the golden lure.
As he crouched by some lonely water-hole, trying to get his big body into a scant patch of shade, his eyes turned upon his crude map, Northrup's thoughts had grown into the way of flying back to the manner of this thing coming to him at all.
He had been in Santa Fé, chafing under a short enforced idleness, restive, eager for whatever might come next on the cards. There he had found Strang; or to be exact Strang had found him. Northrup hadn't particularly liked him from the beginning. But men of his class were few and hard to find hereabouts and Strang was not without a certain insinuating way and a perseverance almost as great as Northrup's own.
Besides, Strang in the beginning of the matter had been in trouble and Northrup in his wide-handed, generous way had befriended him. The ridding oneself of a person to whom one has done a kindness is not without its difficulties.
At any rate Northrup and Strang had been together watching a game of cards in an adobe saloon when the Indian had first come into their stories. The native, a tall, gaunt, sinewy fellow thrusting through a knot of men at the door had come almost at a run to where they were.
"Sax Northrup?" he had asked swiftly.
Even before Northrup could answer, there came a little whirring sound and a small arrow, tipped with a blue feather, evidently fired through the open window from without, drove deep into the Indian's side. His eyes, turned toward the square of darkness, were horrible. And Northrup, bending over him quickly, had seen no pain, just wicked, venemous hatred in them. The arrow was poisoned and the wounded man knew it.
In a little room just off the saloon the Indian told his story to Northrup and Strang. To the latter because he asked to stay, since the Indian made no objection, because Northrup had no reason for privacy in the matter.
That night the Indian died. But first he had told his story. Northrup, looking his incredulity, saw a keenness of eagerness in Strang's eyes. And in the end the Indian convinced them both.
"Look!" he had panted, speaking as swiftly as he might in the Hopi tongue. "There is more—like this!"
He had managed to squirm over on his bed, jerking weakly at something tied about his body under his shirt. It was Strang's eager hands which did the actual work. There was a little bag there, made rudely from a piece of buckskin. And in the bag were two gold nuggets and half a dozen turquoises.
"But why do you give this to me?" Northrup had demanded. "You came here looking for me. I don't know you."
"I know you," the Indian had answered. "Where hard things get done, I hear your name. Where dangerous things are, I hear your name. A man must be like you to go there. Now listen: get paper quick; make marks on it while I tell you."
And so Northrup had made his map.
"It is many miles, more than two hundred, before you come to the beginning of the trail," the Indian had said. "Red Rock Gully, you know? And Badger Gulch beyond, and Coyote Gap on the other side, they are known to you."
"Yes," Northrup had answered.
"Then, Bahana, listen. Listen with both ears!"
He made his description of the trail to travel swiftly, seeming to have each great or minor direction in mind, as if he had carefully arranged every detail already. From Coyote Gap Northrup was to go straight toward the rising sun where it lifted between the two peaks in the Spanish Mountains, the peaks known as Los Dos Hermanos. There, in the pass, was water. It was not over ten miles from Coyote Gap.
Then, before going further, the Indian had wriggled up, his back against the wall, and had seized pencil and paper from Northrup.
"Look," he had said, making a little mark. "This is where the north star is. You can always find the place of the Kwinae Wuhtaka—North Old Man—on the desert? Day and night, by the stars?"
Northrup nodded. Already he had begun to feel something of the earnestness which seemed to possess the Indian and which at the jump had gotten into Strang's blood. The Indian grunted his satisfaction.
"Now," the Hopi had said at the end, showing the same readiness which So Wuhti showed months later to meet the Skeleton Old Man half-way, "it is done. You will go, for there is gold at the end of it all, and where there is gold, if it is under hot rocks, a white man will go. The other Bahana," looking shrewdly into Strang's brightening eyes, "will go also. You will make two writings, so that if the wind steals one you will not die for water."
"Oh, I suppose we'll go," had been Northrup's answer. "But look here, my friend—I want to know what's back of this? Why are you so infernally set upon anybody using the stuff you can't use yourself?"
The Hopi's last earthly grin was full of malice.
"It is because I hate Tiyo," had been the full of his explanation.
Chapter 4
IV
THE question, "Who the devil is Tiyo?" had come quite naturally to Northrup's lips when he had first heard the name. But now it had long ago been crowded aside, all but forgotten. In due time he'd know, or else he'd never know, and in the meantime he had other matters to ponder upon.
It had been at a spot some ten miles in a general northeasterly direction from the point indicated on his map by the words "Cañon—Pines—Mountain Ridge," that he had had his mishap. Here Strang had left him. Here So Wuhti had appeared before him like a black witch, to become his good angel.
When he had pushed on again he had found that, day after day, the country unfolding before him became more menacing. He found no water of any description, excepting at those spots where little crosses upon his map indicated it. He slept and woke with the knowledge that should he miss one of these holes, should the Indian have lied to him, should the drifting sands have covered and blotted out a spring, why then the tale was told for Sax Northrup.
And there was another thing, a thing which multiplied a hundredfold the danger which lay about him: While the figures upon his map told him definitely that it was ten or twenty-five miles between water-holes it was, after all, just guesswork—guesswork first on the part of an Indian runner, guesswork on his own part; guesswork where the penalty for a mistake might well be death. No, as he went on, there was not much call to puzzle over the question, "Who is Tiyo?"
"In a race across the desert with the 'Skeleton Old Man' it is well to travel light!" Northrup remembered that bit of advice. From So Wuhti's caves he had brought water, corn-meal, a little dried meat which she informed him was rabbit meat but concerning which he had his doubt. At any rate it was meat.
When he came to a pool in a dry creek-bed, a spring great enough to give life to a little splotch of green stuff under the cliffs, he rested, sometimes a day or two if there was a hard pull ahead of him. Here he found animal life, cotton-tails and jack-rabbits for the most part and a few birds. They were tame, having no doubt never set their bright round eyes upon a thing which walked upright as he did, and they were curious.
What he needed Northrup killed, either with his automatic or with stones. The meat had but to be tossed over the limb of sage or mesquite for the sun to "jerk" it for him.
But times came when his stomach was empty and he went long without food; when there were no last, precious drops in his canteen and he began to fear that at last his map was lying to him. But always he forged on; never did the thought of turning back come to him. He knew that Strang had gone ahead, Strang for whom he had felt a mild sort of contempt.
He passed successively the points he had marked "Cave Rocks," where he spent two days and a half in interested exploration of the broken remnants of a civilization which must have been many centuries old before the Spaniards came into the New World; Big Skeleton, where, as the Hopi had foretold, he came upon the sun-bleached bones of what must at one time been a veritable giant of a man, now a pile of bones no longer of interest to preying animals where it lay upon the