“Stop! He calls,” he said.
Rawley stopped the car, his head tilted outward, looking back. The storekeeper was coming down the trail toward them.
“I forgot to tell you there’s a bad Indian loose in the hills somewhere along the river,” he panted when he came up. “He’s waylaid a couple of prospectors that we know of. A blood feud against the whites, the Indians tell me. You may not run across him at all, but it will be just as well to keep an eye out.”
“What’s his name?” Johnny Buffalo turned his head and stared hard at the other.
“His name’s Queo. He’s middle-aged—somewhere in the late forties, I should say. Medium-sized and kind of stocky built. He’ll kill to get grub or tobacco. Seeing there’s two of you he might not try anything, but I’d be careful, if I were in your place. There’s a price on his head, so if he tries any tricks—” He waved his hand and grinned expressively as he turned back to the store.
“He is older than that man thinks,” said Johnny Buffalo after a silence. “Queo has almost as many years as I have. When we were children we fought. He is bad. For him to kill is pleasure, but he is a coward.”
“If there is a price on his head he has probably left the country,” Rawley remarked indifferently. “Old-timers are fine people, most of them. But they do like to tell it wild to tenderfeet. I suppose that’s human nature.”
Johnny Buffalo did not argue the point. He seemed content to gaze at the hills in the effort to locate old landmarks. And as for Rawley himself, his mind was wholly absorbed by his mission into the country, which he had dreamed of for more than a month. There had been some delay in getting started. First, he could not well curtail the length of his visit with his mother, in spite of the fact that they seemed to have little in common. Then he thought it wise to make the trip to Kingman and report upon a property there which was about to be sold for a good-sized fortune. The job netted him several hundred dollars, which he was likely to need. Wherefore he had of necessity had plenty of time to dream over his own fortune which might be lying in the hills—“In the cleft of the jagged rocks”—waiting for him to find it.
Just at first he had been somewhat skeptical. Fifty years is a long time for gold to remain hidden in the hills of a mining country so rich as Nevada, without some prospector discovering it. But Johnny Buffalo believed. Whether his belief was based solely upon his faith in his sergeant, Rawley could not determine. But Johnny Buffalo had a very plausible argument in favor of the gold remaining where Grandfather King had left it in the underground stream.
The fact that Rawley was exhorted to “take victuals for the journey” meant a distance of a good many miles, perhaps, which they must travel from El Dorado. Then, they were to go to the top of a very high mountain and pass over on the other side. Johnny Buffalo argued that the start was to be made from El Dorado merely because the mountain would be most visible from that point. It would be rough country, he contended. The code mentioned cliffs and great heaps of stones and clefts in jagged rocks, with a deep pit, “Hid from the eyes of all living,” for the final goal. He thought it more than likely that Grandfather King’s gold mine was still undiscovered. And toward the last, Rawley had been much more inclined to believe him. He had read diligently all the mining information he could get concerning this particular district, as far back as the records went. Nowhere was any mention made of such a rich placer discovery on—or in—a mountain.