As the shadows thickened, the night prowlers on padded feet crept from their dark retreats into the gloom. Owls and bats on silent wings swept by. Old ghosts of the dead past stirred again on the old desert and mountain ways. In the deeper dusk that now filled the cañon, voices awoke—strange, murmuring, whispering, phantom voices that seemed to come from an innumerable company of dreary, hopeless souls. The light went out of the western sky. Details of plant and rock and bush were lost. Weird and wild, like a mysterious spirit brooding over the scene, the dark figure of the Indian on the rocky point above the Cañon of Gold was silhouetted against the starlit sky.
In the little white house on the mountain side, Saint Jimmy was thinking of the strange story that the Pardners had told.
In their home beside the cañon creek, the old prospectors and their partnership daughter were sleeping, with no dreams of the strange leading of the tangled threads of lives to the Cañon of Gold.
Far away to the south, in old Mexico, two men sat in a cantina. Between them, on a table, with glasses and a bottle of mescal, lay a crudely drawn map. As they talked together in low tones, they referred often to the rude sketch which bore in poorly written words “La mina con la puerta de fierro en la Cañada del Oro”—The mine with the door of iron in the Cañon of the Gold.
CHAPTER VI
NIGHT
Night skies are kind to those who love the stars; to others they are heavy with brooding fears.
THE man who was following the old road up the Cañon of Gold had made his way a mile or more from the point where he was last seen by the Indian, when the deepening twilight warned him of the nearness of the night. It was evident, from the pedestrian’s irresolute movements and from his manner of nervous doubt in selecting a spot for his camp, that not only was he a stranger in the Cañada del Oro, but as well that he was unaccustomed to such surroundings.
He was a young man of about twenty-two or twenty-three years—tall, but rather slender, with a face habitually clean shaven but covered, just now, with a stubby beard of several days’ growth. His skin, where it was exposed, was sunburned rather than tanned that deep color so marked in the out-of-doors men of the West. On the whole, he gave the impression, somehow, of one but recently recovered from a serious illness; and yet he did not appear overfatigued, though the pack which he carried was not light and he had evidently been many hours on the road. In spite of his rude dress and unkempt appearance due to his mode of traveling there was, in his bearing, the unmistakable air of a man of business. But he was that type of business man that knows something more than the daily grind of money-making machines. His world, apparently, was not wholly a world of factories and banks and institutions of commerce.
Forced, at last, by the approaching darkness, to decide upon some place to spend the night, the traveler selected a spot beside the cañon creek, a hundred yards from the road. But even after he had lowered his heavy pack to the ground, he stood for some minutes looking anxiously about, as if still uncertain as to the wisdom of his selection.
Nor was the man’s manner wholly that of inexperience. Suddenly, without thought of his evening meal, or any preparation for his comfort until the morning, he climbed again up the steep bank to the road, where he gazed back along the way he had come and studied the mountain sides with eyes of dread. The man was in an agony of fear. Not until it was too dark to distinguish objects at any distance did he return to the place where he had left his pack and set about the necessary work of preparing his supper and making his bed.