Even after he had turned the pinto loose there, it still seemed spontaneously inevitable for their hands to stay linked together until they sat side by side on a bench of rock and he had to light cigarettes for both of them. There was nothing to say about it. All their lives it had been certain that this would happen if they ever met.
With the smoke from his mouth curling and vanishing in the lazy air, Simon Templar took out the piece of rock he had picked up and turned it in his hands, while the girl glanced at it curiously.
“What is it?” she asked. “A souvenir? Or are you going to find gold in these hyar hills?”
He shook his head.
“No, darling. Not gold. That would have been rather corny, somehow. But some people would give a lot of gold for it. It’s more useful, in certain ways... I think I’m beginning to get somewhere.”
He turned the rock this way and that. It was heavier than one would have expected for its size. One face was caked with brown limestone, that matched many of the surrounding formations. But the rest of it was a hard greenish-grey, quartz-like stone, faintly dappled with darker shadows. And in this quartz ran veins and beads of bright magenta.
The Saint, as had been admitted, was no great geologist, but there were a useful few ores which he could recognise at a glance, and he knew now why Dr Julius must be greatly interested in Max Valmon’s feud with the Circle Y.
4
“They’ve rounded up some cattle for branding in a canyon a couple of miles over that way,” Jean Morland said. “I think I can find it, and we can have lunch with them.”
They had found another way down through the hills without any more accidents.