A huge rattlesnake protested stridently against being disturbed. Rawley drew his automatic, meaning to shoot it; but Johnny Buffalo stopped him with a warning gesture, and himself killed the snake with a rock. While it was still writhing with a smashed head, he picked it up by the tail, took a long step or two and heaved it into the river, grinning his satisfaction over a deed well done.

Rawley, standing back watching him, had a swift vision of the old Indian paddling solemnly about the yard near the west wing. There he was an incongruous figure amongst the syringas and the roses. Here, although he had discarded the showy fringed buckskin for the orthodox brown khaki clothes of the desert, he somehow fitted into his surroundings and became a part of the wilderness itself. Johnny Buffalo was assuredly coming into his own.

CHAPTER SIX
TRAILS MEET

By sunrise they were ready for the trail, light packs and filled canteens slung upon their shoulders. The car was backed against the bluff that would shade it from the scorching sunlight from early afternoon to sundown. Beside it were the embers of a mesquite-wood fire where they had boiled coffee and fried bacon in the cool of dawn. As a safeguard against the loss of his car, Rawley had disconnected the breaker points from the distributor and carried them, carefully wrapped, in his pocket. There would be no moving of the car under its own power until the points were replaced. And Johnny Buffalo had advised leaving a few things in the car, to ward off suspicion that their outfit had been cached. Furthermore, he had cunningly obliterated their tracks through the deep, fine sand to the ruins of the stamp mill. Even the keen, predatory eyes of an outlaw Indian could scarcely distinguish any trace of their many trips that way.

They crossed the wash, turned into the remnant of an old road leading up the bank to the level above, and followed a trail up the river. Once Johnny Buffalo stopped and pointed down the bank.

“The ferryboat went there,” he explained. “Much land has been eaten by the river since last I saw this place. Many houses stood here. They are gone. All is gone. My people are gone, like the town. Of Queo only have I heard, and him the white men hunt as they hunt the wolf.”

Rawley nodded, having no words for what he felt. There was something inexpressibly melancholy in this desolation where his grandfather had found riotous life. Of the fortunes gathered here, the fortunes lost—of the hopes fulfilled and the hopes crushed slowly in long, monotonous days of toil and disappointment—what man could tell? Only the river, rushing heedlessly past as it had hurried, all those years ago, to meet the lumbering little river boats struggling against its current with their burden of human emotions, only the river might have told how the town was born,—and how it had died. Or the grim hills standing there as they had stood since the land was in the making, looking down with saturnine calm upon the puny endeavors of men whose lives would soon enough cease upon earth and be forgotten. Rawley’s boot toe struck against something in the loose gravel,—a child’s shoe with the toe worn to a gaping mouth, the heel worn down to the last on the outer edge: dry as a bleached bone, warped by many a storm, blackened, doleful. Even a young man setting out in quest of his fortune, with a picturesque secret code in his pocket, may be forgiven for sending a thought after the child who had scuffed that coarse little shoe down here in El Dorado.

But presently Johnny Buffalo, leading the way briskly, his sharp old eyes taking in everything within their range as if he were eagerly verifying his memories of the place, turned from the trail along the river and entered the hills. His moccasined feet clung tenaciously to the steep places where Rawley’s high-laced mining boots slipped. The sun rays struck them fiercely and the “little stinging gnats” which Grandfather King had mentioned in his diary were there to pester them, poising vibrantly just before the eyes as if they waited only the opportunity to dart between the lids.

The thought that perhaps his grandfather had come that way, fifty years ago, filled the toil of climbing up the long gully with a peculiar interest. Fifty years ago these hills must have looked much the same. Fifty years ago, the prospect holes they passed occasionally may have been fresh-turned earth and rocks. Men searching for rich silver and gold might have been seen plodding along the hillsides; but the hills themselves could not have changed much. His grandfather had looked upon all this, and had divided his thoughts, perhaps, between the gold and his latest infatuation, the half-breed girl, Anita. And suddenly Rawley put a vague speculation into words:

“Hey, Johnny! Here’s a good place to make a smoke, in the shade.” He waited until the Indian had retraced the dozen steps between them. “Johnny, there was a beautiful half-breed girl here, when Grandfather made his last trip up the river. She was half Spanish. My grandfather mentioned her once or twice in his diary. Do you remember her?”