He was swayed by indefinable sensations, fascinated, so as to be fearful of breaking the spell.
When, at length, he mastered his emotion, he did not forget the duty of an honest man constrained to invade the property of another, though that other might be his enemy!
Trapper law is explicit; wanton breaking into a cache is punishable by death.
So he shaped out a square of the sod with a sharp mussel shell which he spied glistening near him, and slowly removed that piece, anxiously quivering in the act. Other turf he removed in the same manner, more and more sure that it was a cache. This preliminary over, he paused to take breath, and to enjoy the luxury of discounting a pleasure which came as veritable life in the midst of death.
Then he resumed a task terrible for one exhausted by privations and loss of blood. Many times he was forced to stop, his energy giving out.
Slow went on the work; no indications of his being correct arose to corroborate his surmise. The shell broke, but then he used the two fragments, held in his hand with such tenacity that they seemed to be supplementary nails. Vain as was the toil, here lay, he still believed, the sole chance of safety; if heaven smiled on his efforts, his darling Dolores might yet be a happy woman. So he clung to this last chance offered by happy hazard with that energy of despair, the immense power of Archimedes, for which nothing is impossible.
The hole, of no contemptible size, yawned blankly before him. Nothing augured success, and, whatever the indomitable energy of the young man's character, he felt discouragement cast a new gloom over his soul. His eyelids, red with fever, licked up the tear that ventured to soothe them, and his lips cracked as he pressed them together.
"At least, here I dig a grave for don José, and my poor love," he said wildly. "It shall be deep enough to baffle the wolf!"
He renewed his tearing at the soil, when suddenly the shells snapped off, both pieces together, and his nails also scraping something of a different material to the earth, turned back at their jagged ends, but not at that supreme moment giving him the pain which at another time the same accident must have caused. Some hairs were mingled with the earth, and a scent different from that of the freshly bared ground intoxicated him with its musk.
Disdaining the shattered mussel shell, he used his hands as scoops, and presently unearthed a buffalo skin.