We cooked ourselves a meal, and built ourselves a fire. About midnight we heard the sounds of horses rapidly approaching. Immediately we leaped from our bunks and seized our rifles, peering anxiously into the darkness. A moment later, however, we were reassured by a shrill whistle peculiar to Buck Barry, and a moment later he and Don Gaspar rode into camp.

We assailed them with a storm of questions–why had they returned? what had happened? where was Yank? had there been an accident?

Don Gaspar, who appeared very weary and depressed, shook his head sadly. Barry looked at us savagely from beneath his brows.

“The gold is gone; and that’s an end of it!” he growled.

At these words a careful, dead silence fell on us all. The situation had suddenly become too serious for hasty treatment. We felt instinctively that a wrong word might do irreparable damage. But in our hearts suspicion and anger and dull hatred leaped to life full grown. We tightened our belts, as it were, and clamped our elbows to our sides, and became wary, watching with unfriendly eyes. Johnny alone opened his lips.

“Lost? I don’t believe it!” he cried.

250Barry cast an ugly look at him, but said nothing. We all saw that look.

“Where’s Yank?” I asked.

“Dead by now, I suppose,” flung back Barry.

“Good God!” I cried; and under my breath, “Then you’ve murdered him!”

I don’t know whether Barry heard me or not, and at the time I did not much care. His sullen eye was resting on one after the other of us as we stood there in the firelight. Every face was angry and suspicious. Barry flung himself from his horse, tore the pad from its back, slapped it on the flank, and turned away, reckless of where it went. He cut himself a steak and set to cooking his food, an uncompromising shoulder turned in our direction; nor did he open his mouth to utter another word until the general discussion later in the evening. Don Gaspar, who owned the only riding saddle, unharnessed his horse, led it to water, knee haltered it, and turned it loose to graze. While he was gone no one spoke, but we glanced at each other darkly. He returned, sat down by the fire, rolled himself a cigaretto, and volunteered his story.

“My fren’,” said he, with a directness and succinctness utterly foreign to his everyday speech, “you want to know what happen’. Ver’ well; it was like this.”

He told us that, after we had left them, they hurried on as fast as possible in order to reach the settled country. Owing to the excellence of his animal he was generally some distance in advance. At one point, stopping on a slight elevation to allow them to catch up, he looked back in time to see two men on horseback emerge from the chaparral 251 just behind his companions. Don Gaspar shouted and leaped from his saddle; but before the warning had reached the others, a riata from the hand of one of the men had fallen with deadly accuracy around Yank’s arms and body, jerking him violently from the saddle. The thrower whirled his horse to drag his victim, Don Gaspar fired, and by great good luck shot the animal through the brain. It fell in a heap, pinning its rider beneath it. In the meantime Barry had leaped to the ground, and from behind the shelter of his horse had shot the first robber through the body. Our two companions now drew together, and took refuge behind some large rocks, preparing to receive the charge of a band of half dozen who now appeared. The situation looked desperate. Don Gaspar fired and missed. He was never anything of a marksman, and his first shot must have been a great piece of luck. Barry held his fire. The robbers each discharged his rifle, but harmlessly. Then just as they seemed about to charge in, they whirled their horses and made off into the brush.

“We could not tell the why,” observed Don Gaspar.

The two men did not speculate, but ran out to where Yank lay, apparently dead, his arms still bound close to his body by the noose of the riata. Barry cut the rope with his bowie knife, and they rolled him over. They found he still breathed, but that, beside the shock of his violent fall, he had been badly trampled by the horses. After a moment he came to consciousness, but when they attempted to lift him upright, they found that his leg was broken.

At this moment they heard the sound of voices, and, 252 looking up, saw coming from the other direction a band of a dozen men, half of whom were on horseback, and all of whom were armed. This looked serious.

“We got behind the rock,” said Don Gaspar, “but we think to ourself our goose is cook.”

The newcomers, however, proved to be miners, who had heard the shots, and who now came hurrying up. Evidently the robbers had caught sight or sound of their approach. They were much interested in the state of affairs, examined the horse Don Gaspar had killed, searched for and found the body of the robber Barry had shot. It proved to be a Mexican, well known to them all, and suspected to be a member of Andreas Amijo’s celebrated band. They inquired for the dead horse’s rider.

“And then, for the first time,” said Don Gaspar, “we think of him. He went down with his horse. But now he was gone; and also the horse of SeÑor Yank. But I think he crawl off in the chaparral; and that the horse of SeÑor Yank run away with the other horse of the dead man.”

And then, I must confess, to our disbelief in the tale, Don Gaspar told us that the miners, their curiosity satisfied, calmly prepared to return to their diggings, quite deaf to all appeals for further help.

“They say to us,” narrated Don Gaspar evenly, “that they wash much gold, and that they cannot take the time; and when I tell them our friend is dying, they laugh, and essay that we ought to be glad they come and essave our lives; and that we get along all right.”

We did not believe this, though we could see no object in Don Gaspar’s deceiving us on the point. Three months 253 had passed while we had been isolated in the valley of the Porcupine; and we had not yet been taught what a difference three months can make in a young country. In that time thousands had landed, and the diggings had filled. All the world had turned to California; its riffraff and offscourings as well as its true men. Australia had unloaded its ex-convicts, so that the term “Sydney duck” had become only too well known. The idyllic time of order and honesty and pleasant living with one’s fellow-men was over. But we were unaware of that; and, knowing the average generous-hearted miner, we listened to Don Gaspar with a certain surprised skepticism.

“But I follow them,” said Don Gaspar, “and I offer them to pay; and after a while two of them come back with me, and we make a litter of branches with many blanket; and we carry SeÑor Yank down to the town. There is a town there now. And by good chance,” concluded Don Gaspar with a little show of quiet racial pride, “we find a California man and his wife, and they do their bes’ for SeÑor Yank, who is very essick, and I think he is now dead from the tramp of the horses. And we borrow the fresh horse and come back.”

It was indeed, as I think of it, a wonderful ride in the darkness; but at the time my mind was full of our poor friend. The others, however, thought only of the gold.

“We have left,” replied Don Gaspar to the rudely expressed shower of questions, “just the one half. It is well known to all that SeÑor Yank carried the most of the gold.”

254“Yes, and we have Munroe to thank for that,” snarled Missouri Jones.

“As far at that is concerned, I was against sending out the gold from the very start,” I retorted. “If you’d listened to me, it would have all been safe right here.”

“If we’d had a decently strong guard, we’d have been all right,” growled McNally.

We all saw the futility of our first instinctive flare of suspicion. It was obvious that if Don Gaspar and Buck Barry had intended treachery they would never have returned to us. I think that, curiously enough, we were unreasonably a little sorry for this. It would have been satisfactory to have had something definite to antagonize. As it was, we sat humped around our fire until morning. For a long period we remained sullenly silent; then we would break into recriminations or into expressions of bitter or sarcastic dissatisfaction with the way things had been planned and carried out. Bagsby alone had the sense to turn in. We chewed the cud of bitter disappointment. Our work had been hard and continuous; we were, as I have pointed out, just ready for a reaction; and now this catastrophe arrived in the exact moment to throw us into the depths of genuine revulsion. We hated each other, and the work, and the valley of the Porcupine, and gold diggings, and California with a fine impartiality. The gray morning light found us sitting haggard, dejected, disgusted, and vindictive around the dying embers of our fire.