Chapter 12

She freed herself, and while he let her go he stood watching her with the new look in his eyes. Scarlet-faced she flashed her look at him from across the table. Then she fled to the stove and retrieved the burning bacon as though here were the one matter of transcendent importance. King began to laugh, his laughter as joyous as a boy's.

"Gloria----"

"That's five times you've said 'Gloria,'" she informed him hurriedly. "And----Please, Mark," as he moved toward her. "And you haven't read papa's letter yet. And--and I'm dying to know what is in that funny package. Aren't you?"

"If I'm dying at all," he told her gravely, though he found a smile to answer her own--and two very serious smiles they were--"it is of quite another complaint. And this time----"

"But _please_, Mark! I am here all alone--with you--and----"

"I know. I haven't forgotten. But, Gloria----"

They both started to a sudden sound outside, a scuffling on the porch. Involuntarily Gloria, prone to nervous alarm in her overwrought condition, moved hastily back toward him from whom just now she had escaped. They glanced toward the sound; they saw at the window the puckered and perplexed face of the "judge"; they were just in time to see a big hand grasp him by the shoulder and yank him out of sight. They heard Summerling expostulate; they heard Jim Spalding's far from gentle voice cursing him.

King understood, at least in part, what must lie under Gloria's look of distress. Surely circumstance had placed her in an equivocal position to-night. Summerling was the type to blab; he was in no charitable frame of mind; he had found her alone here with men, had come to marry her to one man, and now had seen her in the arms of another. There was but one answer, even to Mark King.

"Some time you are going to marry me, Gloria," he said gravely. "Why not now?"

"It sounds like--like an advertisement, Mark," she laughed somewhat wildly.

"Poor little kid," he muttered, seeing how she trembled. "But, Gloria, why not? Some time you are going to give yourself to me, aren't you, dear? While this man is still here, won't you let him marry us? It will give me the right to shut that fool Gratton's mouth for him and----Oh, Gloria, my dear, my dear----"

She stood staring at him with wide eyes. He pleaded with her.

"Will you, Gloria?"

And then from lips which did not smile he heard the very faint but no longer evasive "Yes."

"Now, Gloria?"

"Yes, Mark. If you are sure that you want me." She spoke humbly; at the instant she was humble. "But," she added hastily, "still you haven't read poor papa's letter. He was very anxious. Let me go a minute, Mark. I am going upstairs. I--I want to phone to mamma first. And while I am gone you can read papa's letter, and--and----" Her face was hot with blushes.

"And arrange with the judge," he said, his own voice uncertain. "Yes, Gloria."

She ran by him then. He heard her going upstairs, he heard a door closing after her. Then like a man who treads on air he went to the window and threw it up and called:

"Jim! Tell the judge not to go. I have business with him. I want him and you here in ten minutes."

And then when Jim's voice had answered him he thought to take up the parcel on the table--largely because Gloria had asked him! A hurried letter from Ben and the parcel from Honeycutt's. Something here for which he had been seeking, working, for years, remembered now only because Gloria had made the request that they be not forgotten.

* * * * *

To withdraw his racing thoughts from Gloria and her golden promise, to bend them to a letter--this was in the beginning an effort. But Ben's words caught him when he had read the first line. He had opened the packet, ripping off the old encasement of cloth. There was a book, a Bible that looked to be centuries old, battered, the covers gone; Gaynor's letter was slipped into it:

"DEAR MARK:

"Honeycutt's dead. I've got his secret. But Brodie came near doing me in. Honeycutt, dying, sent for me. I got there just in time. He gave me the Bible; it was the "parson's" and then Gus Ingle's. As I was going out of the cabin Brodie and two of his gang swooped down on me. In the dark I pitched the Bible clear and they did not see; it was just that near! They came close to killing me; when I came to I found they'd been through my pockets. I don't know how much Brodie knows. I do know he is working with Gratton, the dirty crook. I think you can beat them to it, hands down. And, for God's sake, Mark, and for my sake if not for your own, don't let the grass grow! I am on the edge of absolute bankruptcy; laid up this way I don't see a chance unless you find what we've been after so long _and find it quick_. Will you start without any delay? As soon as you get this phone to Charlie Marsh at Coloma. Leave word for me. And let that word be that nothing on earth will stop you! Then I won't go crazy here with worry. And watch out for Gratton as well as Brodie.

"BEN."

A bit of the old interest swept back over King as he read; the old excitement raced through his blood. He dropped Ben's note into the stove and eagerly took up the old Bible. There on the blank pages, written in a crabbed hand long ago, at times letters blurred out but always a trace left where the unaccustomed scribe had borne down hard in his painful labourings, was the "secret" at last--Gus Ingle's message come to him across the dead years:

"Good god I never see such gold nor no man neither and when he come in to camp you could reed in his look he had found it because no man could have looked at that Mother load and not look like Jimmy. And big Brodie grabbed him by the throat and shook him and nearly killed him until Jimmy told. And I guess there was enough there for everybody in all the world. We went down the gorge to the narrow place over on the big seedar that had broke off and that was how we come to the First Caive, and then we come to Caive number thre and two. And good god have mercy on my soul when Ime dead but I got the thought right then if it was only all mine--we worked all seven until we dropped that day and night and early in the morning and the storm was coming but we stayed. And for two weeks maybe thre we lost track of time until this grate big pile of gold was dug that I am setting right on top of right now how can a man eat gold when he is dying of hunger and burn it when he is freezing. And it was big Brodie killed pore Manny I seen him and the next day or maybe it was two days Dago was gone and never come back was it Manny's goast got him and drug him down the cliffs screaming horrible and in the gorge--anyway that was Two. and I am all that is left and I am going--I tride to get out and the Big storm drov me back and all I can see is Jimmy Kelp and the parson if I had not of killed them they would killed me sure and big Brodie's gone he is crazy and cant never make it back across the mountains in this storm, and Baldy Winch he took a big nugget and went off, and he stoled what handful of grub there was. And now I can look down in the gorge and see the water all white and snow and ice sickles and I am afraide to get lost in the caives and if I write all this in the bible that was preacher Elsons and tie it up safe in oilcloath and canvas and make a bote out of a chunk of wood and throw it in the river maybe it will get to one of the camps down there and a good man will find it and Ile give him half. You come up the old trail past where the thre Eytalians had their camp last year and over the big mountain strate ahead and about another seven miles strate on and then there is the pass with the big black rocks on one side and streaks of white granite on the other and down into the gorge and strate up four or five miles where the old seedar broke off and fell acrost. My god here goes.

"GUS INGLE."

To any man who knew the Sierra hereabouts less intimately than did Mark King, Gus Ingle's message would have brought only stupefaction. But to King now, as to Ben Gaynor before him, the "secret" lay bare. Old names held on; the three Italians had given a name to what was now known as Italy Gulch. The caves were on a certain fork of the American River then, and King had approximately the distances and direction.

"What is more," he thought triumphantly, "I know where two caves are in there. But where the devil is 'Caive thre'?"

* * * * *

Here he started up and thrust the old Bible into his shirt. There were steps on the porch. Jim and the "judge" were coming----

_Chapter XV_

"It strikes me," said Summerling sarcastically, "that there's mighty funny goings-on here to-night. I show up to marry one man to a girl and nex' thing I know I peek in a winder and see----"

"Never mind that," cut in King hastily. "You are going to marry her after all. Only to another man."

"Meanin' you, Mark?" demanded Jim. On his honest old face was a look of utter bewilderment; for the life of him he couldn't decide whether he or every one else had gone crazy.

King flushed under the look, but nodded and managed a calm "Yes, Jim."

Summerling cleared his throat and thereafter scratched his head.

"It's irregular. I told Gratton that. But he said there was--was extenuatin' circumstances and all that. Hadn't been time for a licence. It's irregular; don't know as I mightn't get in trouble for it----"

"The marriage would be binding, wouldn't it?" demanded King.

"Sure it would; once I said 'man and wife' nary man could set _that_ aside. But, if any one wanted to get _me_ in bad, seeing there's no licence--well, it would make trouble with my bondsmen and they'd make trouble with me."

King silenced the man with a scowl and led him and Jim into the living-room, closing the door. It was unthinkable that Gloria should hear a lot of talk about why's and how's. For Gloria, it struck him, had undergone enough for one day. "Look here," he said to Summerling then, "either you will or you won't. If you won't, then Miss Gaynor and myself will go elsewhere. Now, which is it?"

"Gratton promised me a hundred dollars," muttered the "judge." "And he cleared out without taking the trouble to pay me."

King's face cleared. His cheque for a hundred dollars decided the "judge."

"That's a might of money to pay the old duffer for one night's work, Mark," muttered Jim. "Strikes me that way, anyhow."

A might of money! King laughed.

"Now if you folks are ready," said Summerling, grown impatient the moment the cheque was in his pocket, "I've got a long ride ahead of me."

This time Gloria did not keep them waiting. She came down the staircase to Mark King standing at the bottom. In her pink dress, like a thistledown, floating down to him. He was thinking--she, too, remembered--how for the first time they had met thus. She smiled at him; she put out her two hands to him as she had done that other time. And right there they were married--on Gus Ingle's old Bible.

"It's done!" whispered Mark, bending over her. "You are mine now; mine for all time, Gloria. And, girl of mine," he added reverently, "may God deal with me as I deal with you."

"It's done!" In an awed little voice came Gloria's response, like an echo. Mark King had seen her across the quicksands.

Jim and the "judge" had gone. They two were alone in the still house. Gloria was nervous; King could see that and thought that he understood. So he went for wood, made a cheery blaze in the fireplace, and drew two chairs up to it.

"Tell me about papa's letter," said Gloria hastily Had there not been that obvious topic she would have caught at another, any other. "He didn't tell me how badly he was hurt or what had happened."

King put out his hand for hers, and while Gloria looked into the fire and he looked into her face, he told her. At the end he brought out Gus Ingle's Bible and read to her what was written in it. All the time that his eyes were occupied she watched him eagerly, a little anxiously. But by the time he had finished she had been intrigued for the moment out of her own self-centred thoughts, her fancies caught by all that underlay this crude tale of treasure and murder, of lust for gold, of treachery and lonely death.

"And you know where it is?"

"I can go to it as straight as a string. Two days to get to it and to stake a claim; two days to come out with a couple of horses loaded to the guards. And that itself means a fortune, if it's clean, raw gold, as would seem to be the case. We need not fear the poorhouse, you and I, Mrs. King!"

"But Brodie? And Mr. Gratton?"

"They don't know where it is! They can't know, since we've got the Bible, and Honeycutt was dead before they got to him! If they knew they would have been on their way already. And I'll be striking out before dawn, leaving no such trail that they can follow it in a hurry, even if they should seek to. No; Brodie and Gratton and the rest of them have lost the game!"

"You are going so soon? Papa wanted that?"

"He wanted me to telephone as soon as I got this." He rose, lingering over her. "We mustn't forget him, even for our own happiness." He brushed her hair with his lips; he hastened the few steps to the telephone in Ben's study.

"I--I am going upstairs, Mark," called Gloria after him.

"All right, Queen of the World," he answered her. "I'm just to phone in a message for him. It won't take me five minutes to get it done; just to say: 'Tell Ben that I start at dawn and that he's got my word for it that nothing's going to stop me! And--that I've just married Gloria!'"

But he was at the telephone longer than he thought to be. The operator buzzed into his ear as he took down the receiver; San Francisco was trying to get a message through. For Gloria Gaynor. Would he take the message? Then an operator in San Francisco, droning the words: "For Miss Gloria Gaynor. Your father is hurt in Coloma. Just sent me word. Says not dangerously, but I must go to him immediately. Meet me there. Mamma."

"Got it," said King, and San Francisco rang off. Thereafter he got his own message through; he wondered how Mrs. Gaynor would take the news of her new son-in-law. Ben would be glad; he was sure of Ben.

Gloria was still upstairs. King sat in front of the fire, staring into the flames, listening to the wind in the chimney, waiting for Gloria. When time passed and she did not come, he went softly upstairs and to her door. It was closed and he knocked lightly, then dropped his hand to the knob, awaiting her voice.

His knuckles had hardly brushed the door, this door which he approached in reverence; Gloria had not even heard him. He called softly, his voice little above a whisper:

"Gloria!" He heard her move; for a moment she did not answer. He could not know how she stood, scarcely breathing, her hands at her breast; nor how, now that the great step was taken, she was again half-frightened, half-regretful, altogether bewildered and uncertain. Of herself, of him, of everything----

"Is it you, Mark?"

"Yes. May I come in, Gloria?"

"Please, Mark. It's all so new, so strange ... I intended to come right back downstairs, but I'm so tired, Mark. And I want to be alone a little; to think. I haven't had time to think of anything! You don't mind, do you, Mark?"

He answered promptly and heartily, refusing to allow himself to harbour a shadow of disappointment.

"No. No, of course not. You will go right to bed? I know you must be half-dead for sleep."

"Yes." There was a note of eagerness in the voice coming to him from beyond the shut door.

"There was a message from your mother; she has gone to your father and wanted you to meet her there. But we will talk of that later."

"Yes.... Good-night, Mark."

"Aren't you going to kiss me good-night?" he asked, hesitating a little between the words. His new privilege, a lover's, a husband's, was not an hour old; he felt strangely shy as he spoke softly to her.

"Please, Mark! I am terribly tired out, and--and I'm afraid I've mislaid the key, and----"

That hurt him; his eyes darkened with the quick pain that came to him from her words. He had hoped that Gloria had known him better than that.

"You need never lock your door against me, my dear," he told her gently. "I don't want you to be afraid of me. Why, God bless you, I wouldn't touch the hem of your dress if you didn't want me to."

"Yes," said Gloria. "I know. You are so good, Mark. But now----"

"I am going," he returned tenderly, "to sit by the fire and think. Just to soak myself in the realization," he added with a happy laugh, "that you are mine."

"Before you go in the morning you will come to my door?"

"If you want me to...."

"Of course, Mark."

"Then--good-night, dear."

"Good-night, Mark."

_Chapter XVI_

King was astir long before dawn. He got the fire going in the kitchen and started breakfast, seeking to be very silent and succeeding in making the usual clatter of a male among pots and pans. Whilst water heated and bacon sizzled, he rummaged through the store-room at the rear of the house, gathering what he meant to put into his pack for the four or five days' trip. As he returned from the last journey to the store-room, his arms full of camp accessories, including canvas and camp blankets, he confronted Gloria, fully dressed. He dropped his arm-load and filled his eyes with her. Any shadow left overnight in his heart was sent scurrying before his new joyousness. Gloria had come down to him while he deemed her fast asleep!

"Gloria!" he cried.

A more radiantly lovely Gloria he had never looked upon. She had slept and rested; she had bathed and groomed and set herself in order. She was dressed after a fashion to bewilder a mere man in the only utterly ravishing outing costume Mark King had ever seen. He felt insanely inclined to pick up her little boots, one after the other, and go down on his knees and kiss them; her hat was a flopsy turban, from under the brim of which the most adorable of golden-brown curls half escaped to throw kiss-shadows on her rosy cheeks. And Gloria's eyes!

This time there was no door between them, nor even the memory of a door. He gathered her up into his arms so that her boot-heels swung clear of the floor.

"Do you know ... do you guess ... have you the faintest suspicion how I love you?"

"The--the coffee!" gasped Gloria. "It's boiling over!"

He laughed joyously at that, and finally, when he had set her down, Gloria, bright and flushed, laughed too.

"Burning bacon last night, boiling coffee this morning!" he chuckled. And then, there in the kitchen, they sat down to breakfast. "It's sweet of you," he told her softly, "to get up and come down and see me off."

"Oh," said Gloria, "I am going with you."

Not once had King dared think of a thing like that. He had thought that at best he would be with her again in four or five days. But that she should go with him into the mountains on this quest of his? He sat and pondered and stared at her.

"Don't you want me?" asked Gloria. "Aren't you glad, Mark?"

She was serenely prepared for objections, should they be forthcoming. For it was not on any spur of the moment, but after long deliberation, that she had decided that she would go with him. She wanted no scandal in the papers; she meant that there should be none. If it were rumoured that she had gone out of town with Gratton; if Gratton wanted to be ugly and feed rumour; then on top of that if she appeared within reach of a reporter without a husband, there would be talk. If it were answered that she was married to Mark King, there would be the question: "And where, my dear, is this Mark King?" Those girl friends in San Francisco who had met him at her birthday-party would be fairly squirming with excited curiosity to know _everything_. Among themselves they would make insinuations about the Bear Tamer or the Animal Trainer, as Gloria knew that they would variously and mirthfully designate him. They would find it unusual that King had married her one day and had gone off the next without her. They would hazard endless unpleasant explanations; they would get their heads together; they would make an astonishing patchwork of scraps of distorted rumour and bits of wild speculation.... From upstairs last night she had heard fragmentary outbursts from the "judge." "Irregular; no licence." Now Gloria meant to kill the snake outright, not to allow the scotched reptile to writhe free. She was married; she was going with her husband into the wilderness on the most romantic of all honeymoons. The papers were free to make much of that.

"Of course I want you," said King slowly. "Glad? Glad that you want to come with me? Can't you see that I am the gladdest man on earth? But----"

"I have already written a message I wanted to send to a girl friend in San Francisco...." It was to Miss Mildred Carter, who was engaged to be married to Bob Dwight of the _Chronicle_.... "I was going to have it phoned in to her. It tells her I'm--married. To you, Mark. And that we're off on the most wonderful trip together into the heart of the wild country."

"God bless you," he said heartily. But Gloria, glancing at him swiftly, saw that his eyes were clouded with perplexity.

"Of course," she said, "if you don't want a girl along----"

"Gloria!"

"Well, then? It's settled? I'm to go?"

"Only I'm afraid it isn't the sort of a trip for a girl. It's hard going, and--Oh, it's a cursed shame I can't put it off."

"You said last night that you weren't afraid of anything Brodie and his men could do? That they didn't even know where to go? That they'd never know where to find you?"

"Yes. And I meant it. But----"