Carefully, with slow, leaden movements, she searched every corner of the bare room. She looked in the cupboard, under the bunk, in every crevice of the walls. She even searched with a stick among the dead ashes in the fireplace. There was nothing.
She did not cry out. The hurt was too deep. She sat on the threshold of the empty cabin and tried to make it all seem real.
It was two hours later when Saint Jimmy found her sitting there.
CHAPTER XXI
THE WAY OF A RED MAN
“The dark clouds of the white man’s lust for gold have hidden all the stars in the red man’s sky.”
THE weeks of the “Little Spring” passed. The blossoms vanished from mountain and foothill and mesa and desert. The air grew crisp with the tang of frost. On the higher elevations the cold winds moaned through the junipers and cedars—wailed among the peaks and shrieked about the cliffs and crags. Again on Mount Lemmon the snow gleamed, white and cold, among the somber pines.
In the wild remote region of the upper Cañada del Oro the man, known to his friends in the Cañon of Gold as Hugh Edwards, lived with his captor, Natachee the Indian.
The white man was not a prisoner of force—rather was he a captive of circumstance. But captive and prisoner he was, none the less. He was held by the red man’s threat to reveal his real name and identity as the convict who had escaped from San Quentin, together with that hope so cunningly offered by the Indian—the hope of finding the gold that would bring him freedom and the woman he loved.
Every day the white man toiled with pick and shovel in a hidden gulch where the Indian had shown to him a little gold in the sand and gravel. Every night before the fire in the Indian’s hut he brooded over his memories, dreamed dreams of freedom and love, or sat despondent with the meager returns of his day’s labor. And always the Indian held out to him the possibilities of to-morrow. To-morrow he might, at one stroke of his pick, open a golden vein of such magnitude that the realization of all his dreams would be assured—to-morrow—to-morrow.
His small hoard of gold increased so slowly that, unless he should strike a rich pocket, it would be years before he could accumulate enough to win his freedom and his happiness. But gold was his only hope. And every day he found enough to justify the belief that all he needed was near to his hand if only he could find it. He was held by that chain of to-morrows.