His arms groped for her. Gloria swept up a dead pine limb that lay by the fire and swung it in both hands and struck him full across the face.
He reeled back and stood, half in the shadow, his shoulders to the rock wall, his hands to his face.
"You beast!" she panted. "You cowardly, contemptible beast."
From the way in which he brought his hand down and looked at it and laid it back upon his lips she knew that his mouth was bleeding. And she read in the gesture and in the man"s whole cringing att.i.tude that the danger of any physical violence from him was past and done with. In the grip of his pa.s.sion, ugly as it was, he had risen somewhat from his essential weakness; in the moment he had at least thought of himself as a conqueror. Now he was again what he always really was at heart, a contemptible coward.
An absolutely new sense of elation sang through Gloria"s blood. She was fully mistress of the situation, and had found within her an unguessed strength. Physically superb at all times because nature had richly gifted her, now she was magnificent.
"Mr. Gratton," she said swiftly, "you have made a mistake. Mr. King has never offered me violence of that sort. Remember that, though we are alone, and in the mountains, I am the same Gloria Gaynor that you have known. And be sure that you treat me as such."
He nursed his battered lips and stared at her. The blow had dazed him.
Slowly, as his mind cleared, there dawned in it the realization that he _had_ made a mistake. The stick was still in her hands; a shiver ran through him. His desire went out of him.
"I wish to G.o.d I had never seen you," he groaned.
She had meant from the first to take the upper hand. Now she was almost glad that this had happened. For now she was very sure of herself; Gratton had merely been bold like other young men who had sought to presume; he had been cruder simply because the situation seemed to his mind to offer the opportunity; now a blow from her had accomplished the work of a haughty look in drawing-room encounters with those other young men. She dropped the stick and wiped her hands.
"We have other things to think of," she said. She might have been a young queen who had punished a subject and now from her exalted place condescended to consider that the indignity offered her royal person had never occurred. She began dragging the blankets from her bed, tumbling them to the floor. "Take these," she commanded.
"I was a fool for ever leaving San Francisco," he muttered bitterly.
"You let me think that you cared for me, and now you treat me like a dog. I spent time and money trying to be the one to find gold in these infernal mountains, and I find nothing but storm and starvation. I don"t believe there ever was gold here."
_Gold!_ He stopped at his own words, his eyes flying wide open. During these later hours, fleeing from Brodie"s men, stumbling upon Gloria, swirled away by mad longings, he had not thought of gold. But here was King"s camp; straight here had King come after Gloria had brought him her father"s message and old Honeycutt"s secret. Then the gold was here!
The cupidity which in the man never slept long was awake on the instant.
He began looking about him eagerly. King was gone? Then not for men to bring help to Gloria but to aid him in carrying off the gold. Having brought Gloria here so that she could not tell others what she knew, he left her here with the same purpose; so Gratton would have done! King would have hidden it here; at least some of it. He began questing feverishly, shuffling about in the shadows while Gloria, busy with her plans for moving, wondered at him. He was striking matches, running back and forth; she could hear his mutterings. And presently, when Gloria had called and he had not heard, he came upon the bag which King had meant to take out with him that day the horse was lost. He hovered over it; he struck other matches, he came hastening back dragging it after him.
He went down on his knees by the sack, got a heavy lump in his hands, rubbed at it, held it closer to the firelight, rubbed again more excitedly, and finally sat back, staring up at her with new flames of another sort leaping in his eyes.
"It"s next thing to solid gold!" he gasped. "There are thousands--thousands----Millions!"
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."
Gloria was already trying to put out the fire; if ill fortune should lead Brodie"s crowd here, it would be just as well if they found no smouldering sticks to tell them that the fugitives had been here so short a time ago and could not be far off. She called to Gratton to help her. He stamped out burning brands while she hastened back and forth, bringing handfuls of snow with which to extinguish the last glowing coals. She worked vigorously and swiftly; he only half-heartedly, since his thoughts were elsewhere.
"Maybe," he said thoughtfully, "I"d better bring that bag in here and hide it somewhere--far back in the dark."
"No," she said. "Leave it where it is. We must hurry back to the other cave."
But he grew stubborn over it. The storm might end at any time; the sun might melt all this fluffy snow; the bag then would be for any one to see. Heedless of her expostulations, he left her extinguishing the fire and went back for the gold. He was gone several minutes, digging after it. She had finished her task when he reappeared, dragging the heavy sack after him. He disappeared swiftly, going into the deeper dark of the further end of the cave; she heard him moving with shuffling feet.
What a treacherous, thieving, petty animal he was----
She started and whirled about. There was a new sound in the air, a low mumble, a vague murmur. Men"s voices. Outside, coming nearer swiftly, were men. Her first thought was of King; then she knew that it was too soon for him to have gotten out of the mountains, found a.s.sistance, and returned. A deep, heavy ba.s.s voice drowned out the others; it was like a low-throated growl, ominous, sinister.
Gloria whirled again, this time toward the dark into which Gratton had gone. Blindly she hurried after him; she stumbled but kept on. She could hear him at work, hiding his gold. At last she was at his side; she clutched at his sleeve.
"Listen!" she whispered. "They are outside. They have followed you!"
She felt his arm stiffen as from head to foot he grew rigid. She heard his breath whistling through his nostrils. She could hear the beating of his heart--or was it her own? The voices came nearer, rose higher.
Gratton began to shake as with a terrible chill.
"If they find me--oh, my G.o.d, if they find me--Benny killed a man he thought had the bacon--I had it all the time! My G.o.d, Gloria, if they find me----"
"Sh!" she commanded. "Be still! Maybe they will go by----"
The voices came nearer--pa.s.sed on. Two or three men out there were speaking at once; then all were silent. The silence lasted so long that Gloria began to breathe again. Surely, surely Brodie and his men had gone----
Then again came Brodie"s deep, sinister voice:
"Back this way, boys," he shouted. "He"s gone in here. We"ve trapped the dirty white rat."
Gloria and Gratton clung to each other, too terrified to move.
_Chapter XXVIII_
Gratton, had he been left to his own devices, would have stood stock-still where he was, frozen to the ground in terror. Gloria tugged at him, whispering over and over: "They are coming! Don"t you hear them?
Quick! We must try to hide."
At last he seemed to awaken from a trance; he started and began hurrying with her, crowding by her, stumbling on ahead in the darkness, seeking the cave"s unfathomed depths of darkness. She heard him stumble and fall; she ran blindly and caught him by the arm again, whispering fiercely: