She looked at him and marvelled. In his shallow soul no emotion lived
long; greed of gold now obliterated the little ripples that another
greed had fleetingly made. How had she thought well of him down in the
city? How had she so much as tolerated him? On the instant it struck her
that there was small justice in Gratton reaping any reward, having done
nothing to earn it. "We have the things to move. Come; hurry."
"Why should we move, after all?" he demanded sharply. "Now that I have
got up here, why not stay? There's wood here; everything is fixed up
after a fashion. King would know where to send for us, and--and those
cursed dogs of Brodie's would never think of looking up here, even if
chance did lead them along the gorge."
Gloria, recalling King's warning, remembering Brodie's brute face, said
hastily:
"Do you think there is any real danger that they will come this way?"
"I hope not," he groaned. "They couldn't follow my trail if they tried
to. You see, I left them last night, as early as I dared; I struck out
in a straight line down the slope; then I made a turn off to the side
and along the ridge where there was but little snow. By now all those
tracks are wiped out, what with wind and new snow. There's nothing to
lead them this way."
"Then, if we go down quickly, if we get your bag of food and put out the
fire down there, and come right back up, it won't be very long before
our tracks will be gone. And we'll not budge from here until help comes.
Come; let's hurry."
"Coming," said Gratton. "Yes; we must hurry."
She went ahead and began to clamber down the cliffs. Half-way down she
wondered why he was not following. She found a place where she could
cling and look up. Thus she was just in time to see him, standing at the
mouth of the cave, clutching a heavy bag; he had been tying the mouth of
it. Now he cast it outward so that it fell, striking against the
cliff-side, and then rolling and dropping to disappear at last in the
snow-bank below. And then he began, though hesitantly, to follow her.
"That's one thing Mark King won't get," he announced with emphasis. At
last he stood beside her in the snow. "No matter how the game breaks,
whether he comes back or not, and no matter who gets away with the rest,
that bagful is mine! There's a fortune in it, and it's mine." He began
tossing double handfuls of loose snow into the hole which the bag of
gold had made. "When I get a chance," he muttered, "I'll move it
somewhere else."
His avarice disgusted her. Just now the thought of gold sickened.
"We are wasting time," she reminded him.
He followed her again, casting a last look behind him, then looking up
at the sky, grey everywhere except for a long patch of blue.
"What we want is another three or four hours of steady snowing," he was
saying when they slipped into the mouth of the lower cave. "Enough to
hide that and to cover up our paths."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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