“To-morrow,” said Johnny Buffalo, with a transparent air of triumph, “we will go to the cleft in the rocks, by the path which no man knoweth, and you shall go down into the deep pit and find the gold.”
“What’s that?” Rawley looked up from crowding tobacco into his pipe after a most satisfying supper. “You found it, did you?”
“My sergeant led me to the place,” Johnny Buffalo stated gravely. “There was a mistake. The great and high mountain which holds the gold was not that greatest mountain which we can see. There were cedar trees scattered over the face of the mountain when my sergeant found the gold. That was many years ago. Now there are no cedar trees or trees of any kind. That is why we could not find the place. One year ago, my sergeant came and led me to the spot.”
“Is the gold there?” Rawley leaned forward, studying the old Indian through half-shut eyes.
“I did not go down into the pit. My sergeant would not permit me to go. He says that you will go, and that you will there learn the truth about riches. He told me that I must not go down and look, for it would not be good that I should see what will be revealed to you.” Johnny Buffalo spoke as if he were reciting a lesson. His face was turned toward the empty wheel chair, drawn before the open window.
Rawley frowned over the lighting of his pipe. The mystical message made little impression on his mind, but he did worry over the Indian’s implicit belief in it. His promise to Nevada bound him to silence on the subject of hallucinations, however, even though he had in mind several things which he would like to say.
Johnny Buffalo, sitting straight-backed with his hands spread palm down on his knees, related all the incidents of his life during the past two years. Queo had been accused of other murders, and after a particularly heinous one at the Techatticup mine had disappeared altogether. Once Johnny Buffalo had seen him and had taken a shot at him, but again the gun had kicked,—or perhaps his aim was not too good. He had missed. Once his cabin had been robbed of food, and he suspected the outlaw of committing the depredation. Of the tribe of Cramer he would say little. Not once in the two years had he been in their camp, he said. Peter and Nevada came often to see him. They were good to him. His sergeant had come, and he had seen him. His sergeant sometimes spoke to him. Perhaps Rawley would see him.
Rawley did not think so, but he refrained from voicing his doubt. As tactfully as possible he avoided the subject and told some of his own adventures, to which Johnny Buffalo listened with polite attention. It was plain to Rawley that his mind was given up to another matter, and that he was merely waiting with his Indian patience until he could guide his adopted son to the secret cleft on the side of the mountain.
“No man has been before us,” he declared emphatically, when Rawley questioned him. “Bushes have grown in the cleft until I could not have found it or suspected that a cleft was there if my sergeant had not shown me the spot. The cleft is there. I have seen it. The bushes are very old, and there is much dead wood. There is the great heap of stones, and there has been a dead tree. But it is gone many years and only the root is left to show that it once stood joined to the great heap of stones. When the sun comes I will show you.”
He was punctiliously true to his promise, for the sun was not ten minutes above the peak across the river when Rawley stood beside the “Great heap of stones ... joined to a dry tree”, or what even he could see had once been a dry tree. It had been an unmerciful trail, and he could easily believe that it was a path which the eye of man had not seen. Indeed, it was not a path at all, but a line of least obstruction through an upheaval of what Rawley’s trained eyes recognized as iron-stained quartz and porphyry.
The place was almost inaccessible, and from a short distance it resembled a blow-out of granite so much that no prospector would trouble to investigate. Besides, Johnny Buffalo explained that this had been a popular habitat of snakes, and that he had spent a great deal of his time, since the location of the spot, in hunting rattlesnakes. He proudly added that he had earned many dollars in extracting the oil and in selling the skins. He feared that he had not gathered them all, however, and he warned Rawley against setting his foot carelessly amongst the rocks.
Johnny Buffalo then gathered dry leaves and started a fire in the brush. So much dead wood underlay the growth that the crevice was presently a furnace.
“If any snakes are there, they will come out,” he observed grimly. “Also, light will go down, so that you will not stumble in darkness. I know what my sergeant meant in the message: ‘Take heed, now ... that is exceeding deep.’ You will need light.”
Rawley nodded. He was watching the flames curiously.
“By Jove, Johnny, I believe you are right,” he exclaimed, pointing. “Do you see that? There is a strong draught from beneath. There’s an opening down there, sure as anything. And I’ll admit to you right now that this is gold formation blown out here. The iron stain is a good mask for it. I can readily believe that it hasn’t been prospected.”
“My sergeant does not speak lies,” Johnny Buffalo retorted imperturbably. “I know that it is so.” Whereupon he gave chase to a rattlesnake that had slipped out from between two tilted bowlders and went sliding sinuously away. With a crude trident, long of handle and tough and light, he pinned the snake to the ground and neatly sliced off its head with a light ax which he carried suspended from his belt.
“Here’s another,” Rawley told him, and Johnny Buffalo, moving with surprising agility, caught that one also.
“For a time I gathered the venom in a bottle,” he informed Rawley in his serious tone. “But now I take only the body. When you go down into the pit there will be no snakes until you reach the bottom. Then you look out.”
Rawley was sufficiently impressed to borrow the trident, which was barbed and could kill as easily as it could capture. So, when the fire had died and the rocks had cooled a little, he went down into the pit.
A blowhole it was, such as is frequently found in a country so torn by volcanic action. As he descended he read the signs at a glance,—signs which to a layman would have meant nothing whatever. Beneath all this, said the rocks to Rawley, there should be gold. His pulse quickened as he worked his way downward, seeking foothold precariously where he might. The thought that Grandfather King, of all the millions of men in the world, was the only one who had ever dared these depths, thrilled him with pride. Not even the Indians had known of it, he was sure. He wondered how his grandfather had managed the snakes, and then it occurred to him that Grandfather King might have discovered this place late in some season after the snakes had been overcome by their winter lethargy.
He breathed freer when his feet crunched in coarse gravel and he knew that he had reached the bottom. He had encountered no snakes, which he considered good luck, especially since he had needed hands and feet and all his great strength to negotiate the descent, and had been compelled to abandon the trident before he had gone fifty feet. As nearly as he could estimate, the blowhole was well over two hundred feet in depth, and there were places where he had no more than comfortable room for his body. The flashlight hung on a thong around his neck showed him how terrific had been the explosion that had torn this crevice open to the surface.
Rawley stood in a cavern probably ten feet high and extending farther than his light could penetrate in two directions, which his pocket compass showed him as east and west. So far the code was correct. The width he estimated as being approximately thirty feet, although the walls drew in or receded sharply, as the formation turned hard or soft. He faced toward the east and went forward, pacing three feet at a stride, his flashlight throwing a white brilliance before him.
Seventy-two strides down the high, tunnel-like cavern brought him to the “River of pure water.” There he stopped and stood, turning his light here and there upon the walls, the water, the gravel. His heart, that had been beating exultantly as his hopes rose higher, slumped and became a leaden weight.
Gold had been there. Of that he had no doubt whatever. But the placer had been mined,—gutted and abandoned. He apprehended at once the truth; that here was an underground stream, one of the sunken rivers for which the desert country is famous—that, or a small branch of a sunken river. There must be some other point of ingress, one of which Grandfather King had no knowledge. Some one had come in by the other route and had taken the gold. The work had been done systematically, by miners who knew what they were about. A glance at the workings told him that.
Rawley turned his light down the stream. As far as its rays could pierce the dark of the cavern, the placer workings extended. He went on, following the windings of the stream and its natural tunnel. Now that he had discovered his grandfather’s potential riches, the legacy which he had confidently believed was a fortune, Rawley was determined to see just where the watercourse would lead him.
He thought that he must have followed it for a mile or more, although it could have been farther. All the way along, the gravel had been worked and the gold taken out. A suspicion had been growing in his mind, and quite suddenly it crystallized into certainty. He walked into a larger cavern, the full extent of which he could not see from that point. There he stopped and considered.
Near at hand, all around him, black cans were piled. He did not need the second glance to tell him what it was he had run into. Here was the secret hoard of black powder which the Cramers had been gathering together for years. Here was the powder that would, in the space of a breath, tear down two mountain sides and halt the flow of a great river,—if what they hoped and dreamed should come to pass.
The Cramers, then, had taken the gold which Grandfather King had discovered. Here was a part of it, no doubt, transformed into tons of explosive. Rawley’s grin was sardonic as he surveyed the piled cans. It would be a bitter ending for their quest that he must show to Johnny Buffalo, he thought.
He walked on slowly and halted suddenly when a light showed ahead. Some one was coming toward him, and Rawley instinctively snapped off his light and moved to one side. War habits were still strong upon him, and in any case he would not trust the Cramers.
Presently he saw that it was Peter, and called to him and went forward. Peter was astonished, but he was also glad to see Rawley.
“I meant to walk over to your place this evening,” he explained. “We’re so busy, right now—”
“With the dam?” Rawley sat down on a keg of powder, started to roll a cigarette and remembered that it might not be wise.
“Yes. We’re loading her as fast as we can. It’s a big job, and the old man is getting fractious over the delay.” Peter sat down on another keg and took off his hat, wiping his forehead with his sleeve. “It’s going to be a blistering day outside. Seems like an ice-box in here. How did you come?”
Then Rawley told him.
Peter listened in complete silence, his arms folded on his knees. When Rawley had finished, Peter straightened up with a sigh.
“I never dreamed we had cut into your ground,” he said heavily. “I thought, as you probably did, that the code described an old, underground watercourse some miles from here. But you must be right, this is it. Old Jess discovered gold near the river, at a point where this stream back here dives under the cliffs and empties, most likely, into the river somewhere under the water line. It was rich; a heap richer than any one ever dreamed, I guess. And the fact that the stream flowed right into the Colorado may have given him his first idea of gathering the gold that had washed on into the river. If you come with me, I’ll show you.”
“I can’t be too long,” said Rawley. “Johnny Buffalo’s up on top, waiting for me to come back with my pockets full of gold. It’s going to be hard on the old man, especially since Grandfather’s gold went into the clutches of Old Jess. I don’t know that I’d better tell him. At the same time,” he mused aloud, “I can’t tell him that there isn’t any gold; he is so firmly convinced that his sergeant told the truth. He’d have to know that some one else has beat us to it.”
Peter turned and looked at him thoughtfully. “I’ll give you some nuggets to take up to him,” he said. “Old Johnny’s pretty keen, and he holds a bad grudge against Young Jess and the old man. If I could, you know I’d replace the gold we got from under that blowhole. But I can’t. It has all been spent, practically. Gone into the dam, along with the rest.”
Rawley laid his hand on Peter’s shoulder and left it there.
“You wouldn’t do anything of the kind,” he laughed. “That darned dam idea of yours is catching. I’ve got it, and got it bad. If that gold you beat me to will tip enough rock into the river to make a good job of the dam, I’m satisfied. All I ask is that you let me know when you’re ready so I can see her go. Are you doing as I advised,—preparing to shoot her with electricity?”
Peter nodded. “Old Jess kicked on the cost, but we showed him how it was the only safe way. She’s all loaded, across the river. We did that during low water and carried the wiring across up to a high, overhead cable that crosses the river all ready to be hooked up to the battery. I talked with a mining man about explosives and found out some things that came in pretty handy, I guess. I got a hint not to break the ground with dynamite enough so that the power of the black powder would be killed in the seams opened up. We didn’t use so much dynamite, after all. We’re depending on the black powder.”
“I still warn you against it,” said Rawley. “But if you can’t be stopped, I do want to see the fireworks. There’s a pretty engineering problem there, and it will be worth a good deal to see how it works out.” His thoughts returned again to the old Indian waiting up on the hill. “I’ll buy some gold from you, Uncle Peter, if you have it handy. I’ll tell old Johnny it’s all I could find; I think I can satisfy the old fellow with the thought that his sergeant had it straight.”
Peter left him for five minutes and returned, carrying a small canvas sack.
“Here’s a handful of specimens I tucked into a niche in the rocks, intending to give them to Nevada for a necklace or something,” he told Rawley. “But Nevada can have diamond necklaces when the dam goes in. You take these, boy. Maybe some of them sort of belong to you, anyway.”
“Lord, I don’t want them,” Rawley protested. “I’ll give them to Johnny Buffalo, though. It will keep him from worrying about it. More than all that, it will keep him off the warpath, the old catamount.”