Simon nodded uncritically.
“I should have figured that out for myself,” he said. “It must have been pretty rugged.”
“I’d rather not talk about it,” she said, and meant every word. She despised herself for the palpitation that his unreserved acceptance of her explanation had set at rest again, but she was in no hurry to expose herself to any more potentially devastating questions. “Shall we try some fishing? Loro says that snook come all the way up here to spawn.”
He was still studying the banks rather than the water, his keen eyes raking along the ragged edge of the forest as though searching for something more than timber and foliage.
“I’d prefer to tramp around on shore a bit, as soon as we’ve got some lunch under our belts. I wouldn’t want to have to go back and say I’d never set foot in this wilderness. We can take the shotgun, and maybe pick up something good to eat.”
She had only her own build-up to thank for his bland assumption that she would not want to be left behind. She thought wildly of all the facile excuses she could make, but she realized that every one of them would have a hollow ring. So far he had only heard talk about her tomboy virtues, and if she seemed to wriggle out of the first opportunity to display them he could hardly help being touched by a flicker of suspicion. And once a man started to doubt, there was no forecasting where his scepticism would turn next.
She gritted her teeth and wished that lightning would strike him, but she forced herself to say, “That would be fun.”
Four hours later she was nearly ready to strike him down herself. Following the river on foot was a minor nightmare which developed its miseries cumulatively but inexorably until their weight and blackness was smothering.
Sometimes they were stumbling over tangled roots, sometimes sinking above their ankles in thick gluey mud, almost continuously warding off branches, leaves, fronds, vines, and thorns that poked and scratched and tugged at clothing and bare skin. The only respite from that harassment was when they took to the river to circumvent a particularly impassable thicket on land: then there was the treachery of invisible hazards underfoot, the haunting fear of crocodiles, and the discomfort of boots full of water for a memento. Winged and crawling things in infinite variety tickled and bit them. She was soaked with mud up to the hips and with sweat above that; her blonde hair hung in bedraggled skeins. She swore bitterly to herself that if she survived this excursion she would insist on some basic re-writing in her part next time.
The Saint was equally hot and muddy, but his good humour seemed to feel no strain. He could be fascinated by a sloth which they came upon suspended from a cecropia bough, too sluggish to stir even when he touched it, and he could exclaim delightedly over a toucan taking off before them and speculate earnestly as to why its enormous yellow bill didn’t send it immediately into a fatal nose-dive. At other times he seemed to continue seeking for something, picking up a small rock to examine it or taking a handful of loam and gravel from the bank and crumbling it between his fingers, until she had had to ask what he was doing.
“I told you I was a speculator, didn’t I, darling? It wasn’t only your golden frogs that intrigued me. They suggested something else which you seem to have missed. The ancient frog-worshippers who made ’em had to get the gold from somewhere, and the odds are it wasn’t so very far away. Also it isn’t likely that they used it all up. If I found the mother lode I’d have a real return on my investment.”
A time came when she felt it would not be worth going any farther for any sort of wealth.
“We should be turning back,” she said, with heroically simulated reluctance. “We ought to get back to the boat before dark.”
The boat was an old forty-foot native hull on which some intermediate owner had built an oversize deckhouse and partitioned it into a crude kind of houseboat; it was cramped and dilapidated and none too clean, but it possessed screens on the windows and a primitive form of shower bath, and from her point of suffering it was starting to resemble a luxury yacht.
The Saint was staring fixedly at the river bank, and suddenly his arm and forefinger stretched out in a compelling gesture.
“Look!”
Her eyes turned where he pointed, and even she saw the metallic yellow gleams on a rock caught by the sun.
He picked up the chunk of stone and wiped it on his shirt. There were half a dozen kernels of the yellow metal embedded in it. He was able to prise one of them out with the point of a pocket knife and lay it in the palm of her hand, a nugget the size of a small pea.
He looked around, and pointed to another rock, and another. All her wretchedness and exhaustion miraculously forgotten, she too began casting around and picked up other stones herself. She discovered that they were surrounded by a score and more of similar half-buried fragments, each crusted with the same crumbs of gold. She found herself grabbing them up wildly, trying to build a stack on one outspread hand and the arm held against her chest.
“Hey, take it easy,” he said, as the top-heavy pile slipped and most of it spilled. “A couple of souvenirs is enough for now. We’ll pick up some more when we come by in the boat, if you like.”
“The boat isn’t half big enough,” she gasped distractedly.
He was laughing, an almost soundless laughter of celestial contentment.
“Sweetheart, I’m not even thinking about what we could put in that boat. It’s what can be taken out with dredger and draglines and strings of barges. This isn’t something I’ll have to work myself with a pick and shovel.”
“Do you really think it’s that big?”
“I know it. I know a lot about mining, among a number of things. This is what every prospector dreams of blundering into. This is the end of the rainbow. When you find this exact kind of geological set-up, you know that you haven’t a thing to do but file your claim, form a company, and wait for the dividends!”
She trudged all the way back to the boat in a daze that nullified fatigue and time.
“This is one time when a long cold drink isn’t going to be merely medicinal,” he said. “This will be a legitimate celebration.”
She managed to smile somehow.
“I’d enjoy it lots more if I were clean,” she said. “Will you save it for me?”
“You’ve got the best idea. Yell when you’re through with the shower, and I’ll get clean too. Then we’ll make it a party.”
What she wanted more than anything was a chance to gather her wits without the superimposed strain of maintaining a mask. But her usually agile mind seemed to have gone numb. Soap and water, brush and comb, perfume and lipstick, and lastly a minimum of fresh cool garments, made her feel physically better but for once were inadequate to restore her mentally. She was overwhelmed by the magnitude of a complication that had never entered her dizziest dreams.
Later, when he entered the forward section of the deckhouse, which served as both wheelhouse and saloon, Simon Templar found her sitting at the table, her eyes fastened in a hypnotized way on one of the gold-studded pieces of rock which she had brought back.
“A lovely hunk of mineral, isn’t it?” he remarked, as he went to work improvising lime and soda and ice with fortification from a bottle of Pimm’s Cup which he had thoughtfully contributed to the ship’s stores. “It’s a shame you had those head-hunters sniping at you the last time you went by there, or I’m sure the Professor would have spotted that formation.”
“But what a wonderful break it was that we asked you to take our picture.”
It was all she could think of to say, a forlorn attempt to be reassured that the foreboding that chilled her to the marrow was unfounded.