looked at what was on the track. And I agreed with Seth entirely in his
remark. It was an Indian girl—and take it from me, Indians ain’t
Spiggoties by any manner of means. Seth had managed to fetch a stop
within twenty feet of her, and us bowling down hill at that! But the
girl. She—”
I saw the form of Mrs. Julian Jones stiffen, although she kept her gaze
fixed balefully upon two mud-hens that were prowling along the lagoon
shallows below us. “The hussy!” she hissed, once and implacably. Jones
had stopped at the sound, but went on immediately.
“She was a tall girl, slim and slender, you know the kind, with black
hair, remarkably long hanging, down loose behind her, as she stood there
no more afraid than nothing, her arms spread out to stop the engine. She
was wearing a slimpsy sort of garment wrapped around her that wasn’t
cloth but ocelot skins, soft and dappled, and silky. It was all she had
on—”
“The hussy!” breathed Mrs. Jones.
But Mr. Jones went on, making believe that he was unaware of the
interruption.
“‘Hell of a way to stop a locomotive,’ I complained at Seth, as I climbed
down on to the right of way. I walked past our engine and up to the
girl, and what do you think? Her eyes were shut tight. She was
trembling that violent that you would see it by the moonlight. And she
was barefoot, too.
“‘What’s the row?’ I said, none too gentle. She gave a start, seemed to
come out of her trance, and opened her eyes. Say! They were big and
black and beautiful. Believe me, she was some looker—”
“The hussy!” At which hiss the two mud-hens veered away a few feet. But
Jones was getting himself in hand, and didn’t even blink.
“‘What are you stopping this locomotive for?’ I demanded in Spanish.
Nary an answer. She stared at me, then at the snorting engine and then
burst into tears, which you’ll admit is uncommon behaviour for an Indian
woman.
“‘If you try to get rides that way,’ I slung at her in Spiggoty Spanish
(which they tell me is some different from regular Spanish), ‘you’ll be
taking one smeared all over our cowcatcher and headlight, and it’ll be up
to my fireman to scrape you off.’
“My Spiggoty Spanish wasn’t much to brag on, but I could see she
understood, though she only shook her head and wouldn’t speak. But great
Moses, she was some looker—”
I glanced apprehensively at Mrs. Jones, who must have caught me out of
the tail of her eye, for she muttered: “If she hadn’t been do you think
he’d a-taken her into his house to live?”
“Now hold on, Sarah,” he protested. “That ain’t fair. Besides, I’m
telling this.—Next thing, Seth yells at me, ‘Goin’ to stay here all
night?’
“‘Come on,’ I said to the girl, ‘and climb on board. But next time you
want a ride don’t flag a locomotive between stations.’ She followed
along; but when I got to the step and turned to give her a lift-up, she
wasn’t there. I went forward again. Not a sign of her. Above and below
was sheer cliff, and the track stretched ahead a hundred yards clear and
empty. And then I spotted her, crouched down right against the
cowcatcher, that close I’d almost stepped on her. If we’d started up,
we’d have run over her in a second. It was all so nonsensical, I never
could make out her actions. Maybe she was trying to suicide. I grabbed
her by the wrist and jerked her none too gentle to her feet. And she
came along all right. Women do know when a man means business.”
I glanced from this Goliath to his little, bird-eyed spouse, and wondered
if he had ever tried to mean business with her.
“Seth kicked at first, but I boosted her into the cab and made her sit up
beside me—”
“And I suppose Seth was busy running the engine,” Mrs. Jones observed.
“I was breaking him in, wasn’t I?” Mr. Jones protested. “So we made the
run into Amato. She’d never opened her mouth once, and no sooner’d the
engine stopped than she’d jumped to the ground and was gone. Just like
that. Not a thank you kindly. Nothing.
“But next morning when we came to pull out for Quito with a dozen flat
cars loaded with rails, there she was in the cab waiting for us; and in
the daylight I could see how much better a looker she was than the night
before.
“‘Huh! she’s adopted you,’ Seth grins. And it looked like it. She just
stood there and looked at me—at us—like a loving hound dog that you love,
that you’ve caught with a string of sausages inside of him, and that just
knows you ain’t going to lift a hand to him. ‘Go chase yourself!’ I told
her _pronto_.” (Mrs. Jones her proximity noticeable with a wince at the
Spanish word.) “You see, Sarah, I’d no use for her, even at the start.”
Mrs. Jones stiffened. Her lips moved soundlessly, but I knew to what
syllables.
“And what made it hardest was Seth jeering at me. ‘You can’t shake her
that way,’ he said. ‘You saved her life—’ ‘I didn’t,’ I said sharply;
‘it was you.’ ‘But she thinks you did, which is the same thing,’ he came
back at me. ‘And now she belongs to you. Custom of the country, as you
ought to know.’”
“Heathenish,” said Mrs. Jones, and though her steady gaze was set upon
the Tower of Jewels I knew she was making no reference to its
architecture.
“‘She’s come to do light housekeeping for you,’ Seth grinned. I let him
rave, though afterwards I kept him throwing in the coal too fast to work
his mouth very much. Why, say, when I got to the spot where I picked her
up, and stopped the train for her to get off, she just flopped down on
her knees, got a hammerlock with her arms around my knees, and cried all
over my shoes. What was I to do?”
With no perceptible movement that I was aware of, Mrs. Jones advertised
her certitude of knowledge of what _she_ would have done.
“And the moment we pulled into Quito, she did what she’d done
before—vanished. Sarah never believes me when I say how relieved I felt
to be quit of her. But it was not to be. I got to my ’dobe house and
managed a cracking fine dinner my cook had ready for me. She was mostly
Spiggoty and half Indian, and her name was Paloma.—Now, Sarah, haven’t I
told you she was older’n a grandmother, and looked more like a buzzard
than a dove? Why, I couldn’t bear to eat with her around where I could
look at her. But she did make things comfortable, and she was some
economical when it came to marketing.
“That afternoon, after a big long siesta, what’d I find in the kitchen,
just as much at home as if she belonged there, but that blamed Indian
girl. And old Paloma was squatting at the girl’s feet and rubbing the
girl’s knees and legs like for rheumatism, which I knew the girl didn’t
have from the way I’d sized up the walk of her, and keeping time to the
rubbing with a funny sort of gibberish chant. And I let loose right
there and then. As Sarah knows, I never could a-bear women around the
house—young, unmarried women, I mean. But it was no go! Old Paloma
sided with the girl, and said if the girl went she went, too. Also, she
called me more kinds of a fool than the English language has
accommodation for. You’d like the Spanish lingo, Sarah, for expressing
yourself in such ways, and you’d have liked old Paloma, too. She was a
good woman, though she didn’t have any teeth and her face could kill a
strong man’s appetite in the cradle.
“I gave in. I had to. Except for the excuse that she needed Vahna’s
help around the house (which she didn’t at all), old Paloma never said
why she stuck up for the girl. Anyway, Vahna was a quiet thing, never in
the way. And she never gadded. Just sat in-doors jabbering with Paloma
and helping with the chores. But I wasn’t long in getting on to that she
was afraid of something. She would look up, that anxious it hurt,
whenever anybody called, like some of the boys to have a gas or a game of
pedro. I tried to worm it out of Paloma what was worrying the girl, but
all the old woman did was to look solemn and shake her head like all the
devils in hell was liable to precipitate a visit on us.
“And then one day Vahna had a visitor. I’d just come in from a run and
was passing the time of day with her—I had to be polite, even if she had
butted in on me and come to live in my house for keeps—when I saw a queer
expression come into her eyes. In the doorway stood an Indian boy. He
looked like her, but was younger and slimmer. She took him into the
kitchen and they must have had a great palaver, for he didn’t leave until
after dark. Inside the week he came back, but I missed him. When I got
home, Paloma put a fat nugget of gold into my hand, which Vahna had sent
him for. The blamed thing weighed all of two pounds and was worth more
than five hundred dollars. She explained that Vahna wanted me to take it
to pay for her keep. And I had to take it to keep peace in the house.
“Then, after a long time, came another visitor. We were sitting before
the fire—”
“Him and the hussy,” quoth Mrs. Jones.
“And Paloma,” he added quickly.
“Him and his cook and his light housekeeper sitting by the fire,” she
amended.
“Oh, I admit Vahna did like me a whole heap,” he asserted recklessly,
then modified with a pang of caution: “A heap more than was good for her,
seeing that I had no inclination her way.
“Well, as I was saying, she had another visitor. He was a lean, tall,
white-headed old Indian, with a beak on him like an eagle. He walked
right in without knocking. Vahna gave a little cry that was half like a
yelp and half like a gasp, and flumped down on her knees before me,
pleading to me with deer’s eyes and to him with the eyes of a deer about
to be killed that don’t want to be killed. Then, for a minute that
seemed as long as a life-time, she and the old fellow glared at each
other. Paloma was the first to talk, in his own lingo, for he talked
back to her. But great Moses, if he wasn’t the high and mighty one!
Paloma’s old knees were shaking, and she cringed to him like a hound dog.
And all this in my own house! I’d have thrown him out on his neck, only
he was so old.
“If the things he said to Vahna were as terrible as the way he looked!
Say! He just spit words at her! But Paloma kept whimpering and butting
in, till something she said got across, because his face relaxed. He
condescended to give me the once over and fired some question at Vahna.
She hung her head, and looked foolish, and blushed, and then replied with
a single word and a shake of the head. And with that he just naturally
turned on his heel and beat it. I guess she’d said ‘No.’
“For some time after that Vahna used to fluster up whenever she saw me.
Then she took to the kitchen for a spell. But after a long time she
began hanging around the big room again. She was still mighty shy, but
she’d keep on following me about with those big eyes of hers—”
“The hussy!” I heard plainly. But Julian Jones and I were pretty well
used to it by this time.
“I don’t mind saying that I was getting some interested myself—oh, not in
the way Sarah never lets up letting me know she thinks. That two-pound
nugget was what had me going. If Vahna’d put me wise to where it came
from, I could say good-bye to railroading and hit the high places for
Nebraska and Sarah.
“And then the beans were spilled . . . by accident. Come a letter from
Wisconsin. My Aunt Eliza ’d died and up and left me her big farm. I let
out a whoop when I read it; but I could have canned my joy, for I was
jobbed out of it by the courts and lawyers afterward—not a cent to me,
and I’m still paying ’m in instalments.
“But I didn’t know, then; and I prepared to pull back to God’s country.
Paloma got sore, and Vahna got the weeps. ‘Don’t go! Don’t go!’ That
was her song. But I gave notice on my job, and wrote a letter to Sarah
here—didn’t I, Sarah?
“That night, sitting by the fire like at a funeral, Vahna really loosened
up for the first time.
“‘Don’t go,’ she says to me, with old Paloma nodding agreement with her.
‘I’ll show you where my brother got the nugget, if you don’t go.’ ‘Too
late,’ said I. And I told her why.
“And told her about me waiting for you back in Nebraska,” Mrs. Jones
observed in cold, passionless tones.
“Now, Sarah, why should I hurt a poor Indian girl’s feelings? Of course
I didn’t.
“Well, she and Paloma talked Indian some more, and then Vahna says: ‘If
you stay, I’ll show you the biggest nugget that is the father of all
other nuggets.’ ‘How big?’ I asked. ‘As big as me?’ She laughed.
‘Bigger than you,’ she says, ‘much, much bigger.’ ‘They don’t grow that
way,’ I said. But she said she’d seen it and Paloma backed her up. Why,
to listen to them you’d have thought there was millions in that one
nugget. Paloma ’d never seen it herself, but she’d heard about it. A
secret of the tribe which she couldn’t share, being only half Indian
herself.”
Julian Jones paused and heaved a sigh.
“And they kept on insisting until I fell for—”
“The hussy,” said Mrs. Jones, pert as a bird, at the ready instant.
“‘No; for the nugget. What of Aunt Eliza’s farm I was rich enough to
quit railroading, but not rich enough to turn my back on big money—and I
just couldn’t help believing them two women. Gee! I could be another
Vanderbilt, or J. P. Morgan. That’s the way I thought; and I started in
to pump Vahna. But she wouldn’t give down. ‘You come along with me,’
she says. ‘We can be back here in a couple of weeks with all the gold
the both of us can carry.’ ‘We’ll take a burro, or a pack-train of
burros,’ was my suggestion. But nothing doing. And Paloma agreed with
her. It was too dangerous. The Indians would catch us.
“The two of us pulled out when the nights were moonlight. We travelled
only at night, and laid up in the days. Vahna wouldn’t let me light a
fire, and I missed my coffee something fierce. We got up in the real
high mountains of the main Andes, where the snow on one pass gave us some
trouble; but the girl knew the trails, and, though we didn’t waste any
time, we were a full week getting there. I know the general trend of our
travel, because I carried a pocket compass; and the general trend is all
I need to get there again, because of that peak. There’s no mistaking
it. There ain’t another peak like it in the world. Now, I’m not telling
you its particular shape, but when you and I head out for it from Quito
I’ll take you straight to it.
“It’s no easy thing to climb, and the person doesn’t live that can climb
it at night. We had to take the daylight to it, and didn’t reach the top
till after sunset. Why, I could take hours and hours telling you about
that last climb, which I won’t. The top was flat as a billiard table,
about a quarter of an acre in size, and was almost clean of snow. Vahna
told me that the great winds that usually blew, kept the snow off of it.
“We were winded, and I got mountain sickness so bad that I had to stretch
out for a spell. Then, when the moon come up, I took a prowl around. It
didn’t take long, and I didn’t catch a sight or a smell of anything that
looked like gold. And when I asked Vahna, she only laughed and clapped
her hands. Meantime my mountain sickness tuned up something fierce, and
I sat down on a big rock to wait for it to ease down.
“‘Come on, now,’ I said, when I felt better. ‘Stop your fooling and tell
me where that nugget is.’ ‘It’s nearer to you right now than I’ll ever
get,’ she answered, her big eyes going sudden wistful. ‘All you Gringos
are alike. Gold is the love of your heart, and women don’t count much.’
“I didn’t say anything. That was no time to tell her about Sarah here.
But Vahna seemed to shake off her depressed feelings, and began to laugh
and tease again. ‘How do you like it?’ she asked. ‘Like what?’ ‘The
nugget you’re sitting on.’
“I jumped up as though it was a red-hot stove. And all it was was a
rock. I felt nay heart sink. Either she had gone clean loco or this was
her idea of a joke. Wrong on both counts. She gave me the hatchet and
told me to take a hack at the boulder, which I did, again and again, for
yellow spots sprang up from under every blow. By the great Moses! it was
gold! The whole blamed boulder!”
Jones rose suddenly to his full height and flung out his long arms, his
face turned to the southern skies. The movement shot panic into the
heart of a swan that had drawn nearer with amiably predatory designs.
Its consequent abrupt retreat collided it with a stout old lady, who
squealed and dropped her bag of peanuts. Jones sat down and resumed.
“Gold, I tell you, solid gold and that pure and soft that I chopped chips
out of it. It had been coated with some sort of rain-proof paint or
lacquer made out of asphalt or something. No wonder I’d taken it for a
rock. It was ten feet long, all of five feet through, and tapering to
both ends like an egg. Here. Take a look at this.”
From his pocket he drew and opened a leather case, from which he took an
object wrapped in tissue-paper. Unwrapping it, he dropped into my hand a
chip of pure soft gold, the size of a ten-dollar gold-piece. I could
make out the greyish substance on one side with which it had been
painted.
“I chopped that from one end of the thing,” Jones went on, replacing the
chip in its paper and leather case. “And lucky I put it in my pocket.
For right at my back came one loud word—more like a croak than a word, in
my way of thinking. And there was that lean old fellow with the eagle
beak that had dropped in on us one night. And there was about thirty
Indians with him—all slim young fellows.
“Vahna’d flopped down and begun whimpering, but I told her, ‘Get up and
make friends with them for me.’ ‘No, no,’ she cried. ‘This is death.
Good-bye, _amigo_—’”
Here Mrs. Jones winced, and her husband abruptly checked the particular
flow of his narrative.
“‘Then get up and fight along with me,’ I said to her. And she did. She
was some hellion, there on the top of the world, clawing and scratching
tooth and nail—a regular she cat. And I wasn’t idle, though all I had
was that hatchet and my long arms. But they were too many for me, and
there was no place for me to put my back against a wall. When I come to,
minutes after they’d cracked me on the head—here, feel this.”
Removing his hat, Julian Jones guided my finger tips through his thatch
of sandy hair until they sank into an indentation. It was fully three
inches long, and went into the bone itself of the skull.
“When I come to, there was Vahna spread-eagled on top of the nugget, and
the old fellow with a beak jabbering away solemnly as if going through
some sort of religious exercises. In his hand he had a stone knife—you
know, a thin, sharp sliver of some obsidian-like stuff same as they make
arrow-heads out of. I couldn’t lift a hand, being held down, and being
too weak besides. And—well, anyway, that stone knife did for her, and me
they didn’t even do the honour of killing there on top their sacred peak.
They chucked me off of it like so much carrion.
“And the buzzards didn’t get me either. I can see the moonlight yet,
shining on all those peaks of snow, as I went down. Why, sir, it was a
five-hundred-foot fall, only I didn’t make it. I went into a big
snow-drift in a crevice. And when I come to (hours after I know, for it
was full day when I next saw the sun), I found myself in a regular
snow-cave or tunnel caused by the water from the melting snow running
along the ledge. In fact, the stone above actually overhung just beyond
where I first landed. A few feet more to the side, either way, and I’d
almost be going yet. It was a straight miracle, that’s what it was.
“But I paid for it. It was two years and over before I knew what
happened. All I knew was that I was Julian Jones and that I’d been
blacklisted in the big strike, and that I was married to Sarah here. I
mean that. I didn’t know anything in between, and when Sarah tried to
talk about it, it gave me pains in the head. I mean my head was queer,
and I knew it was queer.
“And then, sitting on the porch of her father’s farmhouse back in
Nebraska one moonlight evening, Sarah came out and put that gold chip
into my hand. Seems she’d just found it in the torn lining of the trunk
I’d brought back from Ecuador—I who for two years didn’t even know I’d
been to Ecuador, or Australia, or anything! Well, I just sat there
looking at the chip in the moonlight, and turning it over and over and
figuring what it was and where it’d come from, when all of a sudden there
was a snap inside my head as if something had broken, and then I could
see Vahna spread-eagled on that big nugget and the old fellow with the
beak waving the stone knife, and . . . and everything. That is,
everything that had happened from the time I first left Nebraska to when
I crawled to the daylight out of the snow after they had chucked me off
the mountain-top. But everything that’d happened after that I’d clean
forgotten. When Sarah said I was her husband, I wouldn’t listen to her.
Took all her family and the preacher that’d married us to convince me.
“Later on I wrote to Seth Manners. The railroad hadn’t killed him yet,
and he pieced out a lot for me. I’ll show you his letters. I’ve got
them at the hotel. One day, he said, making his regular run, I crawled
out on to the track. I didn’t stand upright, I just crawled. He took me
for a calf, or a big dog, at first. I wasn’t anything human, he said,
and I didn’t know him or anything. As near as I can make out, it was ten
days after the mountain-top to the time Seth picked me up. What I ate I
don’t know. Maybe I didn’t eat. Then it was doctors at Quito, and
Paloma nursing me (she must have packed that gold chip in my trunk),
until they found out I was a man without a mind, and the railroad sent me
back to Nebraska. At any rate, that’s what Seth writes me. Of myself, I
don’t know. But Sarah here knows. She corresponded with the railroad
before they shipped me and all that.”
Mrs. Jones nodded affirmation of his words, sighed and evidenced
unmistakable signs of eagerness to go.
“I ain’t been able to work since,” her husband continued. “And I ain’t
been able to figure out how to get back that big nugget. Sarah’s got
money of her own, and she won’t let go a penny—”
“He won’t get down to _that_ country no more!” she broke forth.
“But, Sarah, Vahna’s dead—you know that,” Julian Jones protested.
“I don’t know anything about anything,” she answered decisively, “except
that _that_ country is no place for a married man.”
Her lips snapped together, and she fixed an unseeing stare across to
where the afternoon sun was beginning to glow into sunset. I gazed for a
moment at her face, white, plump, tiny, and implacable, and gave her up.
“How do you account for such a mass of gold being there?” I queried of
Julian Jones. “A solid-gold meteor that fell out of the sky?”
“Not for a moment.” He shook his head. “ It was carried there by the
Indians.”
“Up a mountain like that—and such enormous weight and size!” I objected.
“Just as easy,” he smiled. “I used to be stumped by that proposition
myself, after I got my memory back. Now how in Sam Hill—’ I used to
begin, and then spend hours figuring at it. And then when I got the
answer I felt downright idiotic, it was that easy.” He paused, then
announced: “They didn’t.”
“But you just—said they did.”
“They did and they didn’t,” was his enigmatic reply. “Of course they
never carried that monster nugget up there. What they did was to carry
up its contents.”
He waited until he saw enlightenment dawn in my face.
“And then of course melted all the gold, or welded it, or smelted it, all
into one piece. You know the first Spaniards down there, under a leader
named Pizarro, were a gang of robbers and cut-throats. They went through
the country like the hoof-and-mouth disease, and killed the Indians off
like cattle. You see, the Indians had lots of gold. Well, what the
Spaniards didn’t get, the surviving Indians hid away in that one big
chunk on top the mountain, and it’s been waiting there ever since for
me—and for you, if you want to go in on it.”
And here, by the Lagoon of the Palace of Fine Arts, ended my acquaintance
with Julian Jones. On my agreeing to finance the adventure, he promised
to call on me at my hotel next morning with the letters of Seth Manners
and the railroad, and conclude arrangements. But he did not call. That
evening I telephoned his hotel and was informed by the clerk that Mr.
Julian Jones and wife had departed in the early afternoon, with their
baggage.
Can Mrs. Jones have rushed him back and hidden him away in Nebraska? I
remember that as we said good-bye, there was that in her smile that
recalled the vulpine complacency of Mona Lisa, the Wise.
THE END
Kohala, Hawaii,
_May_ 5, 1916.
LIKE ARGUS OF THE ANCIENT TIMES