“There isn’t any city now,” Rawley told him. “It’s been abandoned for years. I don’t think there’s a town there, any more.”
“There is the place by the river,” Johnny Buffalo observed calmly. “There is the great and high mountain. There is ‘the path that no man knoweth.’”
“Yes, you bet. And we’re going to find it, Johnny Buffalo. I’ve got a chance to go out that way this month, to examine a mine. I didn’t think I’d take the job. I wanted to go to Mexico. But now, of course, it will be Nevada, and I’ll want you to go with me. Do you know that country?”
A strange expression lightened the Indian’s face for an instant.
“When I killed my first meat,” he said, “I could walk from the kill to the city by the river. My father’s tent was no more distant than it is from here to the great city yonder. Not so far, I think. The way was rough with many hills.”
Impulsively Rawley leaned and stretched out his arm toward the Indian.
“Let’s shake on it. We will go together, and you will be my partner. Whatever we find is the gift of my grandfather, and half of it is yours when we find it. I feel he’d want it that way. Is it a go, Johnny Buffalo?”
Something very much like a smile stirred the old man’s lips. He took Rawley’s hand and gave it a solemn shake, once up, once down, as is the way of the Indian.
“It is go. You are like my sergeant when he held me in his arms and gave me water from his canteen. You are my son. Where you go I will go with you.”