“They continued on a mile or so further and then he suggested they stop and trap out a beaver pond they’d found. Arnaud volunteered to hunt meat for them and he took off along the river, and as soon as he was out of sight of the others he started back, found his trail and started up.
“It was a steep trail, unused in a long time, and he figured that in the two miles or so of trail he climbed about three thousand feet … he was judging in part by the change in vegetation. He reached a high saddle, crossed over and started down. He was looking for a creek that flowed out of the mountain, and he could see the canyon down which it flowed, but there was no longer a trail. That had played out when he reached the crest of the ridge.
“It was very cold, and the going was difficult. He had to move slowly because of the altitude. He crossed over the saddle, as I’ve said, but he had no more than started down when he heard a shot where he had left his friends. A shot, and then several shots.
“As you can imagine, he was in a quandary. If he went back to help his friends, it would take him the better part of an hour, moving as he would have to, and by then any fight would be over.
“Or perhaps they had merely killed a deer. In the final event, he continued on, found the head of the creek and found the marker, a piece of a ramrod thrust into a crack in the rock. The gold was cached just below it and to the right, and when he removed the stones he found a dozen gold bars, several sacks of dust, and one small sack of diamonds.
“It was too much to carry and now that he knew where it was he could come back any time. He took one sack of dust and dropped a couple of the diamonds in it and thrust it into his pack. Then he recovered the gold and started back.
“There had been no more shooting, but when he came near the bottom of the hill he took great care, studying out his trail in advance. He was still some distance from the beaver pond when he saw Mohler. He was lying face down in the grass with five arrows in his back, a golden carpet of dandelions all about him.
“Arnaud watched for several minutes but there was no movement from the body, no sign of life. From where he lay he could see the dead man still had his rifle and tomahawk, so the body had not been looted.
“Easing back into the brush he worked his way around toward the pond, and there near a fallen log he saw another one. He couldn’t make out who it was, but this body had been stripped, scalped, and mutilated.
“The fact that the one body had been stripped and the other had not implied the Indians were still around, so he moved back into the brush and lay quiet, listening.
“He stayed there all day without moving on the theory that if he did not move he would make no sound and leave no tracks. Several times he saw Indians, but each time they passed some distance away, and finally they mounted up and rode away.
“When it was dark he went down to Mohler, but the man was cold in death and had been stripped and robbed in the meantime. The others, if any remained alive, were busy getting away from there, and that was what he decided to do. The Utes had gone downstream, so he went upstream with the idea of striking the highline trail. He did, found one of the others of his party still alive, and together they got out of the country.”
“But the gold is still there?”
“The gold and the diamonds. Of the two he got out with, one was worthless. The other was an excellent stone, however, and with the results he bought a small farm in French Canada.”
“He never came back?”
“He decided to let well enough alone. He married, had children, but none of them were inclined toward adventure. I gathered they did not have much faith in their father’s stories. Their own lives were rather prosaic and his stories were unbelievable to them … but not to me.”
“Well,” I said, “it won’t do any harm to look. You say the place is close by?”
“Right back of that peak yonder. The start of that trail can’t be three miles from here.” He glanced over at Galloway. “Now you know why I was so willing to come along. I’ve been up here before, but these rivers were named when Arnaud was in here, and I wasted time on the Florida and the Animas before I realized they had to be wrong.”
We brought our horses in from their picket-ropes and after watering them, turned them into the corral. Then we bedded down and went to sleep.
There for a few minutes I lay awake, considering that gold. If we had it we could buy more cattle, fix our place up better, but I wasn’t counting any gold we didn’t have. A lot of folks had their hands on that gold and it hadn’t done any of them much good.
The fire died down to coals, and I could hear the rustling of the aspens and the faint sounds the horses made in the corral.
I wondered, suddenly, what had become of that wolf.
Chapter X
Many a campfire dies down with talk that doesn’t count up to much in the sunlight.
Around the fire is the time to talk of treasure, and ha’nts and witches and such, but come broad day there’s work to be done. Somewhere back down the line Parmalee Sackett should be starting north with a herd, and it was time for Nick Shadow to ride down to meet him.
It was also time for somebody to ride down to Shalako and burden themselves with grub for the next two weeks of work, and it spelled out to be me for that job. The past few days had helped a sight when it came to my strength catching up to itself, and I felt a whole lot better. Still, we didn’t want to leave our place alone too long. Not that we had anything there. Galloway, he said to me, “Flagan, let’s ride this out for awhile. Let’s sleep out and see what they do. If there’s to be a fraction over this let’s not have anything they can bum.” … So we hadn’t.
Nevertheless the thought of that gold was in all our minds, and it was in our thoughts to ride up there someday and have a look for it. Right now we had to pin down the things that were sure or that we were trying to make sure.
Shalako lay still under the afternoon sun when I rode into town. I was still wearing the moccasins because my feet were not quite well, and they were almighty tender around the edges where the flesh had been broken and torn and mashed by rocks, but otherwise I was dressed pretty well for the time, and for a working cowhand.
The first thing I saw was the buckboard from the Rossiter outfit, and Meg about to get down, so I swung my horse alongside and stepped down in time to take her hand and help her down.
She smiled, but I’d say it was a might cool, but when she taken my hand to step down she done it like a real lady, and I could see she set store by such things. Fact is, I set store by them myself. It pleasures a man to do graceful things for a lady, and if she’s pretty, so much the better. We’d be a sorry world without the courtesies, as Ma used to say.
“My!” Meg said. “I would scarcely know you!”
Me, I blushed like a fool, which I have a way of doing whenever a woman says “I, yes, or no” to me. And the blushing makes me mad at myself, which makes me blush all the more. So I stood there, all red around the ears like a dirt-kicking country boy.
“I got me an outfit,” I said finally. And then I added, “We’re fixing to go ranching, me and Galloway and Nick Shadow.”
“How nice!” she said primly, and then with a little edge to her voice she said, “I’m surprised you have the nerve after the way you backed down for Curly Dunn.”
Now I never backed down for no man, and she knew it, but girls like to put a man in a bad place and she had done it to me. Like a fool I started in to argue the question, which I shouldn’t have done. “I never backed down for him,” I said, “or any man.”