For sixty days and more, while the weather had been turning from cold
to warm and they had been laboring feebly to clear way the great slide
of loose rock that covered up the ledge, the Eagle Tail mine had
remained a mystery.
Whether, like the old Eagle Tail of frontier fable, it was so rich that
only the eagle's head was needed to turn the chunks into twenty-dollar
gold pieces; or whether, like many other frontier mines, it was nothing
but a hole in the ground, was a matter still to be settled. And Bud,
for one, was determined to settle it quickly.
"Come on," he said, as Phil hesitated to open up the way to the lead;
"we got a month, maybe less, to get to the bottom of this; and then the
hills will be lousy with rebels. If the's nothing here, we want to find
out about it quick and skip--and if we strike it, by grab! the' ain't
enough red-flaggers in Sonora to pry me loose from it. So show these
_hombres_ where to work and we'll be up against rock by the end of the
week."
The original Eagle Tail tunnel had been driven into the side of a steep
hill; so steep, in fact, that the loose shale stretched in long shoots
from the base of the frowning porphyry dikes that crowned the tops of
the hills to the bottom of the cañon. On each side of the discovery
gulch sharp ridges, perforated by the gopher-holes of the Mexicans, and
the ancient workings of the Spaniards, ran directly up the hill to meet
the contact. But it was against the face of the big ridge itself that
Kruger had driven his drift and exploded his giant blast of dynamite,
and the whole slope had been altered and covered with a slide of rock.
Against this slide, in the days when they were marking time, Bud and
his pardner had directed their energies, throwing the loose stones
aside, building up walls against the slip, and clearing the way to the
solid schist. There, somewhere beneath the jumble of powder-riven rock,
lay the ledge which, if they found it, would make them rich; and now,
with single-jack and drill, they attacked the last huge fragments,
blasting them into pieces and groveling deeper until they could strike
the contact, where the schist and porphyry met and the gold spray had
spewed up between.
It was slow work; slower than they had thought, and the gang of
Mexicans that they had hired for muckers were marvels of ineptitude.
Left to themselves, they accomplished nothing, since each problem they
encountered seemed to present to them some element of insuperable
difficulty, to solve which they either went into caucus or waited for
the boss. Meanwhile they kept themselves awake by smoking cigarettes
and telling stories about Bernardo Bravo.
To the Mexicans of Sonora Bernardo Bravo was the personification of all
the malevolent qualities--he being a bandit chief who had turned first
general and then rebel under Madero--and the fact that he had at last
been driven out of Chihuahua and therefore over into Sonora, made his
malevolence all the more imminent.
Undoubtedly, somewhere over to the east, where the Sierras towered like
a blue wall, Bernardo and his outlaw followers were gathering for a
raid, and the raid would bring death to Sonora.
He was a bad man, this Bernardo Bravo, and if half of the current
stories were true, he killed men whenever they failed to give him
money, and was never too hurried to take a fair daughter of the country
up behind him, provided she took his fancy.
Yes, surely he was a bad man--but that did not clear away the rock.
For the first week Phil took charge of the gang, urging, directing, and
cajoling them, and the work went merrily on, though rather slowly. The
Mexicans liked to work for Don Felipe, he was so polite and spoke such
good Spanish; but at the end of the week it developed that Bud could
get more results out of them.
Every time Phil started to explain anything to one Mexican all the
others stopped to listen to him, and that took time. But Bud's favorite
way of directing a man was by grunts and signs and bending his own back
to the task. Also, he refused to understand Spanish, and cut off all
long-winded explanations and suggestions by an impatient motion to go
to work, which the _trabajadores_ obeyed with shrugs and grins.
So Don Felipe turned powder-man and blacksmith, sharpening up the
drills at the little forge they had fashioned and loading the holes
with dynamite when it became necessary to break a rock, while Bud
bossed the unwilling Mexicans.
In an old tunnel behind their tent they set a heavy gate, and behind
it they stored their precious powder. Then came the portable forge and
the blacksmith-shop, just inside the mouth of the cave, and the tent
backed up against it for protection. For if there is any one thing,
next to horses, that the rebels are wont to steal, it is giant powder
to blow up culverts with, or to lay on the counters of timorous country
merchants and frighten them into making contributions.
As for their horses, Bud kept them belled and hobbled, close to the
house, and no one ever saw him without his gun. In the morning, when he
got up, he took it from under his pillow and hung it on his belt, and
there it stayed until bedtime.
He also kept a sharp watch on the trail, above and below, and what few
men did pass through were conscious of his eye. Therefore it was all
the more surprising when, one day, looking up suddenly from heaving at
a great rock, he saw the big Yaqui soldier, Amigo, gazing down at him
from the cut bank.
Yes, it was the same man, yet with a difference--his rifle and
cartridge-belts were absent and his clothes were torn by the brush. But
the same good-natured, competent smile was there, and after a few words
with Bud he leaped nimbly down the bank and laid hold upon the rock.
They pulled together, and the boulder that had balked Bud's gang of
Mexicans moved easily for the two of them.
Then Amigo seized a crowbar and slipped it into a cranny and showed
them a few things about moving rocks. For half an hour or more he
worked along, seemingly bent on displaying his skill, then he sat down
on the bank and watched the Mexicans with tolerant, half-amused eyes.
If he was hungry he showed it only by the cigarettes he smoked, and
Hooker, studying upon the chances he would take by hiring a deserter,
let him wait until he came to a decision.
"_Oyez_, Amigo," he hailed at last and, rubbing his hand around on his
stomach he smiled questioningly, whereat the Yaqui nodded his head
avidly.
"_Stowano!_" said Hooker. "_Ven._" And he left his Mexicans to dawdle
as they would while he led the Indian to camp. There he showed him
the coffeepot and the kettle of beans by the fire, set out a slab of
Dutch-oven bread and a sack of jerked beef, some stewed fruit and a can
of sirup, and left him to do his worst.
In the course of half an hour or so he came back and found the Yaqui
sopping up sirup with the last of the bread and humming a little tune.
So they sat down and smoked a cigarette and came to the business at
hand.
"Where you go?" inquired Bud; but Amigo only shrugged enigmatically.
"You like to work?" continued Bud, and the Indian broke into a smile of
assent.
"_Muy bien_," said Hooker with finality; "I give Mexicans two dollars
a day--I give you four. Is that enough?"
"_Sí_," nodded the Yaqui, and without more words he followed Bud back
to the cut. There, in half a day, he accomplished more than all the
Mexicans put together, leaping boldly up the bank to dislodge hanging
boulders, boosting them by main strength up onto the ramshackle tram
they had constructed, and trundling them out to the dump with the shove
of a mighty hand.
He was a willing worker, using his head every minute; but though he
was such a hustler and made their puny efforts seem so ineffectual by
comparison, he managed in some mysterious way to gain the immediate
approval of the Mexicans. Perhaps it was his all-pervasive good nature,
or the respect inspired by his hardihood; perhaps the qualities of
natural leadership which had made him a picked man among his brother
Yaquis. But when, late in the afternoon, Bud came back from a trip to
the tent he found Amigo in charge of the gang, heaving and struggling
and making motions with his head.
"Good enough!" he muttered, after watching him for a minute in silence,
and leaving the new boss in command, he went back and started supper.
That was the beginning of a new day at the Eagle Tail, and when De
Lancey came back from town--whither he went whenever he could conjure
up an errand--he found that, for once, he had not been missed.
Bud was doing the blacksmithing, Amigo was directing the gang, and a
fresh mess of beans was on the fire, the first kettleful having gone to
reënforce the Yaqui's backbone. But they were beans well spent, and Bud
did not regret the raid on his grub-pile. If he could get half as much
work for what he fed the Mexicans he could well rest content.
"But how did this Indian happen to find you?" demanded Phil, when his
pardner had explained his acquisition. "Say, he must have deserted from
his company when they brought them back from Moctezuma!"
"More'n likely," assented Bud. "He ain't talking much, but I notice he
keeps his eye out--they'd shoot him for a deserter if they could ketch
him. I'd hate to see him go that way."
"Well, if he's as good as this, let's take care of him!" cried Phil
with enthusiasm. "I'll tell you, Bud, there's something big coming off
pretty soon and I'd like to stay around town a little more if I could.
I want to keep track of things."
"F'r instance?" suggested Hooker dryly. It had struck him that Phil was
spending a good deal of time in town already.
"Well, there's this revolution. Sure as shooting they're going to pull
one soon. There's two thousand Mexican miners working at Fortuna, and
they say every one of 'em has got a rifle buried. Now they're beginning
to quit and drift out into the hills, and we're likely to hear from
them any time."
"All the more reason for staying in camp, then," remarked Bud. "I'll
tell you, Phil, I need you here. That dogged ledge is lost, good and
plenty, and I need you to say where to dig. We ain't doing much better
than old Aragon did--just rooting around in that rock-pile--let's do a
little timbering, and sink."
"You can't timber that rock," answered De Lancey decidedly. "And
besides, it's cheaper to make a cut twenty feet deep than it is to
tunnel or sink a shaft. Wait till we get to that porphyry contact--then
we'll know where we're at."
"All right," grumbled Bud; "but seems like we're a long time getting
there. What's the news downtown?"
"Well, the fireworks have begun again over in Chihauhua--Orozco and
Salazar and that bunch--but it seems there was something to this
Moctezuma scare, after all. I was talking to an American mining man
from down that way and he told me that the Federals marched out to
where the rebels were and then sat down and watched them cross the
river without firing on them--some kind of an understanding between
Bernardo Bravo and these black-leg Federals.
"The only fighting there was was when a bunch of twenty Yaquis got away
from their officers in the rough country and went after Bernardo Bravo
by their lonesome. That threw a big scare into him, too, but he managed
to fight them off--and if I was making a guess I'd bet that your Yaqui
friend was one of that fighting twenty."
"I reckon," assented Bud; "but don't you say nothing. I need that
_hombre_ in my business. Come on, let's go up and look at that cut--I
come across an old board to-day, down in the muck, and I bet you it's
a piece that Kruger left. Funny we don't come across some of his tools,
though, or the hole where the powder went off."
"When we do that," observed Phil, "we'll be where we're going. Nothing
to do then but lay off the men and wait till I get my papers. That's
why I say don't hurry so hard--we haven't got our title to this claim,
pardner, and we won't get it, either--not for some time yet. Suppose
you'd hit this ledge--"
"Well, if I hit it," remarked Bud, "I'll stay with it--you can trust me
for that. Hello, what's the Yaqui found?"
As they came up the cut Amigo quit work and, while the Mexicans
followed suit and gathered expectantly behind him, he picked up three
rusty drills and an iron drill-spoon and presented them to Bud.
Evidently he had learned the object of their search from the Mexicans,
but if he looked for any demonstrations of delight at sight of these
much-sought-for tools he was doomed to disappointment, for both Bud and
Phil had schooled themselves to keep their faces straight.
"Um-m," said Bud, "old drills, eh? Where you find them?"
The Yaqui led the way to the face of the cut and showed the spot, a
hole beneath the pile of riven rock; and a Mexican, not to be outdone,
grabbed up a handful of powdered porphyry and indicated where the
dynamite had pulverized it.
"_Bien_," said Phil, pawing solemnly around in the bottom of the hole;
and then, filling his handkerchief with fine dirt, he carried it down
to the creek. There, in a miner's pan, he washed it out carefully,
slopping the waste over the edge and swirling the water around until at
last only a little dirt was left in the bottom of the pan. Then, while
all the Mexicans looked on, he tailed this toward the edge, scanning
the last remnant for gold--and quit without a color.
"_Nada!_" he cried, throwing down the pan, and in some way the Mexicans
sensed the fact that the mine had turned out a failure. Three times he
went back to the cut and scooped up the barren dust, and then he told
the men they could quit.
"No more work!" he said, affecting a dejected bitterness. "_No hay
nada_--there is nothing!" And with this sad, but by no means unusual,
ending to their labors, the Mexicans went away to their camp,
speculating among themselves as to whether they could get their pay.
But when the last of them had gone Phil beckoned Bud into the tent and
showed him a piece of quartz.
"Just take a look at that!" he said, and a single glance told Hooker
that it was full of fine particles of gold.
"I picked that up when they weren't looking," whispered De Lancey, his
eyes dancing with triumph. "It's the same rock--the same as Kruger's!"
"Well, put 'er there, then, pardner!" cried Bud, grabbing at 'De
Lancey's hand. "We've struck it!"
And with a broad grin on their deceitful faces they danced silently
around the tent, after which they paid off the Mexicans and bade them
"_Adios!_"