“I still warn you against it,” said Rawley. “But if you can’t be stopped, I do want to see the fireworks. There’s a pretty engineering problem there, and it will be worth a good deal to see how it works out.” His thoughts returned again to the old Indian waiting up on the hill. “I’ll buy some gold from you, Uncle Peter, if you have it handy. I’ll tell old Johnny it’s all I could find; I think I can satisfy the old fellow with the thought that his sergeant had it straight.” Peter left him for five minutes and returned, carrying a small canvas sack. “Here’s a handful of specimens I tucked into a niche in the rocks, intending to give them to Nevada for a necklace or something,” he told Rawley. “But Nevada can have diamond necklaces when the dam goes in. You take these, boy. Maybe some of them sort of belong to you, anyway.” “Lord, _I_ don’t want them,” Rawley protested. “I’ll give them to Johnny Buffalo, though. It will keep him from worrying about it. More than all that, it will keep him off the warpath, the old catamount.” CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO GREATER THAN GOLD Johnny Buffalo held a handful of nuggets in his hard, brown palms. His eyes shone whenever he looked toward the old wheel chair beside the window. He listened to Rawley’s explanation of why there would be no more gold, but the technical phraseology went completely over his head, and he smiled abstractedly and held up first one bit of gold and then another to the light. They were very heavy. They were beautiful. They had lain, hidden away all these years, just where his sergeant had said that they were hidden. “‘There is a path which no man knoweth,’” he muttered, when Rawley had finished and was waiting to see what effect his harangue about erosions and changed currents had taken on the Indian mind. “It is so. My sergeant said it, and it was the truth. My sergeant never lied. Always the words he spoke were true. I know it without proof. Now you have the proof, and you know it also.” “There won’t be any more, you understand,” Rawley repeated with finality. “My work is to examine these matters and report the truth about them. After examining what lies at the bottom of the pit, I am reporting to you that there will be no more gold--” Johnny Buffalo stopped him with a hand lifted, palm out. “What was revealed to you in the pit is not good for me to know,” he stated firmly. “My sergeant has said that you should know the truth about riches. He said that it would not be good that I should know the truth as you would know it.” “That’s true, too,” Rawley admitted, taken aback. “The gold was there when my sergeant said that it was there. That is good. My sergeant did not say that there would always be gold where gold has been. I think that is the truth about riches which you have learned.”