The truth forced itself upon the girl with overwhelming weight. Hugh Edwards was gone. He had not merely left his cabin for an hour or a day. He had not stepped out somewhere to return again presently. He was _gone_. Sometime during the night he had packed his things and had disappeared with no parting word--no good-by--no promise--leaving no message. He had vanished.
The girl was stunned. She argued with herself dully that she must be mistaken--that it could not be so. Hugh, her Hugh, would never do such a cruel, cruel thing.
From the open doorway she looked out at the familiar scene, at the cañon walls, the mountain ridges and peaks, her home--nothing was changed. She turned again to the empty, silent room. Hugh was gone.
But there must be something--some word to tell her--to explain.
Carefully, with slow, leaden movements, she searched every corner of the bare room. She looked in the cupboard, under the bunk, in every crevice of the walls. She even searched with a stick among the dead ashes in the fireplace. There was nothing.
She did not cry out. The hurt was too deep. She sat on the threshold of the empty cabin and tried to make it all seem real.
It was two hours later when Saint Jimmy found her sitting there.
“The dark clouds of the white man’s lust for gold have hidden all the stars in the red man’s sky.”
The weeks of the “Little Spring” passed. The blossoms vanished from mountain and foothill and mesa and desert. The air grew crisp with the tang of frost. On the higher elevations the cold winds moaned through the junipers and cedars--wailed among the peaks and shrieked about the cliffs and crags. Again on Mount Lemmon the snow gleamed, white and cold, among the somber pines.
In the wild remote region of the upper Cañada del Oro the man, known to his friends in the Cañon of Gold as Hugh Edwards, lived with his captor, Natachee the Indian.
The white man was not a prisoner of force--rather was he a captive of circumstance. But captive and prisoner he was, none the less. He was held by the red man’s threat to reveal his real name and identity as the convict who had escaped from San Quentin, together with that hope so cunningly offered by the Indian--the hope of finding the gold that would bring him freedom and the woman he loved.