“This shows you, Señor,” said he, “that we are in the right path, and that the coming day will bring us into the presence of the traitor.”
“It shall then be his last treason,” said Don Estevan; and they now rode silently on with the certainty that Cuchillo was before them.
Strange chain of coincidences! When the sun appeared in the horizon, the different actors in this drama, apparently drawn together by accident, but in truth impelled onwards by the hand of God, had met in the most inaccessible part of the great American desert.
Chapter Forty Six.
The Golden Valley.
The darkness was no longer that of midnight—the outlines of the different objects began to be visible, and the peaks of the hills looked like domes or fantastic turrets in the half-light. Detached from the mass of the mountains, a rock in the form of a truncated cone towered up like an outwork. A cascade fell noisily from an adjacent hill into a deep gulf below, and in front of the rock a row of willows and cotton-trees indicated the neighbourhood of a stream. Then the immense plain of the delta formed by the two arms of the Rio Gila (which from east to west cuts for itself a double passage through the chain of the Misty Mountains) displayed itself in all its sombre majesty. Such were the striking points of the landscape which opened before the travellers.
Soon the blue light of morning replaced the darkness, and the summits of the hills one by one became visible. On the top of the rock two pines could now be seen, their bending stems and dark foliage extending over the abyss. At their foot the skeleton of a horse, held up by hidden fastenings, showed upon his whitened bones the savage ornaments with which he had been embellished, and fragments of the saddle still rested upon his back. The increasing light soon shone on more sinister emblems: on posts raised in different places, and human scalps floating on them. These hideous trophies indicated the burial-place of an Indian warrior. In fact a renowned chief reposed there; and his spirit overlooked, like the genius of plunder, those plains where his war-cry had so often resounded, and which he had ridden over on that battle-horse whose bones were whitening by his tomb. Birds of prey flew over his grave, uttering their shrill cries, as if they would awaken him who slept there forever, and whose cold hand would no longer prepare for them their bloody feasts.
A few minutes later the horizon became tinted with pale rose-coloured clouds, and soon after, like the first spark of a fire, a ray of sunlight struck like a golden arrow on the thick fog, and floods of light inundated the depths of the valley. Day had come in all its glory, but wreaths of vapour still hung capriciously on the leaves of the trees or clung around the trunks. Soon were displayed wild precipices, with falls of water foaming down their sides; then deep defiles, at the entrance of which fantastic offerings of Indian superstition were suspended.