Page:A-Hunting of Deer-1906.djvu/75

Rh mysterious race whose presence anywhere on this continent is a nest-egg of romance or of terror. They were Spaniards! You need not say buccaneers, you need not say gold-hunters, you need not say swarthy adventurers even: it is enough to say Spaniards! There is no tale of mystery and fanaticism and daring I would not believe if a Spaniard is the hero of it, and it is not necessary either that he should have the high-sounding name of Bobadilla or Ojeda.

Nobody, I suppose, would doubt this story, if the cave were in the mountains of Hispaniola or in the Florida Keys. But a Spaniard in the Adirondacks does seem misplaced. Well, there would be no romance about it if he were not misplaced. The Spaniard, anywhere out of Spain, has always been misplaced. What could draw him to this loggy and remote region? There are two substances that will draw a Spaniard from any distance as certainly as sugar will draw wasps,&mdash;gold and silver. Does the reader begin to see light? There was a rumor that silver existed in these mountains. I do not know where the rumor came from, but it is necessary to account for the Spaniards in the cave.

How long these greedy Spaniards occupied the cave on Nipple Top is not known, nor how much silver they found, whether they found any, or whether they secretly took away all there was in the hills. That they discovered silver in considerable quantities is a fair inference from the length of their residence in this mountain, and the extreme care they took to guard their secret, and the mystery that enveloped all their movements. What they mined, they smelted in the cave and carried off with them.

To my imagination nothing is more impressive than