From the window of the largest cabin MacDonald pulled the sapling shutter, and, like the other, it fell at his feet.  Then they opened the door, and entered; and here the sunlight revealed the cabin’s ghastly tragedy.  The first thing that they saw, because it was most terrible, was a rough table, half over which lay the shrunken thing that had once been a man.  A part of its clothes still remained, but the head had broken from its column, and the white and fleshless skull lay facing them.  Out of tattered and dust-crumbling sleeves reached the naked bones of hands and arms.  And on the floor lay another of these things, in a crumpled and huddled heap, only the back of the skull showing, like the polished pate of a bald man.  These things they saw first, and then two others:  on the table were a heap of age-blackened and dusty sacks, and out of the back of the crumbling thing that guarded them stuck the long buckhorn hilt of a knife.

“They must ha’ died fighting,” said MacDonald.  “An’ there, Johnny, is their gold!”

White as death Joanne stood in the door and watched them.  MacDonald and Aldous went to the sacks.  They were of buckskin.  The years had not aged them.  When Aldous took one in his hands he found that it was heavier than lead.  With his knife MacDonald cut a slit in one of them, and the sun that came through the window flashed in a little golden stream that ran from the bag.

“We’ll take them out and put ’em in a pannier,” said MacDonald.  “The others won’t be far behind us, Johnny.”

Between them they carried out the seven sacks of gold.  It was a load for their arms.  They put it in one of the panniers, and then MacDonald nodded toward the cabin next the one that had been his own.

“I wouldn’t go in there, Joanne,” he said.

“I’m going,” she whispered again.

“It was their cabin—­the man an’ his wife,” persisted old Donald.  “An’ the men was beasts, Joanne!  I don’t know what happened in there—­but I guess.”

“I’m going,” she said again.

MacDonald pulled down the barricade from the window—­a window that also faced the south and west, and this time he had to thrust against the door with his shoulder.  They entered, and now a cry came from Joanne’s lips—­a cry that had in it horror, disbelief, a woman’s wrath.  Against the wall was a pile of something, and on that pile was the searching first light of day that had fallen upon it for nearly half a century.  The pile was a man crumpled down; across it, her skeleton arms thrown about it protectingly, was a woman.  This time Aldous did not go forward.  MacDonald was alone, and Aldous took Joanne from the cabin, and held her while she swayed in his arms.  Donald came out a little later, and there was a curious look of exultation and triumph in his face.

“She killed herself,” he said.  “That was her husband.  I know him.  I gave him the rock-nails he put in the soles of his boots—­and the nails are still there.”