"Know anybody in that bunch?"
"I didn't notice them particularly," I replied. "I understood they
were Denver people--friends of somebody in the railroad management."
"There was women," he said significantly.
"I know; I saw some of them."
"Yes; and be the same token, there was one of them lamped yous off. I
listened at her askin' one o' the men who you was; d'ye see?"
Instantly I began to ransack my brain for the possibilities, and almost
at once the talk on the train with Horace Barton, the wagon sales
manager, flashed into the field of recollection.
"Could you describe the woman for me?" I asked.
Dorgan made hard work of this, though it was evident that he was trying
his best. His description would have fitted any one of a round million
of American women, I suppose; yet out of it I thought I could draw some
faint touches of familiarity. The stumbling description, coupled with
Barton's assertion that Agatha Geddis was living in Colorado, fitted
together only too well.
"Did you hear what she said to the man?" I inquired, and my mouth was
dry.
"On'y a bit of it. She says, says she: 'Who is that man wit' a French
beard--the young man in his shirt-sleeves?' The felly she t'rowed this
into was one o' the kid-gloves, and he didn't know. So he went to
Shelton, who was showin' the crowd around on the job. When he comes
back, he tells her your name is Jim Bertrand, and that you makes a
noise like the camp paymaster."
"Well?" I prompted. "Go on."
"She laughs when he says that. 'Jim Bertrand, is it?' says she. 'Will
you do me a favor, Mister Jullybird'--'r some such name. 'Go and ask
that young man how did he leave all the folks in Glendale. I want to
see him jump,' says she. He didn't do it because at that same minute
yous was walkin' down the track to flag Benson's ingine."
The bolt had fallen. The woman could have been no other than Agatha
Geddis. Once more I stood in critical danger of losing all that I had
gained. There was only one faint hope, and that was that she had not
heard of the broken parole. I had to go to the water jug in the
Commissary and get a drink before I could thank Dorgan for telling me.
"'Tis nothin'," he said shortly. Then, after a protracted pause: "What
can she do to yous, pally?"
"She can send me up for two years; and then some--for the penalties."
Again a silence intervened.
"'Twas in the back part o' my head to take a chance and ditch that
damn' special when she was comin' back down the gulch," said Dorgan, at
length, as coolly as if he were merely telling me that his pipe had
gone out. "But if I'd done it, it would have been just my crooked luck
to 'a' killed everybody on it but that woman. What'll ye be doin'?"
"Nothing at present. We shall finish here in a week or so more, and
then I'll see."
That ended it. After Dorgan had got another match for his pipe, I let
him out at the side door of the commissary, and he went his way across
to the sleeping shacks on the other side of the tracks.
Two weeks later it was this story of the inquisitive young woman,
weighing in the balance with some other things, that determined my
immediate future course. The work on the branch line was completed,
and my employers had taken a dam-building contract in Idaho. I was
offered the job of bookkeeper and paymaster, combined, on the new work,
with a substantial raise in salary, and the temptation to accept was
very strong. But I argued, foolishly, perhaps, that so long as I
remained in the same service as that in which she had discovered me,
Agatha Geddis would always be able to trace me; that my best chance was
to lose myself again as speedily as possible.
The "losing" opportunity had already offered itself. By this time I
had made a few acquaintances in town and was beginning to be bitten by
the mining bug. Though I was a late comer in the district, and Cripple
Creek had fully caught its stride as one of the greatest gold-producing
camps in the world some time before my advent, "strikes" were still
occurring frequently enough to keep the gold seekers' excitement from
dying out. With the greater part of my Hadley-and-Shelton earnings in
my pocket, and with muscles camp-hardened sufficiently to enable me to
hold my own as a workingman, I decided to take a chance and become a
prospector.
We went at it judiciously and with well-considered plans, three of us:
the bank teller, Barrett, a young carpenter named Gifford, and myself.
Altogether we could pool less than a thousand dollars of capital, but
we determined to make the modest stake suffice. By this time the
entire district had been plotted and replotted into mining claims;
hence we did our preliminary prospecting in the records of the land
office. A careful search revealed a number of infinitesimally small
areas as yet uncovered by the many criss-crossing claims; and among
these we chose a triangular-shaped bit of mountain side on the farther
slope of Bull Mountain, with a mine called the "Lawrenceburg," a fairly
large producer, for our nearest neighbor.
There was a good bit of discussion precedent to the making of this
decision. Barrett thought that we stood but a slight chance of finding
mineral in the over-prospected area. The Lawrenceburg was a full
quarter of a mile distant from our triangle, and its "pay-streak" was
said to dip southward, while our gulch slope lay on the other side of a
spur and due northeast. It was a further examination of the
land-office records that turned the scale. Among the numerous unworked
claims lying higher up the gulch, beyond and adjoining our proposed
location, we found three whose ownership we traced, through a number of
transfers apparently designed to hide something, to the Lawrenceburg.
Barrett, a fine, keen-witted young fellow whose real name, if I might
give it, would be familiar to everybody in the West, was the first to
draw the probable inference.
"Jimmie, you've got the longest head in the bunch," was his comment;
this because I had chanced to be the one to make the discovery of the
well-concealed ownership. "At some period in the history of the
Lawrenceburg, which is one of the oldest mines on Bull Mountain, its
owners have had reason to believe that their pay streak was going to
run the other way--to the northeast. They undertook to cover the
chance by making these locations quietly, and through 'dummy' locators,
on the other side of the spur."
"But how did they come to overlook this patch we're figuring on?" asked
Gifford, the carpenter.
"That was somebody's blunder," Barrett offered. "These section plats
we have been studying may have been made after the locations were
staked out; in all probability that was the case. That sort of thing
happens easily in a new country like this. It was an oversight; you
can bet to win on that. If those Lawrenceburg people had any good
business reason for locating these claims beyond us, they had precisely
the same reason for covering this intervening bit of ground that we are
going to grab."
Gifford took fire at once; and if I didn't it was only because we were
not yet in possession, and I thought there might be many chances for a
slip between the cup and the lip. This talk took place at night in
Barrett's room in town, and before we separated our plans were fully
made. Gifford and I were to start at once--that night, mind you--for
Bull Mountain to locate a claim which should cover as completely as
possible the entire area of the irregular triangle. The location made,
the carpenter and I were to work the claim as a two-man proposition.
Barrett was to retain his place in the bank, so that the savings from
his salary might add more capital. We even went so far as to christen
our as yet unborn mine. Since we were picking up--or were going to
pick up--one of the unconsidered fragments after the big fellows had
taken their fill of the loaves and fishes, we proposed to call our
venture "The Little Clean-Up."
I shall always remember Barrett's good-natured grin when the meeting
was adjourned.
"You two will have the hot end of it," he remarked. "You're going to
do the hard work, and all you've left me is a chance to do the starving
act. Right here is where I see myself giving up this palatial
apartment and going into a boarding-house. For heaven's sake, eat
light, you two. We may have to sink a hundred feet in solid rock
before we find anything."
We went in light marching order, Gifford and I; and the early dawn of
the following morning found us driving our location stakes and pacing
off the boundaries of the new claim. I like to remember that we were
neither too new to the business, nor too much excited, to be careful
and methodical. The triangular patch of unclaimed ground lay along the
slope, with the apex of the triangle pointing toward the hill-hidden
Lawrenceburg. Ignoring any vein directions which might develop later
on, we laid off our location to fit the ground, taking in all the space
we could legally hold; which would be, of course, only the triangle,
though our staking necessarily overlapped this area on all sides. If
we should be lucky enough to make a strike, ground space for our
operations was going to be at a premium, and at the very best there
wasn't an inch of room to spare.
I don't know just why we should have been afraid that anybody would
have been foolish enough to try to "jump" an unworked claim; but we
were, and we decided at once that we would not leave the ground
unwatched now that our stakes were driven and our notice duly posted.
Accordingly, Gifford went back to town to make the needful land-office
entry and to bring out the supplies, tools, and a wagon-load of lumber
for a shack, leaving me to stand guard with an old horse-pistol of
Gifford's for a weapon. It was after dark when I heard the wagon
trailing up the gulch, and I had had nothing to eat since morning. But
I was free and hopeful--and happy; with the nightmare past becoming
more and more a thing to be pushed aside and comfortably ignored.
Looking back at it now, I can see that our venture was haphazard to the
tenderfoot degree. Having built a sleeping shack out of the lumber, we
picked a place for the prospect shaft solely with reference to its
convenience on the hillside. But for this we had plenty of precedents.
What the miners of any other district would have called sheer miracles
of luck were the usual thing in the Cripple Creek region. From the
earliest of the discoveries the region had been upsetting all the
well-established mining traditions, and the tenderfoot was quite as
likely to find mineral as was the most experienced prospector; more
likely, in fact, since the man with everything to learn would not be
hampered by the traditions.
The top layer of fine gravel which answers for soil in the district
carries gold "float"--"color," a Californian would say,--in numberless
localities over an area of many square miles; a fact which was well
known long before any one knew of the underlying treasures which have
since been taken out of the deep workings. But there are no vein
outcroppings on the surface, and the prospector's first task is to
uncover the bed-rock by sinking one or more test pits through the
gravel. In some one of these shallow shafts he may--or may not--make
his discovery. If successful, he will find, on some well-cleaned
surface of the bed-rock, a fine broken line; a minute vein in many
instances so narrow as to be discoverable only by the use of a
magnifying-glass; and that discolored line will be his invitation to
dig deeper.
By the morning of the second day Gifford had built our rude windlass,
and the work of shaft sinking was begun. The gravel layer varies in
thickness in different parts of the district, ranging from a few inches
in some places to many feet in others. In our case we were less than
waist-deep in the hole, and had not yet set up the windlass, when we
reached the upper surface of the bed-rock.
Generally speaking, the Cripple Creek district is a dry region as to
its surface, but we were lucky enough to have a trickling rivulet in
our gulch. It was dark before we had carried water in sufficient
quantity to wash off the uncovered bed-rock bottom in our hole, so we
turned in without knowing what we had found, or whether or not we had
found anything.
I was cooking the bacon and pan-bread the next morning when Gifford,
who had gone early into the hole with a bucket of water and a
scrubbing-brush, came running up to the shack with his eyes bulging.
"We--we've got it!" he gasped. "Where's that magnifying-glass?"
I left the bacon to burn if it wanted to and ran with him to the
shallow shaft. He had scrubbed the solid rock of the pit bottom until
it was as bare as the back of a hand, and across the cleaned stone,
running from southwest to northeast, there was a thin line of
discoloration showing plainly enough as a fissure vein. Gifford dug a
little of the crack-filling out with the blade of his pocket-knife and
we examined it under the magnifier. We were both ready to swear that
we could see flecks and dust grains of free gold in the bluish-brown
gangue-matter; but that was purely imagination.
I think neither of us knew or cared that the bacon was burned to a
blackened crisp when we got back to it. The breakfast was bolted like
a tramp's hand-out, and before the sun was fairly over the shoulder of
the eastern mountain we were back in the hole with hammer and drills.
The frantic haste was entirely excusable. While it was true that a
greater number of the Cripple Creek discoveries had widened
satisfactorily from the surface down, becoming more and more profitable
at increasing depths, it was also true that some of them had begun as
"knife-blades" and had so continued. What Gifford and I did not know
about drilling and shooting rock would have filled a library of
volumes; none the less, by noon we had succeeded in worrying a couple
of holes in the solid shaft bottom, had loaded them, and were ready for
the blast.
If any real miner should chance to read this true and unvarnished tale
of our beginnings he will smile when I confess that we cut the fuses
four feet long and retreated a good quarter of a mile up the gulch
after they were lighted. In our breathless eagerness it seemed as if
we waited a full half-hour before the shallow hole vomited a mouthful
of broken rock and dust, and a dull double rumble told us that both
shots had gone off. Gifford was a fairly good sprinter, but I beat him
on the home run. The hole was half full of shattered rock and loosened
gravel and we went at it with our bare hands. After a few minutes of
this senseless dog-scratching, Gifford sat down on the edge of the pit
and burst out laughing.
"I guess there ain't any manner o' need for us to go plumb locoed," he
said. "We've got all the time there is, and a shovel will last a heap
longer than our fingers."
I may say, in passing, that this attitude was characteristic of our
carpenter partner. He was a country boy from Southern Indiana; a
natural-born mechanic, with only a common school education. But he had
initiative and a good gift of horse sense and balance, and in the
troublous times that followed he was always our level-headed stand-by.
Acting upon his most sensible suggestion, we took our time, spelling
each other in shoveling out the debris. The two shots driven in
opposite corners had deepened the shaft over two feet. When the new
bottom of the hole was uncovered we nearly had a return of the
frenzies. The discolored line of the vein had widened to four inches
or more, and the last of the broken rock shoveled out was freely mixed
with fragments of the bluish-brown gangue-matter.
A hasty estimate assured us that we had a sufficient quantity of the
lode matter for a trial assay, and we spent the better part of the
afternoon picking out pieces of the ore on the small dump and in
chipping more of them from the exposed face of the seam. It was
arranged that one of us should take the samples to town after dark, for
the sake of secrecy, and we put in what daylight there was left after
our sample was prepared drilling another set of holes--though we did
not fire them.
Leaving Gifford to stand guard over what now might be something well
worth guarding, I made my way down the mountain after supper with the
two small sacks of selected samples. True to his promise, I found
Barrett already established in a rather cheap boarding-house. He was
surprised to see me so soon, and more than surprised when I showed him
the specimens of bluish rock.
"Say--by George!" he exclaimed; "that sure does look like the real
stuff, Jimmie; though of course you can't tell. Have you roasted any
of it?"
I was so green a miner at that time that I did not know what "roasting"
meant. Barrett had a tiny coal-stove in his room with a bit of fire in
it. Even the June nights are sometimes chilly at the Cripple Creek
altitude. Selecting a bit of the stone he put it upon the fire-shovel
among the coals and while it was heating listened to my recounting of
the short and exciting story of the "find."
When the piece of bluish stone had been roasted and cooled we did not
need the magnifying-glass. It was covered with a dew of fine pin-point
yellow globules. Barrett went up in the air as if his chair had
exploded under him. "My God, Jimmie!" he choked, "it's--it's a
_bonanza_!"
The next step was to have authoritative assays made, and together we
took the two small sacks of ore to the sampling works, which, at that
time, were running day and night. We waited in the office while the
tests were being made. The result, which came to us well past
midnight, was enough to upset the equanimity of a wooden Indian. Some
of the selected samples carried values as high as twenty-five dollars
in gold--not to the ton; oh, no; nothing like that: _to the pound_!
Barrett had the situation firmly by the neck when we left the sampling
works.
"I have a sort of provisional arrangement with Mr. Conaughy, our
president, and I can quit the bank without notice and explain
afterward," he said. "I'm going right back with you to-night. Three
of us will be none too many to handle this thing when the news gets
out."
We went to his room first and loaded up with blankets, working clothes,
a shot-gun and a generous supply of fixed ammunition. On the long
tramp up the mountain, Barrett, who was older in the district than
either Gifford or myself, told me what we might expect.
"You needn't think we are going to be allowed to dig that hole without
the toughest kind of a fight, Jimmie," he predicted. "The minute the
news gets loose, we shall be swamped with 'interferences,' relocations,
law-suits, process servers and constables, to say nothing of the
strong-hands and claim-jumpers. The Lawrenceburg people will doubtless
claim that mistakes were made in their surveys, as perhaps there were.
They've got a first-class fighting man for a superintendent; as I
happen to know: a man who won't stick at anything to carry his end."
"But it's our strike," I urged.
"It's ours if we can hold it," was the sober reply. "Our best play is
to keep the thing absolutely dark until we can dig out enough money to
give us a fighting fund. That's where we're lame. Our bit of capital
won't go anywhere when they drag us into the courts."
Our shortest way to the new claim led us in sight of the Lawrenceburg
workings. They were running night shifts, and though it was now well
along in the small hours, the plant was in full swing. Like most of
the mines within trolley distance of the towns, it had no miners'
village, the men going back and forth at the shift-changing hours. But
the superintendent lived at the plant, and there were a few bunk houses
and one other detached cottage.
There was a light in one room of this cottage as we passed, and Barrett
called my attention to it.
"There's a man in that shack that I hope we may be able to get, if we
ever grow big enough to hire him," he said. Then he added, quite
irrelevantly: "He has a daughter, and I'm telling you right now,
Jimmie, she's a peach."