Page:Allan Dunn--Dead Man's Gold.djvu/226

212 Thirst did not bother them as they set down the stuff they had brought and stood close to the foot of this savage reredos. It seemed to hang like a magnificent curtain, fifty feet wide, at least, and reaching far up into the darkness. How thick, they hardly dared conjecture. The floor from which it sprang, and which might have been scraped and stoped [sic] out by the Indian miners who worshipped this marvellous thing, was no longer hollow, as it had been above where the steaming water ran, and Harvey stumbled into the charred remnants of a fire. Lyman and his partners must have lighted this when they saw "the great wall of it, reachin' way up into the darkness." Now the fire was charcoal and ashes, Lyman was dust, two men lay in the blue pool at the head of Stone Men Cañon, and the bones of all the rest of them who had tried to reach the treasure^ were scattered graveless.

Then a very wonderful thing happened: From high above them, through a rift that opened to the sky, with ragged edges that proclaimed it a natural window, the moon shot a shaft of light. It struck the matrix high up and invested it with a mystical, shimmering lustre that seemed to give it transparency, to make the gold hang in translucent space.

"The Milky Way," said Stone, softly.

It was not strange that a wild race should have preserved this thing in all its beauty, have worshipped before it as a shrine. It was easy to conjure up mystic rituals held before its splendour while the moon illumined it or torches, borne in the hands of the