We worked for hours, in silence and darkness, digging our way through
the snow and shoveling it back into the cabin as we tunneled toward
the cliff. It was early morning when we saw the light of day.
Once in the open where we could breathe the pure air we beheld a sight
that would appall the strongest heart. The great flat rock, that had
stood on edge at the back of the cabin, was now slanting at a sharp
angle above our heads. The avalanche from near the summit of the
Sangre de Christo had struck the cliff and with its incalculable tons
tilted it, piling itself hundreds of feet in the depth about us. The
cliff might fall at any moment and blot us out of existence.
Reaching a point of sight near the open space at the edge of the base
of the cliff we could see something of the awful havoc wrought by the
avalanche. Huge rocks had been loosened from their foundations and
with the speed of a meteor dashed to the valley below. Great pines one
hundred feet in height had been torn up by their roots and hurled down
the mountain side by the tremendous weight of the avalanche.
The cliff had sheltered our cabin and saved our lives.
We cleared the snow away from the chimney and out of the cabin. Our
wood was dry and we soon had a cheerful fire blazing and the tea
kettle boiling. But living under that slanting cliff, from which we
could not escape, we felt, indeed that the sword of Damocles hung by a
spider web above our heads.
When we had rested some and refreshed ourselves with coffee, we
tunneled from the open space under the cliff to near the entrance of
the mine, intending to live in the tunnel until the melting snows of
the spring released us from our prison. But when we had tunneled
through the snow to near the entrance of the mine, we found our way
blocked by a debris of rock and trees which would require weeks of
labor to remove. Tunnels in other directions gave us no better
results, and we became resigned to our fate, returning to the cabin to
while away the dreary hours until the hanging cliff above should
become our grave stone.
Days of gloom and monotony came and went. We dug the snow away from
our windows and tunneled a hole to the top which gave us a glare of
reflected light.
Buchan had hitherto been silent as to his past life. By a few stray
remarks we had caught glimpses of his romantic career, but now he
began relating in detail incidents of his early life in Scotland, or
on the high seas, and later in Peru. His stories were so full of human
interest and replete with love and romance, that I became more than
ever interested in him. But my hearing was bad, and it had been
getting worse since the day of the avalanche, so I prevailed upon him
to write. I could read better than listen, besides he would write his
better thoughts and nobler sentiments when he would not speak them.
It was writing these memoirs of his eventful life that furnished him
pastime and I was employed in reading them, during the two months of
our imprisonment in our snow bound cabin.
By the dim light of the window by day and the blaze of a pine log at
night, he wrote upon the scraps of paper found about the cabin. As I
now review the pile I find it made up of paper bags, margins of
newspapers, fly leaves from a few old books, and much of it on strips
of a yellow window shade, also on the backs of fancy calendars with
which Carson had adorned our cabin, and almost a whole chapter I find
penciled finely on a pair of lady's cuffs that were strangely out of
place in a miner's hut.
Buchan does not know that I am going to give his story to the public
and I shall have to take chances and risk his displeasure. In that
event I have the defence of pleading that no man has the right to
withhold so good a tale from the world.