The eagle's wing: A story of the Colorado

by B. M. Bower

The month of inaction which followed fretted Johnny Buffalo nearly as much as the companionship of the squaws had done. In his boyhood he had been trained to serve his sergeant. For fifty years that service had been uninterrupted by ill health or accident. It irked him now to lie idle and watch Rawley burn his fingers on the handle of the frying pan, or wash the dishes from which Johnny Buffalo had been fed.

The long days when Rawley was away with Peter were lonesome. There was nothing to do but to seek sedulously after comfort, which is so rare a thing in a camp beside the Colorado in summer that every little whiff of cool breeze is prized, every little change in the monotonous diet makes an impromptu banquet. Sometimes Nevada walked down to camp with things she herself had cooked; but Johnny Buffalo had taken care to insult Gladys and Anita so definitely that they refused to come near him.

“I am well enough now to walk,” he announced one evening, when he had insisted upon cooking the supper. “To-day I climbed to the top of that hill. In a sack on my shoulder I carried a rock that weighed twenty-five pounds. I am well. We can go now and find the gold.”

“You packed a rock up that hill?” Rawley laid his hands on his hips and squinted at the hill indicated. “You ought to get sun-struck for that. But if you think you’re up to it, we can hit the trail to the mountain about day after to-morrow. I’ll have to drive up to Nelson to-morrow to get more grub and the mail. You might borrow the burros from Peter and meet me at the mouth of the canyon. That will save time and give you a chance to try out your shoulder.”

Johnny Buffalo actually grinned and stepped more briskly than was his normal gait, as if he would prove himself as spry as any young man of twenty-six.

Thus for ten days they wandered through rocky gorges, and climbed the steep sides of hills, and returned to their camp for fresh supplies and a day or two of rest. The “great and high mountain” in the distance had seemed to recede before them as they walked. They had been three days in reaching its base. Another two days had served to take them over the top and down on the other side westward. There their trail seemed to end, for that side of the mountain was almost entirely covered with loose rubble of decomposed rock. There were no cliffs or jagged rocks anywhere that they could see.

Since Peter had burned the code, and the list of references was in St. Louis with Grandfather’s Bible, they were compelled for the present to depend altogether on memory. But Rawley could repeat the code from beginning to end without hesitation. The only explanation, then, of their failure was that either he had made a mistake somewhere in writing down the marked passages or Grandfather King had marked them wrong.

Rawley astonished Nevada somewhat by asking to borrow her Bible. But when he received it he could not remember the references, so that he was no better off than before. One thing was certain: the only great and high mountain within sight of El Dorado, looking north, with “Cedar trees in abundance scattered over the face of the high mountain” had no cliffs upon its western side. When the mountain itself failed to measure up with the description, the whole code fell flat. It was a big country, and it was a rough country. A man might spend a lifetime in the search.

“My sergeant did not lie,” Johnny Buffalo contended stubbornly. “He was a great man. He did not make mistakes. When he said the gold was there, in the clefts of the jagged rocks, it was there. He said it.”

“He said it—fifty years ago,” Rawley retorted rather impatiently. “I didn’t see any gold formation anywhere on that mountain. It’s true that ‘Gold is where you find it’; but it leaves earmarks in its particular neighborhood for the man who knows how to read the signs. If there is any gold on that mountain, some one carried it there.”