“You think I’d touch that money?” I looked squarely at him for the first time. “No more than if you’d stolen it. You made the sale. Get what you can out of it. I want to ask you one question: did you ever think I was digging those things up for what I could sell them for?”
Rodney explained that he knew I cared about the things, and was proud of them, but he’d always supposed I meant to “realize” on them, just as he did, and that it would come to money in the end. “Everything does,” he added.
“If that nice young Frenchman I met had come down here with me, and offered me four million instead of four thousand, I’d have refused him. There never was any question of money with me, where this mesa and its people were concerned. They were something that had been preserved through the ages by a miracle, and handed on to you and me, two poor cowpunchers, rough and ignorant, but I thought we were men enough to keep a trust. I’d as soon have sold my own grandmother as Mother Eve—I’d have sold any living woman first.”
“Save your tears,” said Roddy grimly. “She refused to leave us. She went to the bottom of Black Canyon and carried Hook’s best mule along with her. They had to make her box extra wide, and she crowded Jenny out an inch or so too far from the canyon wall.”
This painful interview went on for hours. I walked up and down the kitchen trying to make Blake understand the kind of value those objects had had for me. Unfortunately, I succeeded. He sat slumping on the bench, his elbows on the table, shading his eyes from the lantern with his hands.
“There’s no need to keep this up,” he said at last. “You’re away out of my depth, but I think I get you. You might have given me some of this Fourth of July talk a little earlier in the game. I didn’t know you valued that stuff any different than anything else a fellow might run on to: a gold mine or a pocket of turquoise.”