“Very well. I’ll speak to the Peace Conference about the Gulf Stream,” Rawley assured her gravely. “In case I am unable to reserve it for you—would the Gulf of Mexico do, or the Mississippi River, perhaps?”
“We’re accustomed to cracking our whip over fresh water,” Nevada retorted. “I should prefer to have the Mississippi, please.”
Johnny Buffalo glanced toward the wheel chair, gazed at it intently and nodded his head.
“You will succeed and fail in the succeeding,” he intoned solemnly. “In the failure you will rise to greater things. It is so. My sergeant never speaks what is not true.”
Eyes moved guardedly to meet other eyes that understood, conveying a warning that the old man must be humored. Johnny Buffalo stood up, his face turned toward the wheel chair. He seemed to be listening. His eyes brightened. The wrinkles in his bronzed old face deepened and radiated joy.
“It is good! I need not wait—I go now!” He took an eager step and wavered there.
Peter and Rawley, rising together, caught the old man in their arms as he went down, falling slowly like a straight, old tree whose roots have snapped with age.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
THE EAGLE LOOKS UPON A GREAT RIVER
Rawley drove down El Dorado Canyon, now silent in mid-afternoon, with not a sound of stamp mill or compressor or the mingled voices of men at work. Techatticup stood forlorn, deserted save by one old man who bore himself proudly because he was the guardian there. The war, the labor question, the slump in metals, had done their work. It seemed to Rawley as if the nation were taking a long breath, making ready to go forward again more resistlessly than before. He missed Johnny Buffalo terribly; but if he could, he would not have called him back. Johnny would have had a dreary time of it, alone all these long months when Rawley’s work had held close to the affairs of the government.
The eye of the Eagle had not been closed. His keen glance had gone to this and to that, his piercing gaze had fixed itself upon the desert land and the river that went hurrying down through flaming gorge and painted canyon, a law unto itself, an untaught, untamed giant of the wild; a scenic wonder set deep in savage walls of rock, where people came and looked down upon it, drew back shivering, ventured to look again in silent awe; a terrible, devastating thing from which men fled in terror when the giant river rose, leaped from its bed and went raging across the land.