, with the exception of Santa Fé.

A mirage, or rather a succession of them, formed the basis for some thrilling African desert tales, with which Phil's father was well-primed, and when, passing round the mile-long horseshoe curve, the train pulled into El Paso, Roger was extremely sorry to leave the friends who had made his trip such a pleasant one.

A few hours sufficed for the boy to purchase some trifles needed to make up his equipment, and bright and early the following morning he started for Aragon, where he would find out the location of the party he was to join. It was quite dull after the jollity and interest of the trip to El Paso, and Roger began to wish that he had arrived, and was pining to get into action again. But the incident for which he was anxious did not fail him. As the train pulled up at Chispa, a station about fifty miles west of Aragon, it was seen that almost the whole population of the village was at the depot, a crowd numbering perhaps twenty people, and foremost among them a man carrying a little girl, about eight years old, in his arms.

In answer to questions put to him in Spanish, for he could speak no English, the father explained his trouble by pointing to six little marks on the girl's leg, three groups of two, all near each other. No sooner was it seen what the trouble was than a big six-footer shouldered his way through the car.

"When?" he asked.

In a torrent of Spanish and gesticulation, the man explained that the child had been struck by a rattlesnake three times, fortunately, a small one, just half an hour before the train came in, and that he was going to take her to the nearest doctor, who was in Marfa, a town some few stations down the line.

"Well," said the big man, "I can fix her, I guess. That is, I've got the regular serum here, but I haven't a syringe. Any gentleman got a hypodermic needle?"

But none of the passengers would confess to the use of a needle, because of its implication that its owner would be a "dope fiend," and the querist shrugged his shoulders.

"Are you a doctor?" asked one of the men in the car.

"I'm not a little girl doctor, I'm a cattle doctor," answered the big man with a laugh, "or at least I'm a government inspector, and I haven't anything smaller than this!" He pulled out of his case a hypodermic syringe used for injecting fluid into cattle.

But the father sent up a cry of protest at the sight of the instrument, and would not allow it to be used. The matter was explained to him in Spanish, in English, and in half a dozen different dialects of each, but he only shook his head.

"Has anybody got a sharp knife? I mean really sharp," next asked the inspector, who had assumed control of the situation and was in no wise disconcerted by the opposition of the girl's father. There was a moment's pause and then Roger stepped forward.

"I was taught on the Survey," he emphasized the words to give them weight with the government official, "to keep a blade sharp, and I guess this is about as good steel as you can get."

The inspector took it, opened it, and ran his thumb along the blade.

"It's a good knife, son," he said, "but it's no surgical instrument. Some one lend me a razor, I use a safety myself."

Of the stock of razors that were handed to him, the big man took one, sterilized it in some boiling water from the dining car, and prepared to make an incision in the girl's leg just above the fang marks.

But no sooner had the blade touched the skin and drawn a little blood, than with a yell the father leaped straight at the inspector, flashing a knife as he did so. Not expecting an attack, the government man would have been taken unawares, but that is a land of quick action, and before the Mexican could bring his arm down, he found his wrist seized, and a revolver barrel an inch from his nose stopped his onward rush.

"That's a Greaser's gratitood, every time," said the holder of the gun. "Go ahead with your job, pard, and if this ornery cayuse so much as squirms, I'll give you an elegant opportoonity to perform a little operation for bullet extraction."

The inspector, who, seeing that the danger was averted, had gone back to his task, merely nodded. He made several wide and deep incisions, thinking that scars were better than death, and then, despite the crying of the girl and the fluent curses of the father, rubbed soda in the wounds with a vigorous hand.

"There!" he said, as he completed the task. "I think she'll do all right now!"

"But is that a sure preventive?" asked the boy.

"No, son," was the reply. "To be honest with you, nothing's sure against a rattler, because, you see, some folks' constitutions are worked on more easily than others, but in a certain number of cases the soda fixes it. That is, if you're not afraid to cut deep enough."