The Argosy — page 35: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

THE PRIZE OF THE MISSING GOLD MINE. 227 ‘‘ So you agree tomy terms?’’ said the don. ‘‘ There must be no shifting about in the matter.’’ ‘ Yes,’? said Lola, ‘‘ I agree.”’ She went to her chamber and sat by the window to watch for Camp- thorne so as to be the first to tell him the good news that he had only to go and find the old Spanish mine before December, and then come back to marry her. Don Albino sat smiling in high satisfaction at the way he had got the best of the young lovers with the impossible condition about the Cincha Larga. For to search for that historic mine was in the estimation of people in general in that region about as practicable as to hunt for the pot of gold at the foot of the rainbow. Not but that the mine was, or had been, somewhere in the mountains to the west ; and from it, by common report, the Spaniards, centuries before, had taken millions of treasure in gold. When near the end of the seven- teenth century the Pueblo Indians rose in revolt against their Spanish Op- pressors and drove them out of New Mexico, they obliterated, or concealed past finding, the mines they had worked in as slaves, the Cincha Larga with the others. When the Spaniards came back, at last, to possess the country again, try as they might, they could not rediscover the Cincha Larga mine. So many searchers lost their lives in the attempt, through exposure, acci- dents, and Apache arrows, that the superstition became prevalent that the mine had been laid under enchantment, and that the discoverer of it would perish on the spot. In sending Campthorne out to find it, Don Albino felt that he was playing a sure game with his daughter and her-American lover, in which the man of his own choice, Don Enrico, would come in for the prize at the end. Aunt Eloisa took good care that Lola should gét no chance to speak with ~Campthorne that morning. Instead, when he came into the plaza, Don Albino, standing at the door of his store, greeted him pleasantly, for the first time in many months, invited him to his office and a cigar, and, by degrees, opened the subject of his going out to search for the Cincha Larga, which undertaking he presented in the light of a hopeful project. The climax of the interview came when Don Albino produced from his safe a re- markable mine specimen. It was a piece of quartz of a peculiar, clouded tint. It had been broken apart but was held together by strands of wire gold, and its surface, without and within the fracture, was spangled with gold specks and nuggets. ‘ This,’’ said the don, ““was taken, more than two hundred years ago. from the Cincha Larga mine. It was preserved through all the years that followed in a Franciscan mission, until it was given me by a Franciscan father. The man who brings me from the mine he discovers a specimen to match this, I should be proud to call my son-in-law.”? The end of this conversation was that Campthorne went .to the clerk of the “#enda with authority from Don Albino to select such supplies as he deemed necessary for a three months’ trip into the mountains; and, in an hour, there were piled up on the floor the sides of bacon, sacks of flour, coffee and sugar, the repeating rifle, pick, shovel, coffee pot, and frying pan, that CoOMmicoool<s (S@)