CHAPTER II
A Secret in Three Parts
THERE was no doctor at Skyfields. The camp had not yet attained to that dignity. A good many of the miners had done rough surgery, could set a limb, tie an artery, and attend to superficial wounds, but a bullet through the lungs, with internal hemorrhage, was beyond their skill. Lyman himself knew as much of such practice as any of them and he was convinced that his case was hopeless.
When they laid him on his built-in bunk in the corner of the little cabin and stripped him for an examination, he shook his head and protested that they were only wasting time. The bullet could be felt lodged in the muscles of the back but he would not allow them to attempt to remove it.
"I've seen men shot this way," he said, "and doctors working over 'em. They didn't get well, not when they were as old as I am."
The wound, half hidden in the matted gray hair of his chest, seemed almost a trifling thing, blue at its contracting edges, with only a smear of blood from the piercing of the scanty outer tissues.
"Let me lie down," said Lyman. "I'll live longer. Give me a sup of the whisky once in a while when I get faint. He was too quick for me. I'd given up lookin' for him though I felt we'd meet up sooner or later in some mining camp. And I had to kill him without finding out what. …"
His features contracted in a spasm of pain, and stayed with a curiously pinched look upon them. Stone fed him some whisky.
"I've got to talk fast," he said, gaspingly, "and low. You boys get closer round me. You've known me as the rest of 'em have, as old Wat Lyman who never made a strike. 'Out-of-Luck Watty.' But I know where there's gold enough to make all of you millionaires. I'm not raving," he went on, as Lefty winked at Healy. "Wait and I'll show you. Stone, get me my valise."
The bag was a wrinkled, worn-out affair that weighed heavily. The three knew from previous openings that it contained some folded papers bound with faded ribbon, a batch of letters tied in the same fashion, a quantity of ore samples, a more or less precious or curious record of Lyman's work and wandering, a few articles of clothing, and an old, leather-bound volume. It had been jokingly referred to as his "war-bag."
Stone, at a weak gesture from the dying man, set it down, unopened, at the foot of the bunk.
"That skunk, Sam Lowe," said Lyman, talking in little jerks, "stole my wife. Twelve years ago. Mebbe it was my fault, in a way. She was lots younger'n me, fond of life. I was her father's pardner an', w'en he died, I sort of looked after her an' then I married her. She come to me cryin' one day about some gossip in the camp, clung round my neck an'—well, we was married. I tried to do the best I could, worked in the camp awhile, but I'm a prospector, a mining tramp. I got her sort of worked up over my dreams, I reckon. She'd sit with her eyes sparkling, an' plan what we'd do, an' where we'd go, when I struck it rich. So I got to trampin' the hills again. Mebbe she'd have gone with me only the babby was expected. I never told her about the Madre d'Oro. That was too much of a risk for me, seein' as I was to be the father of a babby.
"Lowe was assayer, a handsome devil, before he let his beard grow long. It was that that fooled me, for a breath, w'en he stood in the door. Wal', he got to entertainin' her while I was gold chasin'. I never suspected anything wrong. How could I, w'en he'd meet me open-handed, an' both of 'em 'ud tell me of the rides they took, with the little 'un, as she growed up, always with 'em? I wanted to find pay-dirt worse than ever an' went rainbow chasin' hard an' long."
His voice grew fainter and more laboured and Stone gave him some more whisky. He lay still for a while after taking it, his eyes closed. They would have thought him dead but for the horrid whistling that seemed to come, partly through his closed teeth, partly through the wound in his chest. Presently he opened his eyes again.
"I've got to get ahead," he said. "Time's gettin' short. It took me five years to see the thing. I heard it first an' nearly killed a man for tellin' me what I thought a damned lie. But it was true. I got back to find her gone, little Madge gone, Lowe gone, and the camp lookin' at me with what didn't strike me altogether as pity. I seemed to hear 'em talking about December and May, an' I couldn't stand it. I traced 'em for a while until I l'arned they'd gone to California. W'en I had enough to git thar, they was gone.
"So you see, in killin' him, I spoiled my chances of findin' them. If he hadn't grown tired of her or, mebbe, bin unfaithful, an' she left him. Twelve years ago, an' little Madge now nearin' seventeen. I want you boys to look about for her if she's near here. If she—if they—ain't, I want you to find 'em. Open the bag, Stone, an' dump out the ore where I can get at it."
Lyman fumbled with the specimens, seeming to judge them by feel and weight. Five or six of the fragments he handed to them. They were milky quartz, white and crisp as sugar, veined and pocked with yellow gold. It needed no expert to tell that here was the aurum purum, the genuine metal.
"Looks like 'blow-out' stuff," said Healy, scratching at the gold with his nail as if he would pick it loose.
"It's no blow-out," said Lyman. "There's a great wall of it, reaching way up into the blackness. The torch brought out the gold, like stars in the Milky Way. It is the mother-lode, I tell you. The Madre d'Oro. The Mother-of-Gold. Cliffs of it, thick, streaked like bacon, the lean for the gold, the fat for the quartz. Blast into it, and who knows what you'll find?"
"Is this hall you got?" asked Lefty, his eyes shining in the light of the dip stuck into the miner's candlestick at the head of the bunk like a wild animal's in the dark. His voice was hoarse, his fists were closely gripped.
"'Bout half of what I got out of the lode. Rest's bin stolen. I was lucky to git that much, with th' arrers an' bullets thicker'n bees when a b'ar robs the bee-tree. Dave got a big chunk. So did Lem."
The three listeners looked at each other furtively. This talk of a great wall of quartz, blazing with strings and patches of gold, reaching way up into the blackness; of arrows and bullets, sounded like delirium. Surely the old man's mind was failing. Healy tapped on the back of Lyman's hand.
"Three of you, were they?" he asked. "Where are Dave and Lem?"
"I figger th' 'Paches got 'em long ago," said the prospector. "Dave went down first to try and relocate an' he never came back. Then Lem tried his luck an' he never showed. They was two men with Dave, an' Lem took in five or six. Thet was afore they caught Geronimo. The bucks got all of 'em, I reckon. Whisky, Stone, an' give me the Bible."
Stone passed the whisky to Healy, who held it to Lyman's purpling lips, and Stone got the old volume from the bag. At Lyman's direction he opened it in the middle, so that there was an open space between the sewed and glued backs of the leaves and the rounded back of the binding. From this he pulled out a piece of brown cloth folded about three or four cylindrical objects. These proved to be the quills of some large bird, plugged with wooden stoppers, three in all.
"I'm losin' th' life in my arms," said Lyman. "Empty the quills out, separate."
Stone took some mail from his pockets and made little sacks of the envelopes of three letters, into which he poured the contents of the quills. All was gold, some fine as grit, some flaky, and some pellets from the size of birdshot up to the diameter of the quill.
"Thar was nuggets, too," said Lyman. "I had a brooch pin and bracelets made of 'em for my wife. I got the dust inside of three hours, dry washin', jest poundin' the dirt, chuckin' out th' pebbles, an' throwin' the rest up in th' air from a bit of hide. Winnowin' it. Come from four places up th' dry crick, the colours gittin' bigger as you went up, an' the nuggets close under the cliff. Them nuggets come clear from the Mother-of-Gold. Over nine hundred pure thet stuff runs. Purer than Californy gold.
"Forty years ago thet was. Dave an' Lem an' me, in Arizony. First we found th' stuff in Wet Crick, on the bars where the freshets had washed it. Then it quit an' we worked back an' located the dry wash. Up thet to the mesa cliff, with arrer heads an' nuggets in the gravel. An' the gravel nigh all quartz. Nex' day I found th' secret an' we found the Mother-of-Gold. Then the 'Paches come. Th' crick nor the lode ain't on their reservation but it's so close they figger it's their property. They'd bin watchin' us. Smoke-talk all along the route. Then they warned us. Then they nigh got us. Later they did get Dave an' Lem, I reckon."
His voice tailed off. His great, gaunt frame quivered and relaxed. The candle threw weird shadows on his face and body. The heavy eyelids, closed wearily, showed in great pits of darkness. The big chest laboured, was convulsed, and then quiet.
"He's gone!" said Healy, his voice sharp with greed and anger. "Gone—and he never told us where it was. Wasted his time talking about his fool wife and kid."
"Forget that," said Stone, crisply, himself trembling with excitement. "He was trying to tell us in his own way. Keep the women out of it, Healy. Give me that whisky. Lefty."
The Cockney did so, his eyes still glittering as he watched Stone's efforts to get some liquor between the old prospector's teeth, worn and stained, but stubbornly resisting. It was ghastly work. It seemed like trying to wrest a secret from the grave, disturbing the rest that an old man longed for. Stone felt the brutality of it, but the lust of gold had entered into him as it had entered into the others. The glittering quartz, the little piles in the envelopes, had done their age-old-task, the Genius of Gold possessed their spirits.
Sweat was trickling down the face of Healy and his hands shook like leaves in the wind. Sweat showed in beads on Lefty's forehead. The will to arrest the ancient miner's retreating soul shone from their six eyes.
At last the tired lids fluttered, the shrunken throat seemed trying to swallow. Healy reached out trembling, eager fingers and touched Lyman's throat. Lyman's eyes opened, the mist slowly clearing. Lefty shot out the question that dominated all of them.
"Where?"
Light gathered in the gray orbs of the old prospector as his will flogged his brain and rallied his senses.
"I nigh slipped," he whispered. "But I ain't gone yet. More whisky." After taking it he rested, but his eyes stayed open and his chest began to labour.
"I'll tell you," he gasped after a little. "The three of ye, after you swear on the Book thar to seek out my Madge. My wife is dead. I've just seen her." The three looked at each other. There was a quality of certainty in the simple statement that forced conviction. The old man's spirit, dragged back from the brink of eternity, had seen something.
"Swear to do your best to find the stuff, then to split half with her. Thar's millions in that mother-lode. Swear it with your right hands on the Book."
Their three hands covered the yellow middle pages. Healy's lips held an impatient sneer. Lefty's pug face was a blank. To them the thing was a farce, a formula to be gone through swiftly. Stone was not bound by the creed the volume represented but his will supplemented his act and made a vow of it.
"Thar's somethin' back of thet Book," said Lyman, "thet'll make th' oath stand. Break it an' yore luck breaks. Stone, put th' oath."
"Repeat it after me," said Stone» and the others followed his phrases.
"We, severally and together, in the presence of death, and upon the pages of this Book, which, to this dying man, is a divine symbol, do swear to do our utmost to seek out Madge Lyman, daughter of our friend and partner, and to give her an equal share, of all that we may gain from the knowledge of gold deposits about to be given us by Wat Lyman. So help us God!"
"So help us God!" galloped Healy. "Now, old man, tell us."
"You, Lefty, and you, Stone, go outside for a minnit," said Lyman. He had palpably braced himself. The guttering candle now revealed his face wet with moisture that showed darkly in the mat of grisly hair upon his chest and arms. The outstanding veins were flaccid. The hand he laid for a second on Stone's wrist was cold.
"Wot's the hidea?" started Lefty, but Stone checked him.
"The gen'ral location an' th' route to Healy," said Lyman. "Th' placer cricks to Lefty, an' the secret of th' lode to Stone."
"That's all danmed foolishness!" snapped Healy. "You'll die before you get it out. Tell it all to us at once. You must be crazy. Out with it, or. …"
His fist clenched, but Stone gripped his wrist so hard that his fingers opened from the pressure on the tendons. He turned with a snarl.
"What in hell are you trying to do?" he began, and then Lefty took a hand.
"It's you who's the bloody fool, Healy," he hissed. "You'll queer the whole deal. Look at 'im!"
Lyman's eyes were fairly blazing with such a concentration of contempt that Healy wilted.
"You, bein' my pardner, git a chance with th' rest," said Lyman. "Otherwise. …" He feebly lifted the fingers of one hand and the gesture was eloquent despite its physical uncertainty.
"I know what gold does to men," went on Lyman. "To th' best of 'em. I'm playin' this three ways or none."
Stone and Lefty went outside beneath the stars, waiting by the door. Lefty whistled softly.
"It's a rum go, hain't it?" he said, just above his breath. "Gives you th' creeps. Look at them stars, Stone. 'E says the gold is thick like the glitter in that streak. Think of it. Gawd!"
Stone looked up with him to where the gleaming scarf of the Milky Way was aureoled across the heavens. Then the door opened and Healy came out.
"In with you!" he said, panting. "You next, Lefty! The old fox is nutty, but I'm damned if I don't believe there's something in it." He turned to Stone as the Cockney disappeared.
"I've got my end of the dope," he said. "What do you make of that Indian stuff, Stone? Do you take any stock in it?"
"It sounds plausible to me," replied Stone. "I know something about Indians. I lived in New Mexico for awhile. They might easily resent our taking the gold so close to their lines. They know the value of it. They might not care to work it themselves for various reasons. Might be some superstition about it. More likely they figure that, if they did uncover it, so many men would rush to the place that they couldn't hold them off. Dog-in-the-manger spirit, but I fancy that's the most likely cause."
"Maybe," assented Healy. "What's his game? Playing each of us off against the others. Don't trust any of us, eh? Here's Lefty. For God's sake get it all out of him. Stone, before he croaks!"
"'Urry up," said Lefty. "'E's going, for fair."
Stone thought for the second time that Lyman was dead. Putting his ear down toward his chest, he caught a vague whisper. There was barely a movement of the lips, the eyes were sealed, the syllables hardly to be distinguished. With his head close to that of the dying man, listening to words that seemed echoes coming back from the Valley of Death itself. Stone pieced together the sense of what was said. It was jumbled. There were references to rock caves and carvings, to skulls, to dried bodies stacked like cordwood—but the main secret was clear. The gateway to the Madre d'Oro was open. His third of the knowledge was obtained.
One word hung on the bloodless lips, lacking the breath for utterance. It came finally—a gasp.
Madge!
A choking convulsion followed it. The prospector's will released its mastery over death. Crimson froth of blood and air bubbled up and then the choked lungs emitted the blood that had slowly gathered in their overburdened cells. Lyman had gone "across the range."
In that still presence the gold on the bed lost its glamour. Stone went to the door and called.
"Did you get it?" asked Healy. Stone looked at him, disgustedly.
"You're a cold-blooded sort of hound, Healy," he said. "Help me to lay him out." Healy's thin lips drew back.
"Do it yourself and be damned to you," he said. And one hand slid back toward his hip pocket. As they stood facing each other, Stone trying to restrain his wrath, that had leaped to confront Healy's mood, Lefty suddenly pinioned Healy's elbows from behind in a grasp that held him helpless. When he struggled Lefty lifted him off his feet and shook him.
"You bloody fool!" he said. "Wot's the hidea of startin' a scrap? We've got to stand together, we 'ave. Thick an' thin. Get me?"
Healy calmed suddenly, his face a mask.
"You're right. Lefty," he said. "We're all in on this even. The old fox! I'm damned if he isn't grinning at us!"