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The river at his back! Flight down its cement-like bank was impossible. He might plunge forward and pray that the water was beneath. The death cry of the man he had shot and the echoing yells of the Indians behind him had been taken up by others. He knew the determined savages were making a final rush. Indian cries seemed to come from the very ground at his feet. He hesitated no lodger.
Then a new wonder revealed itself; for, on approaching more closely to the glittering walls, it became apparent that they were seamed with wide cracks here and there, the cracks being filled with a cement-like substance, so thickly studded with nuggets of gold of all sizes, that in less than five minutes a man might have gathered more than he could carry away.
The state of the ship was enough to show that those on board must have undergone an awful experience. "The Roddam was covered with a mass of fine bluish gray dust or ashes of cement-like appearance. In some parts it lay two feet deep on the decks.
Our first day from Li-chou was a short stage, and we had a long, leisurely tiffin at Sung-lin, where there was an exceptionally good inn. The proprietor was away, but his wife, who was in charge, seemed very competent and friendly, and took me into their private rooms, fairly clean and airy, and quite spacious. In one was a large, grave-shaped mound of cement-like substance.
As a rule, during the remaining day or two the temperature sharply falls, thunder crashes between downpours of heavy rain, and the wet plank sidewalks provide a badly-needed refuge from the cement-like "gumbo" mire. The day, however, had been cloudless and unusually hot. Prescott had driven in from his wheat farm at some distance from the settlement, and he now walked toward the hotel.
In one of the downtown parks the youngsters were fairly rolling in the dirt, and rubbing their cheeks on the scanty grass as they furtively scooped up handfuls of cement-like soil to make mud pies, in spite of the big policeman, who, I like to think, was sympathetically blind. The same impulse stirs my boys, even though they have all outdoors around them.
With moodily indifferent interest Elliott scarcely more than glanced up at the horseman's approach across the open plot of raw earth, hard-packed to a cement-like surface by the endless passage and repassage of countless hob-nailed, heavy-booted feet, but with that first glance his forehead began to smooth a little.
Unless the lake was wet with one of those sporadic desert rains, you couldn't make any impression on the cement-like surface. And when the lake was wet, you stuck where you were until wind and sun dried it for you. Wherefore Casey plunged out upon five miles of blank, baked clay with neither road, chart nor compass to guide him.
That's what got Raintree. He hunted all over the garden, prospected every part of it, ye kin see the holes yet, but he never even got the color!" * That is, a viscid cement-like refuse of gold-washing. He paused, and then, as the colonel made an impatient gesture, he went on.
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