Part 8 (2/2)
”Oh, thunder!” I exclaimed. ”Do you reckon _that's_ what he meant?”
”What else?” Mac reasoned. ”They'd mark the place somehow--and aren't those his exact words? What dummies we were not to look on those ledges before. You can't see the surface of them from the flat; and we might have known they would hardly put a mark where it could be seen by any pilgrim who happened to ride through that bottom.”
”Hope you're right,” I grunted optimistically.
”We'll know beyond a doubt, in the morning,” Mac declared. ”To-night we won't do anything but eat, drink, and sleep as sound as possible, for to-morrow we may have one h.e.l.l of a time. I prefer to have a few hours of daylight ahead of us when we raise that _cache_. Things are apt to tighten, and I don't like a rumpus in the dark. Just now I'm hungry. If that stuff is there, it will keep. Come on to camp; our troubles are either nearly over or just about to begin in earnest.”
We followed the upland past the end of the Stone till we found a slope that didn't require wings for descent. If Hicks or Gregory wondered at our arrival from the opposite direction in which we should have appeared, they didn't betray any unseemly curiosity. Supper and a cigarette or two consumed the twilight hour, and when dark shut down we took to our blankets and dozed through the night.
At daybreak we breakfasted. Without a word to any one MacRae picked up his carbine and walked out of camp. I followed, equally silent. It was barely a hundred yards to the ledge, and I caught myself wis.h.i.+ng it were a good deal farther--out of range of those watchful eyes. I couldn't help wondering how it would feel to be potted at the moment of discovery.
”I thought I'd leave them both behind, and let them take it out in guessing,” Mac explained, when we stood under the rock shelf upon which we had looked down the evening before. ”We're right under their noses, so they won't do anything till the stuff's actually in sight.”
He studied the face of the cliff for a minute. The ledge jutted out from the towering wall approximately twenty feet above our heads, but it could be reached by a series of jagged points and k.n.o.bs; a sort of natural stairway--though some of the steps were a long way apart.
Boulders of all shapes and sizes lay bedded in the soft earth where we stood.
”You s.h.i.+n up there, Sarge,” Mac commanded, ”and locate that mark. It ought to be an easy climb.”
I ”s.h.i.+nned,” and reached the ledge with a good deal of skin peeled from various parts of my person. The first object my eye fell upon as I hoisted myself above the four-foot shelf was a dull, yellow spot on the gray rock, near enough so that I could lean forward and touch it with my fingers. A two-inch circle of the real thing--I'd seen enough gold in the raw to know it without any acid test--hammered into the coa.r.s.e sandstone. I pried it up with the blade of my knife and looked it over.
Originally it had been a fair-sized nugget. Hans or Rowan had pounded it into place with the back of a hatchet (the corner-marks told me that), flattening it to several times its natural diameter. I threw it down to MacRae, and looked carefully along the ledge. There was no other mark that I could see; I began to wonder if we were as hot on the scent as we had thought.
”Is there a loose piece of rock up there?” Mac called presently. ”If there is, set it on the edge, in line with where this was.”
I found a fragment about the size of my fist and set it on the rim of the ledge. He squinted up at it a moment, then nodded, smiling.
”Come on down now, Sarge,” he grinned; and, seating himself on a rock with the carbine across his knees, he began to roll a cigarette, as if the finding of Hank Rowan's gold-_cache_ were a thing of no importance whatever.
”Well,” I began, when I had negotiated that precarious succession of k.n.o.bs and notches and acc.u.mulated a fresh set of bruises, ”why don't you get busy? How much wiser are you now? Where's your gold-dust?”
He took a deliberate puff and squinted up at the ledge again. ”I'm sitting on it, as near as I can figure,” he coolly a.s.serted.
”Yes, you are,” I fleered. ”I'm from Missouri!”
”Oh, you're a doubting Thomas of the first water,” he said. ”Stand behind me, you confounded unbeliever. Kink your back a little and look over that stone you set for a mark. Do you see anything that catches your attention?”
Getting in the position he suggested, I looked up. Away back in the days before the white man was a power to be reckoned with in the Indian's scheme of things, some warrior had stood upon that self-same ledge and hacked out with a flint chisel what he and his fellows doubtless considered a work of art. Uncanny-looking animals, and uncannier figures that might have pa.s.sed for anything from an articulated skeleton to a Missing Link, cavorted in a long line across that tribal picture-gallery. Between each group of figures the face of the rock was scored with mysterious signs and rudely limned weapons of war and chase.
Right over the stone marker, a long-shafted war-lance was carved--the blade pointing down. MacRae's seat, stone-marker, and aboriginal spearhead; the three lined up like the sights of a modern rifle. The conclusion, in the light of what we knew from Rutter, was obvious, even to a lunkhead like myself.
”It looks like you might have struck it,” I was constrained to admit.
Mac threw away his cigarette. ”Here and now is where we find out,” he declared.
Worming our fingers under the edge of the boulder, we lifted with all the strength that was in us. For a second it seemed that we could never budge it. Then it began to rise slowly, so slowly that I thought the muscles of my back would snap, and MacRae's face close by mine grew red and then purple with the strain. But it moved, and presently a great heave turned it over. Bedded in the soft earth underneath lay the slim buckskin sacks. Our fingers, I remember, trembled a bit as we stood one on end and loosened its mouth to make sure if we had found the treasure for which two men had already lost their lives.
[Ill.u.s.tration: BEDDED IN THE SOFT EARTH UNDERNEATH LAY THE SLIM BUCKSKIN SACKS.
_Page 159._]
<script>