Page:Weird Tales Volume 7 Number 2 (1926-02).djvu/106

Francisco—to Salt Lake; some center where I can look, look, and then work back. I must look again."

He strode frenziedly. A glance about as I stripped myself of incumbrances showed me that we were isolated. The mesa dropped abruptly on all sides; by a running start we might soar from an edge like a seaplane from the platform of a battleship. And I noted also that without doubt we should have to depend upon our own resources, for if this was a country God forgot it moreover seemed to be a country by man forgotten, granted that man ever before had known it. All furrowed and washed and castlemented, it was a region where we might remain pancaked and unremarked, as insignificant as a beetle.

I was hunting our engine trouble, when on a sudden he called, and beckoned.

"Here, you! What's this?"

I went over. Something quickened me, electric and prickling as when one's flesh crawls in contact with a presence unseen. Skull and skeleton lay eery and mysterious, whitely gleaming, bleached by many weathers. He stooped———

"Great God!" he stammered.

"You've found it?" I asked: and I knew that he had, even while he was polishing it against his sleeve.

"I don't know, I don't know. Look at it. Tell me. I can't see. What is it?"

His hand shook as with palsy as he extended it to me; then the half of a silver coin, plucked from the loosened grip of skeleton fingers; the date———

"Give it to me," he cried, and snatched at it.

The date, 1866; and the legend, upon the side less tarnished, "—Till We Meet Again." He fumbled in his pocket. The two halves matched sufficiently—"God Be With You Till We Meet Again."

"What you've been looking for?" I prompted.

He stared dazedly at me.

"Looking for! A thousand times. A thousand years. No, no; not that long, but more than fifty years. Denver, Cheyenne, Salt Lake, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Helena, Laramie, Creede, Deadwood, Leadville, Dodge City—wherever men and women of her kind gathered in her day and his I've searched agam and again. Not for her! She must be dead, and long dead. But for word of this; for this, or trace of this. It was mine. I gave it. And now, here! How came it here? Those bones won't speak." He angrily kicked them. "Speak! What were you doing with this half coin? Where was she? Were you man or woman?"

"Woman, Mr. Brown," said I.

His jaw tautened as he faced me full.

"You say woman? How do you know? What woman?"

"I know," said I. "And what woman? A young woman, a girl, somebody's wife who was supposed to have run away with a breed on the Overland Trail fifty odd years ago—but didn't."

He recoiled a step, tottering, countenance blanched.

"What? Supposed! Supposing I say there was such a woman—my own wife, sir—my bar sinister—my cross that has ruined my life and made me doubt God and man and woman for half a century. And this half coin! I vowed I'd have it back. When at old Fort Bridger I got word that she had deserted me—deserted me for a scoundrelly half-breed—I swore that I'd trail her down till I got back the only bond between us. It's been my passion; it's been something to live for. That was 1867; this is 1920. I am seventy-four years of age. I have covered the West, and cursed women while cursing her. And to what end? This forsaken spot, a mess of bones,