The storekeeper at Nelson stood on his little slant-roofed porch and mopped his beaded forehead with a blue calico handkerchief. The desert wrinkles around his eyes drew together and deepened as he squinted across the acarpous gulch where a few rough-board shacks stood forlorn with uncurtained windows, to the heat-ridden hillside beyond.
“It’s going to be awful hot down there by the river,” he observed deprecatingly. “You’ll find the water pretty muddy—but maybe you know that. Strangers don’t always; it’s best to make sure, so if you haven’t a bucket or something to settle the water in, I’d advise you to take one along. I’ve an extra one I could lend you, if you need it.”
“We have a bucket, thanks.” Rawley stepped into the dust-covered car loaded with camp outfit. “El Dorado is right at the mouth of the canyon, isn’t it?”
The storekeeper gave him an odd look. “This is El Dorado,” he answered drily. “This whole canyon is the El Dorado. There used to be a town at the mouth of the canyon, but that’s gone years ago. Better take the left-hand road when you get down here a quarter of a mile or so. That will take you past the Techatticup Mine. Below there, turn to the right where two shacks stand close together in the fork of the road. The other trail’s washed, and I don’t know as you could get down that way. Car in good shape for the pull back? She’s pretty steep, coming this way.”
“She’s pulled everything we’ve struck, so far,” Rawley replied cheerfully. “Other cars make it, don’t they?”
“Some do—and some holler for help. It’s a long, hard drag up the wash. And if you tackle it in the hot part of the day you’ll need plenty of water. And,” the storekeeper added with a whimsical half-smile, “the hot part of the day is any time between sunrise and dark. It does get awful hot down in there! I don’t mean to knock my own district,” he added, “but I don’t like to see any one start down the canyon without knowing about what to expect. Then, if they want to go, that’s their business.”
“That’s the way to look at it,” Rawley agreed. “I expect you’ve been here a good while, haven’t you?”
The storekeeper wiped a fresh collection of beads from his forehead. He looked up and down the canyon rather wistfully.
“About as many years as you are old,” he said quietly. “I came in here twenty-five years ago.”
Rawley laughed. “I was about a year old when you landed. Seems a long while back, to me.” He stepped on the starter, waved his hand to the storekeeper and went grinding away down the steep trail through the loose sand. Johnny Buffalo, sitting beside him, lifted a hand and laid it on his arm.
“Stop! He calls,” he said.
Rawley stopped the car, his head tilted outward, looking back. The storekeeper was coming down the trail toward them.
“I forgot to tell you there’s a bad Indian loose in the hills somewhere along the river,” he panted when he came up. “He’s waylaid a couple of prospectors that we know of. A blood feud against the whites, the Indians tell me. You may not run across him at all, but it will be just as well to keep an eye out.”
“What’s his name?” Johnny Buffalo turned his head and stared hard at the other.
“His name’s Queo. He’s middle-aged—somewhere in the late forties, I should say. Medium-sized and kind of stocky built. He’ll kill to get grub or tobacco. Seeing there’s two of you he might not try anything, but I’d be careful, if I were in your place. There’s a price on his head, so if he tries any tricks—” He waved his hand and grinned expressively as he turned back to the store.
“He is older than that man thinks,” said Johnny Buffalo after a silence. “Queo has almost as many years as I have. When we were children we fought. He is bad. For him to kill is pleasure, but he is a coward.”
“If there is a price on his head he has probably left the country,” Rawley remarked indifferently. “Old-timers are fine people, most of them. But they do like to tell it wild to tenderfeet. I suppose that’s human nature.”
Johnny Buffalo did not argue the point. He seemed content to gaze at the hills in the effort to locate old landmarks. And as for Rawley himself, his mind was wholly absorbed by his mission into the country, which he had dreamed of for more than a month. There had been some delay in getting started. First, he could not well curtail the length of his visit with his mother, in spite of the fact that they seemed to have little in common. Then he thought it wise to make the trip to Kingman and report upon a property there which was about to be sold for a good-sized fortune. The job netted him several hundred dollars, which he was likely to need. Wherefore he had of necessity had plenty of time to dream over his own fortune which might be lying in the hills—“In the cleft of the jagged rocks”—waiting for him to find it.
Just at first he had been somewhat skeptical. Fifty years is a long time for gold to remain hidden in the hills of a mining country so rich as Nevada, without some prospector discovering it. But Johnny Buffalo believed. Whether his belief was based solely upon his faith in his sergeant, Rawley could not determine. But Johnny Buffalo had a very plausible argument in favor of the gold remaining where Grandfather King had left it in the underground stream.
The fact that Rawley was exhorted to “take victuals for the journey” meant a distance of a good many miles, perhaps, which they must travel from El Dorado. Then, they were to go to the top of a very high mountain and pass over on the other side. Johnny Buffalo argued that the start was to be made from El Dorado merely because the mountain would be most visible from that point. It would be rough country, he contended. The code mentioned cliffs and great heaps of stones and clefts in jagged rocks, with a deep pit, “Hid from the eyes of all living,” for the final goal. He thought it more than likely that Grandfather King’s gold mine was still undiscovered. And toward the last, Rawley had been much more inclined to believe him. He had read diligently all the mining information he could get concerning this particular district, as far back as the records went. Nowhere was any mention made of such a rich placer discovery on—or in—a mountain.
He was thinking all this as he drove the devious twistings and turnings of the canyon road. Another mine or two they passed; then, nosing carefully down a hill steeper than the others, they turned sharply to the left and were in the final discomfort of the “wash.” A veritable sweat box it was on this particular hot afternoon in July. The baked, barren hills rose close on either side. Like a deep, gravelly river bed long since gone dry, the wash sloped steeply down toward the Colorado. Rawley could readily understand now the solicitude of the storekeeper. The return was quite likely to be a time of tribulation.
He had expected to come upon a camp of some sort. But the canyon opened bleakly to the river, the hot sand of its floor sloping steeply to meet the lapping waves of the turgid stream. At the water’s edge, on the first high ground of the bank, were ruins of an old stamp mill, which might have been built ten years ago or a hundred, so far as looks went.
He left the car and climbed upon the cement floor of the old mill. What at first had seemed to be a greater extension of the plant he now discovered was a walled roadway winding up to the crest of the hill. He swung about and gazed to the northward, as the Bible code had commanded that he should travel. A mile or so up the river were the walls of a deep canyon,—Black Canyon, according to his map. Farther away, set back from the river a mile, perhaps two miles, a sharp-pointed hill shouldered up above its fellows. This seemed to be the highest mountain, so far as he could see, in that direction. If that were the “great and high mountain” described in the code, their journey would not be so long as Johnny Buffalo anticipated.
The nearer view was desolation simmering in the heat. A hundred yards away, on the opposite bank of the wash, the forlorn ruins of a cabin or two gave melancholy evidence that here men had once worked and laughed and loved—perchance. He looked at the furnace yawning beside him, and at the muddy water swirling in drunken haste just below. It might have been just here that his grandfather had landed from the steamboat Gila and had watched the lovely young half-breed girl in the crowd come to welcome the boat and passengers.
He started when Johnny Buffalo spoke at his elbow. How the Indian had reached that spot unheard and unseen Rawley did not know. Johnny Buffalo was pointing to the north.
“I think that high mountain is where we must go,” he said. “It is one day’s travel. We can go to-day when the sun is behind the mountains, and we can walk until the stars are here. Very early in the morning we can walk again, and before it is too hot we can reach the trees where it will be cool.”
“We have a lot of grub and things in the car,” Rawley objected. “It seems to me that it wouldn’t be a bad plan to carry the stuff up here and cache it somewhere in this old mill. Then if your friend Queo should show up, there won’t be so much for him to steal. And if we want to make a camp on the mountain, we can come down here and carry the stuff up as we need it. There’s a hundred dollars’ worth of outfit in that car, Johnny,” he added frugally. “I’m all for keeping it for ourselves.”
Johnny Buffalo looked at the mountain, and he looked down at the car,—and then grunted a reluctant acquiescence. Rawley laughed at him.
“That’s all right—the mountain won’t run away over night,” he bantered, slapping his hand down on Johnny Buffalo’s shoulder with an affectionate familiarity bred in the past month. “I’ve been juggling that car over the desert trails since sunrise, and I wouldn’t object to taking it easy for a few hours.”
Johnny Buffalo said no more but began helping to unload the car. It was he who chose the trail by which they carried the loads to the upper level, cement-floored, where no tracks would show. He chose a hiding place beneath the wreckage of some machinery that had fallen against the bank in such a way that an open space was left beneath, large enough to hold their outfit.
A huge rattlesnake protested stridently against being disturbed. Rawley drew his automatic, meaning to shoot it; but Johnny Buffalo stopped him with a warning gesture, and himself killed the snake with a rock. While it was still writhing with a smashed head, he picked it up by the tail, took a long step or two and heaved it into the river, grinning his satisfaction over a deed well done.
Rawley, standing back watching him, had a swift vision of the old Indian paddling solemnly about the yard near the west wing. There he was an incongruous figure amongst the syringas and the roses. Here, although he had discarded the showy fringed buckskin for the orthodox brown khaki clothes of the desert, he somehow fitted into his surroundings and became a part of the wilderness itself. Johnny Buffalo was assuredly coming into his own.