“Sorry.” Callaghen shook his head, smiling. “I might have to lick you again, and I’m not sure I could do it.”
The desert was still. They saw no Indians on the long ride back to Camp Cady. The air was hot, but it held no malice. They made stops at Rock Springs, at Marl, Soda Lake, and Cave Canyon.
Callaghen nodded toward the walls of Cave Canyon. “There are places back yonder where a man can stand and look up three or four hundred feet. You’d think you were in a cathedral.”
The fluted columns were pink, beige, and gray, with darker shadows where the hollows were filled with mystery.
Malinda rode beside him. “Mort, what now?” she asked.
“Why, maybe I’ll find a town where they need a marshal, and while doing that job I might study law. You had a point there.”
“There’s the desert,” Malinda said.
“Yes, and I’ll wake up in the night and remember it. As it is now, and as it should always be.”
“What about the River of Gold?”
“I’ll think about it from time to time. I am sure it is there, and I think I know where it is, but when I follow a dream for thirty years like some of these desert rats, there’s got to be more at the end than a pot of gold.”
The mountains stretched their shadows over the desert, a wind played with the sand on a slope, wearied of it, and let it fall. The Mohave River, along which they rode, from time to time made a ripple over rocks, hurrying onward to its destiny in the Sinks far ahead. There it disappeared in the sand, and reappeared in the dark, silent caverns far underground. Here and there on its way it dropped a few flakes of gold.
“I hope nobody ever finds it,” Malinda said. “It should always be there, just to be looked for.”
The End