Desert Gold

  Backed against the door of the hall stood Ben Chase, for once stripped of all authority and confidence and courage.  Gale confronted him, and now Gale's mien was in striking contrast to the coolness with which he had entered the place.  Though sweat dripped from his face, it was as white as chalk.  Like dark flames his eyes seemed to leap and dance and burn.  His lean jaw hung down and quivered with passion.  He shook a huge gloved fist in Chase's face.

  "Your gray hairs save you this time.  But keep out of my way!  And when that son of yours comes to, tell him every time I meet him I'll add some more to what he got to-day!"Chapter XIX - The Secret of Forlorn River

  In the early morning Gale, seeking solitude where he could brood over his trouble, wandered alone.  It was not easy for him to elude the Yaqui, and just at the moment when he had cast himself down in a secluded shady corner the Indian appeared, noiseless, shadowy, mysterious as always.

  "Malo," he said, in his deep voice.

  "Yes, Yaqui, it's bad–very bad," replied Gale.  The Indian had been told of the losses sustained by Belding and his rangers.

  "Go–me!" said Yaqui, with an impressive gesture toward the lofty lilac-colored steps of No Name Mountains.

  He seemed the same as usual, but a glance on Gale's part, a moment's attention, made him conscious of the old strange force in the Yaqui. "Why does my brother want me to climb the nameless mountains with him?" asked Gale.

  "Lluvia d'oro," replied Yaqui, and he made motions that Gale found difficult of interpretation.

  "Shower of Gold," translated Gale.  That was the Yaqui's name for Nell.  What did he mean by using it in connection with a climb into the mountains?  Were his motions intended to convey an idea of a shower of golden blossoms from that rare and beautiful tree, or a golden rain?  Gale's listlessness vanished in a flash of thought. The Yaqui meant gold.  Gold!  He meant he could retrieve the fallen fortunes of the white brother who had saved his life that evil day at the Papago Well.  Gale thrilled as he gazed piercingly into the wonderful eyes of this Indian.  Would Yaqui never consider his debt paid?

  "Go–me?" repeat the Indian, pointing with the singular directness that always made this action remarkable in him.

  "Yes, Yaqui."

  Gale ran to his room, put on hobnailed boots, filled a canteen, and hurried back to the corral.  Yaqui awaited him.  The Indian carried a coiled lasso and a short stout stick.  Without a word he led the way down the lane, turned up the river toward the mountains.  None of Belding's household saw their departure.

  What had once been only a narrow mesquite-bordered trail was now a well-trodden road.  A deep irrigation ditch, full of flowing muddy water, ran parallel with the road.  Gale had been curious about the operations of the Chases, but bitterness he could not help had kept him from going out to see the work.  He was not surprised to find that the engineers who had contructed the ditches and dam had anticipated him in every particular.  The dammed-up gulch made a magnificent reservoir, and Gale could not look upon the long narrow lake without a feeling of gladness.  The dreaded ano seco of the Mexicans might come again and would come, but never to the inhabitants of Forlorn River.  That stone-walled, stone-floored gulch would never leak, and already it contained water enough to irrigate the whole Altar Valley for two dry seasons.

  Yaqui led swiftly along the lake to the upper end, where the stream roared down over unscalable walls.  This point was the farthest Gale had ever penetrated into the rough foothills, and he had Belding's word for it that no white man had ever climbed No Name Mountains from the west.

  But a white man was not an Indian.  The former might have stolen the range and valley and mountain, even the desert, but his possessions would ever remain mysteries.  Gale had scarcely faced the great gray ponderous wall of cliff before the old strange interest in the Yaqui seized him again.  It recalled the tie that existed between them, a tie almost as close as blood. Then he was eager and curious to see how the Indian would conquer those seemingly insurmountable steps of stone.

  Yaqui left the gulch and clambered up over a jumble of weathered slides and traced a slow course along the base of the giant wall.

  He looked up and seemed to select a point for ascent.  It was the last place in that mountainside where Gale would have thought climbing possible.  Before him the wall rose, leaning over him, shutting out the light, a dark mighty mountain mass.  Innumerable cracks and crevices and caves roughened the bulging sides of dark rock.