He saw that the need of gold is a curse—that the craving for gold is a greater curse—that the possession of gold may be the greatest curse of all.
He saw that the need of gold is a curse—that the craving for gold is a greater curse—that the possession of gold may be the greatest curse of all.
WHEN Hugh Edwards left Saint Jimmy and the Indian, he was beside himself with grief and rage. He had prepared himself, in a measure, to lose Marta. He had told himself that his love was strong enough to endure even that test, but to give her up because she proved to be the daughter of the man who, by making him a convict, had robbed him of the right to keep her, was more than he could endure.
As he rushed blindly from the house that had been to him a house of refuge, but was now become a house of torment, Marta called to him.
He did not stop. He must get away—away from them all. The old prospector, Saint Jimmy, Natachee, Marta, the dead Mexican—they had all conspired with God to sink him in a hell of conflicting love and hatred.
When he came to himself, he was at the cabin where he had made his home during those first months of his life in the Cañon of Gold. When he was seeking a place to hide, as a wild creaturewounded by the hunters seeks to hide from the dogs, he had found that little cabin. He had learned to feel safe there. But he did not feel safe there now. The empty place was crowded with memories that would drive him to some deed of madness.
It was there his dream of freedom and love had been born. It was there that the dear comradeship of the girl had led him to believe there might still be something to hope for, to work for and to live for. He could not stay there now. The place was no longer a place where he could hide from his enemies; it was a trap, a snare. He must go, and go quickly.
Without consciously willing his movements, indeed, without realizing where he was going, he climbed out of the cañon and hurried away up the mountain slopes and along the ridges in the direction of Natachee’s hut. With no clearly defined trail to follow, it is doubtful if in his normal mental state he could have found the place. He certainly would not have made the attempt, particularly at that time of day. But some subconscious memory must have guided him, for at sundown he found himself in the familiar gulch where he had toiled all through the winter for the gold that meant for him the realization of his dreams of freedom and happiness with Marta. When night came, he was seated on that spot from which he had so often, in the agony of those lonely months of hiding, watched the tiny point of light in the gloom of the cañon below.
With his eyes fixed on that red spot, which heknew was the window of Marta’s room, Hugh Edwards brooded over the series of events that had ended in that hour of his dead hopes and broken dreams.
His thoughts went back even to those glad days when he was graduated from his university, and when, with a heart of honest courage and purpose, he had accepted a position of trust in the institution that seemed to afford such an opportunity for service. He recalled every proud step of his advancement from office to office, of increasing responsibility.
He lived again that appalling hour when he knew that he had been promoted only that he might be betrayed. Again he suffered the agony of his arrest—the trial, with his baffled attempts to prove his innocence—the hideous publicity—the hatred of the people—and again he heard the sentence that condemned him to years in prison, and to a life of dishonor and shame.
Once more he endured the horror of a convict’s life—and the death of his mother.
Then came the terrible experiences of his escape—when he was hunted as a wild beast is hunted, with dogs and guns.
And then—the Cañon of Gold, with its promise of peace and safety—its blessed work and dreams and hopes—its miraculous gift of love.
One by one, the strange events of his life in the Cañon of Gold passed in review before him—the period when he lived in the cabin next door to the old prospectors and their partnership daughter—hiscomradeship with Marta and the sure development of their love—the story of the girl’s questionable parentage that had made it possible for him to think of her as his wife—then the visit of the sheriff—his enforced life of torment with the Indian, and his fruitless toil for the gold that held him with its promise of freedom and Marta.
Again he lived over the coming of the outlaw, with the sudden turn of fortune that made Natachee his ally, and gave him the gold from the Mine with the Iron Door.
And then, with the gold in his possession and all its promises almost within his grasp, the tragedy and disaster that had followed. Until now, having gained the wealth for which, inspired by love, he had toiled and fought, he had lost the thing which gave the gold its value. The thing for which he had wanted the gold had become impossible to him.
The light in the Cañon of Gold went out. The hours passed, and still the man held his place on that wild spot high up in the mountains.
And now he saw and felt the mysteries of the night—saw the wide sea of darkness that engulfed the vast desert below, and felt the whispering breath of the desert air—saw the mighty peaks and shoulders of the mountains lifting out of the dark shadows below, up and up and up into the star-lit sky, and felt the fragrant coolness dropping from the pines that held the snows—saw the night sky filled with countless star worlds, and felt the brooding Presence that fixes the time of their every movement, andmarks their paths of gleaming light—saw the black depths of the Cañon of Gold, and felt the ghostly multitude of the disappointed ones who had toiled there, as he had toiled, for the treasure they never found, or, finding, were cursed with its possession.
And then, as one who in a vision glimpses the underlying truth of things, this man, on the mountain heights above the Cañada del Oro, saw that life itself was but a Cañon of Gold.
As men through the ages had braved the dangers and endured the hardships of desert and mountains to gain the yellow wealth from the Cañada del Oro, so men braved dangers and endured hardships everywhere. Every dream of man was a dream of gold. Every effort was an effort for gold. Every hope was a hope for gold. For gold was life and honor and power and love and happiness. And gold was death and dishonor and murder and hatred and misery.
It was gold that had led Marta’s father to purchase the rich mining property from the ignorant owners, for a price that was little more than nothing. The victims of George Clinton’s shrewdness had stolen his child, in the hope that by her they might regain the gold they had lost. It was for gold that Clinton had robbed the people who, because of their need for gold, had trusted him with their savings. To insure himself in the possession of gold, Clinton had sent Donald Payne to prison and condemned him to a life of dishonor. Gold, to the escaped convict, had meant, at first, the bare necessities of life. It had come to mean everything for which a man desires tolive. For gold, Sonora Jack had given himself to crime. Lured by the gold of the Mine with the Iron Door he had come to the Cañada del Oro and had been brought, finally, to his death. It was gold that had, at last, led to the revelations that brought the love of Hugh Edwards and Marta to naught.
The man saw that the story of his life in the Cañon of Gold, with its needs, its hopes, its labor, its fears, its victories and defeats, was the story of all life, everywhere.
He saw that the need of gold is a curse—that the craving for gold is a greater curse—that the possession of gold may be the greatest curse of all.
When Hugh Edwards went down to the cabin he found Natachee the Indian waiting for him.
“The heart of a white man is a strange thing—I, Natachee, cannot understand.”
“The heart of a white man is a strange thing—I, Natachee, cannot understand.”
AND Hugh Edwards knew by the light that flashed in the Indian’s somber eyes—by the expression of that dark countenance, and by the proud bearing of the red man, that Natachee had put aside the teaching of the white man’s school. There was something, too, beneath the Indian’s stoical composure which told Hugh that he was under the strain of some great excitement.
Gazing at Edwards with a curious intentness, the Indian said:
“My friend has been watching his star in the Cañon of Gold.”
“Yes, Natachee, I have been up on the mountain.”
Silently the Indian gave him a letter. It was from Marta.
Hugh handled the letter, turning it over and over, as if debating with himself what he should do with it.
“Open it and read,” said the Indian, “then hear what I, Natachee, shall say.”
Edwards opened the letter and read.
It was not a long letter, but it was filled with the strongest assurances of understanding and sympathythat a woman’s loving heart could pen. Saint Jimmy had told her of the completion of the story that had been left unfinished by the Mexican, and had explained its effect on the man she loved. But it made no difference to her, that she was proved to be the daughter of George Clinton, except that she was glad for her future husband’s sake that her birth was honorable—that she was not nameless, as she had believed herself to be. For the rest, everything must go on exactly as if she were still the old prospectors’ partnership girl. Saint Jimmy had gone to complete the arrangements he had started to make when Sonora Jack carried her away. There must be no change in their plans. When they were safe out of the country, she could communicate with her father. Hugh must come for her at once. She would be waiting for him to-morrow morning.
With deliberate care, Hugh Edwards folded the letter and returned it to the envelope.
The Indian was watching him intently.
The man did not appear in any way surprised, elated or disturbed. One would have said that he had been expecting the letter—had foreseen its contents, and had already, in his mind, answered it. His manner was that of one who, having fought and lived through the crisis of a storm, methodically and wearily takes up again the routine duties of his existence.
Calmly, with a shadowy smile that would have caused Marta to think of Saint Jimmy, he spoke.
“What is it that you wish to say, Natachee?”
“I, Natachee the Indian, can now pay the debt I owe Hugh Edwards.”
“You have more than paid that debt, Natachee.”
The red man returned haughtily:
“Is the life of Natachee of such little value that it is paid for by the death of that snake, Sonora Jack, and his companion who stopped the arrow?”
“But for you, Marta would not have escaped from Sonora Jack and the other outlaws,” returned Edwards.
“But for me, no one would know the woman Hugh Edwards loves, except as the Pardners’ girl. Hugh Edwards, but for Natachee, would be free to make her his wife.”
Indicating the letter in his hand, Hugh answered:
“She says here that it need make no difference. She says for me to come, as if the Mexican had died without speaking, as if you had taken nothing from Sonora Jack.”
The Indian’s eyes blazed with triumph.
“Good! That is as I, Natachee, wanted it to be. Now the way of my friend to the great desire of his heart is clear. Listen! When you left so hurriedly, after hearing the name of the girl’s father, Doctor Burton wondered at your manner. I told him that now, when the girl was known to be the daughter of a man of wealth and honorable position, you felt you could not take her for your wife.”
“That was true enough,” returned Edwards,wondering at the excitement which the Indian, with all of his assumed composure, could not hide.
“Yes, but I did not tell any one that it was the girl’s father who sent you, my friend, to prison. No one but Hugh Edwards and Natachee knows that. No one shall know until you, Donald Payne, are revenged for all that this man Clinton has made you suffer. When you have trapped this Clinton coyote—when you have made him pay for your shame—your imprisonment—your mother’s death—when he has paid for everything your heart holds against him—then I, Natachee, will have paid my debt to you.”
Hugh Edwards gazed at the Indian, bewildered, amazed, wondering.
“What on earth do you mean, Natachee?”
“Do you not understand? Listen.”
“The girl, who does not know what her father did, will go with you. Good!—Take her. Let there be a pretense of marriage. Then, when her shame is accomplished, send her to her father. Let George Clinton, who made Donald Payne a convict, beg that convict to give his daughter a name for her children. The shame that he heaped upon your name—the dishonor that he compelled you to suffer—you will give back to him through his daughter.”
The white man exclaimed with horror:
“In God’s name stop!”
“Is not the heart of Donald Payne filled with hate for the man who has filled his life with suffering?”
“Yes, Natachee, I hate George Clinton.”
“But you will not take the revenge that I, Natachee, have planned for you?”
“No—No—No!”
“The heart of a white man is a strange thing,” returned the Indian. “I, Natachee, cannot understand.”
The sun was not yet above the mountains, but the sky was glorious with the beauty of the new day, when Hugh Edwards stood in the doorway of the Indian’s hut.
Against a sky of liquid gold, melting into the deeper blue above, wreaths of flaming crimson cloud mists were flung with the careless splendor of the Artist who paints with the brush of the wind and the colors of light on the canvas of the heavens. The man bared his head and, with face uplifted, watched.
He felt the soft breath of the spring on his cheek and caught the perfume of cedar and pine. He heard the birds singing among the blossoms on the mountain side. He saw the mighty peaks and crags towering high. He looked down upon the foothills and mesas and afar over the desert where gray-blue shadows drifted on a sea of color into the far purple distance. A squirrel, in a live oak near by, chattered a glad good morning. A buck stepped from the cover of a manzanita thicket and stood, for a moment, with antlered head lifted, as if he too sensed the beauty and the meaning of life. A timid doe came to stand beside her lordly mate. The man, motionless, held his breath. In a flash they were gone.
Natachee the Indian stood beside his white companion.
Hugh Edwards held out his hand to the red man.
“Good-by, Natachee.”
“You go?” asked the puzzled Indian.
“Yes, you have paid your debt, Natachee.”
The fire of savage exultation flamed in the red man’s eyes.
“Hugh Edwards will take the revenge that I, Natachee, have offered?”
“No.”
The Indian said doubtfully, as if striving for an answer to the thing which puzzled him so:
“There is something in the white man’s heart that is more than hate?”
“Yes, Natachee. Yesterday I believed that there was nothing left for me in life but hate. Then you, last night, revealed to me what hate might do, and I knew the strength of love. I must go now—to the woman who is waiting for me, down there in the Cañon of Gold.”
But Hugh Edwards, when he told Saint Jimmy that George Clinton was living, had been mistaken.
The very night that Natachee brought the girl from that place where Sonora Jack had taken her, Marta’s father died in a Los Angeles hospital. In the same hour that the Indian and the girl were stealing from the Mexican house south of the border, the man for whose crime Donald Payne was sent to prison was dictating a confession. With the last of his strength, he signed the instrument.
Natachee, when he offered to Hugh Edwards his scheme of revenge, did not know that at that very moment every newspaper in the land was heralding the innocence of the escaped convict, Donald Payne. The man who went down the mountain slopes and ridges toward the Cañon of Gold that morning did not know that he was even then a free man. The girl who waited for her lover who had never spoken to her of his love did not know. But Doctor Burton, when he went to Oracle the evening before to complete his arrangements for that wedding journey, had received the news.
It was like Saint Jimmy to meet Hugh Edwards on the mountain side that morning, and to tell him what he had learned before Hugh had come within sight of the house in the cañon. It was like Saint Jimmy, too, to suggest that perhaps now Marta need never know, at least not until after they had returned from their trip abroad.
It was the plan that had been arranged by Saint Jimmy.
It was the plan that had been arranged by Saint Jimmy.
LATE in the afternoon of that appointed day, an automobile from Tucson turned off from the Bankhead Highway into the old road that leads to the Cañada del Oro.
At the point where the road enters the Cañon of Gold, which is as far as an automobile can go on that ancient trail, Hugh and Marta, with old Thad, were waiting.
The automobile would take them, without a stop, straight south through Tucson to Nogales, where they would cross the international boundary line into Nogales, Mexico. From there, immediately after the wedding ceremony, Donald Payne and his bride would travel by rail to Mexico City, from which point in due time they would go to the lands of the old world. Thad would return to the Cañada del Oro, and would, for a while at least, make his home with Saint Jimmy and Mother Burton.
It was the plan that had been arranged by Saint Jimmy when they all believed that it was unsafe for Hugh to make his real name known in the United States. For Marta’s sake, the original plan was stillto be carried out. When Marta and her husband were safely out of the country and on their way abroad, Doctor Burton would give the facts to the newspapers. In a few months the sensational story would cease to be of news interest to the press and would be forgotten by the public. Then Marta would be told that her husband’s innocence had been established—that Donald Payne, no longer a fugitive from prison, was free to return again to his own country.
Saint Jimmy and his mother had said their goodbys at the little home of the old prospectors and their partnership girl.
From a rocky point on Samaniego Ridge, high above the Cañon of Gold, Natachee the Indian saw the black moving spot which was the automobile on the old trail that had been followed by so many peoples, in so many ages.
Motionless, as a figure of stone, with a face unmoved, the red man watched.
The automobile stopped.
The dark eyes of the Indian, trained to such distance, could see, as no white man could have seen, the three figures entering the machine.
The automobile moved away, winding down through the foothills, crawling cautiously over the ridges, laboring heavily across the sandy washes, growing smaller and smaller until even to the Indian’s vision it was lost in the gray-brown plain of the desert. But still Natachee’s gaze held toward the south where presently he saw a faint cloud ofdust rising from the yellow threadlike line of highway. Then the cloud of dust melted into the desert air. A moment longer the Indian watched. Then slowly his gaze swept the many miles that lie between the foot of the Santa Catalinas and the far horizon.
A puff of air, fragrant with the scent of the desert, stirred the single feather that drooped from the loosely twisted folds of the Indian’s headband. In the blue depth of the sky, a wheeling eagle screamed.
Lifting his dark face toward the mountain peaks that towered above his lonely hut, Natachee the Indian—mystic guardian of the Mine with the Iron Door—smiled.
THE END
By HAROLD BELL WRIGHTTHAT PRINTER OF UDELL’SA gripping story of character and action, dealing with a young man’s fight for more practical Christianity.THE SHEPHERD OF THE HILLSThe hearts of men and women, their thoughts and acts, seen in the clear, inspiring atmosphere of the Ozark region.THE CALLING OF DAN MATTHEWSThrough experience of people and conditions in a mid-western town, Dan Matthews learns that a man’s true ministry is the work in which he serves best.THE UNCROWNED KINGA beautiful allegory of life, showing that “the Crown is not the Kingdom, nor is one King because he wears a Crown.”THE WINNING OF BARBARA WORTHAchievements of human enterprise in a charming love story whose background is an epic of desert reclamation.D. APPLETON AND COMPANYNew YorkLondon
By HAROLD BELL WRIGHT
THAT PRINTER OF UDELL’S
A gripping story of character and action, dealing with a young man’s fight for more practical Christianity.
THE SHEPHERD OF THE HILLS
The hearts of men and women, their thoughts and acts, seen in the clear, inspiring atmosphere of the Ozark region.
THE CALLING OF DAN MATTHEWS
Through experience of people and conditions in a mid-western town, Dan Matthews learns that a man’s true ministry is the work in which he serves best.
THE UNCROWNED KING
A beautiful allegory of life, showing that “the Crown is not the Kingdom, nor is one King because he wears a Crown.”
THE WINNING OF BARBARA WORTH
Achievements of human enterprise in a charming love story whose background is an epic of desert reclamation.
D. APPLETON AND COMPANYNew YorkLondon
By HAROLD BELL WRIGHTHELEN OF THE OLD HOUSEA great human story of American manhood and womanhood in the industrial life of to-day.THE RE-CREATION OF BRIAN KENTKeen revelation of life’s invisible forces, out of which come a man’s recovery from desperation, and his success in life and love.WHEN A MAN’S A MANIn the cattle country of Arizona, where a manmustbe a man, a stranger from another way of life proves himself in many stirring experiences.THE EYES OF THE WORLDA beautiful love story with the inspiration of Nature contrasted impressively with a life of materialism.THEIR YESTERDAYSA delicate story of life and love and the great elemental things that rule men from early childhood onward.D. APPLETON AND COMPANYNew YorkLondon
By HAROLD BELL WRIGHT
HELEN OF THE OLD HOUSE
A great human story of American manhood and womanhood in the industrial life of to-day.
THE RE-CREATION OF BRIAN KENT
Keen revelation of life’s invisible forces, out of which come a man’s recovery from desperation, and his success in life and love.
WHEN A MAN’S A MAN
In the cattle country of Arizona, where a manmustbe a man, a stranger from another way of life proves himself in many stirring experiences.
THE EYES OF THE WORLD
A beautiful love story with the inspiration of Nature contrasted impressively with a life of materialism.
THEIR YESTERDAYS
A delicate story of life and love and the great elemental things that rule men from early childhood onward.
D. APPLETON AND COMPANYNew YorkLondon