On the side bunk of the wagon where the cowboys had stretched him, wrapped in one of his blankets, lay the wounded man, his face, under the black beard, pale and writhen, the eyes staring glassily and the lips moving in the mutterings of what seemed to be delirium. Ike climbed into the wagon and bent over his employee, whose mutterings, as his glazing eyes fell on his master’s face, became more rapid. But he talked in a language that neither Ike nor any of the men could understand.
With a soothing word or two, Ike drew the blanket down from Pete’s chest and looked at the great stain about the rude bandage which had been applied by the men who had found him. One glance was enough to show that Pete was in a bad way.
“Lie still!” said Ike, kindly. “Keep your shirt on, Pete, and we’ll git you outa this pretty soon.”
But Pete was excited about something and insisted on trying to talk, though the froth of blood on his lips indicated the folly of it. In vain Ike soothed him and implored him to rest. His black eyes snapped and his right hand made feeble motions toward the floor of the wagon where, on a pile of supplies and camp equipment, lay a burlap sack containing something lumpy and rough.
“Zose sheep – and zose r-rock!” he whispered, shifting to English mixed with accented French. “Pour vous – et le bébé! Le p’tit bébé an’ she’s mère– France —or– ”
“Never mind the sheep,” said Ike. “You rough-lock your jaw, Pete, an’ we’ll take care o’ the sheep. Lie still, now!”
But Pete moaned and turned his head from side to side with his last strength.
“Mais – mais oui! ze sheep!” He again stuttered words meaningless to his hearers who, of course, had no Basque at command. But here and there were words of English and French, and even some Spanish, which most of them understood a little.
“Ze r-rock —pierre – or! Eet eez to you et le bébé one half. Ze res’ you send – you send heem – France —pour ma femme – mi esposa an’ ze leet-leetla one? Mi padron– you do heem?”
“What’s he drivin’ at?” muttered one of the cowboys. But Ike motioned them to proceed and drive as fast as possible toward Willow Spring. He bent toward the agitated herder again.
“I’ll take care of it, Pete,” he assured him. “Don’t worry none.”
But Pete had more on his mind. He groped feebly about and whined a request which Ike finally understood to be for paper and a pencil. He looked about but found nothing except a paper bag in which were some candles. These he dumped out and, to pacify the man, handed the paper to him with his own pencil. It was evident that Pete would not rest until he had had his way, and if he was crossed further his excitement was bound to kill him almost at once. In obedience to Pete’s wishes Ike lifted him slightly and held him up while he wrote a few scrawling, ragged characters on the sack. Almost illegible, they were written in some language which Ike knew nothing about but, at the bottom of the bag Pete laboriously wrote a name and address which Ike guessed was that of his wife, in the far-off Basse Pyrenean province of France.
“I’ll see it gits to her,” said Ike, reassuringly. But Pete was not satisfied.
“Zose or,” he repeated, chokingly. “I find heem – on ze Lunch R-rock, where I step. Eet ees half to you an’ lettl’ Marian – half to ma femme an’ ze bébé. You weel find heem?”
“Ore?” repeated Ike, doubtingly. “You talking French or English?”
“Or! Oui! Een Englees eet ees gol’, you say! I find heem – back zere by ze Lunch R-rock. Zen some one shoot – I no see heem! I not know w’y. One ‘bang!’ I hear an’ zat ees all. Ze wagon run away, ze sheep are los’, an’ I lose ze head!”
“Ore!” repeated Ike, blankly. “You found gold, is that what you’re telling me? Where?”
“Back – back zere – by ze Lunch Rock where I eat! Much or– gold! I find heem an’ half is yours!”
“That’s all right,” soothed Ike, thinking the man was crazy. “You found a lot of gold and half is mine and Marian’s, while the rest goes to your folks? That’s it, ain’t it?”
Pete nodded as well as he could and even tried to grin his satisfaction at being understood, waving a feeble hand again in the direction of the burlap sack. But his strength was gone and he could not articulate any more. Pretty soon, as the wagon jolted onward, he relapsed into a coma, broken only by mutterings in his native and incomprehensible tongue. By his side Ike sat, vainly wondering who had shot the man and why. But Pete, if he knew, was past telling. To the story of gold, Ike paid hardly any heed, not even taking the trouble to look into the sack.
After a while the mutterings ceased, while his breathing grew more labored and uneven. Then, while Willow Spring was still miles away, he suddenly gasped, choked, and writhed beneath the blanket. The blood welled up to his lips, and he fell back and lay still.
Ike, with face twisted into lines of sorrow, drew the blanket over the man’s head and sat beside his body with bowed face.
As they rode he pondered, endeavoring to search out a clew to the perpetrator of the murder, certainly a cold-blooded one, without any provocation. Pete’s rifle, the cowboys had said, was clean and therefore had not been fired. Furthermore, the wound was in the back. It had been made by a mushrooming bullet, and the wonder was that the man had lived at all after receiving it.
He questioned the cowboys. They knew nothing except that Pete had been found about two miles down on the plain from Shoestring and that his sheep were, presumably, somewhere up the cañon. When Ike sought to know who was in the Esmeraldas, they told him that they had been riding the range for a week and had encountered no one but Pete himself, who, about five days back, had driven into the cañon on his way through the mountains. They had seen nothing of Louisiana, nor had they cut his trail at any time.
The wound showed that it had been recently made; within twelve hours, certainly. But the horses had traveled far in the time given them. One of Wallace’s riders had ridden back up the cañon to search for possible clews and would, perhaps, have something to say when he returned.
They finally arrived at Wallace’s ranch, and found there a doctor who had come from a little hamlet situated to the east. His services were no longer of avail, but Ike asked him to extract the bullet, which he did, finding it to be an ordinary mushroomed ball, to all appearance such as was shot from half the rifles used in that country. There was no clew there, and yet Ike kept it, with a grim idea in the back of his mind suggested by tales which Pete had often told of smuggling and vendettas among the Basques of the border between Spain and France.
It was when the sack was opened, however, that the real sensation appeared to dwarf the excitement over the murder of the sheep-herder. It was found to contain a number of samples of rock in which appeared speckles and nuggets of free gold, or what certainly looked like it. On that point the doubt was settled by sending the samples to an assayer, and his report left nothing to be desired. He estimated the gold content of the ore to be worth from fifty to eighty thousand dollars a ton.
The coroner’s inquest, at Maryville, was attended by swarms, who hoped to get from the testimony some clew to the whereabouts of the mine. But many did not wait for that. Before the assayer’s report had been received there were prospectors hurrying into the Esmeraldas and raking Shoestring Cañon and the environs. It was generally thought that the Bonanza lay on the southern side of the range, however, and on that side there were many places to search. Pete might have taken almost any route to the top of the divide, and there were very few clews as to just where he had entered the mountains and how he had reached the cañon.
Nor did the inquest develop anything further except the fact that Wallace’s cow-puncher, who had ridden back up the cañon after finding Pete, had found the spot where he had been shot, about five miles from the exit on the plain, but had failed to discover anything indicating who had done it. Other searchers also reported failure. There had been burro