And his voice was calm.
"Everything is there, Johnny—everything but the gold," he said. "They took that."
Now he spoke to Joanne.
"You better not go with us into the other cabins," he said.
"Why?" she asked softly.
"Because—there's death in them all."
"I am going," she said.
From the window of the largest cabin MacDonald pulled the sapling shutter, and, like the other, it fell at his feet. Then they opened the door, and entered; and here the sunlight revealed the cabin's ghastly tragedy. The first thing that they saw, because it was most terrible, was a rough table, half over which lay the shrunken thing that had once been a man. A part of its clothes still remained, but the head had broken from its column, and the white and fleshless skull lay facing them. Out of tattered and dust-crumbling sleeves reached the naked bones of hands and arms. And on the floor lay another of these things, in a crumpled and huddled heap, only the back of the skull showing, like the polished pate of a bald man. These things they saw first, and then two others: on the table were a heap of age-blackened and dusty sacks, and out of the back of the crumbling thing that guarded them stuck the long buckhorn hilt of a knife.
"They must ha' died fighting," said MacDonald. "An' there, Johnny, is their gold!"
White as death Joanne stood in the door and watched them. MacDonald and Aldous went to the sacks. They were of buckskin. The years had not aged them. When Aldous took one in his hands he found that it was heavier than lead. With his knife MacDonald cut a slit in one of them, and the sun that came through the window flashed in a little golden stream that ran from the bag.