I nodded and sipped my beer.
He gulped down his whisky, looked at me again, and took a deep breath.
“Flint, you been like a brother to me. I’m going to tell you the real truth.”
That sounded better. I sat my beer glass down and tried to act only half interested.
“There was a prospector came into the place and wanted me to grubstake him. He showed me some gold and said he’d stumbled on a place where it was thick. I gave him a hundred dollars’ worth of grub, and he left me the nuggets. I ain’t never seen the prospector since.”
I pretended my ears hadn’t been expecting anything else. He was getting drunk, but he was an awful liar.
“Do you s’pose we could smuggle a bottle across?” he asked me, putting his head over toward me and peering with a strained expression in his eyes, like a drunken man will.
“We could smuggle two bottles, one apiece,” I told him.
We did.
In a room in a San Diego hotel I poured whisky into him. He seemed to suspect I was getting him oiled, and he had the thought of the gold on his mind, all right.
When the second bottle was half empty he leaned forward, holding the edge of the table.
“Goin’ tell you real truth about thash gold,” he said.
I moved over closer.
“Jush like a brother to me, Jimmy, old boy,” he went on, swayed, straightened, filled his glass and drained it at a gulp. “I came on old prosh-pector... awful shick... dying. I did besht I could, but prosh-pector died. I wash a thief. I went through hish roll an’ found half pound gold dusht. Thish what’s left.”
And then he sagged over on the table and went to sleep.
I put him on the bed, went down, checked out of the hotel, and caught a night train out. At Las Vegas, Nevada, I outfitted. It was a funny outfit, but I was going on a funny errand.
III
Watched
I knew the country pretty well, and I went into the Indian country from the back way. It was hard going. I had a burro to ride and two to pack, but I took it easy. And I did not get clean into the Indian country. I stopped just below the summit of the range that ran into the desert.
There was timber here, water, and lots of game.
I shot a buck and built a fire. I used green wood, so the fire made lots of smoke. I cut up the venison and started to jerk most of it. A ham and some backstrap I hung up in canvas. I kept the fire going most of the time, and, as I said, it made lots of smoke.
I didn’t see anybody at all.
Next morning I went out with my rifle as though I was hunting. But all I did was scout around the ridges above camp.
And I found what I was looking for. The trail of a moccasined foot. I backtracked it to the place where the Indian had squatted behind a clump of brush and watched my camp.
Then I walked all up and down that ridge so my tracks wouldn’t show as having just trailed the Indian, and I put up a target and did a little shooting. Then I went back to camp and let the fire go out.
I stayed there four days without seeing a soul.
But, every morning, I’d take a short hunt and always I’d find moccasin tracks. Sometimes they’d watch me from one angle, sometimes from another. Sometimes there’d be two or three, sometimes one. But they always had me watched. Yet I never saw the faintest flicker of motion on those hillsides.
And the air’s so dry up there, and it’s so high, that the sun just floods light all over the country, all except in the shadows. The shadows are sharp, and contrast with the sunlight so it’s hard to make the eye see into ’em. The Indians watched from the shadow. They must have followed the shadows around.
On the fifth day an Indian came up the cañon. He was carrying a gun and acted as though he was trailing something. When he looked up and saw my camp he acted surprised. Too surprised. In the first place, any Indian would have smelled the camp before he rounded the bend. In the second place, he wouldn’t have acted that surprised over anything. But I pretended I didn’t see anything wrong in the way he acted.
He came into camp and smoked a cigarette Indian-fashion.
That is, he squatted on the ground, and his first six puffs were ceremonial puffs. They always smoke that way. First they puff to the four directions. Then they puff up toward the sky and down toward the ground.
After a while he looked around at camp. “Killed deer,” he said.
“Four days ago.”
He nodded. “You stay four days one camp.”
“I stay long time one camp.”
“Hunt?”
“Little bit.”
That was a pretty long conversation for an Indian to have with a stranger, so he went back to smoking.
Ten minutes passed. The Indian said nothing. I got confidential.
“I may be here six months.”
“One place?”
“Naw. I get tired of being in one place. I’ll move camp around a little bit.”
He waited for me to go on.
“You see, the doctors tell me I gotta live the simple life out in the open for a long time.”
He grunted at that. After a while, he said some more.
“You stay down trader’s for a while?”
I nodded and let my face all break out in smiles.
“Did you see me down there? I don’t remember you. Sure, I’ve got some things down there yet. But I went in to see the doctor in San Diego, and he said I’d have to get up higher in the mountains.”
The Indian grunted again. Then he lit another cigarette, and went through the same rigmarole of smoking it.
Indians always do that, but you’ve got to watch sharp to catch ’em at it. They turn their heads casually, as though they were looking around at something, and you don’t figure they’re turning so as to blow the smoke at the four points of the compass, then up toward the heavens and down into the earth. They want the spirits propitiated before they smoke. It’s like saying grace over a meal.
After a while my visitor went away without saying anything more.
I stayed in that same camp a week longer and shot another buck and jerked most of the meat. I didn’t see another soul.
Then I moved down the cañon half a mile and made another camp. I stayed there five days, cut across a ridge and pitched a camp in a clump of timber. It was cold there in the mornings, and I stayed only three days. Then I worked toward the foothills.
Finally I began to see Indians. They didn’t keep out of sight so much. Now and then one would walk against the skyline and stand there as though he didn’t know I was looking at him.
I never paid any attention.
When I shifted quarters the next time I moved within half a mile of an Indian camp. I didn’t let on I knew it was there.
For a day or two I lay low, and then I went hunting. A couple of Indians stopped me and said there wasn’t any good hunting around there, but I told them I wasn’t in a hurry to get my game. After that they let me alone.
I’d been there for a week when I came on her.
It’s not very often you see an Indian before that Indian spots you. But I did that with Auno. She was engaged in a ceremonial dance on a little flat of sandstone. It was just after sun-up and the air was still pretty crisp.
I saw her shadow first. Shadows are sharp in those mountains, and the sun was low enough to make hers long. The shadow moved and I thought I’d seen a deer. Then I moved over a bit and caught sight of the tawny skin weaving in a series of supple gyrations.
She was playing some sort of queer flute. I could hear the sounds of the music after I listened. I tried to work nearer, but she saw me.
I passed her going toward the camp. She wasn’t even breathing hard, but she’d been staging a sun-up dance and must have run for three or four hundred yards as fast as a deer.