Some time after Felipe's departure, Stephens went to his powder-keg and measured out three charges of blasting-powder.
"Curious, isn't it?" said he aloud to himself as he handled the coarse black grains in which so much potential energy lay hid,--"curious how these Indians, hard-working folk as ever I saw, have lived two or three hundred years here under the Spanish Government, and been allowed by those old Dons to go on, year after year, short of water for irrigating, every time."
He closed up his powder-keg again securely, and locked it away in the room that he used as a storeroom; it was the inner of the two rooms that he rented in the block of dwellings inhabited by the Turquoise family. Here he lived, alone and independent, simply paying Felipe a trifle to do his chores and go up to the mesas and get his fire-wood. Indoors the prospector distinctly preferred to keep himself free and unbeholden to anybody; he continued to live exactly as he did in camp, doing his own cooking and mending, and doing them thoroughly well too, with a pioneer's pride in being sufficient to himself in all things.
"And now," said he, as he wrapped up the charges of powder, "I'll just show my good friends of Santiago here a little trick those old Spanish drones were too thick-headed or too lazy ever to work. This fossilised Territory of New Mexico don't rightly know what's the matter with her. She's got the best climate and some of the best land in America, and all she's good for at present is to bask in the sun. If she only knew it, she's waiting for a few live American men to come along and wake her up."
Stephens had been so much alone in the mountains that he had got into the solitary man's trick of talking to himself. Even among the Indians he would sometimes comment aloud upon things in English, which they did not understand; for in spite of their companionship he lived in a world of his own.
He took down a coil of fuse from a shelf, cut off a piece, rolled it up, and stowed it away along with the charges of blasting-powder in his pockets, first feeling carefully for stray matches inside. "Yes," he continued, as his fingers pried into every angle of each pocket preparatory to filling it with explosive matter, "drones is the only name for Spaniards when it comes to talking real work. They don't work, and they never did. They've made this Territory into a Sleepy Hollow. What she wants is a few genuine Western men, full of vim, vinegar, and vitriol, just to make things hum for a change. New Mexico has got the biggest kind of a future before her when the right sort of men come along and turn to at developing her."