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When Ike sought to know who was in the Esmeraldas, they told him that they had been riding the range for a week and had encountered no one but Pete himself, who, about five days back, had driven into the cañon on his way through the mountains. They had seen nothing of Louisiana, nor had they cut his trail at any time.
Much cheered and encouraged by his late adventures with the forces of law and order, De Launay fared onward to the south where the dim line of the Esmeraldas lay like a cloud on the horizon. He was half conscious of relief, as though something that had been hanging over his head in threat had been proved nonexistent.
"This lady don't seem to have no respect for snow and blizzards, none whatever," was the comment. "Which she hasn't, bein' troubled with notions about gold mines and such things. She needs taking care of." "Ridin' the Esmeraldas this time o' year and doin' chores for Pop all winter strikes me as bein' about a toss-up," said the man called Sucatash.
The coroner's inquest, at Maryville, was attended by swarms, who hoped to get from the testimony some clew to the whereabouts of the mine. But many did not wait for that. Before the assayer's report had been received there were prospectors hurrying into the Esmeraldas and raking Shoestring Cañon and the environs.
The most active and enterprising colonists cannot, in the mountainous districts of Merida, Antioquia, and Los Pastos, in the llanos of Venezuela and Guaviare, in the forests of the Rio Magdalena, the Orinoco, and the province of Las Esmeraldas, west of Quito, extend their agricultural conquests as they have done in the woody plains westward of the Alleghenies, from the sources of the Ohio, the Tennessee and the Alabama, as far as the banks of the Missouri and the Arkansas.
And as he searches, he mutters to himself. He is a very strange man." "Most prospectors, especially the old ones, are strange. The loneliness goes to their heads." "That is true, monsieur, and it is the case with herders, as we have known. But Banker is more than queer. Once, when we were with our flocks in the Esmeraldas, we observed, one evening, a fire at some distance.
"I knew him," said De Launay. "You knowed my old man?" "But maybe he'd not remember me." Sucatash sensed the fact that De Launay intended to be reticent. "Dad sure knows all the old-timers and their histories," he declared. "Him and old Ike Brandon was the last ranchers left this side the Esmeraldas, and since Ike checked in a year ago he's the last survivor.
Wilson has traced six terraces in going up from the sea through the province of Esmeraldas toward Quito, and underneath the living forest, which is older than the Spanish invasion, many gold, copper, and stone vestiges of a lost population were found.
"Soon after this affair I returned to Valparaiso, and engaged as first officer of a ship named the Minerva, which had been hired by the Chilian Government as a transport to carry out troops to Peru. Having landed the troops, I took part, on 5th November, in cutting out a Spanish frigate named the Esmeraldas from under the Callao batteries. This affair was planned and headed by Lord Cochrane.
A man named Banker, who spends all his time searching for gold, has spent year after year in searching the Esmeraldas for D'Albret's mine and, although he has never found it, he still wanders in the hills as though he believed that it would be found at last. Now, why should this Banker be so persistent when others have abandoned the search long ago?"
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