Johnny Buffalo held a handful of nuggets in his hard, brown palms. His eyes shone whenever he looked toward the old wheel chair beside the window. He listened to Rawley’s explanation of why there would be no more gold, but the technical phraseology went completely over his head, and he smiled abstractedly and held up first one bit of gold and then another to the light. They were very heavy. They were beautiful. They had lain, hidden away all these years, just where his sergeant had said that they were hidden.
“‘There is a path which no man knoweth,’” he muttered, when Rawley had finished and was waiting to see what effect his harangue about erosions and changed currents had taken on the Indian mind. “It is so. My sergeant said it, and it was the truth. My sergeant never lied. Always the words he spoke were true. I know it without proof. Now you have the proof, and you know it also.”
“There won’t be any more, you understand,” Rawley repeated with finality. “My work is to examine these matters and report the truth about them. After examining what lies at the bottom of the pit, I am reporting to you that there will be no more gold—”
Johnny Buffalo stopped him with a hand lifted, palm out. “What was revealed to you in the pit is not good for me to know,” he stated firmly. “My sergeant has said that you should know the truth about riches. He said that it would not be good that I should know the truth as you would know it.”
“That’s true, too,” Rawley admitted, taken aback.
“The gold was there when my sergeant said that it was there. That is good. My sergeant did not say that there would always be gold where gold has been. I think that is the truth about riches which you have learned.”
“You’re right, Johnny.” Rawley grinned at him ruefully. “If we’ve had any dream of being millionaires, we may as well forget it. Grandfather gave us the straight dope, and you found the cleft in the rocks. It isn’t Grandfather’s fault that the millions have moved on. So that’s all of that, and the next thing is something else.”
“The next thing is what is given us to do,” said Johnny Buffalo solemnly. “We will do our duty, whatever that may be. Now I have no more searching for my sergeant’s gold. I shall live here until it is time to go. I do not think it will be long.”
Rawley looked at him anxiously, but he could not bring himself to speak what was in his mind. Johnny Buffalo would not understand that to the young death is a dreadful thing, to be shunned and never thought of voluntarily,—an ogre that may snatch one away from the joys of living. After all, he thought, Johnny Buffalo had outlived his love of life. No one needed him. He had only to wait. Rawley wished that he could be with him longer and oftener, but that was not possible unless he were willing to sacrifice the work he loved. Even if he could bring himself to that, Johnny Buffalo would not permit it. It would break his heart to feel that he had hindered his sergeant’s grandson.
“Your work,” said Johnny Buffalo, almost as if he had been reading Rawley’s thoughts, “is better than the gold. A man is great within himself, or he is nothing. The full pocket makes the empty head. It is greater fortune that you have honor and youth and work to perform. So my sergeant would tell you.”
“You’re right, Johnny,” Rawley assented again. “If we’d found a ton of gold I think I’d have gone on with my work just the same. A man my age can’t stop working for the sake of seeing how fast he can spend money. I couldn’t, anyway.”
“Then you do not need the gold. You can earn what you need and have the pleasure twice: in the getting and in the spending. So you have not lost.”
“We’re a great pair of philosophers,” Rawley laughed, “or else we are eating sour grapes. Blamed if I know, sometimes, just where the difference lies. Or perhaps there isn’t any, and crying sour grapes is true philosophy, after all.”
Peter and Nevada, coming up the path, diverted the talk to lighter channels. Nevada, spying the gold, exclaimed over the odd pieces and took them in her cupped palm to admire each specimen by itself.
“They are yours, save this one which I shall keep,” said Johnny Buffalo unexpectedly. “Rawley will not take them. I do not need gold. I have three friends and the spirit of my sergeant, who waits for me. I am rich. They are yours. Put them on a chain and hang them around your neck while yet it is white and round.”
Nevada looked at him a full fifteen seconds before she moved. Then she rose and kissed Johnny Buffalo on the withered cheek nearest her.
“To know a man like you is a privilege,” she said simply. “I shall keep the nuggets to remind me that not all men worship gold.”
“You will wear them in a necklace. My sergeant wishes you to have them. They are not so beautiful as your white throat.”
Nevada blushed vividly and shook the nuggets in her two hands. “It’s a good thing Grandmother can’t hear you,” she laughed. “An old bachelor like you!”
“An old bachelor can say what the young man dares only to think,” Johnny Buffalo stated calmly.
Rawley was trying distractedly to read a letter which Nevada had brought down from the post-office, and to pretend that he did not hear what was going on. But it is reasonable to assume that there was nothing in the letter to make him blush at the moment when Johnny Buffalo said his little say. Nevada stole a glance at him from under her lashes and smiled.
“What is it, Cousin Rawley?” she asked wickedly. “You seem disturbed.”
“I’m called back on the job.” Rawley tried to meet her eyes unconcernedly. “I won’t even have the week I promised myself. This is pretty urgent, and so I think I’ll take the trail again in the morning.”
Even Nevada betrayed some mental disturbance over that information, especially when Rawley could not hazard any opinion concerning his next visit.
“I won’t even have time to look over your work at the dam,” he told Peter. “I intended going down to-morrow. I wanted to have a talk with you about that. I’ve picked up a little information, here and there, and I’m afraid there will be complications. But I’ve been holding off until I was sure of my ground. I know, of course, that my personal opinion won’t have much weight.”
Peter shook his head. “You can work and pry and lift till your eyes pop out of your head, starting a bowlder down a mountain,” he said grimly, “and you can give it the last heave and over she goes. Any time, up to that last heave, you can quit and she stays right there where she was planted. But once she starts, all hell can’t stop her. I’m afraid we’ve given the last heave, son.”
“Look out below!” Nevada cried mockingly and looked at Rawley. “I could tell a cousin in three words how he can make himself as popular as a rattlesnake with the Cramers,—and the last of the Macalisters.”
“And those three words?” Rawley looked her squarely in the eyes.
“Fight the dam.” Nevada’s eyes were as steady as his own.
“Thunder!” Rawley sat back and reached for his tobacco sack. “I’ve no notion of fighting the dam. It’s the biggest proposition I ever saw three lone men—and a girl; excuse me, Nevada!—tackle in my life. Four of you, thinking to stop, just like that,”—he made a slicing, downward gesture, “—the second largest river in the United States! You’ll be damming the Gulf Stream next, I suppose. Divert it so as to warm up Maine and make it a winter-bathing resort!”
“Do you dare us to try?” Nevada poured nuggets from one palm to the other. “That might be a good investment, when we’ve made our clean-up in the river bed.” She smiled dreamily at her handful of gold. “That’s a wonderful idea. We need some wonderful idea to work on, after the dam is in and the gold is out. You can’t,” she looked up wistfully at Rawley, “you can’t live with a tremendous idea all your life and suddenly drop back to three meals a day and which dress shall you wear. One would go mad. It—it’s like taking the mainspring out of life.”
Johnny Buffalo nodded his head in significant approval. “A man can only wait, then, until it is time to go,” he said with quiet decision.
“Very well. I’ll speak to the Peace Conference about the Gulf Stream,” Rawley assured her gravely. “In case I am unable to reserve it for you—would the Gulf of Mexico do, or the Mississippi River, perhaps?”
“We’re accustomed to cracking our whip over fresh water,” Nevada retorted. “I should prefer to have the Mississippi, please.”
Johnny Buffalo glanced toward the wheel chair, gazed at it intently and nodded his head.
“You will succeed and fail in the succeeding,” he intoned solemnly. “In the failure you will rise to greater things. It is so. My sergeant never speaks what is not true.”
Eyes moved guardedly to meet other eyes that understood, conveying a warning that the old man must be humored. Johnny Buffalo stood up, his face turned toward the wheel chair. He seemed to be listening. His eyes brightened. The wrinkles in his bronzed old face deepened and radiated joy.
“It is good! I need not wait—I go now!” He took an eager step and wavered there.
Peter and Rawley, rising together, caught the old man in their arms as he went down, falling slowly like a straight, old tree whose roots have snapped with age.