“Two,” she said enigmatically. “That is good, much good. It will be meat.”
Then she saw him pulling dry grasses and breaking branches of scrub growth for a fire, and she stood up and motioned him to follow. They were in a narrow, deep ravine separated from the main one by the miniature plain of lush grass, a green cradle of rest in the heart of the gray hills. She went as directly upward as the broken rock would permit, and suddenly he followed her into a blackened cave formed by a great granite slab thrusting itself upwards and enduring through the ages when the broken rock had shattered down to form an opposite wall. And the cloud bursts of the desert had swept through, and washed the sands clear, leaving a high black roof slanting upwards to the summit.
Tula moved ahead into the far shadows. He could see that beyond her somewhere a ray of light filtered blue, but he halted at the entrance, puzzled at the black roof where all the rock of the mountain was gray and white except where mineral streaks were of reds and russets and moldy greens. Then he put his hand up and touched the roof and understood. Soot from ancient fires was discernible on his hand, flakes of it fell to the floor, dry and black, scaling off under pressure. The scales were thick and very old, like blackened moss. He had seen blackened rock like that in other volcanic regions, but this was different.
“It is here,” said Tula, and he followed the voice through a darker shadowed bit of the way, then through the ray of light, and then–––
The first thing he saw was the raised hearth of a rather pretentious fireplace, or place of fire, for it resembled not at all the tiny little cooking hearth of desert Indians. A stone hatchet lay beside it, and, what was much more surprising, two iron instruments of white man’s manufacturing, a wedge and a long chisel.
He picked up the chisel, weighed it in his hand, and looked at the girl. He was now becoming accustomed to the dim light and could see her eyes following his every movement with curious questioning. There was a tiny frowning wrinkle between her brows as if serious matters were being decided there.
“It is here,” she said again. “Maybe someone dies when a white friend is shown the way––maybe I die, who knows?––but it is here––El Alisal of the gold of the rose!”
She made a little gesture and moved aside, and the chisel fell to the stone floor with a clang as Kit shouted and dropped on his knees before an incredible thing in the gray wall.
That upthrust of the rock wall had strange variety of color, and between the granite and the gray limestone there was a ragged rusty band of iron as a note of contrast to the sprinkling of glittering quartz catching the ray of light, but the quartz was sprinkled on a six inch band of yellow––not the usual quartz formation with dots of color, but a deep definite yellow held together by white crystals.
“The red gold! it’s the red gold!” he said feeling the yellow surface instinctively.