“If I do this—if I hit down for Cordova tonight—you know, of course, that it is very likely to be the end of me one way or another, in the general stir-up that will follow. I want you to know any way before I start—that I’d like that new beginning—with you.”
For a long moment there was no sound save the myriad voices of the conifers talking mysteriously with the winds of night.
Then the Pomo girl put her hands on the white man’s shoulders.
“A chief,” she said, “does what must be done—without fear—and a chief’s woman follows him—even to death. Saddle two horses.”
At Sheriff Price Selwood’s ranch an anxious circle watched the still form on the bed. The doctor from Bement had not left his station for seven hours. Outside cowboys, all armed, walked here and there, and on the deep veranda sat the prospector, Smith, smoking innumerable cigarettes and waiting on destiny.
Though he was filled with inner excitement his dark face gave no sign. He sat tilted back against the wall, his booted feet on the round of his chair, his hat pulled low over his eyes, and his keen vision sweeping the stretch of meadow that lay before the ranch house.
“It may be an hour—it may be ten—but something is going to happen soon,” the doctor had said at dusk, “he will either rally or sink. If he speaks he will be rational, I think.”
And on that chance the stranger waited to ask one question, namely: “What is the secret of Sky Line? Where is the other end of the passage?”
For all the hours that Price Selwood had lain unconscious fourteen men under Bossick had camped in a glade under the flaring skirts of Mystery’s western end, ready to answer Fair’s summons.