A little way up from the trail that goes toward Rex Monte, not far from
the limit of deep snows, there is what looks to be a round dark hole in
the side of the mountain. It is really the ruined tunnel of an old mine.
Formerly a house stood on the ore dump at one side of the tunnel, a
little unpainted cabin of pine; but a great avalanche of snow and stones
carried them, both the house and the dump, away. The cabin was built and
owned by a solitary miner called Jerry, and whether he ever had any
other name no one in the town below Kearsarge now remembers.
Jerry was old and lean, and his hair, which had been dark when he was
young, was now bleached to the color of the iron-rusted rocks about his
mine. For thirty years he had prospected and mined through that country
from Kearsarge to the Coso Hills, but always in the pay of other men,
and at last he had hit upon this ledge on Rex Monte. To all who looked,
it showed a very slender vein between the walls of country rock, and the
ore of so poor a quality that with all his labor he could do no more
than keep alive; but to all who listened, Jerry could tell a remarkable
story of what it had been, and what he expected it to be. Very many
years ago he had discovered it at the end of a long prospect, when he
was tired and quite discouraged for that time. There was not much
passing then on the Rex Monte, and Jerry drew out of the trail here in
the middle of the afternoon to rest in the shadow of a great rock. So
while he lay there very weary, between sleeping and waking, he gazed out
along the ground, which was all strewn with rubble between the stiff,
scant grass. As he looked it seemed that certain bits of broken stone
picked themselves out of the heap, and grew larger, in some way more
conspicuous, until, Jerry averred, they winked at him. Then he reached
out to draw them in with his hand, and saw that they were all
besprinkled with threads and specks of gold. You may guess that Jerry
was glad, then that he sprang up and began to search for more stones,
and so found a trail of them, and followed it through the grass stems
and the heather until he came to the ledge cropping out by a dike of
weathered rocks. And in those days the ledge was ah, so rich! Now it
seemed that Jerry was to have a mine of his own. So he named it the
Golden Fortune, and told no man what he had found, but went down to the
town which lies in a swale at the foot of Kearsarge, and brought back as
much as was needful for working the mine in a simple way.
It was nearing the end of the summer, when the hills expect the long
thunder and drumming rain, and, not many weeks after that, the quiet
storms that bring the snow. Jerry had enough to do to make all safe and
comfortable at the Golden Fortune before winter set in. It was too steep
here on the hill-slope for the deep snows to trouble him much, so he
built his cabin against the rock, with a covered way from it to the
tunnel of the mine, that he might work on all winter at no unease
because of storms.
It was perhaps a month later, with Jerry as busy as any of the wild folk
thereabout, and the nights turning off bitter cold with frost. Of
mornings he could hear the thin tinkle of the streams along fringes of
delicate ice. It was the afternoon of a day that fell warm and dry with
a promise of snow in the air. Jerry was roofing in his cabin, so intent
that a voice hailed him before he was aware that there was a man on the
trail. Jerry knew at once by his dress and his speech that he was a
stranger in those parts, and he saw that he was not very well prepared
for the mountain passes and the night. He knew this, I say, with the
back of his mind, but took no note of it, for he was so occupied with
his house and his mine. He suffered a fear to have any man know of his
good fortune lest it should somehow slip away from him. So when the
stranger asked him some questions of the trail, it seemed that what
Jerry most wished was to get rid of him as quickly as possible. He was
a young man, ruddy and blue-eyed, and a foreigner, what was called in
careless miners' talk, "some kind of a Dutchman," and could not make
himself well understood. Jerry gathered that he desired to know if he
were headed right for the trail that went over to the Bighorn Mine,
where he had the promise of work. So they nodded and shrugged, and Jerry
made assurance with his hands, as much as to say, it is no great way;
and when the young man had looked wistfully at the cabin and the boding
sky, he moved slowly up the trail. When he came to the turn where it
goes toward Rex Monte, he lingered on the ridge to wave good-by, so
Jerry waved again, and the man dropped out of sight. At that moment the
sun failed behind a long gray film that deepened and spread over all
that quarter of the sky.
Jerry had cause to remember the stranger in the night and fret for him,
for the wind came up and began to seek in the canyon, and the snow fell
slanting down. It fell three days and nights. All that while the gray
veil hung about Jerry's house; now and then the wind would scoop a great
lane in it to show how the drifts lay on the heather, then shut in tight
and dim with a soft, weary sound, and Jerry, though he worked on the
Golden Fortune, could not get the young stranger out of his mind.
When the sun and the frost had made a crust over the snow able to bear
up a man, he went over the Pass to Bighorn to inquire if the stranger
had come in, though he did not tell at that time, nor until long after,
how late it was when the man passed his cabin, how wistfully he turned
away, nor what promise was in the air. The snow lay all about the Pass,
lightly on the pines, deeply in the hollows, so deeply that a man might
lie under it and no one be the wiser. And there it seemed the stranger
must be, for at the Bighorn they had not heard of him, but if he were
under the snow, there he must lie until the spring thaw. Of whatever
happened to him, Jerry saw that he must bear the blame, for, by his own
account, from that day the luck vanished from the Golden Fortune; not
that the ore dwindled or grew less, but there were no more of the golden
specks. With all he could do after that, Jerry could not maintain
himself in the cabin on the slope of Rex Monte. So it came about that
the door was often shut, and the picks rusted in the tunnel of the
Golden Fortune for months together, while Jerry was off earning wages in
more prosperous mines.
All his days Jerry could not quite get his mind away from the earlier
promise of the mine, and as often as he thought of that he thought of
the stranger whom he had sent over the trail on the evening of the
storm. Gradually it came into his mind in a confused way that the two
things were mysteriously connected, that he had sent away his luck with
the stranger into the deep snow. For certainly Jerry held himself
accountable, and in that country between Kearsarge and the Coso Hills to
be inhospitable is the worst offense.
Every year or so he came back to the mine to work a little, and
sometimes it seemed to promise better and sometimes not. Finally, Jerry
argued that the luck would not come back to it until he had made good to
some other man the damage he had done to one. This set him looking for
an opportunity. Jerry mentioned his belief so often that he came at
last, as is the way of miners, to accept it as a thing prophesied of old
time. Afterward, when he grew old himself, and came to live out his life
at the Golden Fortune, he would be always looking along the trail at
evening time for passers-by, and never one was allowed to go on who
could by any possibility be persuaded to stay the night in Jerry's
cabin. Often when there was a wind, and the snow came slanting down,
Jerry fancied he heard one shouting in the drift; then he would light a
lantern and sally forth into the storm, peering and crying.
About that time, when he went down into the town below Kearsarge once in
a month or so for supplies, the people smiled and wagged their heads,
but Jerry conceived that they whispered together about the unkindness
he had done to the stranger so many years gone, and he grew shyer and
went less often among men. So he companioned more with the wild things,
and burrowed deeper into the hill. His cabin weathered to a semblance of
the stones, rabbits ran in and out at the door, and deer drank at his
spring.
From the slope where the cabin stood, the trail, which led up from the
town, winding with the winding of the canyon, went over the Pass, and so
into a region of high meadows and high, keen peaks, the feeding-ground
of deer and mountain sheep. The ravine of Rex Monte was the easiest
going from the high valleys to the foothills, where all winter the feed
kept green. Every year Jerry marked the trooping of the wild kindred to
the foothill pastures when the snow lay heavily on all the higher land,
and saw their returning when the spring pressed hard upon the borders of
the melting drifts. So, as he grew older and stayed closer by his mine,
Jerry learned to look to the furred and feathered folk for news of how
the seasons fared, and what was doing on the high ridges. When the
grouse and quail went down, it was a sign that the snow had covered the
grass and small seed-bearing herbs; the passing of deer--shapely bulks
in a mist of cloud--was a portent of deep drifts over the buckthorn and
the heather. Lastly, if he saw the light fleeting of the mountain sheep,
he looked for wild and bitter work on the crest of Kearsarge and Rex
Monte. It was mostly at such times that Jerry heard voices in the storm,
and he would go stumbling about with his lantern into the swirl of
falling snow, until the wind that played up and down the great canyon,
like the draughts in a chimney, made his very bones a-cold. Then he
would creep back to drowse by the warmth of his fire and dream that the
blue-eyed stranger had come back and brought the luck of the Golden
Fortune. So he passed the years until the winter of the Big Snow. It was
so called many winters after, for no other like it ever fell on the east
slope of Kearsarge.
It came early in the season, following a week of warm weather, when the
sky was full of a dry mist that showed ghostly gray against the sun and
the moon; great bodies of temperate air moved about the pines with a
sound of moaning and distress. The deer, warned by their wild sense,
went down before ever a flake fell, and Jerry, watching, shivered in
sympathy, recalling that so they had run together, and such a spell of
warm weather had gone before a certain snow, years ago before the luck
departed from the Golden Fortune. As the fume of the storm closed in
about the cabin, and flakes began to form lightly in the middle air, the
old man's wits began to fumble among remembrances of the stranger on the
trail, and he would hearken for voices. The snow began, then increased,
and fell steadily, wet and blinding.
The third night of its falling Jerry waked out of a doze to hear his
name shouted, muffled and feebly, through the drift. So it seemed to
him, and he made haste to answer it. There was no wind; on the very
steep slope where the cabin stood was a knee-deep level, soft and
clogging; in the hollows it piled halfway up the pines. Jerry's lantern
threw a faint and stifled gleam. There was no further cry, but something
struggled on the trail below him; dim, unhuman shapes wrestled in the
smother of the snow. Jerry sent them a hail of assurance cut off short
by the white wall of the storm.
There was a little sag in the hill-front where the trail turned off to
the cabin, and here the moist snow fell in a lake, into which the trail
ran like a spit, and was lost. Down this trail at the last fierce end of
the storm came the great wild sheep, the bighorn, the heaviest-headed,
lightest-footed, winter-proof sheep of the mountains that God shepherds
on the high battlements of the hills. Down they came when there was no
meadow, nor thicket, nor any smallest twig of heather left uncovered on
the highlands, and took the lake of soggy snow by Jerry's cabin in the
dark. They had come far under the weight of the great curved horns
through the clogging drifts. Here where the trail failed in the white
smudge they found no footing, floundered at large, sinking belly-deep
where they stood, and not daring to stand lest they sink deeper. If any
cry of theirs, hoarse and broken, had reached old Jerry's dreaming, they
spent no further breath on it. By something the same sense that made him
aware of their need, Jerry understood rather than saw them strain
through the falling veil of snow. It was a sharp struggle without sound
as they won out of the wet drift to the firmer ground. They went on like
shadows pursued by the ghost of a light that wavered with the old man's
wavering feet. It was no night for a man to be abroad in, but Jerry
plowed on in the drift till he found the work that was cut out for him.
There where the snow was deepest, yielding like wool, he found the
oldest wether of the flock, sunk to the shoulders, too feeble for the
struggle, and still too noble for complaining. How many years had Jerry
waited to do a good turn on the trail where he had done his worst: and
in all these years he had lost the sense of distinction which should be
between man and beast. He put his shoulder under the fore shoulder of
the sheep, where he could feel the heart pound with certain fear.
Jerry knew the trail, as he knew the floor of his mine, by the feel of
the ground under him, so as he heaved and guided with his shoulder, the
great ram grew quieter and lent himself to the effort till they came
clear of the swale, and the sweat ran down from Jerry's forehead. But
the bighorn could do no more. In the soft fleece of the snow he stood
cowed and trembling. The snow came on faster, and wiped out the trail of
the flock; he made no motion to go after. Such a death comes to the wild
sheep of the mountains often enough: to fail from old age in some sudden
storm, to sink in the loose snow and await the quest of the wolf, or the
colder mercy of the drift. He turned his back to the storm which began
to slant a little with the rising wind, and looked not once at Jerry nor
at the hills where he had been bred. But Jerry cast his eye upon the
sheep, which was full heavier then than he, and then up at the steep
where his cabin stood, remembering that he had nothing there that might
serve a sheep for food. Then he bent down again, and by dint of pulling
and pushing, and by a dim sense that began to filter through the man's
brain to the beast, they made some progress on the trail. They went over
broken boulders and floundered in the drifts, where Jerry half carried
the sheep and was half borne up and supported by the spread of the great
horns. They crossed Pine Creek, which ran dumbly under the snow, housed
over by the stream tangle. The flakes hissed softly on Jerry's lantern
and struck blindingly on his eyes, but ever as they went the sheep was
eased of his labor, grew assured, and carried himself courageously.
Finally they came where the storm thinned out, and whole hill-slopes
covered with buckthorn and cherry warded off the snow by springy arches,
and Jerry drew up to rest under a long-leaved pine while the sheep went
on alone, nodding his great horns under the branches of the scrub. He
neither lingered nor looked back, and met the new chance of life with as
much quietness as the chance of death. Jerry was worn and weary, and
there was a singing in his brain. The pine trees broke the wind and shed
off the snow in curling wreaths. It seemed to the old man most good to
rest, and he drowsed upon his feet.
"If I sleep I shall freeze," he said; and it seemed on the whole a
pleasant thing to do. So it went on for a little space; then there came
a shape out of the dark, a hand shook him by the shoulder, and a voice
called him by name. Then he started out of dreaming as he had started at
that other call an hour ago, and it seemed not strange to him, the
night, nor the storm, nor the face of the blue-eyed man that shone out
of the dark, but whether by the light of his lantern he could not tell.
He shook the snow from his shoulders.
"I have expected you long," he said.
"And now I have come," said the stranger and smiled.
"Have you brought the luck again?"
"Come and see," said the man.
Then Jerry took his hand and leaned upon him, and together they went up
the trail between the drifts.
"You bear me no ill-will for what I did?" said Jerry.