Pogosa seemed strangely excited. Her eyes were gleaming, her face working with emotion.
"See the old girl!" said Kelley. "We must be hot on the trail of the mine. It don't look like mineral formation, but gold is where you find it."
"Go on," signed Pogosa.
The way seemed interminable, and at times Wetherell despaired of getting his withered commander into the park which he was sure lay above this dike. At noon they halted long enough to make coffee. Kelley flavored it as before, and Pogosa was ready to go on an hour later.
As they rose above the dike and Bonneville's Peak came into view a low humming sound startled the hunters. It came from Pogosa. With eyes lit by the reviving fires of memory, she was chanting a hoarse song. She seemed to have thrown off half the burden of her years. Her voice gradually rose till her weird improvisation put a shiver into Wetherell's heart. She had forgotten the present; and with hands resting on the pommel of her saddle, with dim eyes fixed upon the valley, was reliving the past.
"She singing old hunting song," Eugene explained. "Many years ago she sing it. This heap fine hunting-ground then. Elk, big-horn, bear. All fine things in summer. Winter nothing but big-horn. Sheep-eaters live here many summers. Pogos' young and happy then. Now she is old and lonesome. People all gone. Purty soon she die. So she say."
Even the unimaginative mind of Tall Ed Kelley thrilled to the tragic significance of this survivor of a dying race chanting her solitary song. Her memory was quickening under the touch of these cliffs and the sound of these streams. She was retracing the steps of her youth.
Kelley interpreted it differently. "She's close to it," he called. "It's here in this valley, in some of these ridges."
Resolutely, unhesitatingly, Pogosa rode down the first stream which ran to the north, making directly for a low hill on which could be discerned a low comb of deflected rocks of a dark color. At last, riding up the ledge, she slipped from her horse and, tottering forward, fell face downward on the grass beside an upturned giant slab of gray stone.
The men stared in wonder, searching the ground for evidence of mineral. None could be seen. Suddenly lifting her head, the crone began to sing again, uttering a heart-shaking wail which poured from her quivering lips like the cry of the forsaken. The sight of her withered hands strained together and the tears in her sunken cheeks went to the soul. The desolate rocks, the falling rain, the wild and monstrous cliffs, the encircling mountains, all lent irresistible power to her grief. She seemed the minstrel of her race mourning for a vanished world.