PROGRESS AND SALT
Goldite, by the light of day, presented a wonderful spectacle. It was
a mining camp positively crystallizing into being before the very eyes
of all beholders. It was nearly all tents and canvas structures--a
heterogeneous mixture of incompleteness and modernity to which the
telegraph wires had already been strung from the outside world. It had
no fair supply of water, but it did have a newspaper, issued once a
week.
A dozen new buildings, flimsy, cheap affairs, were growing like
toadstools, day and night. Several brick buildings, and shacks of mud,
were rising side by side. Everywhere the scene was one of crowds,
activity, and hurry. Thousands of men were in the one straight street,
a roughly dressed, excited throng, gold-bitten, eager, and open-handed.
Hundreds of mules and horses, a few bewildered cows, herds of great
wagons, buggies, heaps of household goods, and trunks, with
fortifications of baled hay and grain, were crowded into two great
corrals, where dusty teamsters hastened hotly about, amidst heaps of
dusty harness, sacks of precious ore and the feed troughs for the
beasts.
Beth had slept profoundly, despite the all-night plague of noises,
penetrating vividly through the shell-like walls of the house. She was
out with Elsa at an early hour, amazingly refreshed and absorbingly
interested in all she heard and saw. The sky was clear, but a chill
wind blew down from the mountains, flapping canvas walls in all
directions.
The building wherein the women had rested was a wooden lodging house,
set barely back from the one business street of the camp. Next door
was a small, squat domicile constructed of bottles and mud. The
bottles were laid in the "mortar" with their ends protruding. Near by,
at the rear of a prosperous saloon, was a pyramid of empty bottles,
fully ten feet high--enough to build a little church.
Drawn onward by the novelty of all the scene, Beth crossed the main
street--already teeming with horses, wagons, and men--and proceeded
over towards a barren hill, followed demurely by her maid. The hill
was like a torn-up battlefield, trenched, and piled with earthworks of
defense, for man the impetuous had already flung up great gray dumps of
rock, broken and wrenched from the bulk of the slope, where he quested
for gleaming yellow metal. He had ripped out the adamant--the matrix
of the gold--for as far as Beth could see. Like ant-heaps of
tremendous dimensions stood these monuments of toil--rock-writings,
telling of the heat and desire, the madness of man to be rich.
The world about was one of rocks and treeless ridges, spewed from some
vast volcanic forge of ages past. It was all a hard, gray, adamantine
world, unlovely and severe--a huge old gold furnace, minus heat or
fire, lying neglected in a universe of mountains that might have been a
workshop in the ancient days when Titans wrought their arts upon the
earth.
Beth gazed upon it all in wonder not unmingled with awe. What a place
it was for man to live and wage his puny battles! Yet the fever of all
of it, rising in her veins, made her eager already to partake of the
dream, the excitement that made mere gold-slaves of the men who had
come here compelling this forbidding place to yield up some measure of
comfort and become in a manner their home.
Van, in the meanwhile, having spent the time till midnight on his feet,
and the small hours asleep on a bale of hay, was early abroad, engaged
in various directions. He first proceeded to the largest general store
in the camp and ordered a generous bill of supplies to be sent to his
newest claim. Next he arranged with a friendly teamster for the prompt
return of the two borrowed horses on which Beth and her maid had come
to camp. Then, on his way to an assayer's office, where samples of
rock from the claim in question had been left for the test of fire, he
encountered a homely, little, dried-up woman who was scooting about
from store to store with astonishing celerity of motion.
"Tottering angels!" said he. "Mrs. Dick!"
"Hello--just a minute," said the lively little woman, and she dived
inside the newest building and was out almost immediately with a great
sack of plunder that she jerked about with most diverting energy.
"Here, fetch this down to the house," she demanded imperiously.
"What's the good of my finding you here in Goldite if you don't do
nothing for your country?"
Van shouldered the sack.
"What are you doing here anyhow?" said he, "--up before breakfast and
busy as a hen scratching for one chicken."
"Come on," she answered, starting briskly towards a new white building,
off the main thoroughfare, eastward. "I live here--start my
boarding-house today. I'm going to get rich. Every room's furnished
and every bed wanted as fast as I can make 'em up. Have you had your
breakfast?"
"Say, you're my Indian," answered Van. "I've got you two customers
already. You've got to take them in and give them your best if you
turn someone else inside out to do it."
Mrs. Dick paused suddenly.
"Bronson Van Buren! You're stuck on some woman at last!"
"At last?" said Van. "Haven't I always been stuck after you?"
Mrs. Dick resumed her brisk locomotion.
"Snakes alive!" she concluded explosively. "She's respectable, of
course? But you said two. Now see here, Van, no Mormon games with me!"
"Her _maid_--it's her maid that's with her," Van explained. "Don't
jump down my throat till I grease it."
"Her maid!" Mrs. Dick said no more as to that. The way she said it
was enough. They had come to the door of her newly finished house, a
clean, home-like place from which a fragrance of preparing breakfast
flowed like a ravishing nectar. "Where are they now?" she demanded
impatiently. "Wherever they are it ain't fit for a horse! Why don't
you go and fetch 'em?"
Van put the bag inside the door, then his hands on Mrs. Dick's
shoulders.
"I'll bet your mother was a little red firecracker and your father a
bottle of seltzer," he said. Then off he went for Beth.
She was not, of course, at "home" when he arrived at the place he had
found the previous evening. Disturbed for a moment by her absence, he
presently discerned her, off there westward on the hill from which she
was making a survey of the camp.
Three minutes after he was climbing up the slope and she turned and
looked downward upon him.
"By heavens!" he said beneath his breath, "--what beauty!"
The breeze was molding her dress upon her rounded form till she seemed
like the statue of a goddess--a goddess of freedom, loveliness, and
joy, sculptured in the living flesh--a figure vibrant with glowing
health and youth, startlingly set in the desert's gray austerity. With
the sunlight flinging its gold and riches upon her, what a marvel of
color she presented!--such creamy white and changing rose-tints in her
cheeks--such a wonderful brown in her hair and eyes--such crimson of
lips that parted in a smile over even little jewels of teeth! And she
smiled on the horseman, tall, and active, coming to find her on the
hill.
"Good morning!" she cried. "Oh, isn't it wonderful--so big, and bare,
and _clean_!"
Van smiled.
"It's a hungry-looking country to me--looks as if it has eaten all the
trees. If it makes you think of breakfast, or just plain coffee and
rolls, I've found a place I hope you'll like, with a friend I didn't
know was here."
"You are very kind, I'm sure," she said. "I'm afraid we're a great
deal of trouble."
"That's what women were made for," he answered her frankly, a bright,
dancing light in his eyes. "They couldn't help it if they would, and I
guess they wouldn't if they could."
"Oh, indeed?" She shot him a quick glance, half a challenge. "I
_guess_ if you don't mind we won't go to the place you've found, for
breakfast, this morning."
"You'd better guess again," he answered, and taking her arm, in a
masterful way that bereft her of the power of speech or resistance, he
marched her briskly down the slope and straight towards Mrs. Dick's.
"Thank your stars you've struck a place like this," he said. "If you
don't I'll have to thank them for you."
"Perhaps I ought to thank you first," she ventured smilingly. It would
have seemed absurd to resent his boyish ways.
"You may," he said, "when I get to be one of your stars."
"Oh, really? Why defer mere thanks _indefinitely_?"
"It won't be indefinitely, and besides, thanks will keep--and breakfast
won't."
He entered the house, with Beth and her maid humbly trailing at his
heels. Mrs. Dick came bustling from the kitchen like a busy little
ant. Van introduced his charges briefly. Mrs. Dick shook hands with
them both.
"Well!" she said, "I like you after all! And it's lucky I do, for if I
didn't I don't know's I should take you or not, even if Van did say I
had to."
Van took her by the shoulders and shook her boyishly.
"You'd take a stick of dynamite and a house afire, both in one hand, if
I said so," he announced. "Now don't get hostile."
"Well--I s'pose I would," agreed Mrs. Dick. She added to Beth: "Ain't
he the dickens and all? Just regular brute strength. Come right
upstairs till I show you where you're put. I've turned off two men to
let you have the best room in the house."
Beth had to smile. She had never felt so helpless in her life--or so
amused. She followed Mrs. Dick obediently, finding the two-bed room
above to be a bright, new-smelling apartment of acceptable size and
situation. In answer to a score of rapid-fire questions on the part of
Mrs. Dick, she imparted as much as Van already knew concerning herself
and her quest.
Mrs. Dick became her friend forthwith, then hastened downstairs to the
kitchen. Van and Beth presently took breakfast together, while Elsa,
with a borrowed needle and thread, was busied with some minor repairing
of garments roughly used the day before. Other boarders and lodgers of
the house had already eaten and gone, to resume their swirl in the
maelstrom of the camp.
For a time the two thus left alone in the dining-room appeased their
appetites in silence. Van watched the face of the girl for a time and
finally spoke.
"I'll let you know whatever I hear about your brother, if there is any
more to hear. Meantime you'll have to remain here and wait."
She was silent for a moment, reflecting on, the situation.
"You took my suitcase away from Mr. Bostwick, you'll remember," she
said, "and left it where we got the horses."
"It will be here to-day," he answered. "I arranged for that with Dave."
"Oh. But of course you cannot tell when Mr. Bostwick may appear."
"His movements couldn't be arranged so conveniently, otherwise he
wouldn't appear at all."
She glanced at him, startled.
"Not come at all? But I need him! Besides, he's my---- I expect him
to go and find my brother. And the trunk checks are all in his
pocket--wait!--no they're not, they're in my suitcase after all."
"You're in luck," he assured her blandly, "for Searle has doubtless
lost all his pockets."
"Lost his pockets?" she echoed. "Perhaps you mean the convicts took
them--took his clothing--everything he had."
"Everything except his pleasant manner," Van agreed. "They have plenty
of that of their own."
She was lost for a moment in reflection.
"Poor Searle! Poor Mr. Bostwick!"
Van drank the last of his coffee.
"Was Searle the only man you knew in all New York?"
She colored. "Certainly not. Of course not. Why do you ask such a
question?"
"I was trying to understand the situation, but I give it up." He
looked in her eyes with mock gravity, and she colored.
She understood precisely what he meant--the situation between herself
and Bostwick, to whom, she feared, she had half confessed herself
engaged. She started three times to make a reply, but halted each
answer for a better.
"You don't like Mr. Bostwick," she finally observed.
Van told her gravely: "I like him like the old woman kept tavern."
She could not entirely repress a smile.
"And how did she keep it--the tavern?"
"Like hell," said Van. He rose to go, adding; "You like him about that
way yourself--since yesterday."
Her eyes had been sparkling, but now they snapped.
"Why--how can you speak so rudely? You know that isn't true! You know
I like--admire Mr. Bost---- You haven't any right to say a thing like
that--no matter what you may have done for me!"
She too had risen. She faced him glowingly.
He suddenly took both her hands and held them in a firm, warm clasp
from which there could be no escape.
"Beth," he said audaciously, "you are never going to marry that man."
She was struggling vainly to be free. Her face was crimson.
"Let me go!" she demanded. "Mr. Van--you let me go! I don't see how
you dare to say a thing like that. I don't know why----"
"You can't marry Searle," he interrupted, "because you are going to
marry me."
He raised her hands to his lips and kissed them both.
"Be back by and by," he added, and off he went, through the kitchen,
leaving Beth by the table speechless, burning and confused, with a
hundred wild emotions in her heart.
He continued out at the rear of the place, where little Mrs. Dick was
valiantly tugging at two large buckets of water. He relieved her of
the burden.
"Say, Priscilla," he drawled, "if a smoke-faced Easterner comes around
here while I'm gone, looking for--you know--Miss Kent, remember he
can't have a room in your house if he offers a million and walks on his
hands and prays in thirteen languages."
Little Mrs. Dick glanced up at him shrewdly.
"Have you got it as bad as that? Snakes alive! All right, I guess
I'll remember."
"Be good," said Van, and off he went to the assayer's shop for which he
had started before.
The assayer glanced up briefly. He was busy at a bucking-board, where,
with energetic application of a very heavy weight, on the end of a
handle, he was grinding up a lot of dusty ore.
"Greeting, Van," said he. "Come in."
Van shook his outstretched hand.
"I thought I'd like to see those results," he said, "--that rock I
fetched you last, remember? You thought you could finish the batch
last week. Gold rock from the 'See Saw' claim that I bought three
weeks ago."
"Yes, oh yes. Now what did I do with---- Finished 'em up and put 'em
away somewhere," said the assayer, dusting his hands and moving towards
his desk. "Such a lot of stuff's been coming in--here they are, I
reckon." He drew a half dozen small printed forms from a cavity in the
desk, glanced them over briefly and handed the lot to Van. "Nothing
doing. Pretty good rock for building purposes."
"Nothing doing?" echoed Van incredulously, staring at the assay records
which showed in merciless bluntness that six different samples of
reputed ore had proved to be absolutely worthless. "The samples you
assayed first showed from ten to one hundred and fifty dollars to the
ton, in gold."
"What's that got to do with this?" inquired the master of acids and
fire. "You don't mean to say----"
"Do with it, man? It all came out of the same identical prospect," Van
interrupted. "These were later samples than the others, that's all."
The assayer glanced over his shoulder at the hope-destroying slips.
"The 'See Saw' claim," he said perfunctorily. "You bought it, Van, who
from?"
"From Selwyn Briggs."
"Sorry," said the assayer briefly. "H'm! That Briggs!"
"You don't mean---- It couldn't have been salted on me!" Van declared.
"I took my own samples, broke down a new face purposely, sacked it all
myself--and sealed the sacks. No one touched those sacks till you
broke the seals in this office. He couldn't have salted me, Frank.
What possible chance----"
The assayer went to a shelf, took down a small canvas bag, glanced at a
mark that identified it as one in which samples of "See Saw" rock had
arrived for the former assay, and turned it inside out.
"Once in a while I've heard of a cute one squirting a sharp syringe
full of chloride of gold on worthless rock, through the meshes of the
canvas, even after the samples were sealed," he imparted quietly.
"This sack looks to me like some I've encountered before that were
pretty rich in gold. I'll assay the cloth if you like."
Van took the sack in his hand, examined it silently, then glanced as
before at his papers.
"Salted--by that lump of a Briggs!" His lip was curved in a mirthless
smile. "I guess I've got it in the neck all right. These last samples
tell the real story." He slapped the papers across his hand, then tore
them up in tiny bits and threw them on the floor."
"Sorry, old man," said the assayer, as before. "Hope you didn't pay
him much for the claim."
"Not much," said Van. "All I had--and some of it borrowed money."
The assayer puckered up his mouth.
"Briggs has skipped--gone East."
"I know. Well--all in a lifetime, I suppose. Pay you, Frank, when I
can."
"That's all right," his friend assured him. "Forget it if you like."
Van started off, but returned.
"Say, Frank," he said, "don't hawk this around. It's bad enough for me
to laugh at myself. I don't want the chorus joining in."
"I'm your clam," said Frank. "So long, and better luck!"