Instead of tugging at it with greedy relish to feast on the treasure it doubtlessly muffled, Benito drew back his hands and stared with worse tribulation than ever.
A cache—yes! A full one—who knew?
Long ago it might have been pillaged. With but one movement between him and the verification or annihilation of his hopes the Mexican hesitated. He was frightened.
His labour under difficulties had been so great, he had cherished so many dreams and nursed so many chimeras, that he instinctively dreaded the seeing them swiftly to flee, and leave him falling from his crumbling anticipations into the frightful reality that closed in upon him with inexorable jaws.
In the end, determined to do or die, for to that it had truly come, Benito's trembling hands buried themselves in the buffalo robe, clutched it irresistibly and hauled it up into his palpitating bosom. His haggard eyes swam with joyful gush of many tears, so that he could not see the sky to which he had raised them in gratitude.
Benito had fallen on a hunter's and trapper's store. Not only were there traps and springes of several sorts, weapons, powder horns, bullet bags, shot moulds, leaden bars, horse caparisons, hide for lassoes, but eatables in hermetically sealed tins of modern make, not then familiar to Mexicans, and liquor in bottles protected by homemade wicker and leather plaiting.
He was stretching out his hands ravenously to the bottles and a role of jerked beef, when it seemed to him that the voice of the Unseen prompted him with "God! Thank God!" and repeating the words in a voice unintelligible from stifling emotions, he fairly swooned across the pit as if to defend it with his poor, worn, hard-tried body.
His face was serene when he unclosed his eyes anew. Soberly, by a great control, he ate of some tinned meat and the crackers and swallowed as slowly some cognac. The latter filled him with fire, and he could have leaped into a treetop and crowed defiance to the vultures which were sailing overhead as if baulked of their prey.
In that momentary calmness, he felt so strong and so rejoiced in his self-command that his spirit seemed to spurn its casket. But instantly, with the blood careering anew, the wound in his shoulder smarted furiously, and all down that arm and up to his neck he felt a strange and novel sensation; it was as if molten lead was in the veins, scorching and making heavy the limb.
"The arrow! I am poisoned!" he muttered. "Oh, is this windfall come merely to embitter my death?"