CHAPTER XIII
madre d'oro
LUST of gold ran in their veins. Harvey seemed to have thrown off his years and was as eager as any of them. Close at hand was the first prize he had ever drawn in the long lottery of his prospecting. A little food was snatched, the burros were given a little grain and some grass brought in from the valley, and then they prepared for the conquest of the butte.
It seemed to have felt the influence of the quake that had filled up the gorge of the placer-creek, for it tilted slightly to the east and there was a superficial fracture on that side, where the rock showed less decomposed than the rest of it. The winds seemed to have piled up about its base for, try as they did in the waning daylight, they could not see any signs of the walled-up cavern through which the spring had once issued. Stone fancied it had been so blocked by the priests who inhabited or frequented it, to prevent the precious mineral from being washed away from the matrix within; for he recollected Lyman's wandering sentences about mummies and skulls and fancied that this place must have been both temple and fortress to a dead race.
Besides this crack, the mass was fluted from base
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