“No man has been before us,” he declared emphatically, when Rawley questioned him. “Bushes have grown in the cleft until I could not have found it or suspected that a cleft was there if my sergeant had not shown me the spot. The cleft is there. I have seen it. The bushes are very old, and there is much dead wood. There is the great heap of stones, and there has been a dead tree. But it is gone many years and only the root is left to show that it once stood joined to the great heap of stones. When the sun comes I will show you.”
He was punctiliously true to his promise, for the sun was not ten minutes above the peak across the river when Rawley stood beside the “Great heap of stones ... joined to a dry tree”, or what even he could see had once been a dry tree. It had been an unmerciful trail, and he could easily believe that it was a path which the eye of man had not seen. Indeed, it was not a path at all, but a line of least obstruction through an upheaval of what Rawley’s trained eyes recognized as iron-stained quartz and porphyry.
The place was almost inaccessible, and from a short distance it resembled a blow-out of granite so much that no prospector would trouble to investigate. Besides, Johnny Buffalo explained that this had been a popular habitat of snakes, and that he had spent a great deal of his time, since the location of the spot, in hunting rattlesnakes. He proudly added that he had earned many dollars in extracting the oil and in selling the skins. He feared that he had not gathered them all, however, and he warned Rawley against setting his foot carelessly amongst the rocks.
Johnny Buffalo then gathered dry leaves and started a fire in the brush. So much dead wood underlay the growth that the crevice was presently a furnace.
“If any snakes are there, they will come out,” he observed grimly. “Also, light will go down, so that you will not stumble in darkness. I know what my sergeant meant in the message: ‘Take heed, now ... that is exceeding deep.’ You will need light.”
Rawley nodded. He was watching the flames curiously.
“By Jove, Johnny, I believe you are right,” he exclaimed, pointing. “Do you see that? There is a strong draught from beneath. There’s an opening down there, sure as anything. And I’ll admit to you right now that this is gold formation blown out here. The iron stain is a good mask for it. I can readily believe that it hasn’t been prospected.”
“My sergeant does not speak lies,” Johnny Buffalo retorted imperturbably. “I know that it is so.” Whereupon he gave chase to a rattlesnake that had slipped out from between two tilted bowlders and went sliding sinuously away. With a crude trident, long of handle and tough and light, he pinned the snake to the ground and neatly sliced off its head with a light ax which he carried suspended from his belt.
“Here’s another,” Rawley told him, and Johnny Buffalo, moving with surprising agility, caught that one also.
“For a time I gathered the venom in a bottle,” he informed Rawley in his serious tone. “But now I take only the body. When you go down into the pit there will be no snakes until you reach the bottom. Then you look out.”