Whispering Sands: Stories of Gold Fever and the Western Desert

I Desert Whispers

Oho! So you’re interested in the little yellow pellet, eh? Look again! Virgin gold! It’s a nugget, worn smooth by rubbing around the bottom of a stream. And here’s another. Look! But don’t look too long.

You’ll become gold blind if you’re not careful. Oh, yes, you can. Men get snow blind from the glitter of snow, and they get gold blind from the glitter of gold.

A story connected with it? Rather.

In Ensenada I first heard of the gold. Like all of those things, it came in whispers. The desert’s full of whispers. The sand whispers to the cacti as the wind blows it against the green stalks, and sometimes you’ll even hear the sand whispering to the sand.

Sure, it’s the wind — if you want to figure it that way. I’m not a fool. The sand blows along the desert and gives off a peculiar sound. It’s just the wind, and the sand. But sometimes when you’re asleep in the desert you can hear the sand whispers, and you’ll wake up. Then there’s a minute, just before you get fully awake, that you can hear the sand talking.

But that’s not the whisper I heard about the gold. That came from an old engineer, a mining man, a prospector, an adventurer.

He was dying at the time. We all thought it was TB. He kept wasting away, getting thinner and thinner, and he coughed most of the time.

You know how the beach stretches along the ocean there at Ensenada. There’s the city, then there’s the sand, and then there’s the bay of Todos Santos. By day it’s a deep blue, warm as milk. By night it reflects the stars. There’s not much surf, just a lazy waving of the water that splashes in little sheets of hissing foam.

One night this mining man told me his story. He was pretty far gone, and he had to whisper it.

We sat out on the shore. The stars glittered and reflected from the water. There was a little wind, just enough to make the sand whisper. Tiny waves hissed up on the shore, as though they were whispering back to the sand. And the sand blew along on the warm breeze and whispered to the water, and the engineer whispered to me. Behind us, the lights of the town showed as pin points of brilliance against a jet background.

Of course, I didn’t believe that fellow at first. It was like all those other whispered tales you hear in the desert. The country’s full of them.

He told me of a small trading station up east of the Funeral Range, and of a trader who kept faith with the Indians.

“The Injuns never had a pawn room,” he said. “They paid for everything they bought, provided they could not trade for it. An’ they always paid a little back room, sort of private...”

I waited for the engineer to go on, but he had a fit of coughing that almost laid him out. I wasn’t much interested — not then.

Finally he managed to whisper again.

“I went one night an’ peeked in through a little knot hole,” he said, “an’ saw the trader weighin’ out gold dust. He spoke Injun to the customer an’ asked if he didn’t have anything to trade. The Injun gave him a hard-luck story about how he’d lost all his stuff so the medicine man had let him take the gold. The trader nodded an’ finished weighin’ out the gold.”

That sounded goofy enough, but I nodded real seriously. The man was dying, and there was no call for me to start an argument over something that was none of my business.

He had another spell of coughing. Then he went back to whispering, telling me about how he explored the country where the Indians lived, and finally found a cavern that was gold from grass roots to bed rock, and about how an Indian medicine man shot a little arrow into his shoulder and breathed a curse.

And he told about how he got a stake of gold and started out of the country, and about how he got sick and the gold got heavy, and about booming drums that followed him and sounded inside his ears, and about a snake that followed him wherever he went, and about how he woke up one morning and found the gold gone, and about being sick ever since and being afraid to go back.

I nodded as grave as a judge.

Then this engineer rolled back his shirt and showed me where the arrow struck.

He was all wasted away to skin and bones, but the scar was there, all right. And the funny thing was that he had started to get sick right around that scar. You could see where the flesh had turned a reddish purple and the muscles had shriveled.

That made me think.

Two days later the engineer died.

They buried him out in that big graveyard across the wash. You know the place. It looks bigger than the town. Maybe it is, Ensenada is an old town; lots of people have died there. And the Mexicans keep up graves. They respect the dead that way.

Somehow or other, I couldn’t get him off my mind. Perhaps it was because I spent so much time sitting on the shore near the bay, and the waves whispered as they hissed up the beach, and the sand whispered back to the waves, reminding me of the dead engineer and the story he’d whispered.

Finally I knew I had to go after that whisper, so I packed up my things and started out in my little flivver.

II A Tight-Mouthed Trader

Maybe you know Death Valley. It’s a desolate stretch. But the engineer had said east of Death Valley. So I went up the Funeral Mountains. I traveled by night so it’d be cooler, both on me and the car.

Rhyolite’s right over the hump on the Funeral Mountains. You know, the Ghost City of Nevada. It was moonlight when I went through, a full moon. At the time I didn’t appreciate the real significance of the full moon. That came afterward.

But the city stood there, desolate, silent, deserted. The white buildings, the banks, the depot, the big schoolhouse, all standing white in the moonlight, looking as though they were swathed in winding sheets.

I went on east and then turned to the south. I didn’t know just where I was going, but I knew the general direction. For two weeks I scouted around the country, through the Pahrump Valley, through the Amargosa sinks.

Daytimes I’d laugh at myself for being a credulous fool. But nighttimes when the wind would blow and the sand would begin to whisper as it drifted along, I’d get to thinking I could hear the whispers of the dead engineer. And when I’d hear those whispers I’d begin to feel it was all right again.

Finally I came to a place where there was a belt of artesian water, and some mountains, and a bit of greenery, and there was a board shack that showed it was a small trading station.

I went in, just as I’d been doing at all the trading posts, and right away something seemed to tell me I was on the right track.

The man that came out to see what I wanted was a thin, dour fellow with little puckered lips and eyes that were not much bigger than peas.

I told him I wanted to look at some Indian blankets, so he showed me his stock.

Then I got to talking about business and told him I’d like to see the pawn room.

You know those pawn rooms. The Indians go broke and take their silver finery, maybe a turquoise belt or necklace, their spurs, their guns, anything they happen to have, and pledge it for grub.

Those pledges are always redeemed. The trader keeps a separate little room for ’em. Maybe it’ll be months, maybe it’ll be a year, but the Indian always comes back and pays up, gets his finery, and goes away. Maybe he’ll have to hock it again within a week.

The trader shook his head.

“I’ve got no pawn room,” he said.

Whereupon I knew I was at the right place.

“You wanted Indian blankets,” the trader said, looking as though somebody’d slipped a lemon in under his tongue.

I grinned and stuck out my hand.

“Flint’s my name,” I told him, “Jim Flint, and I’m just roaming around, looking the country over. I was wondering what sort of blankets these redskins made. They seemed to be a pretty shiftless bunch around here.”

He took my hand, but his clasp did not have any warmth in it. He just stuck his paw into mine and then let it drop as soon as I opened my fingers.

“Goin’ to be here long?”

“Maybe a week or two.”

He thought for a minute. “Well, Mr. Flint,” he said, “the Indians ain’t shiftless.”

I yawned as though I wasn’t much interested.

“If you want any grub I can sell it to you,” he said, after a bit.

“Later on, not right now.”

The trader nodded and went back into the tiny office where he’d been when I came in.

That left me nothing to do except go out. I’d liked to have talked awhile, but he wouldn’t talk.

I strolled over to the edge of the ditch where the artesian water went down into the little alfalfa patch, and there I made camp.

The Indians came past and looked me over. I bought a little grub from the trader, but that was all that happened in a week.

Then I sneaked up one night and looked the place over, the trading post. I wanted to see that mysterious back room where the cash transactions took place.

I’d found out about the trader. He was McLaren, a hard-bitten old Scot who could keep his mouth shut in fourteen different languages. He was a naturalized citizen and was always discussing the sanctity of the Constitution. But that was all he’d talk about.

This night the moon was old, and I took advantage of the darkness before moon-up. I sneaked around the place, looking for the room. I found it, all right. It was a little back room, to one side of the office, adjoining the cubbyhole of a kitchen where McLaren lived and did his own cooking.

I could see from the partition studding and the nails that there must be a room there. Also, I could see where there had been a knot hole, but it was filled up with putty now, and a sheet of something was nailed on the inside. Tin, I guess. I poked the blade of my knife through, and it felt like tin.

It was ticklish business. I started boring a small hole right where two of the boards came together. I had to work slow, so as not to make a noise, and I rubbed dirt in it, so it wouldn’t show from the outside where the boards had been scraped.

I didn’t finish that hole for two nights, what with having to work slow, and the moon coming up and all. At last I got the job done. Then I started watching. Every night after dark I’d go up and put my eye to the hole and wait.

But I didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary. Once or twice I saw McLaren walking through the room. But I never saw an Indian come in the place.

I found out McLaren had some booze hidden there, though. Twice I saw him break out a bottle. I made up my mind I’d ask him some day about how it happened he believed in the Constitution so hard and yet kept a stock of hooch in his place.

After a couple of days, when it got slap dark of the moon, McLaren said he was going away to get some stock for his store. I offered to run the place for him while he was gone, but the old fellow shook his head and didn’t even thank me.

“It’s dark of the moon,” said he.

“What’s that got to do with it?”

“The Indians won’t trade during the dark of the moon. It’s some sort of a religious business with ’em.”

I pretended to be awfully glad.

“Then I’ll ride down on the truck with you and pick up some little stuff I need. It’ll be company for you, and if you should have a breakdown you wouldn’t have to leave the truck and go for help.”

He wasn’t cordial, but the code of the desert’s a strange thing-something that a man don’t dare run against — and so he agreed.

I made up my mind I’d see what sort of money he used in paying for his stuff. Not that I was going to take any advantage. It was simply a business proposition. I thought there might be gold in that Indian country. I did not want any of McLaren’s gold. I wanted to find some of my own, but I didn’t want to go on any wild-goose chases.

He went to San Diego for his provisions. Why he went there I don’t know. Maybe because of wholesale prices. He went to a bank first. I told him I wanted to cash a check. He nodded and introduced me to his banker.

I’ve never seen a banker with such fishy eyes or such a cordial handshake. That banker started shaking hands with me while McLaren started for an inner office with the cashier. He was still working my arm up and down like a man jacking up a car when McLaren came out.

And then McLaren got cordial. He acted like he didn’t have a care in the world. He cracked Scotch jokes, and he endorsed the check I wrote on a Los Angeles bank, and he kidded the banker. He was like a two-year-old colt just turned into pasture.

Quickly the cashier came out of the little inside room, rubbing his hands.

“Your credit is one thousand four hundred and ninety dollars, Mr. McLaren,” he said in a low voice.

McLaren made some figures.

Now, why should a banker have to wait a while to tell a man how much he had deposited? There was only one answer. The cashier must have been weighing out gold dust in that inner room.

I didn’t say anything, McLaren didn’t say anything. But McLaren gave a guarded glance at the banker, and the banker replied with a slight nod of his head.

I remembered how the banker had held me with his long handshake, keeping me from following McLaren into that inner room. And I remembered how the banker’s cordiality had vanished into thin air when McLaren came out.

I got my check cashed, after which McLaren and I went out of the bank, went to a wholesale house where McLaren bought a bunch of stock. He paid for it with a check. I wanted to start back. McLaren wanted to go to Tia Juana. We went to Tia Juana.

McLaren was not the Scotchman of the joke magazines when it came to the booze. We swapped treats for a while, and then McLaren started to spend. Not that he was throwing any money away, but he was buying all the drinks.

I switched to beer. Even then I was feeling a little uncertain about the sidewalk when we got started back, and Mac insisted on stopping in one of the cantinas for a last shot of oil.

Then was when he did the funny thing.

He pulled out his purse, couldn’t find any small change, turned the purse upside down, and some gold nuggets fell out.

There were only three of ’em, and they wouldn’t have run over five dollars, but they were virgin gold.

He scooped ’em up quick and dropped ’em back in his purse.

After a bit he started to explain.

“Pocket pieces I’ve had ever since I used to be a prospector, years ago. I’ve carried ’em in that purse for years and years.”

He leered at me like an owl Jeering at a titmouse.

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.

She looked at me with smoky eyes.

“You findum deer?” I asked.

“No findum,” she said, then, after a moment: “and you don’t need to talk that synthetic pidgin English to me. It happens that I was educated at Berkeley, and I majored in English.”

I stood on one foot then the other, trying to think of the proper comeback for that one. There wasn’t any.

Then she smiled. “What were you looking for?”

“Just walking.”

“Why are you camped here?”

“For my health.”

She let her eyes drift away for a flickering instant, then turned them back on me, as glittering as obsidian, as expressionless as ebony.

“If you would like to camp in the desert I know where there is gold.”

I did some rapid thinking. I know Indian psychology.

“I am not interested in gold. I want health, and I must live in the mountains.”

“A white man — not interested in gold!”

I shook my head doggedly.

“It is an evil. Money is only a way of storing food. But people go mad over it, and they ruin their health seeking it. I, too, had my money madness, and then I lost my health. Now I only want to live. One needs very little gold to live.”

She smiled at me, and, as I was admiring the white luster of her perfect teeth, flashing against the tawny silk of her skin, she turned and slipped into the shadows.

Two days later I saw her again. After that she made it a point to keep in contact with me. I figured the tribe had delegated her to see what I was doing and keep track of me.

I was willing.

Gradually she began to talk more. And I think I convinced her that I wasn’t looking for gold. Her name was Auno, and she was the only pretty girl in the tribe. It was just a handful of people anyway, not more than a dozen families.

After a while I got acquainted with them. Among them were Hanebagat, the chief, and Bigluk, a young fellow who was sweet on Auno. And then there was Wailo, the medicine man.

I don’t know how old Wailo was. Nobody did. He had some blue tattooing in his face, but the features had wrinkled so much that it showed only as a blotch. No design to it any more.

Age had withered him until he was a dehydrated shell of a man with wrinkled skin and shriveled arms and legs. But he was as straight as a young pine, and he had eyes that were like thunderclouds when the lightning first starts to play around the dark places.

He said nothing, although his eyes were on me all the time.

I’d been there three months before I learned about the moon ceremony.

It was an ancient rite, handed down from the time when the tribe was powerful.

It took me quite a while to get the straight of it. You see, they weren’t Piutes, and they weren’t Navahos, and they weren’t Apaches. I’d have guessed they were an offshoot of one of the Pueblo tribes that had drifted through the Navaho country, picked up some Piute and Apache customs, and then settled somewhere around the Death Valley.

Age, disease, changed conditions and white encroachments had done the rest. They were the last remnant of a dying people, and they knew it — all except Auno, the girl.

She used to try and pep them up, tell them of the future, predict that they would come back to their own. But the others watched her with somber eyes and said nothing.

It’s hard to watch anybody die. Death seems to send a shadow that hovers about the dying one for quite a while before the soul slips its moorings. It’s harder still, to watch a dying race. That shadow of death seems to be with the very infants. The children play, not like normal children, but like young corpses that are walking hand in hand with death.

But it was the moon ceremony I was thinking of.

The new moon was the time for the very young people to sit out, all by themselves, on the sacred mountain. When the moon went down it was time to go back to camp and bed.

Then, when the moon got into the first quarter, the lovers went forth into the moonlight, and returned when the moon had gone down.

The full moon was the warriors’ moon. It was for the men in the prime of life.

After that the older people came in. They went forth to worship on the wane of the moon. The last quarter was reserved for the sages.

Those Indians ushered in each phase of the moon with a lot of powwow and old Wailo would beat a tom-tom and wail through some song. It differed for each phase of the moon.

Wailo’s personal moon was the very last of the fourth quarter, the one that came up just before the sun. There wasn’t anybody else as old as he was, so he went forth alone to worship.

By that time I was down living with the tribe, almost adopted — thanks to Auno. And I remember the first time I heard Wailo at his ceremony of moon worship.

It was a little before dawn, and it was cold; cold with the dry, chilly cold of the desert places, cold with the soul-shuddering mystery just before dawn.

The old moon was riding the heavens, looking like a bit of pitted gold, and it was cold, too. I awoke with a start to hear something going boom-boom-boom.

I lay in my blankets and shivered, first with the cold, then with the awful note of that tom-tom and the song that was going with it.

It was a wailing chant, coming in from the distance, borne on the thin, cold air without an echo. It was the voice of an old man trying to sing — the song of the old moon, the song of coming death, the song of a dying race.

I tried to get back to sleep, but I couldn’t.

With the red streaks of dawn in the sky Wailo came stealing back to camp. He was all decked out in paint and he moved as silently as a gray ghost.

Then the tribe got up. Little fires began to burn. There was the sound of moccasined feet on the hard ground. And it was time for me to get up.

All this time, I hadn’t seen anything of the gold, or anything that looked like gold. But I did know that the tribe wasn’t dependent upon trading, in the ordinary sense of the word.

The women wove blankets. There were some sheep, and there was a little cornfield. But the work was all done after the manner of those who are sure of their living, and work only to get what they need.

Besides, there were the coin buttons. That’s the fashion of Indians in that country. They take dimes, quarters, sometimes even half dollars, solder a bar on the back and use the coins for buttons and for ornaments. When times get hard they clip the bar off and use their “buttons” for money.

The clothes of this tribe had silver buttons, and they never came off. Whenever any one needed anything at McLaren’s trading post, they had a way of getting it. Old Wailo seemed to be the treasurer of the tribe.

So I figured they had a placer deposit somewhere around, and that Wailo had persuaded ’em that it was magic, and only the medicine man could take out the gold.

After that I commenced to watch Wailo.

I figured he must have a stock of the gold in the village somewhere. Maybe he knew I was watching him, but I don’t think so. Anyhow, he didn’t lead me to anything. I watched him, and that’s all the good it did me.

But he never seemed to leave the village. He was always around, saying very little, his puckery lips sucked into his mouth, his thundercloud eyes darting around the camp, seeing everything.

During the dark of the moon the tribe dedicated the night to those who had already died. They sat up around big fires, talking in low tones of the dead, and there was a circle where the ghosts were supposed to sit and warm their hands. There were places for the big chiefs who had passed on.

The tribe slept most of the day, after those night communions with the dead.

IV Lovers’ Moon

I got an idea during those long sessions around the spectral fires. When the new moon came I went to Hanebagat, the chief, and told him that I was the same as a member of the tribe now, and that I would go out on the ceremony of the first quarter of the moon. He agreed.

The word got spread around, and Bigluk made a protest to the chief. It was easy to see how his mind worked. There weren’t more than five or six of them that came under the lovers’ moon, and Bigluk was afraid I’d get too thick with Auno. He’d always preempted her for the moon ceremonies before.

But Auno whispered to Hanebagat, and the chief stood pat.

When the moon came to the first quarter, Wailo got out the sacred drum, put on some ceremonial paint and chanted a song that was supposed to be the thrilling song of love. But he knew the race was dying, and sadness crept into his voice. The chant sounded more like a dirge, for all its swing and occasional burst of noise.

After the chant we went out onto the sacred mountain, walking hand in hand. On the mountain we separated, each going by himself.

That was the ceremony. The young men were supposed to meditate upon the hunt and upon warlike deeds. The girls were to think of the tanning of skins, the cooking of food, the rearing of a family when they should get married.

If one of the young men chanced upon one of the young women after they had separated, he could talk with her. If they stayed together until the moon set, then it was equivalent to a marriage ceremony.

Of course, all the young men in the tribe wanted to marry Auno. But Bigluk seemed to have the best chance. He was big and surly, and he sort of kept the others away. There wasn’t one of them, though, that hadn’t tried to find her on the mountain after they’d separated.

Custom decreed that the women should leave first. After a few minutes the young men walked apart.

There were only three young women. One was very fat. The other was homely. The third was Auno. There were only three men beside myself. One of them was rather ugly.

After the girls had gone, the men separated and I found myself out on the moonlit mountain. Below was the camp. One of the warriors started a chant that ran for a few bars, then wailed into silence. Here and there a shadow flitted.

Auno was an adept at keeping separate. They could find her, have a little chat, and she’d glide off like a shadow. But, for the most part, they couldn’t find her.

I sat in the shadow of a clump of juniper and watched Bigluk. He tried to trail her for a while, but that was too slow. She could make tracks faster than he could find them in the moonlight. So he got in the shadow of a pine trunk and searched the mountain.

Finally he was off like a deer.

I watched him. He ran fast and well. He jumped into a brush clump, and there was a sound of struggle, the low laugh of a woman, the exclamation of a man’s voice, and Bigluk came out, looking disgusted.

The fat girl was clinging to his arm, pouring words at him. Bigluk was shaking his head. He jerked his arm free and went down the mountainside, peering into brush clumps.

Far above him I heard a low laugh that sounded like the tinkle of a bell.

He turned and charged like a mad bull. But he might as well have been chasing a shadow. He became dignified then and walked about with slow steps, pacing in the moonlight, no doubt meditating upon his life. But I noticed that he had his eye peeled for every bit of motion.

When the moon went down we started for camp, coming in one at a time, in silence. Then we rolled into the blankets.

The next night it was the same, and the next.

I didn’t move around much. I kept up there on the mountainside, mostly in the shadows. The fat girl found me once on the second night, but I left her. She’d have been willing to stay until the moon went down, which, as I said, would have been the same as marriage.

On the fourth night the moon was pretty strong. It was about the last of the ceremonial phase given over to the younger people. Bigluk had charged around as usual. Once he had caught Auno, and they had talked for fifteen or twenty minutes. I couldn’t hear what they said, but he was doing most of the talking, and his voice was getting that note in it that comes to people when they’re desperate over something.

Auno left him. That was the custom; either could leave the other and the other must not follow.

Bigluk walked into the shadows and stayed there.

I went out into the moonlight, walking, thinking. I knew it was no use to look for Auno. She could hide from the keen eyes of the Indians, and it would be too simple for her to elude me with my civilization-dulled senses. She could hide from me so easily it would make me seem absurd. I could no more hope to find her than I could to elude the fat girl.

The fat girl talked a little English, and she put herself in my way, so I’d have to either talk to her or be rude.

I paused for a few minutes, talked.

“You no go ’way,” she said, and her eyes were bright.

I laughed.

“You too good-looking to waste yourself on white, Missa Flint. You get nice Indian.”

She parted her lips and the moon gleamed on her teeth.

“I make you good squaw... I show you plenty gold.”

She lowered her voice for the last few words, glanced quickly around her.

I knew the danger. If other ears overheard, the fat one had pronounced her death sentence. But she had the keen sense of an Indian, and there wasn’t much chance any one would have been in hearing.

I looked at her, hesitated.

She gently tilted one shoulder blade with a seductive motion.

I got a grip on myself.

“Gold no good,” I said sternly. “Gold only good to buy food. Out here plenty food. One needs not much gold.”

And I walked away.

It was a struggle, and I wasn’t sure why I hadn’t said “yes” to the girl. I could have married her, got her to show me where the gold was, and then sneaked back some night, got what I needed for a stake, and left.

Maybe they’d have trailed me, maybe not. A man can go far in a night when he has to, and a rifle in the mountains gives the one who is fleeing a lot of advantage over those who follow.

And I was pretty good at losing a trail myself. I was wearing moccasins, and there are a lot of little tricks of losing trail in that country — ledges of rock, boulder-strewn creek beds where cloud-bursts leave their trails, long drifts of ridge which are exposed to the winds which blow in the mornings, fallen logs — oh, there are lots of ways of making it difficult to follow tracks.

Of course, it was foolish, but I began to get inoculated with something of the philosophy of the tribe. Why work in the treadmill of civilization? Civilization taxes you almost a hundred per cent for the privilege of participating in it.

You have butchers to make your kills, machinery to carry you from place to place, do your work. And yet one really lives in caves. They’re made out of concrete instead of cut into the side of a precipice, but they’re caves just the same, steam-heated caves. Your liver gets sluggish, and you lose the capacity to enjoy life. Out here we were free. We weren’t mere cogs in a machine.

As I walked and looked at the moon, I inhaled great lungfuls of air and wondered if there mightn’t be something in the philosophy of Wailo, after all.

I rounded a bush and Auno got to her feet with a single bound, like a startled deer. Then she paused, poised on one lithe limb, half turned.

“Don’t run, Auno,” I said.

She settled back on her two feet, looked at me.

It was well done, but I knew that her ears had heard my steps long before I came to her. Perhaps they had heard the conversation between the fat girl and myself.

“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.

“Quick!” she breathed, and grasping the still smoking torch, led me farther back into the black recesses of the mountain.

There was the sound of feet upon the gravel floor of the cave. Some one stumbled, halted. A match blazed, a torch flared, and I could see Wailo, the magician, peering about the shadows.

His wrinkled skin seemed as coarse as an elephant’s foot-pad. But his eyes glittered with an undying spirit that made the flames of the torch glitter in dancing reflections.

For several minutes he stood, listening, watching. Then he stooped, gathered some of the gold and retraced his steps. The torch was extinguished, and darkness fell upon the cave.

We sat, she in my arms, and waited until an hour had passed. Then we, too, sought the sunlight.

I thought much of that cave during the next two days. But mostly the thoughts came to me at night. I wondered if I had dropped so low as to be unworthy of Auno’s confidence.

That fine, clean girl meant more to me than anything in the world. Beauty, charm, perfect health; and we could live the care-free life of Nature’s children out in the desert, out where the tumbled mountains stretched their glistening sides down toward the Armagosa sink, down toward the bitter waters of the poison river, toward the shimmering heat of Death Valley.

Then I thought of the gold. Try as I would, I couldn’t get the yellow metal out of my mind. I thought of what it would buy.

Then I realized what the Indian girl had done. She had put my soul to the test. If I had greed, she had shown me how to take all the gold I could carry and escape. If I had spoken the truth and cared naught for gold — then the next new moon would see us walking together down from the mountain.

The nights passed. I slept less. The thought of the gold tortured my mind.

Then came the old moon, the last night of the withered moon when there was a mere streak of crescent light riding in the heavens a half hour before dawn.

And then I heard the faint boom-boom-boom of Wailo’s drum as the old man communed with himself. I thought of the shriveled arm, the wrinkled face, thought of how he had been with the tribe when he was a young man and walked on the mountainside in the light of the new moon.

And I remembered what Auno had said, that this was the safe time to steal the treasure. I tried not to think of the cursed stuff, but my thoughts turned to the gold.

A clammy sweat clothed my body. I raised myself on one elbow. The camp was silent.

Faintly, I could hear the chant of Wailo’s song of extreme age, the chant that greets the grave. The drum gave forth hollow boomings, throbbing like a pulse of the night. It seemed to lift me up... to lead me...

Waiter, bring me another bottle; and bring a bottle for my friend here, too.

Take the price from this sack. See, it contains gold. There is lots of gold, pure virgin gold. My friend and I are celebrating — celebrating my return to civilization.