CHAPTER XXXII.

THE GIRL AND THE EMERALDS.

The fire roared on the pine levels overhead, and the girl and the scout whom she had rescued from the fire talked.

They had much to talk about beyond the fact that she had saved the scout, and the inevitable discussion as to how they were to get off the ledge where they now were.

“Lena,” he said finally, and his tone showed hesitation, “I suppose you are strong enough to hear unpleasant news?”

Her face, already pale, grew paler.

“My uncle?” she gasped. “Something has happened to him!”

The scout put his hand into an inner pocket and brought out a filled buckskin bag.

“He asked me to send, or get, this to you.”

She looked at him, trembling.

“He--he is not dead?”

“Yes, Lena,” said the kind-hearted scout, his own voice shaking. “I am sorry to have to tell you that he died two days ago. You know he was not well when he last saw your father. I’ve been doing some scouting work in the mountains. Thinking to visit him, I called at the cabin, and found him seriously ill with fever, in fact, at the point of death. I did all I could for him, but it was little enough, and he died. He gave me this package to give to you, or send to you; for he thought you had started for the East long ago. He thought you would persuade your father to give up his mine and go home--he had never heard of John Forest’s death.”

He put the buckskin bag in her trembling hands.

When she opened it she found it filled with what seemed to be bits of broken green glass.

“Emeralds, and as fine as you’ll ever see,” he explained. “There’s a fortune there, and he wanted me to see that they went to you. It’s a queer place here to deliver them, and a strange----”

He stopped, for she was not looking at the emeralds; thinking of her father, she had begun to weep.

“There was no letter from my uncle?” she said after a while.

“No; he was too weak to write. He sent his love and the emeralds. He was looking for gold, you know. Well, his pick broke through into a cave, and opened up a queer place that must once have been an Indian temple, or medicine lodge. The emeralds had been round the neck of a stone idol. The buckskin string that had held them was decayed, so that they had fallen to the floor, and were covered with dust. He found one, and then, by a search, got all of them.

“His first thought was that perhaps there were many more, and he made a thorough search. I’m afraid that in that search he got the fever that killed him. The place was horridly damp, as I afterward found; for, after his death, I myself made a thorough exploration of the cave, and discovered that fact, though nothing else. The only gems were round the neck of the idol, I am sure.”

She heard him with heartbreaking interest.

“I must think about it,” she said; “I must have time to adjust myself to it. It seems unbelievable. Oh, my poor uncle!”

She seemed almost to have forgotten her strange position on that ledge, the rescue of the scout, and the roaring of the fire above.

For a long time she sat crouching, regaining her strength, while she thought over the sad thing which had thus been brought to her knowledge, and went back in memory to the past.

For two years she had lived in the mining cabin not far from this cañon with her father. In many ways those two years had been hard ones for both her and her father. They had been lonely years to her, for he had been away from home a good deal, and his brother, now dead also, had visited them very seldom.

But the loneliness had recently been broken by the visits of the young man, to whom she had almost from the first given her heart. Clayton was at Crystal Spring, where he intended to make a home for her, and he was to have met her and accompanied her on her way back to the fort, but she had missed him, and so had come alone.

The morning after her return she had seen the fire, and then had discovered that Buffalo Bill, the friend of her lover, was in peril on the high precipice.

As she sat in silence on the ledge, grieving over the death of her uncle, she paid scant attention to the beautiful emeralds lying in her lap; but finally she looked down at them, slowly placed them in the buckskin bag, and then gave it to the scout.

“Keep them for me a while, until we get out of this danger,” she requested. “I wonder how we are to get out, too?” She looked up at the smoke floating over them in a thick cloud. “Have you thought of any way?”

Buffalo Bill, while watching the changing face of the girl, had also been looking at the rope at intervals, fearing the noose would be burned away above. That had not yet happened, and the fire was dying down. There was a great deal of smoke, yet little fire.

He took the buckskin bag of emeralds and restored it to his pocket.

“I think I’d like to see how that fire is doing,” he said, rising to his feet. He began to climb the rope, and was soon at the top.

There was still a good deal of fire in the woods beyond, where some trees were burning, but close by the rocky point there was hardly any blaze now, and the noose of the rope had been untouched.

He leaned over and looked down at the girl.

“It’s cool enough for one to stand it up here now,” he called to her. “If you’d like to come up, make a noose and put it under your arms.”

She made and adjusted the noose, and the strong arms of the scout soon drew her to the top of the precipitous wall.

“Not very pleasant up here even yet,” he said, “but better than down there; and we have the comforting assurance that we’re out of the cañon, and that the rope was equal to the strain.”

“If we keep close to the cañon’s edge, perhaps we can get beyond the fire now,” she suggested. “You have a horse, you said.”

“If the poor fellow hasn’t been roasted. I’m a bit afraid the fire reached him.”

They set out along the edge of the precipice, Buffalo Bill taking the rope.

Though the ground was still hot and smoking in places, they were able to make their way along, and, after a while, they passed out of the burned area, and came into a region which the fire had not touched.

“There the clever rascal is,” said the scout. “Look at him!--as peaceful as a lamb!”

His horse had broken the rope by which it had been tied, had run from the fire, and was now grazing peacefully, not a hundred yards from where the scout and the girl stood.

The girl had asked many questions about her uncle, about his illness, and about the emeralds; but she began to talk of these matters again, when they got beyond the burned area, showing that she had thought of nothing else all the time, even when she seemed to be thinking only of getting away from the fire.

The scout went over the story again, giving all the details, until, by the aid of her imagination, Lena was able to reconstruct the whole thing.

“About those emeralds,” she said. “What am I to do with them?”

“Whatever you please. It was your uncle’s desire for you to have them, so that you might be freed from all want, educate yourself to whatever extent you desired, travel, and enjoy life. It was a satisfaction to him to believe that you would get them, and that they would make you independent. I promised him faithfully that I would deliver them into your hands; and if you hadn’t happened back here as you did, and I had escaped from that fire, it was my intention to return immediately to the fort for the purpose of delivering them to you personally.”

“You are very kind,” she said. “You wouldn’t trust them to the express or to the stages?”

“I should not have felt it safe to do so.”

“The country is full of road agents.”

“Yes; robbers and outlaws of all kinds.”

She seemed to be thinking of this as they walked on toward the scout’s horse.

The animal was caught by Buffalo Bill, and he then insisted that she should ride and that he would walk. He accompanied her to her uncle’s cabin home, which was not far away. It was situated near the stage trail that ran from Glendive to the railroad.