The thunder boomed more audible, and the eagle screamed defiance over the lonely adventurer's head.
[CHAPTER V.]
THE GODSEND.
The inhabitants of the wilderness, red or white, black or yellow, obliged often to "let go of all," as our sailor friend would word it, and "get" (as he would probably say if his foolhardy behaviour allowed him to live long enough in that region to acquire the cant language), and pretty suddenly too, to follow the chase or avoid an ambush, are necessitated to abandon their plunder and traps, using these words in their legitimate sense. As, at the same time, they have no inclination to renounce their property, they bank it, or, as the trappers say, cache it.
The model cache is thus constructed: the first thing is to spread blankets or buffalo robes around the chosen spot for the excavation, which is scooped out in any desirable shape with knives and flat stones; all the extracted ground, loam, sand, or whatever its nature, being carefully put on the spreads. When the pit is sufficiently capacious it is lined with buffalo hides to keep out damp, and the valuables are deposited within, even packed up in hide, if necessary. The earth is restored and trodden down, or rammed firmly with the rifle butts, water is sometimes sprinkled on the top to facilitate the settling, and upon the replaced sod to prevent it dying after the injury to its roots. All the earth left over is carried to a running water, or scattered to the four winds, so as to make the least evidences of the concealment vanish. The cache is generally so well hidden that only the eye of an uncommonly gifted man can discover it. Often, then, he only chances upon one that has been opened and emptied by the owners, who, after that, of course, were easy in their second operation. The contents of a well-constructed cache may keep half a dozen years without spoiling.
Benito Bustamente believed he had been led to die upon a cache.
To a man dropping of fatigue and famine such a find was of inestimable value. It might reasonably offer him the primary necessities of which he was denuded, and he would be revived, literally, on being furnished with the means to fight his way to civilisation, where otherwise he and Dolores, always hoping the young girl had not preceded him past the bourne, must perish.
For a few instants, propped up on both hands, in a wistful attitude, which I never saw in a pictorial representation of a human being, but which was recalled to me by the pose of the bloodhound in Landseer's picture of the trail of blood, in which floats a broken plume.
A moment of suspense!