"What if I told you, Turk," he said after a little, "that we made a mistake? That you an' me, right now, is trespassin' on Bill Steele's place?"
"But do you tell me that?" asked the cautious Turk. "Honest an' true, cross your heart?"
Bill Rice, still a trifle uncertain, looked across the fire to his old friend, the man who had asked no questions but accepted the half of Bill Rice's quarrel down in Mexico. Steele, meeting his look frankly, nodded. Bill Rice turned again to Turk.
"Yes," he then answered Turk's direct question. "Bill Steele's word is good enough for me to tie my word to. This here is his land, Turk, but I'm teetotally damned if I sabe the play."
Turk waved his hand widely.
"That makes no never mind," he announced calmly. "I guess that's Steele's business an' it ain't ours. The rest is up to Ed an' the Queen."
He sighed, stretched his thick arms above his towselled head, yawned widely and rose to his feet. He had ended this first conference at Hell's Goblet and the darkness was thickening.
"It's a half mile to our camp, Bill," he reminded his companion. "An' I've a notion to travel before it gets any darker so's not to break my neck on a rock pile. G' night, Steele."
"Good night, Wilson," said Steele.
Rising with Bill Rice he put out his hand.
"I'm much obliged, Bill," he said quietly.
Rice, as their hands met, stood looking Steele squarely in the eye for a long moment.
"It looks funny, damn' funny, to me," he said slowly, "I always thought this was her land. Hurley always thought so, an' it's open an shut she ain't sold to you! Dead sure you ain't made a mistake, Steele?"
"Dead sure, Bill."
"Then," said Rice, "good night."
And he followed Turk Wilson's disappearing form into the deeper darkness where what they were pleased to term a trail led down to their camp. When both men were gone from sight Steele was chuckling in anticipation of complications ahead. But, with his own camp preparations still before him he turned back to his fire, threw on an armful of dead branches and set about making his bed.
Tomorrow he would cut fir boughs for his mattress; tonight he was content to spread his blankets out upon the mat of dry needles the winds had shaken from the waving limbs above him. Selecting a spot which suited his fancy he went whistling about his task, the bit of canvas which had served as outside wrapper for his bedding placed down first for warmth, his saddle dragged into place for pillow, his rifle in its case just under the outer edge of his blankets less through a desire to have it handy than through long habit. He drew off his boots, completed his simple preparations for the night, slipped in between his blankets with a big sigh of content.
"When a man can have this sort of thing for nothing," he mused quite as he had done many a time before, quite as many another man had done before Bill Steele came down into the world, "why does he sweat for money to buy himself electric lights that are not in it with the stars, music that tries to copy and can't touch the sound of falling water, a bed that isn't in the same class with a pile of fresh fir boughs or a heap of pine needles?"
The thoughts of a contented man on the verge of drowsing are not usually logically connected.
"That Turk Wilson is a man, a real man," he pondered. "I don't know that either Napoleon or Richard of the Lion Heart had much on him. … I wonder how little Trixie is going to accept the news?"
And as he went to sleep, conscious of something tranquilly maternal in the brooding solitudes about him, his last thought was of the vanished mother who, when Billy Steele was a very little boy, had held him in her arms before she tucked him in for the good night kiss. The faint breeze which found its gentle way here through the forest and world of rocks touched his hair like her fingers. …
In the keen dawn he was joyously awake. His clothes caught up under one arm, he ran down to a pool whose waters were lambs to the roaring lions of the Goblet, poised a moment in white nakedness upon a favourite flat rock, then leaped out and down, gone from the sight of a curious and chattering chipmunk in the spray his own big body flung upward. He beat his way across the ten-foot-wide pool, threshing the water mightily, feeling it laid like ice against him, turned, swam back with vigorous strokes, emerged and climbed upward along the rocks, dripping, warm, laughing, his chest swelling deeply, his blood running gloriously.
" … and for bath tubs," he completed last night's contented musings, "when neither king nor queen can buy better than this!"
Breakfast, both in the preparation and in the eating, was a sheer joy. The smell of frying bacon set him sniffing with a keenness of natural desire, the aroma of coffee in a black and battered pot whose spout and handle had long ago joined the army of the unnecessary luxuries, mingled in perfect harmony with the other incenses of the camp fire. The flapjacks, mixed with water and fried in sizzling hot bacon grease, were in Steele's mind quite the brownest, most fascinating flapjacks it had ever been his pleasure to encounter. Fascinating, no less; brown, tempting beauties.
The morning meal done with, his pipe going, Steele set his camp in order, made experienced provision against a destructive inroad of forest rodents and prepared to take stock of a five-years'-old cache. Last night he had had but the brief time to fumble in the gloom for his coffee pot; today all time was his.
First with a long, searching look directed down stream, then through the woods on either hand to make sure that neither Bill Rice nor Turk Wilson was on the way to pay him an early call, he turned westward, crossed his little plateau and passed down through the boulders, drawing closer to Hell's Goblet. Here the ravine in which were cradled the beginnings of Thunder River was steep sided, granite walled and narrow. Beyond and above the Goblet Steele came to a flat topped rock, overhanging the rugged waterway, whence a man, did he care to take the chance of death below, might have leaped across. But the chance was not one to be accepted lightly, not to be considered without a little shiver along the spine. Looking down, straight down, one saw an inferno of mad waters and jagged rocks.
He passed on, watchful of each step now, clinging to the rocks with hands and feet, continuing to work his way upstream even while he sought to draw constantly nearer the stream below. The sun was up, brightening the tree tops, but no direct rays came to him now as he found the old way down to the stream's riotous edge. In a little strip of wet sand were the tracks made by his boots last night. Here he stopped again to look about him, to make certain that no one watched as he went to his secret place.
Just here the cañon widened, here the water spread out and ran something more placidly, here, to mark each marge, was a pigmy beach of sand and polished stones. Both above and below the rock walls drew in towards each other so that they were little more than a score of feet apart; here was a circular space three times a score of feet in diameter.
Steele followed the tracks he had made last night; later on he would obliterate them as he had no mind to leave them pointing out his cache to the first chance comer. After this he would come down a longer way, leaving no sign of his passing upon the granite blocks and slabs. In after times the spot to which he now was going would be known rather widely as Steele's Cache; he had found it, he had used it, he had kept it his secret and now he counted it in every sense his own.
A half dozen paces further and he left the sandy margin of the stream, beginning to climb again; his body pressed tight against the rock wall. Here, underfoot, was the natural semblance of a path, never wider than twelve inches, often barely allowing foothold. Upon the cañon's sides were occasional bushes, infrequently patches of brush driving hardy roots into soil filled fissures. By gripping a ledge above his head and drawing himself up, Steele came into one of these clumps of mountain brush, to his cache and its hidden door. Hidden because in the rocks there was but the small uneven opening