Page:Allan Dunn--Dead Man's Gold.djvu/90

76 desert sun seemed to have desiccated all superfluous flesh from his bones, leaving only enough to pack his veins and arteries, his tendons, sinews, and muscles. Lean and tall and taciturn he seemed, his black eyes gleaming through lowered lids like fragments of newly chipped obsidian, taking in his audience with a certain suspicious cunning.

"Get any sparklers this time?" asked the landlord. The man's face changed from a leather mask into animation.

"Not yit," he replied. "But I'll do it. I'll turn 'em up afore long. Stands to all reason an' scientific logic. Then we'll see who'll do the larfing. I'll find 'em. Never you fear." He pulled out a mass of grayish rock from his pocket that shone with crimson gleams.

"See them garnets?" he said, eagerly, with a certain childishness in the display. "Look at them olivines." He scooped up half a palmful of bottle-green fragments that gave out little gleams of light, "chrysolites, some call 'em—or peridots. What grows in the rocks where peridots and garnets are found? Tell me that. Or I'll tell you. Di'monds!"

The landlord laughed.

"Come in because you're broke, Dick? Well, here are three gents who want to explore the head-waters of the Last Fork of the Tonto. Goin' to take pictures an' pick up arrer-heads an' write books about the cave-dwellings. They're lookin' for a guide. Want to go along?"

"Di'mond Dick" surveyed them narrowly.