A MAN WHO NEEDED BRACING UP
THE road to Miners' Camp from Meeteetse, forty-five miles long, follows
the Grey Bull to its junction with Wood River. Thence it wanders along
through miles of fertile ranch lands; then, rising among the black
foot-hills, up, up, it winds across the precipitous face of Jo-Jo Hill,
and plunges among the snow-crowned Shoshones, crowded nearer and yet
nearer to Wood River until finally there is but room for the narrow
track and the narrow stream at the bottom of the deep canon.
This was the road which Ross traveled the day following Weston's
departure for Cody, and traveled in increasing discomfort. The further
they advanced among the mountains, the colder it became, until, finally,
Ross was obliged to desert the high seat beside Bill Travers, the
driver, and seek shelter inside the stage, but not until he had learned
from Bill that there was no hotel in Miners' Camp.
In talking with Hank he had taken it for granted that there was a lodging
house of some description and so had asked no questions on the subject.
"I pack my grub along," Bill assured him carelessly, "'n' roll up in
a bunk in a shack that some one 'r other has left. If you've packed
yer bed along, stay with me to-night. There's the floor," hospitably,
"and I guess I can rustle grub enough fer both. Anyhow, there's two
eatin'-houses where you could fill up."
At five in the afternoon the stage crawled through the dusk over a
yielding bridge built of hemlock saplings creaking under their coating
of ice and snow, and stopped in front of a shack out of whose open door
glinted a welcome light. Another light appeared high up on the side of
the mountain.
"Hold up there, Bill," was the shout which had brought the stage to a
standstill. "Got a cold, hungry young chap inside there, name of Grant?
Wishin' Wilson went through yesterday and said he'd be along with you
to-day."
Ross recognized the voice as belonging to Steele, and, opening the stage
door, answered for himself in the affirmative.
Steele shook hands cordially. "Better get out here, Grant," he invited in
an offhand way; "I have some beefsteak ready to fry, and the spuds are
bakin' in the oven."
Ross climbed out with as much alacrity as his cold, benumbed limbs would
permit. But no sooner was he on the ground than something queer occurred.
His legs gave every indication of doubling up under him, while his head
felt as large and airy as a balloon. He clutched the wheel, but not
until Steele had clutched him.
"Altitude!" exclaimed Steele. "Being a mile and a half above sea-level
don't agree with most people just at first."
Ross leaned against the wheel, looking up giddily at the strip of sky
corralled between the towering summits of Dundee and Gale's Ridge.
It seemed to him that it was the mountains and not the altitude which
oppressed him, and bore down upon him, and shut off his breath.
"My baggage," he began hesitatingly to the stage-driver, "where--if
there's no hotel----"
But Steele interposed. "Lend a hand here, Bill, with these trunks. I want
Grant to put up at my hotel to-night, bag and baggage."
Bill grinned, and laid hands on the emergency chest. "He'll git a better
layout than at my old shack, I tell ye! Say! Is Uncle Jake in Camp?"
Steele shook his head. "Nope. I'm going to see about packin' Grant over
to the Creek myself in a few days," and a great wave of thankfulness
surged over Ross.
A few moments later Steele waved his hand around the one room of his
little log shack. "This is the only kind of home you'll find up here,
Grant, about the same as Weimer has over on the Creek. Things are rough
and ready here, without any frills."
As he spoke he glanced at the larger of Ross's trunks.
If Amos Steele understood one subject better than mining operations, that
one subject was men. He saw in Ross an overgrown, homesick boy, with a
stout but untested "backbone."
"And I wonder," thought Steele, "how far that backbone is going to take
him when it gets a healthy development, and--how far is he goin' to
develop it?"
Furthermore, Steele concluded, Ross was more accustomed to bending over
a book than over a shovel; and he shrugged his shoulders at the thought
of the Weimer-Grant claims.
"His backbone can't do everything," he decided, "no matter how stout
it grows, especially when Weimer has lost his."
Steele's shack was at the foot of Gale's Ridge. Half-way up the
mountainside was another and larger shack, where his miners, thirty in
number, ate. Above that was the "bunk-house" where they slept. And yet
higher up was the mouth of the tunnel out of which the Gale's Ridge
Mining Company expected to pull vast wealth when the Burlington Road
had done its part.
"I'd rather bach it," Steele explained to Ross as they sat down to
beefsteak and baked potatoes, "than to be with the men. It's pleasanter
for me--and," with a jolly laugh, "for them also, I expect."
Ross liked this frank young superintendent who had so kindly taken him
in. He felt that he must get his bearings in some way, and Steele was
the man to set him right.
Therefore quite early in the evening the boy burst out with:
"Mr. Steele, I've come to the conclusion that I'm the greenest
tenderfoot that ever came to Wyoming. Now, you know the ropes here, and I
don't. Will you advise me?"
"That is exactly what I've been wanting to do," assented Steele swiftly
and heartily. "But I won't do it at all to-night. It'll take you a
few days to get over your light-headedness, and until you do the trail
around Crosby won't be healthy ridin' for you. Anyway, there's a lot
to be done, for Uncle Jake Weimer hasn't laid in any winter supplies
yet."
Ross tipped his chair back against the unhewn logs, and thrust his
hands into his pockets. Ever since the talkative prospector had passed
through the stage camp he had wondered what manner of man Weimer was.
But not until he was jolting along in the stage that day did one sentence
especially recur to him in all its possible significance.
The prospector had said, "'Curious how that snow-blindness should have
touched Dutch Weimer.'"
Therefore, Ross's first question was of the man he had crossed the
continent to help.
The answer reached far into the night; and when at last Ross, wrapped in
his blankets, lay down in a bunk built against the wall, it was a long
time before sleep came, tired as he was.
The following evening, after a full day's work, he sat down beside the
little home-made table to write to Dr. Grant and Aunt Anne while Steele
washed up the supper dishes.
"I should be worse than helpless, were it not for Steele," he wrote;
"and even with him to help me I may as well own up I am in blue funk.
Not a man is there to hire; so the programme for the next few months
seems to be this: Yours truly has got to put on some muscle, and buckle
down to pick and shovel. Where do you think Piersol's 'Histology' is
coming in, uncle, or that man Remsen?
"But that's not the worst. It seems that Weimer isn't as stout in
his head as he was before he was stricken with snow-blindness, and,
although he is as stout as ever in his muscles, he doesn't take kindly
to work any more. Hasn't even taken the winter's supplies of food
and dynamite over to Meadow Creek. He's just smoking his pipe in peace
because of the man father is sending to help him out! But I can tell
you that the peace is all on his side.
"The mountains here are the original packages, all right. They're miles
high, and look as if they'd topple over on a fellow with but half an
excuse. And then the air--or the lack of it, rather! I've not been able
to walk any distance without a cane, so uncertain does this rare air
make me in my motions. But Steele says I'll get over that in a day or
two. So, day after to-morrow he is going with me to Meadow Creek with
the Gale's Ridge Company's horses--we 'pack' over the supplies for
the winter, and the emergency chest just as it is; but, Aunt Anne, only
a small portion of the contents of my big trunk can go. Over on the
Creek Steele can explain to me about the amount of work to be done,
for fear Weimer doesn't tell it straight----"
Suddenly Ross stopped. He leaned back and bit his pencil, his eyes
narrowing frowningly as he glanced over the letter. Then with a gesture
of disdain he caught up the sheets, and tore them into fragments.
Steele paused in the act of placing the dishes in the rough cupboard
which was nailed to the logs behind the stove.
"Well, I'd think twice before I tore up a letter--too hard work to write
'em."
"I have thought twice," returned Ross emphatically. "That's why I tore
it up. No use piling up all my difficulties on them first thing. Aunt
Anne worries enough over my being here, as it is."
"So there's an 'Aunt Anne,' is there?" mused Steele to himself over
the dishes. He glanced at the bits of paper in a heap on the table. "Good
work she and that doctor uncle have done." He surveyed Ross's clean-cut,
clear-eyed face as it bent above a second and brighter letter, one that
ignored or made light of the difficulties oppressing the boy.
In order to divert further the attention of the recipients, Ross also
wrote divers pieces of information that he had learned from Steele.
"I am trying to ferret out this gold mining business from the beginning,"
he wrote. "I never got the hang of it before, and, if Mr. Steele wasn't
everlasting patient with me, I wouldn't be getting much now, because
everything is so new and strange here. I don't half understand the
men's lingo, because they have a strange name for everything.... Well,
it seems that a gold mine up here is started in some such a way as this:
along comes a prospector--quartz crazy, he is called if he's in dead
earnest--with a pick and shovel, a hammer and microscope, and a camp
outfit. If some one else has provided him with food and the outfit he is
'grub-staked' and his 'pard' is entitled to half of the results of
his work. Father, for instance, has grub-staked Weimer for years. This
prospector pegs away at the rocks, getting specimens of ore and
examining them under his microscope. He goes right past rocks that
look to me full of gold they glitter so. No gold in such! But when he
finds some common, dull old stone that doesn't show up much to me but
has all the earmarks of 'a high value' in gold, then he thinks he has
found the outcropping of a good 'lead,' because all the rock that
is behind that rock in the same strata is supposed to have that much
gold in it or more. So there he 'stakes his claim.' You see I've
got the hang of a few of the terms already. First, he drives a stake near
the rock and leaves on it a paper with his name and the date and a
notice that the land is his for so many feet each way. He can't take
possession of more than six hundred feet one way and fifteen hundred
the other in one claim, but he can stake off as many other claims
right beside this first as he wants to. The staking is easy enough,
but the tug of war comes in doing enough work to patent the claims! This
means to get a deed of possession from the state. There is where Weimer
and I are up against it--on the work side! But guess I'd better not
make your heads ache any more with such an accumulation of learned facts.
I'll just say good-bye now and continue the headache in my next."
To his father he wrote a different kind of letter, a defense of his delay
at Dry Creek.
"I couldn't desert a man in that shape," he wrote, "although I have
lost three weeks at exactly the season of the year, I find, when three
weeks count for the most. I'm sorry it happened that way, but I shall
try to put in good time now and make up. Anyway, I guess the delay is
as broad as it is long, because, if that accident hadn't occurred,
I shouldn't have known Steele; and it's his help that's smoothing
things out here for me to begin work."
Ross did not know that the way he had conducted himself at Dry Creek was
the cause of the very practical interest which Steele was taking in him.
But not all of Steele's influence in Camp had secured a single laborer
for Meadow Creek. Ross found that Andy's explanation on the Cody stage
held good. No one cared to go any further out of the world than Miners'
Camp.
"It's bad enough," one of the Mountain Company's men told Ross, "up
here eighty miles from the railroad, with a stage only three times a
week in summer and any time it can get through in the winter. But, when
it comes to workin' on the Creek, _ex_cuse me! Seven mile over Crosby,
and the trail shut up half the year. No, I'm goin' to Cody when the
Mountain works shuts down."
The Gale's Ridge Company worked all winter; but the Mountain Company
dismissed its employees, twenty in number, when the deep snows came.
To the twenty Ross applied in vain. Labor was dear and men scarce "Cody
way," and the miners refused to be mewed up over on the Creek for five
months at any price.
"You see," Steele explained, "I'd be glad to employ all the twenty
during the winter myself; but not many of 'em will ever stay up here
in Camp--too much cut off. I shall run short of hands all winter. Of
course, when the railroad gets up here, it will be different. They'll
be willing to stay then."
Ross checked a groan. "The railroad isn't here, but I am," he observed
grimly.
Steele looked at him curiously. "Why don't you strike the trail back
East," he asked abruptly, "since you started out without understanding
the situation?"
Ross glanced up in surprise. "Why, I never thought of doing that!" he
exclaimed, and dropped the subject.
But Steele continued to look him over with a new interest; for the stage
the previous evening had brought to Steele a letter from the elder Grant
asking for private information concerning the situation Ross, Junior,
was encountering. Ross's brief letters from Dry Creek had shown Ross,
Senior, that he had no real knowledge of the nature of the difficulties
into which he had sent his son.
The morning of the third day, Ross, staggering around uncertainly without
a cane, aided Steele in binding the supplies on the wooden saddles of
the packhorses. From the Gale's Ridge Company's supply-shack they
brought sacks of flour and cornmeal, boxes of canned vegetables and
condensed milk, sides of bacon and hams, bags of coffee and tea, all of
which Steele with many a twist of the rope and "half-hitch" secured to
the clumsy saddles. The trustiest horse carried the emergency chest.
On Ross's own horse, lashed behind his saddle, were his bed blankets
and a bundle from the trunk Aunt Anne had packed with such care.
"All ready?" called Steele, one foot in his stirrup.
He looked back at Ross already mounted, bringing up the rear of the
string of packhorses, standing in front of the company's store.
"All ready," shouted Ross.
Steele, about to swing himself up, hesitated. He glanced again at Ross.
Then, dropping his bridle reins to the ground, he disappeared inside the
store, emerging presently with a short rifle and a cartridge belt.
"Ever use a gun?" he asked.
Ross hesitated. "I've practiced target shooting a little, and gone
hunting a few times; but," candidly, "I don't amount to shucks with a
gun."
Steele grinned, and handed it up. "Take it along," he advised, "and
practice some more. It may bring you fresh meat. Sometimes elk and
mountain sheep come down to the Creek to drink over there--won't come
amiss, anyhow."
Ross accepted the gun; and Steele, going back to the head of the
procession, mounted, and led the way up the canon, which presently
broadened until it formed a snow-flecked valley a few rods wide. Here
were a dozen shacks, another eating house, and the store of the Mountain
Company. The mouth of its tunnel could be seen high on the side of the
mountain above the store.
Immediately beyond this valley the canon was nearly closed by two great
peaks. The one on the left was still Dundee; but on the right Gale's
Ridge gave place to Crosby, behind which lay Meadow Creek Valley.
Zigzagging across the face of this mountain wound a narrow trail
gradually ascending. Up and yet up climbed the horses until Ross clung to
his saddle involuntarily while looking down. Soon Wood River became
a thread, and the shacks became black doll-houses set in patches of snow.
On the trail the snow lay deep in the hollows, but was swept away
wherever the east wind could touch it. But, snow-filled or black,
the trail ever ascended. The peak of Dundee opposite, which had seemed
from the canon narrow and remote, stretched out now immense and so near
that Ross felt he could hurl a stone across and hit it.
He looked ahead. They were approaching the dizzy shoulder of Crosby.
Steele rounded it, and disappeared. One by one the slow packhorses, their
loads hitting against the rocks on the inside of the trail, crawled
cautiously after, and also disappeared. Then before Ross opened a view
of startling grandeur. He was looking out over the top of Gale's Ridge
and down across Big Horn Basin, beyond Cody, eighty miles away and into
the blue heart of the Big Horn Mountains. The sight brought with it a
pang of homesickness. Eighty miles from a railroad! Eighty difficult,
laborious miles! Ross felt helpless and small and decidedly shaky in
this strange new world about which he had so much to learn.
Clinching his teeth hard together, he looked up. Above were bowlders
seemingly glued to the almost upright mountainside. Below--but Ross's
head swam, and he turned his eyes to the inside of the trail, and clung
to the saddle. Below was a sheer drop of a thousand feet down to the
falls of Meadow Creek, which separated Crosby from Gale's Ridge. The
mist came up in clouds rolling thick and frosty in the zero air. This was
the quarter-mile of trail which cut Meadow Creek Valley off from Wood
River Canon for months during the year.
"Well," laughed Steele as they stopped where the trail widened beyond
the dangerous shoulder, "you didn't take a header, did you?"
Ross passed his hand across his forehead. His face was pale. "No, but--I
felt every minute that I'd go over."
"You'll get used to that," returned Steele easily. "You see why that
trail becomes impassable later, don't you? If it was just the snow on
the trail, why, that wouldn't count. You could shovel it off around
the shoulder, and go on snow-shoes the rest of the way. But, when the
snow lodges up over the shoulder something like ten feet deep, and a
chinook or warm wind comes along and loosens it, a footfall or a man
calling might start it, and then----" Steele shrugged his shoulders.
"And there is no other way you can get into the Creek valley?" asked Ross.
"No other way with a horse. You can follow the Creek toward its source,
they say, a few miles and then across. Hunters go that way sometimes,
but on foot; and they have to scramble for it."
On and on they went over a wide trail now beside the clear little Meadow
Creek. Ross began to feel giddy again.
"Of course you do," Steele explained the next time they made a stop,
"because the Creek is half a mile higher than the canon. But you get
over that in a few days."
"I wonder," exclaimed Ross suddenly, "how Leslie Jones stood that trail?"
"About the same as the average and ordinary mortal," rejoined Steele
sarcastically. "But you'll probably have a good many chances of finding
out for yourself. You'll be glad to see anybody, even young Jones!"
At last, after threading their way between spurs and over bowlders and
through valleys, they emerged on the other side of Crosby, and found
themselves in a bowl the sides of which were formed by mountains so high
and grim that Ross gasped for the breath that he felt the peaks would
eventually shut off.
It was a queer and uncomfortable feeling, this which the mountains gave
him, a sense of being shut in and overpowered and helpless.
The peaks on all sides were snow-heaped; but the valley, protected as
it was, showed patches of black earth. Sage-brush with scrub spruce and
hemlock were the only vegetation of the valley visible, but the sides
of the mountains showed a good growth of hemlock and pine trees reaching
to timber line only a few hundred feet up.
On the left at the foot of Crosby--whose back looked as high to Ross
as its face, despite the fact that he was half a mile higher here than
in the canon--two columns of smoke were ascending from two clusters of
hemlocks a quarter of a mile apart. Toward these, Steele, drawing in his
horse, pointed.
"The first is your layout," he called back over his shoulder, "the other
is the McKenzies'!"
"And where is Wilson's?" asked Ross, eagerly.
Steele faced in the opposite direction and indicated a narrow trail that
led to the right, disappearing in a forest of scrub pine which filled the
ravine between two of the mountains that formed the rim of the bowl.
"Follow that trail and you'll reach 'em. But ten to one, before you can
do it they'll follow the trail this way and reach you!"
"I hope so!" exclaimed Ross in a heartfelt tone.
A few moments later he was face to face with Weimer.
The latter stood in the doorway of a low log shack, his great hands
cupped over large blue goggles through which his eyes showed dimly,
the lids screwed together, leaving only slits for the admission of the
dreaded glare of light from the snow. His hands were crusted with
dirt. His face, bearded to the rim of the goggles, was grimy, and the
beard matted. His hair hung uneven and uncombed to his thick rounded
shoulders. He wore a colored flannel shirt, a sheepskin coat, and
corduroy trousers thrust into the knee-high tops of old shoes.
In response to Steele's greeting and introduction Weimer extended his
hand, peered at Ross a moment, and then asked eagerly in a throaty, husky
voice of Steele:
"D'ye pack any tobac' over?"
"Lots of it," cried Steele jovially. "Enough for your use and some for
you to give to your neighbors."
Immediately Weimer's sagging, middle-aged figure became straight and
stiff, and his high forehead wrinkled in a heavy frown.
"Give dem McKenzies anyting! Ven I do, it'll be ven my name ain't Shake
Veimer."
Steele stepped quickly in front of the older man, and spoke forcefully.
"There's one thing, Uncle Jake, that you're givin' 'em as fast as
you can, and that's these claims."
"Nein! Nein!" Weimer shouted. "Das ist nicht so!"
His uneven black hair bobbed wildly about his shoulders. He pumped his
powerful arms up and down as if the McKenzies were beneath them.
Steele thrust his face near that of the agitated man, and demanded
roughly, "How many shots have you put since you were over to Camp to
get me to write to young Grant's father? Say, now!"
Weimer's manner became cringing. He backed into the cabin. "If your
eyes----" he began, but Steele cut him short.
"You know you've not taken one pound of ore out of your tunnel since.
You know you have sat around here waitin' for Grant to send some one to
help you out----"
Weimer put up a great hand, and shrank back as a child would have
retreated before his mother's upraised slipper. Steele followed him
into the cabin, and Ross slowly followed Steele.
"The snow ist come," whimpered Weimer; "und I can't see ven the snow
comes, und the tunnel so far ist to valk----"
But Steele cut short his complaints sternly. "Now," he declared, "all
your excuses must come to an end. Here is some one to help. Young Grant
here is going to put this work through, and you've got to brace up and
help him. I should be ashamed to sit down and let a couple of McKenzies
take away my claims."
At once Weimer became alert and combative. The McKenzies should not take
the claims.
"You see how it is," Steele began as he and Ross were carrying the
cases of dynamite "sticks" up the trail to the tunnel in which Weimer
was doing the assessment work for the four tracts to which he had laid
claim. "Mentally Weimer has become suddenly an old and childish man
while retaining all his physical powers. He can do the work of two
ordinary men if he can be made to work--and it's up to you to compel
him. Otherwise, by the first of next July, at the time when these claims
ought to be patented, you will have to forfeit 'em."
Ross's heart sank. "The first of next July," and it was then but the
middle of October! He laid the case of sticks down on the ore-dump, and,
glancing up at the peaks which held him a prisoner, caught his breath
in a gust of rebellion.
At the mouth of the tunnel, some seven feet high and eight wide, was
the "dump," to the edge of which ran a rusty track with a "bumper" at
the end. The track extended into the tunnel. On it stood a lumbering
vehicle, consisting of the trucks of a hand car, on which was fastened a
home-made box to carry ore.
"This," explained Steele, "is a remnant of Weimer's better days. There
was no way to pack a regular car over here, and he devised this. He was a
smart man until last year."
After dinner, which Weimer prepared,--Ross found him always ready to
prepare food and eat it,--Steele suggested that they "drop in" on the
McKenzies.
"Especially," he added, his eyes scanning Ross's face, "after your
meeting Sandy on the way to Cody."
Ross hesitated. "I don't know about that," he objected, surprised that
Steele should suggest such a thing. "Wouldn't it be a bit queer for me
to call on my 'friends the enemy'?"
Steele laughed, but held strongly to his point. "Not queer at all.
There's no object in not being on a speakin'-footing with 'em," he
said. "There's nothing to be gained and a lot to be lost by openly
recognizing what they're waiting for. You're goin' to get almighty
lonesome up here,"--involuntarily Ross swallowed, and turned his face
away,--"and that Sandy McKenzie is good company--on the surface. I
can't say as much for the other, Waymart, but he'll pass."
The sun was shining warmly when they left Weimer's cabin. The snow above
the narrow loam-paved trail was melting and running in rivulets down to
the creek. Overhead the spruce boughs met, and laced their green fingers
together, sending down a damp, spicy odor.
Near the McKenzie cabin Steele paused and looked up the mountainside.
A few rods away the earth was thrown up around some tree stumps whose
tops had been recently cut off.
"You see," he explained in a low tone to Ross, "the McKenzies are
supposed to be over here working some claims that they staked out last
spring. But look there! They haven't got the discovery hole finished
yet!"
The "discovery hole," as Ross had learned, must be dug within thirty
days after the staking of the claim, and is a name given to the ten
feet of development work required by the law of Wyoming. This ten feet of
digging may mark either the commencement of a tunnel if the claim is
located on the side of a mountain, or, if the claim is on level ground,
the hole takes the form of a shaft driven perpendicularly into the
earth. With a claim thus staked and developed, the owner may rest secure
for one year without further work. Then, in order to hold the claim
against any covetous claim "jumper" he must do one hundred dollars'
worth of development work a year for five years in order to obtain a
patent. If he has staked several adjacent claims, work for all may be
done in one shaft or tunnel.
Ross, merely glancing at the incomplete discovery hole, looked at the
cabin from which the sound of voices issued. His gaze was doubtful, and
his footsteps lagged.
Seeing this, Steele walked on briskly, rapped on the sagging door, threw
it open, and brought Ross reluctantly face to face with his "friends the
enemy."