The Cave of Gold | Page 9

be able to comprehend what had happened. Then the blank wondering look suddenly left his eyes.
"Did they get the gold?" and his hand went quickly to his waist. There was no belt there. "Gone! A good twenty pounds of as fine gold as was ever dug from the earth, gone!--Gods, if they had but given me any kind of a show, they would not have got it so easily!" and his eyes flamed and he attempted to sit up, but fell back with a groan and a whitening face.
For a minute or two he lay with eyes closed, breathing heavily. Evidently he was trying to collect his thoughts, to realize his situation. When he opened his eyes again there was a solemn, an awed look in them that had not been there before, and the anger had gone.
"I have been stabbed," he said slowly, "and I am dying."
"No, no. The knife did not go near your heart. It struck too low. You will soon be all right again. Wait until we get you home and mother will soon make a whole man of you. Mother is about the best nurse in all California," and Thure gripped one of the hard toil-worn hands and smiled encouragingly.
"No." As the man spoke his eyes never once left Thure's face. "No, I am dying. I know. I was once a surgeon, an army surgeon." For a moment his eyes darkened, as if with bitter recollections. "But, what matters the past now? Let it bury its dead," and he smiled grimly. "This is death. I know. I have seen many die just this way. Internal hemorrhage, we doctors called it. The blood from the wound is flowing into my body. I can feel it. I have half an hour, possibly an hour to live; and then--" The awed look in the eyes deepened, and, for a couple of minutes, he did not speak, but lay staring straight up into the blue skies. Suddenly his white lips tightened and he turned to Thure.
"How far is it to your home and to your mother?" he asked abruptly.
"About three miles; but I can carry you so easily that I am sure--"
"Too far," the wounded man broke in impatiently. "I might die before I got there. No, this shall be my deathbed--the soft green grass, canopied by the blue skies--a fitting end, a fitting end," he added gloomily.
"Come, come," and Thure tried to make his voice sound cheery and full of hope. "Never say die, until you are dead. Just wait until we get home and mother will put new life into you. Now, I'll get on my horse, and Bud will lift you up into my arms, and we'll be home before you know it," and Thure jumped to his feet and started toward his horse.
"No, come back," and the miner impatiently lifted himself up on one elbow. "Come back. I have no time to waste riding three miles for a deathbed. I--" Again the keen eyes searched the faces of the two boys. "I have much to say and little time in which to say it. Get that bearskin off your horse and make me as comfortable as possible on it. And be quick about it; for I am going fast, and, before I go, I want to make you two boys my heirs for saving me from those two villains. The cowardly curs! They hit me from behind!" and again the eyes flamed with anger. "They got the gold I had with me and they got me; but they did not get the secret of Crooked Arm Gulch, nor learn how to find its Golden Elbow. Curse them! If I could but live, I'd--But, what's the use?" and he sank back white-lipped on the grass. "That knife stab in the breast has done for me. And just when the golden key that unlocks all the doors of pleasure and power was tight-gripped in my very fingers! Just my luck! But," and the look of somber resignation came back into the pain-racked eyes, "I'll not die like a snarling, whining coyote. I'll meet death, as I have met life--face to face, with both eyes wide open. Now," and he turned to Bud, who had hurried to his horse and, unloosening the bear-skin, had hastened back with it and spread it out on the grass, soft hair up, by the side of the wounded man, "lay me on the skin and stuff something under my head and shoulders, so as to keep the blood from flooding my lungs and heart as long as possible; for I have that to tell that must not wait, even for death," and the white lips tightened firmly.
Thure and Bud, anxious to do everything possible to ease the last moments of the dying