"Come on down now, Sarge," he grinned; and, seating himself on a rock with the carbine across his knees, he began to roll a cigarette, as if the finding of Hank Rowan's gold-cache were a thing of no importance whatever.
"Well," I began, when I had negotiated that precarious succession of knobs and notches and accumulated a fresh set of bruises, "why don't you get busy? How much wiser are you now? Where's your gold-dust?"
He took a deliberate puff and squinted up at the ledge again. "I'm sitting on it, as near as I can figure," he coolly asserted.
"Yes, you are," I fleered. "I'm from Missouri!"
"Oh, you're a doubting Thomas of the first water," he said. "Stand behind me, you confounded unbeliever. Kink your back a little and look over that stone you set for a mark. Do you see anything that catches your attention?"
Getting in the position he suggested, I looked up. Away back in the days before the white man was a power to be reckoned with in the Indian's scheme of things, some warrior had stood upon that self-same ledge and hacked out with a flint chisel what he and his fellows doubtless considered a work of art. Uncanny-looking animals, and uncannier figures that might have passed for anything from an articulated skeleton to a Missing Link, cavorted in a long line across that tribal picture-gallery. Between each group of figures the face of the rock was scored with mysterious signs and rudely limned weapons of war and chase. Right over the stone marker, a long-shafted war-lance was carved—the blade pointing down. MacRae's seat, stone-marker, and aboriginal spearhead; the three lined up like the sights of a modern rifle. The conclusion, in the light of what we knew from Rutter, was obvious, even to a lunkhead like myself.
"It looks like you might have struck it," I was constrained to admit.
Mac threw away his cigarette. "Here and now is where we find out," he declared.
Worming our fingers under the edge of the boulder, we lifted with all the strength that was in us. For a second it seemed that we could never budge it. Then it began to rise slowly, so slowly that I thought the muscles of my back would snap, and MacRae's face close by mine grew red and then purple with the strain. But it moved, and presently a great heave turned it over. Bedded in the soft earth underneath lay the slim buckskin sacks. Our fingers, I remember, trembled a bit as we stood one on end and loosened its mouth to make sure if we had found the treasure for which two men had already lost their lives.