Close by the ruins of the community house they located the spring. It was in a ferny dell with mossy banks. Charmian stooped for water and saw a white object a little distance off, half hidden by the drooping fronds. Instinctively she knew what it was. She rose and walked around to it. It was the tibia bone of a human being, and, scattered here and there throughout the ferns, she discovered the remainder of the skeleton, including the skull.
It gave her somewhat of a shock, but in the days to follow she was to grow accustomed to finding the bones and skulls of men in every conceivable place. This scatteration, the doctor held, bespoke the extinction of the tribe from the ravages of some epidemic—possibly smallpox—rather than a war of annihilation. Particularly so because no weapons were discovered near skeletons they found on open land.
The broiled jackrabbit was appetizing, for their stomachs were turned against salt meat and jerky. Though the air was frosty, the evening in the protected valley was pleasant, the smoke of the incense cedar of their campfire sweet. Dr. Inman Shonto had been taciturn during the preparations for supper and the coming night. His face was grave, his eyes thoughtful. Finally Charmian asked:
“Your case would sink, of course, wouldn’t it?”
“I saw it sink out of sight,” he replied. “There were some surgical instruments in it that made it heavy. And the river must be deep where it fell, with that sheer wall above it. Besides, all of my medical supplies that were not in corked bottles would be ruined, provided we could drag it up. It’s a goner.”
They made no further mention of the subject until the meal was over and Shonto, having heaped more wood on the coals, leaned back against the hole of a tree with pipe aglow.
He puffed thoughtfully for several minutes, while the girl gazed into the leaping flames, silent, sensing that her companion was nerving himself to lay his troubles before her. Finally he knocked the dottle from his pipe, pocketed it, and looked at her with a brotherly smile.
“I have decided sooner than I thought I should,” he began. “So you may as well know the worst to-night. I don’t think I’ll have reached a better solution by morning.”
He smiled again, patiently, as does a strong man in the face of threatening disaster.
“Charmian,” he said, “to-morrow I must start back to Mary and Andy and leave you here alone. I’ll get Andy and send him on to you, while I make an effort to take Mary back to Shirttail Henry’s—or at least as far as Mosquito. Then I go on to civilization, while you and Andy wait for me to return to the Valley of Arcana. I’ll probably come back to you in an aeroplane. Only by following that plan can Andy Jerome be saved.”