He went alone into the remaining two cabins, while Aldous stood with Joanne.  He did not stay long.  From the fourth cabin he brought an armful of the little brown sacks.  He returned, and brought a second armful.

“There’s three more in that last cabin,” he explained.  “Two men, an’ a woman.  She must ha’ been the wife of the man they killed.  They were the last to live, an’ they starved to death.  An’ now, Johnny——­”

He paused, and he drew in a great breath.

He was looking to the west, where the sun was beginning to sink behind the mountains.

“An’ now, Johnny, if you’re ready, an’ if Joanne is ready, we’ll go,” he said.

CHAPTER XXVII

As they went up out of the basin into the broad meadows of the larger valley, MacDonald rode between Aldous and Joanne, and the pack-horses, led by Pinto, trailed behind.

Again old Donald said, as he searched the valley: 

“We’ve beat ’em, Johnny.  Quade an’ Rann are coming up on the other side of the range, and I figger they’re just about a day behind—­mebby only hours, or an hour.  You can’t tell.  There’s more gold back there.  We got about a hunderd pounds in them fifteen sacks, an’ there was twice that much.  It’s hid somewhere.  Calkins used to keep his’n under the floor.  So did Watts.  We’ll find it later.  An’ the river, an’ the dry gulches on both sides of the valley—­they’re full of it!  It’s all gold, Johnny—­gold everywhere!”

He pointed ahead to where the valley rose in a green slope between two mountains half a mile away.

“That’s the break,” he said.  “It don’t seem very far now, do it, Joanne?” His silence seemed to have dropped from him like a mantle, and there was joy in what he was telling.  “But it was a distance that night—­a tumble distance,” he continued, before she could answer.  “That was forty-one years ago, coming November.  An’ it was cold, an’ the snow was deep.  It was bitter cold—­so cold it caught my Jane’s lungs, an’ that was what made her go a little later.  The slope up there don’t look steep now, but it was steep then—­with two feet of snow to drag ourselves through.  I don’t think the cavern is more’n five or six miles away, Johnny, mebby less, an’ it took us twenty hours to reach it.  It snowed so heavy that night, an’ the wind blowed so, that our trail was filled up or they might ha’ followed.”

Many times Aldous had been on the point of asking old Donald a question.  For the first time he asked it now, even as his eyes swept slowly and searchingly over the valley for signs of Mortimer FitzHugh and Quade.

“I’ve often wondered why you ran away with Jane,” he said.  “I know what threatened her—­a thing worse than death.  But why did you run?  Why didn’t you stay and fight?”

A low growl rumbled in MacDonald’s beard.