“I was thinking, and you startled me,” she half whispered.
“Thinking of what, Auno?”
She raised her head, looking at me with half-closed eyes, then tilted her neck, after the manner of a listening deer.
“He comes. You will go with me and we will avoid him.”
I listened, but could hear nothing save the faint rustle of the night wind on the moonlit slope of the mountain. But her delicate senses had apprised her of the coming of Bigluk.
“Very, very softly,” she said, as she nestled her warm hand confidingly in mine and guided me along the moonlit game trails that networked the side of the slope.
We crossed the ridge and were in shadow. Then she paused, listened, and led me into the deeper darkness.
“Now we are safe.”
Reluctantly, I let go her hand. Of a sudden I realized what this girl had come to mean to me.
“So you would not marry, get the gold and desert the tribe?” she cooed.
“You heard, then?”
“I heard.”
I shifted my weight from one foot to the other, not knowing just what to say next.
“Why?” she asked.
“Because I do not care for gold — no, I’ll be honest; that is not it.”
She came closer to me. I could feel the warmth of her body, glowing through the soft tanned fawnskin of her clothes.
“You are not like other white men. You are more of a man, less of a hog?”
“It is because I love you!” I told her, and swept the girl into a tender embrace.
Quick as I was, she could have avoided me had she desired. Her splendid muscles functioned as easily and swiftly as those of a springing cougar. But she slipped into the curve of my arm and, after a moment, raised her red lips to mine.
For long minutes we stood, close to each other, I feeling the warm fragrance of her breath on my cheek.
The moon slid lower in the velvet sky.
“It is not the gold?”
“It is not the gold.”
And, at that moment, gold seemed sordid to me. I resented the very use of the word.
She sank to the ground, pulled me down beside her, slipped her head upon my shoulder, laughed, sat snuggled close to me, patted my cheek and hair, kissed my eyes, looked up at the star-studded sky, and rippled into another laugh.
“Soon the moon sets, Jimmy.”
“You will go back with me, Auno beloved?”
For a long minute she was silent, thinking.
I knew when a sudden thought came to her. I could feel her body stiffen in my embrace. The hands were at my shoulder where her head had been, pushing us apart.
“Perhaps it is because you knew I loved you, Jimmy. You still want the gold, but you would rather have the gold and me, than the gold and her.”
I was on my feet, words poured from my lips.
I convinced her heart, but the thought remained in her mind.
“We will see,” she said, and made a single writhing motion which gathered the cloak of darkness about her as a tangible thing. One moment she had been there. The next she was gone.
The moon set, and I returned alone to the camp.
V
Ordeal by Gold
That was the last night of the lovers. Thereafter Auno avoided me. And Bigluk had muttered some comment to the elders of the tribe. I detected a feeling of hostility which had not before been apparent.
The full moon came and went.
One morning the air was calm, still, cold. I set out with my rifle, going more for the exercise than anything else, for there was plenty of meat in camp.
A bush ahead of me showed a ripple of motion. I flung up the gun, and Auno stepped out into the trail.
“Are your eyes still the eyes of a white man?” she asked, tauntingly. “Do you not know that a deer would not be on the windward side of the bush? Think you that a deer would shut off his vision on the same side that his nose was blind?”
I muttered something about having seen motion and acted automatically.
She laughed, beckoned for me to follow.
She picked her way down a game trail, came to a cañon, paused, looked about her, her eyes snapping, every muscle poised, tense.
Then she took my hand. Together we raced up a bed of smooth rock, worn down by the torrents of many cloud-bursts.
She paused where a branch cañon came into the main cleft in the hills, parted a bit of brush and disclosed a worn trail.
I followed her without a word.
The trail ended at a rock. Behind the rock was a place which yawned black and forbidding, the entrance to a cave.
She slipped into it, grasped a torch from a place in the wall, lit it, and advanced.
The smoking flames of the pitch torch gave weird shadows which danced about on the wall of the cave. A damp smell of musty ages was in the atmosphere. A bat flew past, almost knocking against my shoulder.
The girl stopped, held forward the torch.
I saw where some subterranean stream had cut a channel through the cave, leaving coarse bits of gravel, bigger rocks worn smooth. I saw where a dike of rock came across the course of that ancient stream, making a dam. And I saw something else, pebbles that were not pebbles, but glittered here and there as the light of the torch struck them.
Mostly they were black, but in places the black oxidation had been rubbed away and the gold showed through. I had seen black gold in places before.
“Behold,” she said, “the treasure of the tribe. There is more here than many men could possibly carry away.”
I knew she was right.
Auno moved the torch, and I saw a row of something white, something which sent a sudden chill through my bones. They were skeletons, three of them!
There they sat, grinning into the dark depths of the cavern, grouped in a row upon a little shelf in the rock.
“And these,” she went on, “are the white men whose greed betrayed them. These are the skeletons of those who would have looted our treasure, stolen from us that which is ours.”
“Murder?” I asked.
“Bah!” she spat, an expletive of disgust. “Murder, is it? Didn’t the white men crowd us out of our own country, banish us to the burning desert? And now that we have a little of the precious metal in our possession, they must come even here and grab that, too!”
I decided not to argue the point.
“Yes,” she said, and her voice was low, almost crooning, “these men discovered our secret, tried to steal our treasure. The braves trailed them, cut off their escape and returned the bodies to the cave. They wanted the treasure so much! Let them remain with it always.
“But they were foolish, Jimmy. They took the gold and started over the mountains toward the road. But had they been wise, they would have gone out into the desert. There they would have had heat and thirst, but the shifting sands would have drifted in over their tracks.
“Wailo guards the treasure. And in the mornings when there is a very old moon and Wailo is on the mountainside, a man could enter here, wait until dawn came, and then slip out. He would get far before he would be missed.”
I thought that over, the last sentence in particular.
“You are telling me how I could steal the gold?”
She nodded.
“Why?”
“Because either you love me, or you love the gold. I want to find out which. If it is the gold, take what you can carry and go. If you love me — well, then when there comes a new moon again, Jimmy, and we walk upon the mountainside, perhaps—”
Her voice trailed into silence.
I grasped her in my arms. The torch fell sputtering to the floor, flickered a minute, and went out. There in the darkness of the cave we embraced and I whispered that gold meant nothing to me.
Of a sudden, she broke away.