A few moments after her burro had deserted her, Bettina, hurrying up the incline to join her companions, slipped on a loose stone. Yet this would not have been serious had she given up and allowed herself to go. Instead she stumbled sideways, tried to regain her balance, stumbled a second time, and then, looking down, found herself at the edge of a ravine that had a sheer descent of thirty or more feet. Even now Bettina might have saved herself by dropping down on her knees or flinging herself backward. But the sight of the precipice must have made her dizzy, or else she was too frightened to think. For she went over quietly and without even a cry for help. And afterwards she did not call out. In falling Bettina’s head had struck against a jutting rock, so that she lay crumpled up between two walls of stone with a deep crevice between them. Her position was a strange one. She seemed to be sitting in a giant chair, except that one leg was bent beneath her and her head drooped forward on her breast.
Yet the stones and earth were misplaced where Bettina had slipped, and if the searchers had been less anxious, or more accustomed to their task, they must have found her. Mr. Simpson had not this second excuse. When he went back, after leaving Peggy and Vera, he did discover the place where Bettina had disappeared, but by that time Bettina was not there.
Yet, certainly an hour had not passed since her two friends and their escort had gone slowly past.
It was perhaps about fifteen minutes after they had gone when a young man appeared on the same trail. He was not riding, but walking more swiftly and more surely than any four-footed animal trained to the western trails.
He wore an odd costume—a soft shirt of an unbleached cotton almost the color of the yellow sand; a pair of leather trousers fringed at the knee and held about the waist with a broad leather belt brightly decorated in beads, forming designs of animals and birds. His legs were bare and his feet in moccasins.
Yet he was whistling as he came along—an unusual air and an unusual act for an Indian. He was whistling the “Marseillaise,” perhaps the greatest song of national freedom in the world. And the young man was an Indian, although his skin was only a light bronze. The carriage of his head, the free movements of his body, and in some strange way his expression betrayed him.
So far as one could have observed him, he seemed to be looking neither to the right nor the left; neither the glory of the encircling ledge of blue hills nor the river gorge interesting him. Nevertheless, when he came to the spot where Bettina had lost her footing, he stopped as abruptly as an animal who is suddenly arrested by an unexpected smell.
The next instant the young Indian was lying across the trail, with his head extending over the ledge and gazing down at the broken shelves of rock.
At first he could see nothing unusual.
It was afternoon and the sun was casting a brilliant, slanting light across the ravine. For the instant it blinded one. The next, the Indian’s keen eyes were caught by what looked like a golden ball caught between a wide split in two rocks about midway of the precipice. The illusion was a ridiculous one and yet it made one think of some golden legend of the sun.