“Well, as I was saying, she had another visitor. He was a lean, tall, white-headed old Indian, with a beak on him like an eagle. He walked right in without knocking. Vahna gave a little cry that was half like a yelp and half like a gasp, and flumped down on her knees before me, pleading to me with deer’s eyes and to him with the eyes of a deer about to be killed that don’t want to be killed. Then, for a minute that seemed as long as a life-time, she and the old fellow glared at each other. Paloma was the first to talk, in his own lingo, for he talked back to her. But great Moses, if he wasn’t the high and mighty one! Paloma’s old knees were shaking, and she cringed to him like a hound dog. And all this in my own house! I’d have thrown him out on his neck, only he was so old.
“If the things he said to Vahna were as terrible as the way he looked! Say! He just spit words at her! But Paloma kept whimpering and butting in, till something she said got across, because his face relaxed. He condescended to give me the once over and fired some question at Vahna. She hung her head, and looked foolish, and blushed, and then replied with a single word and a shake of the head. And with that he just naturally turned on his heel and beat it. I guess she’d said ‘No.’
“For some time after that Vahna used to fluster up whenever she saw me. Then she took to the kitchen for a spell. But after a long time she began hanging around the big room again. She was still mighty shy, but she’d keep on following me about with those big eyes of hers - ”
“The hussy!” I heard plainly. But Julian Jones and I were pretty well used to it by this time.
“I don’t mind saying that I was getting some interested myself - oh, not in the way Sarah never lets up letting me know she thinks. That two-pound nugget was what had me going. If Vahna’d put me wise to where it came from, I could say good-bye to railroading and hit the high places for Nebraska and Sarah.
“And then the beans were spilled… by accident. Come a letter from Wisconsin. My Aunt Eliza ’d died and up and left me her big farm. I let out a whoop when I read it; but I could have canned my joy, for I was jobbed out of it by the courts and lawyers afterward - not a cent to me, and I’m still paying ’m in instalments.
“But I didn’t know, then; and I prepared to pull back to God’s country. Paloma got sore, and Vahna got the weeps. ‘Don’t go! Don’t go!’ That was her song. But I gave notice on my job, and wrote a letter to Sarah here - didn’t I, Sarah?
“That night, sitting by the fire like at a funeral, Vahna really loosened up for the first time.
“‘Don’t go,’ she says to me, with old Paloma nodding agreement with her. ‘I’ll show you where my brother got the nugget, if you don’t go.’ ‘Too late,’ said I. And I told her why.
“And told her about me waiting for you back in Nebraska,” Mrs. Jones observed in cold, passionless tones.
“Now, Sarah, why should I hurt a poor Indian girl’s feelings? Of course I didn’t.
“Well, she and Paloma talked Indian some more, and then Vahna says: ‘If you stay, I’ll show you the biggest nugget that is the father of all other nuggets.’ ‘How big?’ I asked. ‘As big as me?’ She laughed. ‘Bigger than you,’ she says, ‘much, much bigger.’ ‘They don’t grow that way,’ I said. But she said she’d seen it and Paloma backed her up. Why, to listen to them you’d have thought there was millions in that one nugget. Paloma ’d never seen it herself, but she’d heard about it. A secret of the tribe which she couldn’t share, being only half Indian herself.”
Julian Jones paused and heaved a sigh.
“And they kept on insisting until I fell for - ”
“The hussy,” said Mrs. Jones, pert as a bird, at the ready instant.
“‘No; for the nugget. What of Aunt Eliza’s farm I was rich enough to quit railroading, but not rich enough to turn my back on big money - and I just couldn’t help believing them two women. Gee! I could be another Vanderbilt, or J. P. Morgan. That’s the way I thought; and I started in to pump Vahna. But she wouldn’t give down. ‘You come along with me,’ she says. ‘We can be back here in a couple of weeks with all the gold the both of us can carry.’ ‘We’ll take a burro, or a pack-train of burros,’ was my suggestion. But nothing doing. And Paloma agreed with her. It was too dangerous. The Indians would catch us.
“The two of us pulled out when the nights were moonlight. We travelled only at night, and laid up in the days. Vahna wouldn’t let me light a fire, and I missed my coffee something fierce. We got up in the real high mountains of the main Andes, where the snow on one pass gave us some trouble; but the girl knew the trails, and, though we didn’t waste any time, we were a full week getting there. I know the general trend of our travel, because I carried a pocket compass; and the general trend is all I need to get there again, because of that peak. There’s no mistaking it. There ain’t another peak like it in the world. Now, I’m not telling you its particular shape, but when you and I head out for it from Quito I’ll take you straight to it.
“It’s no easy thing to climb, and the person doesn’t live that can climb it at night. We had to take the daylight to it, and didn’t reach the top till after sunset. Why, I could take hours and hours telling you about that last climb, which I won’t. The top was flat as a billiard table, about a quarter of an acre in size, and was almost clean of snow. Vahna told me that the great winds that usually blew, kept the snow off of it.
“We were winded, and I got mountain sickness so bad that I had to stretch out for a spell. Then, when the moon come up, I took a prowl around. It didn’t take long, and I didn’t catch a sight or a smell of anything that looked like gold. And when I asked Vahna, she only laughed and clapped her hands. Meantime my mountain sickness tuned up something fierce, and I sat down on a big rock to wait for it to ease down.
“‘Come on, now,’ I said, when I felt better. ‘Stop your fooling and tell me where that nugget is.’ ‘It’s nearer to you right now than I’ll ever get,’ she answered, her big eyes going sudden wistful. ‘All you Gringos are alike. Gold is the love of your heart, and women don’t count much.’
“I didn’t say anything. That was no time to tell her about Sarah here. But Vahna seemed to shake off her depressed feelings, and began to laugh and tease again. ‘How do you like it?’ she asked. ‘Like what?’ ‘The nugget you’re sitting on.’
“I jumped up as though it was a red-hot stove. And all it was was a rock. I felt nay heart sink. Either she had gone clean loco or this was her idea of a joke. Wrong on both counts. She gave me the hatchet and told me to take a hack at the boulder, which I did, again and again, for yellow spots sprang up from under every blow. By the great Moses! it was gold! The whole blamed boulder!”
Jones rose suddenly to his full height and flung out his long arms, his face turned to the southern skies. The movement shot panic into the heart of a swan that had drawn nearer with amiably predatory designs. Its consequent abrupt retreat collided it with a stout old lady, who squealed and dropped her bag of peanuts. Jones sat down and resumed.
“Gold, I tell you, solid gold and that pure and soft that I chopped chips out of it. It had been coated with some sort of rain-proof paint or lacquer made out of asphalt or something. No wonder I’d taken it for a rock. It was ten feet long, all of five feet through, and tapering to both ends like an egg. Here. Take a look at this.”
From his pocket he drew and opened a leather case, from which he took an object wrapped in tissue-paper. Unwrapping it, he dropped into my hand a chip of pure soft gold, the size of a ten-dollar gold-piece. I could make out the greyish substance on one side with which it had been painted.
“I chopped that from one end of the thing,” Jones went on, replacing the chip in its paper and leather case. “And lucky I put it in my pocket. For right at my back came one loud word - more like a croak than a word, in my way of thinking. And there was that lean old fellow with the eagle beak that had dropped in on us one night. And there was about thirty Indians with him - all slim young fellows.