under the shelving wall. He
threw out an object that rang against the stone. It was a belt buckle.
He threw out old shrunken, withered boots. He came upon other things,
and then he ceased to dig.

The grave of desert prospectors! Gale had seen more than one. Ladd had
told him many a story of such gruesome finds. It was grim, hard fact.

Then the keen-eyed Yaqui reached up to a little projecting shelf of
rock and took from it a small object. He showed no curiosity and gave
the thing to Gale.

How strangely Gale felt when he received into his hands a flat oblong
box! Was it only the influence of the Yaqui, or was there a nameless
and unseen presence beside that grave? Gale could not be sure. But he
knew he had gone back to the old desert mood. He knew something hung
in the balance. No accident, no luck, no debt-paying Indian could
account wholly for that moment. Gale knew he held in his hands more
than gold.

The box was a tin one, and not all rusty. Gale pried open the
reluctant lid. A faint old musty odor penetrated his nostrils. Inside
the box lay a packet wrapped in what once might have been oilskin. He
took it out and removed this covering. A folded paper remained in his
hands.

It was growing yellow with age. But he descried a dim tracery of
words. A crabbed scrawl, written in blood, hard to read! He held it
more to the light, and slowly he deciphered its content.

"We, Robert Burton and Jonas Warren, give half of this gold claim to
the man who finds it and half to Nell Burton, daughter and
granddaughter."

Gasping, with a bursting heart, overwhelmed by an unutterable joy of
divination, Gale fumbled with the paper until he got it open.

It was a certificate twenty-one years old, and recorded the marriage of
Robert Burton and Nellie Warren.

XX

DESERT GOLD

A SUMMER day dawned on Forlorn River, a beautiful, still, hot, golden
day with huge sail clouds of white motionless over No Name Peaks and
the purple of clear air in the distance along the desert horizon.

Mrs. Belding returned that day to find her daughter happy and the past
buried forever in two lonely graves. The haunting shadow left her
eyes. Gale believed he would never forget the sweetness, the wonder,
the passion of her embrace when she called him her boy and gave him her
blessing.

The little wrinkled padre who married Gale and Nell performed the
ceremony as he told his beads, without interest or penetration,