The eagle's wing: A story of the Colorado

by B. M. Bower

Again his mood impelled him to the manner that most appealed to the old Indian, nephew of a chief of his tribe. He waited for a space before he spoke. And when he did speak it was in the restrained tone which had won the Indian’s confidence the evening before.

“I have read,” he stated quietly, “and I know what it is that Grandfather meant. If we can go inside I’ll read it to you.”

“The door is locked.” Johnny Buffalo pointed one finger over his shoulder. “It is a new lock put there by your mother. She does not want me to go in.”

Rawley pressed his lips tightly together before he dared trust himself to speak. He looked at the barred door, thought of the room he had seen, its furnishings enriched by a hundred little mementoes of the past that belonged to his soldier grandfather. He had a swift, panicky fear that his mother would call in a second-hand furniture dealer and take what price he offered for the stuff. That, he promised himself, he would prevent at all costs.

“Come into my room, then,” he invited. “I want to read you what I discovered.”

“No. The house is your mother’s. We will go to my camp.”

So it was by the light of a camp fire, with the Mississippi flowing majestically past them under the stars, that Rawley first read as a complete document the Scriptural fragments that contained his grandfather’s message. Away in the northeast the lights of St. Louis set the sky aglow. Little lapping waves crept like licking lips against the bank with a whispery sound that mingled pleasantly with the subdued crackling of the fire. Across the leaping flames, Johnny Buffalo sat with his brown, corded hands upon his knees, his black braids drawn neatly forward across his chest. His lean face with its high nose and cheek bones flared into light or grew shadowed as the flames reached toward him or drew away. His lips were pressed firmly together, as if he had learned well the lesson of setting their seal against his thoughts.

“There is one point I thought you might be able to tell me,” Rawley said, looking across the fire when he had finished reading. “This ‘City which is by the river in the wilderness’—and ‘In the midst thereof a ferryboat which is by the brink of the river.’ Do you know what place is meant by that? Is it El Dorado, Nevada? Because Grandfather’s diary tells of going up the river to El Dorado. And I remember, now, there was some kind of Bible reference written over the name. I don’t remember what it was, though. I didn’t look it up. We’ll have to make sure about that, for the directions start from that point. It says we’re to go through the city which is by the river, and turn northward—and so on.”

The Indian reached out a hand, lifted a stick of wood and laid it across the fire. His eyes turned toward the river.

“Many times, when the air was warm and the stars sat in their places to watch the night, my sergeant came here with me, and I gathered wood to make a fire. Many hours he would sit here in his chair beside the river. Sometimes he would talk. His words were of the past when he was the strongest of all men. Sometimes his words were of El Dorado. It is a city by the river, and a ferryboat is in the midst thereof. It has made many rich with the gold they dig from the mountains. I think that is the city you must go through.”