During the silent hours of the afternoon Farley strove to keep his partner always in sight, hurrying up the lagging horses, keeping them at Watson’s heels. And, although he still told himself that he did not and would not believe in this senseless superstition, he carried all day a forty-five-caliber Colt.
All day they drove steadily into the mountains. For ahead of them was the thing which had called to them across the miles of wilderness, which, since the world was young, had drawn men into hardship, exile and often enough to death—soft, yellow, crumbling gold! And it was almost eight, and dark in the narrow pass, when Watson called out and Farley pushed by the horses to his side and looked on the site for their camp—“the last camp this side the strike.”
It was a spring which bubbled out clear and cold upon a little flat hardly bigger than the barroom at the Eagle Hotel. And oddly, there was no creek flowing from it to mark its whereabouts. For the water ran a scant ten feet westward and sank into a great fissure in the rock.
“We’ll eat first,” said Watson when the two men had drunk. “The moon’ll be up pretty quick. Then I’ll show you something—what the Devil’s Pocket country looks like.”
The day had died slowly. It did not grow dark, for with the rising evening breeze the full moon climbed up through a tangle of fir-tops and barren peaks, its strong white light driving all but the most valiant stars from the sky. Watson knocked the dead ashes out of his pipe and got to his feet.
“Come ahead, Dick. We’ll take a look at where we’re going. Where a good many men have been—and not many come back.”
They climbed from the trail along a spine of rock to a black spire, rising clear of the scanty brush. To the very top of the sloping rock they worked their cautious way until their two gaunt bodies stood outlined against the sky. Here they found footing, and here Watson stood with arm flung out, pointing. Dick Farley was not unused to the thousand moods of the mountain places, and yet as his eyes ran along the pointing arm, and beyond it eagerly, he muttered his startled admiration.
The moon, full, round and yellow, had floated clear of the distant ridges and hung in rich splendor above a long, narrow, twisting valley, the Devil’s Pocket. Trees, hills, peaks and ravines stood out in the soft light, black and without detail. The floor of the winding valley took upon itself many shifting shades, a dark silver-gray here where there was a strip of sandy soil, a more somber splotch there where the willows followed a thin thread of a stream.
“There she is!” Watson exclaimed. “That thread of willows marks the only creek in the valley. It runs from a big spring like ours here, and the lake drinks it up. They call the lake ‘The Last Drink.’ We’ll walk fifteen minutes before we get to it. We hit the southeast shore just about where you see that little bay with the cliffs coming down close. There’s a trail along the base of them cliffs; we follow that worse’n six miles fu’ther. And when we’re there, Dickie boy, we’re right on top of the biggest goldmine——”