He was thinking all this as he drove the devious twistings and turnings of the canyon road. Another mine or two they passed; then, nosing carefully down a hill steeper than the others, they turned sharply to the left and were in the final discomfort of the “wash.” A veritable sweat box it was on this particular hot afternoon in July. The baked, barren hills rose close on either side. Like a deep, gravelly river bed long since gone dry, the wash sloped steeply down toward the Colorado. Rawley could readily understand now the solicitude of the storekeeper. The return was quite likely to be a time of tribulation.
He had expected to come upon a camp of some sort. But the canyon opened bleakly to the river, the hot sand of its floor sloping steeply to meet the lapping waves of the turgid stream. At the water’s edge, on the first high ground of the bank, were ruins of an old stamp mill, which might have been built ten years ago or a hundred, so far as looks went.
He left the car and climbed upon the cement floor of the old mill. What at first had seemed to be a greater extension of the plant he now discovered was a walled roadway winding up to the crest of the hill. He swung about and gazed to the northward, as the Bible code had commanded that he should travel. A mile or so up the river were the walls of a deep canyon,—Black Canyon, according to his map. Farther away, set back from the river a mile, perhaps two miles, a sharp-pointed hill shouldered up above its fellows. This seemed to be the highest mountain, so far as he could see, in that direction. If that were the “great and high mountain” described in the code, their journey would not be so long as Johnny Buffalo anticipated.
The nearer view was desolation simmering in the heat. A hundred yards away, on the opposite bank of the wash, the forlorn ruins of a cabin or two gave melancholy evidence that here men had once worked and laughed and loved—perchance. He looked at the furnace yawning beside him, and at the muddy water swirling in drunken haste just below. It might have been just here that his grandfather had landed from the steamboat Gila and had watched the lovely young half-breed girl in the crowd come to welcome the boat and passengers.
He started when Johnny Buffalo spoke at his elbow. How the Indian had reached that spot unheard and unseen Rawley did not know. Johnny Buffalo was pointing to the north.
“I think that high mountain is where we must go,” he said. “It is one day’s travel. We can go to-day when the sun is behind the mountains, and we can walk until the stars are here. Very early in the morning we can walk again, and before it is too hot we can reach the trees where it will be cool.”
“We have a lot of grub and things in the car,” Rawley objected. “It seems to me that it wouldn’t be a bad plan to carry the stuff up here and cache it somewhere in this old mill. Then if your friend Queo should show up, there won’t be so much for him to steal. And if we want to make a camp on the mountain, we can come down here and carry the stuff up as we need it. There’s a hundred dollars’ worth of outfit in that car, Johnny,” he added frugally. “I’m all for keeping it for ourselves.”
Johnny Buffalo looked at the mountain, and he looked down at the car,—and then grunted a reluctant acquiescence. Rawley laughed at him.
“That’s all right—the mountain won’t run away over night,” he bantered, slapping his hand down on Johnny Buffalo’s shoulder with an affectionate familiarity bred in the past month. “I’ve been juggling that car over the desert trails since sunrise, and I wouldn’t object to taking it easy for a few hours.”
Johnny Buffalo said no more but began helping to unload the car. It was he who chose the trail by which they carried the loads to the upper level, cement-floored, where no tracks would show. He chose a hiding place beneath the wreckage of some machinery that had fallen against the bank in such a way that an open space was left beneath, large enough to hold their outfit.