Rawley laid his hand on Peter’s shoulder and left it there.
“You wouldn’t do anything of the kind,” he laughed. “That darned dam idea of yours is catching. I’ve got it, and got it bad. If that gold you beat me to will tip enough rock into the river to make a good job of the dam, I’m satisfied. All I ask is that you let me know when you’re ready so I can see her go. Are you doing as I advised,—preparing to shoot her with electricity?”
Peter nodded. “Old Jess kicked on the cost, but we showed him how it was the only safe way. She’s all loaded, across the river. We did that during low water and carried the wiring across up to a high, overhead cable that crosses the river all ready to be hooked up to the battery. I talked with a mining man about explosives and found out some things that came in pretty handy, I guess. I got a hint not to break the ground with dynamite enough so that the power of the black powder would be killed in the seams opened up. We didn’t use so much dynamite, after all. We’re depending on the black powder.”
“I still warn you against it,” said Rawley. “But if you can’t be stopped, I do want to see the fireworks. There’s a pretty engineering problem there, and it will be worth a good deal to see how it works out.” His thoughts returned again to the old Indian waiting up on the hill. “I’ll buy some gold from you, Uncle Peter, if you have it handy. I’ll tell old Johnny it’s all I could find; I think I can satisfy the old fellow with the thought that his sergeant had it straight.”
Peter left him for five minutes and returned, carrying a small canvas sack.
“Here’s a handful of specimens I tucked into a niche in the rocks, intending to give them to Nevada for a necklace or something,” he told Rawley. “But Nevada can have diamond necklaces when the dam goes in. You take these, boy. Maybe some of them sort of belong to you, anyway.”
“Lord, I don’t want them,” Rawley protested. “I’ll give them to Johnny Buffalo, though. It will keep him from worrying about it. More than all that, it will keep him off the warpath, the old catamount.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
GREATER THAN GOLD
Johnny Buffalo held a handful of nuggets in his hard, brown palms. His eyes shone whenever he looked toward the old wheel chair beside the window. He listened to Rawley’s explanation of why there would be no more gold, but the technical phraseology went completely over his head, and he smiled abstractedly and held up first one bit of gold and then another to the light. They were very heavy. They were beautiful. They had lain, hidden away all these years, just where his sergeant had said that they were hidden.
“‘There is a path which no man knoweth,’” he muttered, when Rawley had finished and was waiting to see what effect his harangue about erosions and changed currents had taken on the Indian mind. “It is so. My sergeant said it, and it was the truth. My sergeant never lied. Always the words he spoke were true. I know it without proof. Now you have the proof, and you know it also.”