“I had built the shed and stabled my horse there, and purposely located my cabin below. The trail up here from the plain is a blind one, because of the wash from the hills at times, and I didn’t fear much from white men,––still I concealed my tracks like this. Gold often turns men into devils.”
He was silent for a time, and Harry King wondered much why he had made no further effort to find his son before making to himself the offer he had, but he dared not question him, and preferred to let Larry take his own way of telling what he would. As if divining his thought Larry said quietly: “Something held me back from going down again to find my son. The way is long, and in the old way of traveling over the plains it would take a year or more to 239 make the journey and return here, and somehow a superstition seized me that my boy would set out sometime to find me, and I would make the way easy for him to do it. And here on the mountain the years slip by like a long sleep.”
He began moving the torch about to show the walls of the cave in which they sat, and as he did so he threw the light strongly on the young man’s face, and scrutinized it sharply. He saw again that terrible look of sadness as if his soul were dying within him. He saw great drops of sweat on his brow, and his eyes narrowed and fixed, and he hurried on with the narrative. He could not bear the sight.
“Now here, look how this hole widens out? Here was where I prospected about to find the vein again, and there is where I took it up. All this overhead is full of gold. Think what it would mean if a man had the right apparatus for getting it out––I mean separating it! I only took what was free; that is, what could be easily freed from the quartz. Sometimes I found it in fine nuggets, and then I would go wild, and work until I was so weak I could hardly crawl back to the entrance. I often lay down here and slept with fatigue before I could get back and cook my supper.”
As they went on a strange roaring seemed gradually to fill the passage, and Harry spoke for the first time since they had entered. He feared the sound of his own voice, as though if he began to speak, he might scream out, or reveal something he was determined to hide. He thought the roaring sound might be in his own ears from the surging of blood in his veins and the tumultuous beating of his heart.
“What is it I hear? Is my head right?”
“The roaring? Yes, you’re all right. I thought when 240 I was working here and slowly burrowing farther and farther that it might be the lack of air, and tried to contrive some way of getting it from the outside. I thought all the time that I was working farther into the mountain, and that I would have to stop or die here like a rat in a hole. But you just wait. You’ll be surprised in a minute.”
Then Harry laughed, and the laugh, unexpected to himself, woke him from the trancelike feeling that possessed him, and he walked more steadily. “I’ve been being more surprised each minute. Am I in Aladdin’s cave––or whose is it?”
“Only mine. Just one more turn here and then––! It was not in the night I came here, and it was not all at once, as you are coming––hold on! Let me go in front of you. The hole was made gradually, until, one morning about ten o’clock, a great mass of rock––gold bearing, I tell you––rich in nuggets––I was crazed to lose it––fell out into space, and there I stood on the very verge of eternity.”
They rounded the turn as he talked, and Larry Kildene stood forward under the stars and waved the torch over his head and held Harry back from the edge with his other hand. The air over their heads was sweet and pure and cold, and full of the roar of falling water. They could see it in a long, vast ribbon of luminous whiteness against the black abyss––moving––and waving––coming out from nothingness far above them, and reaching down to the nethermost depths––in that weird gloom of night––into nothingness again.