"Come away," Eugene urged with a delicacy which sprang from awe. "Her husband buried there."
Deeply touched to know that her grief was personal, and filled, too, with a kind of helpless amazement at this emotional outbreak, the gold-seekers withdrew down the slope, followed by the riderless pony, leaving the old woman crouched close against the sepulcher of her dead, pouring forth the sobbing wail of her song.
"This looks like the end of our mine," said Kelley, gloomily. "I begin to think that the old witch led us up here just for the sake of visiting that grave."
"It looks that way," responded Wetherell, "but what can we do? You can't beat her, and we've done all we could to bribe her."
Eugene advised: "You wait. Bimeby she got done cryin'. To-morrow she got cold—want meat, coffee—plenty bad. Then we go get her."
They went into camp not far away in the edge of a thicket of scraggly wind-dwarfed pines, and put up their tents for the night.
"Wouldn't it put a cramp into you," began Kelley, as they stood beside their fire, "to think that this old relict has actually led us all the way up here in order to water the grave of a sweetheart who died forty years ago?"
"It shows how human she is."
"Human! She's superhuman. She's crazy, that's what she is."
"It is all very wonderful to me, but I'm worried about her. She mustn't stay out there in this rain. It's going to turn cold. See that streak in the west?"