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.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
GREATER THAN GOLD
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.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
THE EAGLE LOOKS UPON A GREAT RIVER
Rawley drove down El Dorado Canyon, now silent in mid-afternoon, with not a
sound of stamp mill or compressor or the mingled voices of men at work.
Techatticup stood forlorn, deserted save by one old man who bore himself
proudly because he was the guardian there. The war, the labor question, the
slump in metals, had done their work. It seemed to Rawley as if the nation
were taking a long breath, making ready to go forward again more resistlessly
than before. He missed Johnny Buffalo terribly; but if he could, he would not
have called him back. Johnny would have had a dreary time of it, alone all
these long months when Rawley’s work had held close to the affairs of the
government.
The eye of the Eagle had not been closed. His keen glance had gone to this and
to that, his piercing gaze had fixed itself upon the desert land and the river
that went hurrying down through flaming gorge and painted canyon, a law unto
itself, an untaught, untamed giant of the wild; a scenic wonder set deep in
savage walls of rock, where people came and looked down upon it, drew back
shivering, ventured to look again in silent awe; a terrible, devastating thing
from which men fled in terror when the giant river rose, leaped from its bed
and went raging across the land.
Men called for power, for protection, for water to till barren acres that
might be made fertile. Men shouted for the things which the Colorado held
arrogantly within its grasp, to hoard with miserly greed or to let loose in a
ferocious fury. The Colorado had power, it had water, it had a cruel habit of
devouring lands and homes and whooping onward toward the gulf, heedless of the
destruction in its wake.
And the Eagle had lifted his head and turned his eyes upon the great river.
Here, within the borders of his domain, dwelt a powerful, savage thing that
must be tamed and taught to obey the will of men. The Eagle considered this
headlong defiance of all civilized restraint. The Eagle saw how men looked
upon the river, drew back in awe and ventured to look again; men, who should
be the masters of the river. The Eagle lifted and spread his wings. And the
tip of a wing reached over the desert land and laid its shadow across the
Colorado.
A great orator had painted it so, and Rawley was thinking of that picture of
the Eagle as he drove down the canyon to the very brink of the river and
climbed out of his car. Still desolate, more forsaken than ever was the place
where El Dorado had stood alive, alert, self-sufficient. The camp was gone,
almost forgotten. The river flowed past, disdainful of the puny efforts of men
who died and forgot their dreams and their endeavors, while it rushed on
through the ages, and played with the lives of men and mocked at their fear of
it.
But three men and a girl had dared to dream of holding the might of it in
leash. It was to see these dreamers, to warn and to show them the shadow of
the Eagle’s wing, that he had come in haste to the bank of the Colorado. For
months he had heard nothing. Nevada had not written, or if she had the letter
had not reached him. There was danger in delay, in their continued silence.
Rawley slung a canteen over his shoulder and started up the river, taking the
well-known trail. This was the quickest way to reach the Cramers, and now that
he was in their neighborhood once more a great impatience was upon him, a
nervous dread that he might be an hour, a minute too late for what he had come
to do.
He came upon Nevada suddenly. She was standing on the site of the old camp
where he had stayed with Johnny Buffalo. Her back was toward him, and she was
holding something in her two hands; something he had seen her extract from the
thorny branches of a stunted mesquite bush. When his footsteps sounded close,
she turned and looked at him dumbly, her eyes wide and dark. The thing she
held in her hands was his pipe,--one that he had lost on that first trip into
the country.