"I won't be far." With that he set fire to a dry pine faggot, the best torch available, and left her, going deeper into the cave. She watched him, marvelling at the size of the cavern. He went on a score of paces; he seemed to be ascending a steepening slant floor and then to have gone over a sort of ridge and to be descending again. But still going further from her. Presently she knew that the tunnel had turned sharply to the right; she could hear the thud of his boots and for a little while could see the flare of his torch against a wall of rock; he himself had passed out of her sight.
But she knew that he had not gone a great deal further. For he was not so far away that she could not hear him; he was going back and forth; at irregular intervals she saw a dim, ghostly light playing upon the dark cavern walls. And, despite the weary ache of a hardship-tortured body, she began to be interested in his search. If there were, in truth, such gold here somewhere as he and her father with him had dreamed of—gold for which seven men had died sixty years ago, for which old Loony Honeycutt had hungered all these years, for which Brodie and his following and even a city man like Gratton were like so many ravening wolves on the trail—gold in quantity to make even toughened old gold-seekers delirious with the dreams of it—why, then, that gold was half Mark King's and half Ben Gaynor's! And it might be that now, at this very instant, Mark King was finding it; was standing over it, staring down at it by the ghostly flare of a smoking torch. She sat, tense and still, listening, trying to probe with tired but suddenly bright eyes through the dark.
She started, realizing that no longer could she hear King searching back and forth. It was very silent about her, only the crackle of the flames making a sound to be heard against the rush of air outside. It seemed to her that King had been gone a long time. She rose to her feet, tempted to follow him. She was curious to know what he was doing; why he was so silent; where he had gone. But in the end pride restrained her and she sat down again to wait in an attitude of indifference.
But the minutes dragged on and never a sound came back from the far, dark depths of the cavern; fifteen minutes, half an hour. She grew restless and walked up and down; she went to the mouth of the cave and stood looking out into the swirling snow-storm; she returned to the fire, throwing on more wood. She felt sure that an hour had passed—two hours—she began to grow alarmed. Always that dread thought was ready to spring out upon her: "If something had happened to him!" She went a little way in the direction he had taken; stood peering into the dark, listening breathless and rigid. Never a sound. She went back to the front of the cave, looking down, staring out into the grey sky, across the ridge….
Gloria, trembling with a new excitement, was down on her knees before the pack when King returned. She sprang up to face him. And each, with the other's emotions and experiences of the past two or three hours unknown to him, marvelled at what was to be read in the other's face. Gloria was excited; King's excitement was no less. Where she had at least the clue to his altered expression, he had none to hers.
"It's here!" he burst out. "And I've found it. Tons and tons of it, such knobs and nuggets of pure gold as never man laid eyes on! We have here the Magic Lamp to rub: a castle in Spain and an ocean-going yacht and the newest thing in motor-cars and a trip around the world and a presentation to royalty—a fragment of heaven and a very large slice of hell. Ambition fulfilled and love consumed and hate born. We have old Ben made whole and full of power again. And here we have all that is left of Gus Ingle and his friends—except for a pile of bones back yonder!"
She saw that in each hand he carried what looked like a big rough stone; she saw from the way he carried them that they were heavy. The fires leaped higher, brighter in her eyes. Now she saw the way to make Mark King pay for all of his brutality to her; to pay to the uttermost!
"I have nothing to say to you," she said as stiffly as she knew the way. "I care to hear nothing you have to say. I have tolerated all that I mean to tolerate from you."
Her bearing, no less than her words, astonished him. For the first time he saw what it was that she held in her hands. She had been gathering up her own little personal effects; a tiny parcel of silken things, comb and brush, trifling feminine odds and ends. He stared at her wonderingly.
"I don't understand——"