The Yaqui uttered the low, strange, involuntary cry so rare with him, a cry somehow always associated with death.  Gale shuddered.

The Indian was digging in the sand and dust under the shelving wall.  He threw out an object that rang against the stone.  It was a belt buckle.  He threw out old shrunken, withered boots.  He came upon other things, and then he ceased to dig.

The grave of desert prospectors!  Gale had seen more than one.  Ladd had told him many a story of such gruesome finds.  It was grim, hard fact.

Then the keen-eyed Yaqui reached up to a little projecting shelf of rock and took from it a small object.  He showed no curiosity and gave the thing to Gale.

How strangely Gale felt when he received into his hands a flat oblong box!  Was it only the influence of the Yaqui, or was there a nameless and unseen presence beside that grave?  Gale could not be sure.  But he knew he had gone back to the old desert mood.  He knew something hung in the balance.  No accident, no luck, no debt-paying Indian could account wholly for that moment.  Gale knew he held in his hands more than gold.

The box was a tin one, and not all rusty.  Gale pried open the reluctant lid.  A faint old musty odor penetrated his nostrils.  Inside the box lay a packet wrapped in what once might have been oilskin.  He took it out and removed this covering.  A folded paper remained in his hands.

It was growing yellow with age.  But he descried a dim tracery of words.  A crabbed scrawl, written in blood, hard to read!  He held it more to the light, and slowly he deciphered its content.

“We, Robert Burton and Jonas Warren, give half of this gold claim to the man who finds it and half to Nell Burton, daughter and granddaughter.”

Gasping, with a bursting heart, ovewhelmed by an unutterable joy of divination, Gale fumbled with the paper until he got it open.

It was a certificate twenty-one years old, and recorded the marriage of Robert Burton and Nellie Warren.

XX

DESERT GOLD

A summer day dawned on Forlorn River, a beautiful, still, hot, golden day with huge sail clouds of white motionless over No Name Peaks and the purple of clear air in the distance along the desert horizon.

Mrs. Belding returned that day to find her daughter happy and the past buried forever in two lonely graves.  The haunting shadow left her eyes.  Gale believed he would never forget the sweetness, the wonder, the passion of her embrace when she called him her boy and gave him her blessing.

The little wrinkled padre who married Gale and Nell performed the ceremoney as he told his beads, without interest or penetration, and went his way, leaving happiness behind.

“Shore I was a sick man,” Ladd said, “an’ darn near a dead one, but I’m agoin’ to get well.  Mebbe I’ll be able to ride again someday.  Nell, I lay it to you.  An’ I’m agoin’ to kiss you an’ wish you all the joy there is in this world.  An’, Dick, as Yaqui says, she’s shore your Shower of Gold.”