CHAPTER II
FORWARD
It was Johnny Watson’s voice swearing at old Shaggy that awoke Dick Farley in the early dawn. Farley stared upward through the still tree-tops at the gray morning, his mind groping for the unpleasant something of last night. And when he remembered he smiled, thinking how he would chaff his partner about his night fears and his dead men.
But when he caught a swift glimpse of the deep-set eyes under the shaggy gray-sprinkled brows, the bantering remarks which were trooping to the end of his tongue were left unuttered. In a blind sort of way he realized that the thing which had come upon Johnny Watson yesterday had not left him. Those eyes were looking out upon death calmly, expectantly, a bit reluctantly, but not with fear and not with rebellion. Farley said nothing as he turned away and went down into the creek-bed to wash his hands and face.
Over their breakfast of coffee, bacon and flapjacks the two men talked lightly of this and that, with no mention of last night. When Watson had finished he began speaking of the day’s work into the cañon. He told briefly where they would leave the creek in three or four hours, where they would find water for the noon camp, where more water and grass for the evening camp.
“Tonight—we ought to be there by six—we get over the ridge and into the Devil’s Pocket country. There’s just one way to get out of that country, Dick, and that’s the way we’re going in. If a man looks for a short cut, if he goes skallyhooting east or west, north or south of the place where our trail is going to cut into the basin there, he’s a goner.
“If you leave this trail on the way back you’re going to run out of water first thing, and your horse is going to break his leg, if it ain’t his neck, the next thing; and then you die because you can’t pick up another waterhole. I was in that country more’n a dozen years ago. There was three of us. Me being lucky in them days, I got out. The others didn’t. And I ain’t never been back until I took a whirl at it last month.”
The morning sun had not yet peeped down into the steep-walled ravine in which their course lay when the two men led their pack-horses out of its shadows, along the higher bank upon the right, and upon the little bench land there. They moved swiftly, with long swinging strides, and as Watson had said, within three or four hours they left the creek entirely, moved eastward through a cut in the mountains which rose steeply against them, and found what might once have been a trail.
Conversation had died. Watson was in the lead, at times hidden from his companion a hundred yards in advance. Then came the two horses. And in the rear, his brain leaping from the talk of last night to Watson’s accounts of the place where “the whole side of the mountain was rotten with gold,” to wondering about this Devil’s Pocket, Dick Farley followed silently.
They camped a little at noon by a spring which Watson had marked upon his map, and rested for a couple of hours. The older man, unostentatiously and without effort at concealment, unlimbered the two heavy revolvers at his belt and looked to them as a man does when he expects he will use them.
“The cards ain’t played yet, Dick,” he said. “And if it don’t come too onexpected, we’re going to give ’em a run for their money, old timer.”