Gifford, sitting in the darkness with his back to the windlass and the
big old-fashioned holster revolver across his knees, held us up promptly
and peremptorily when we came over the spur. Seeing Barrett with me, he
knew pretty well what the results of the assay were before we told him.
At the edge of the shallow pit we held a council of war--the first of
many. Gifford fully agreed with Barrett that the most profound secrecy
was the first requisite. Though he was new to the business of
gold-mining--as new as either the bank teller or myself--he could
prefigure pretty accurately what was before us.
"Here's where we'll have to ride and tie on the snoozing act," was his
drawling comment. "We mustn't leave her alone for a single minute, after
this; and it's got to be one of us, at that. We couldn't afford to hire
a watchman if we had a million dollars."
Under the ride-and-tie proposal I volunteered to stand watch for the
remainder of the night; and after the other two had turned in I took
Gifford's place, with the windlass for a back rest and Barrett's shot-gun
for a weapon.
I was not sorry to have a little time to think; to try in some fashion to
readjust the point of view so suddenly snatched from its anchorings in
the commonplace and shot high into the empyrean. It was the night of the
ninth of June. Three months earlier, to a day, I had been an outcast; a
miserable tramp roaming the streets of a great city; broken in mind, body
and heart; bitter, discouraged, and so nearly ready to fall in with
Kellow's criminal suggestion as actually to let him give me the money
which, if I had kept it or spent it as he directed, would have committed
me irretrievably to a life of crime.
Looking back upon it from the vantage point gained by a few hours' toil
on a bare Colorado mountain-side, that ninth of March seemed to have
withdrawn into a fathomless past. I was no longer a hunted vagabond; I
was breathing the free clean air of a new environment, and in the narrow
pit beside me a fortune was waiting to be dug out; a fortune for the
ex-convict no less than for the two who had never by hint or innuendo
sought to inquire into their partner's past. It was too good to be true;
and yet it was true, contingent, as I saw it, only upon our fortitude,
discretion and manful courage.
Nevertheless, there was still one small disturbing note in the music of
the spheres. Barrett's mention of Phineas Everton as one of our nearest
neighbors disquieted me vaguely. It was quite in vain that I reasoned
that in all human probability Everton would fail to identify the bearded
man of twenty-eight with the schoolboy he had known ten or twelve years
earlier. He had taught only one year in the Glendale High School, and I
was not in any of his classes. Polly had known me much better. She had
been in one of the grammar grades, and was just at an age to make a
big-brother confidant of her teacher's brother--my sister being at that
time a teacher in the grammar school.
Upon this I fell to wondering curiously how Polly, a plain-faced,
eager-eyed little girl in short dresses, could have grown into anything
meriting Barrett's enthusiastic description of her as a "peach." Also, I
wondered how her bookish, studious father had ever contrived to break
with the scholastic traditions sufficiently to become an assayer for a
Western mine. But I might have saved myself this latter speculation.
Cripple Creek, like other great mining-camps, served as a melting-pot for
many strange and diverse elements.
At the earliest graying of dawn I roused my partners and took my turn
with the blankets, too tired and drowsy to stay awake while Gifford
cooked breakfast. I was sound asleep long before they fired the two
holes Gifford and I had drilled the previous afternoon, and they let me
alone until the noonday meal was ready on the rough plank table. Over
the coffee and canned things Barrett brought our bonanza story up to date.
"It's no joke, Jimmie," he said soberly. "We've got the world by the
ears, if we can only manage to hold on and go on digging. The lead has
widened to over six inches, and we have two more sacks of the stuff
picked out and ready to take to town."
"Any visitors?" I asked.
"Not a soul, as yet. But we'll have them soon enough; there's no doubt
about that. If our guess is right--that the Lawrenceburg people meant to
cover this hillside in their later locations--we'll hear from Bart
Blackwell before we are many hours older."
"Blackwell is the superintendent you spoke of when we were coming up last
night?"
"The same. I don't know why he hasn't been here before this time. They
must surely hear the blasting."
We had our visitor that afternoon, while Barrett and I were working in
the hole and Gifford was sleeping. Luckily for us, Barrett never for a
single moment lost sight of the need for secrecy. We were drilling when
Blackwell's shadow fell across the mouth of the pit, but we had taken the
precaution to cover the gold-bearing vein with spalls and chippings of
the porphyry, and to see to it that none of the gold-bearing material
showed in the small dump at the pit mouth.
Blackwell was a short man but heavy-set, with a curly black beard and
eyes that were curiously heavy-lidded. As he leaned over the windlass
and looked down upon us he reminded me of one of the fairy-tale ogres.
"Hello, Bob," he said, speaking to Barrett, whom he knew. "Quit the
banking business, have you?"
"Taking a bit of a lay-off," Barrett returned easily. "We all have to
get out and dig in the ground, sooner or later."
Blackwell laughed good-naturedly.
"You'll get enough of it up here before you've gone very far," he
predicted. "Just the same, you might have come by the office and asked
permission before you began to work off your digging fit on Lawrenceburg
property."
"We're not on Lawrenceburg," said Barrett cheerfully.
"Oh, yes, you are," was the equally cheerful rejoinder. "Our ground runs
pretty well up to the head of the gulch. I'm not trying to run you off,
you know. If you feel like digging a well, it's all right: it amuses
you, and it doesn't hurt us any."
Barrett pulled himself up and sat on the edge of the hole.
"Let's get this thing straight, Blackwell," he argued. "You've got three
claims in this gulch, but we are not on any one of them. Look at your
maps when you go back to the office."
"I know the maps well enough. We cover everything up to the head of the
gulch, just as I say, joining with the original Lawrenceburg locations on
the other side of the spur." Then, suddenly: "Who's your friend?"
Barrett introduced me briefly as Jim Bertrand, late of the Colorado
Midland construction force. Blackwell nodded and looked toward the shack.
"Any more of you?" he asked.
"One more; a fellow named Gifford. He's asleep just now."
Blackwell straightened up.
"It's all right, as I say, Bob. If you three tenderfoots want to come up
here and play at digging a hole, it's no skin off of us. When you get
tired we'll buy the lumber in your shack and what dynamite you happen to
have left, just to save your hauling it away."
"Thanks," said Barrett; "we'll remember that. We haven't much money now,
but we'll probably have more--or less--when we quit."
"Less it is," chuckled the square-shouldered boss of the Lawrenceburg.
"Go to it and work off your little mining fever. But if you should
happen to find anything--which you won't, up here--just remember that
I've given you legal notice, with your partner here as a witness, that
you're on Lawrenceburg ground."
Barrett's grin was a good match for Blackwell's chuckle.
"We're going to sink fifty feet; that's about as far as our present
capital will carry us. As to the ownership of the ground, we needn't
quarrel about that at this stage of the game. You've given us notice;
and you've also given us permission to amuse ourselves if we want to.
We'll call it a stand-off."
After the superintendent had gone I ventured to point out to my
drill-mate that the matter of ownership had been left rather indefinite,
after all.
"Diplomacy, Jimmie," was the quick reply. "The one thing we can't stand
for is to be tied up in litigation before we have contrived to dig a few
of the sinews of war out of this hole. Blackwell's little pop-call warns
us to use about a thousand times as much care and caution as we have been
using. I saw him scraping the dump around with his foot as he talked.
He is one of the shrewdest miners in Colorado, and if he had got his
sleepy eye on a piece of the vein matter as big as a marble, it would
have been all over but the shouting. You can see where all this is
pointing?"
"It means that we've got to make this hole look like a barren hole, and
keep it looking that way--if we have to handle every piece of rock that
comes out of it in our fingers," I said.
"Just that," Barrett asserted, and then we went on with the drilling.
We arranged our routine that evening over a supper of Gifford's
preparing. We planned to take out each day as much ore as the watch on
duty could dig, to sort it carefully, sacking the best of it and hiding
the remainder under the shack. Then, during the night, one of us would
carry what he could of the sacked ore down the mountain to the sampling
works to be assayed and sold on the spot.
The sheer labor involved in this method of procedure was something
appalling, but we could devise no alternative. To have a wagon haul the
ore to town would, we were all agreed, be instantly fatal to secrecy; and
at whatever cost we must have more money before we could dare face a
legal fight with the Lawrenceburg people. Looking back upon it now, our
plan seems almost childish; but the enthusiasm born of the miraculous
discovery was accountable for the cheerful readiness with which we
adopted it.
Gifford took the first turn at the ore-carrying while Barrett and I
shared the night watch, two hours at a time for each of us. The
carpenter came back just before daybreak, haggard and hollow-eyed, but
profanely triumphant. There had been no questions asked at the sampling
works, and his back-load of ore had been purchased on the strength of the
assay--doubtless with a good, round profit to the buyers. He had limited
his carry to seventy-five pounds, and he brought back the sampling
company's check for $1355 as the result of the day's work!
Speaking for myself, I can say truly that I lived in the heart of a dream
for the next few days--the dream of a galley-slave. We worked like dogs.
Added to the drilling and shooting and digging, there was the all-night
job of ore-carrying--at which we took turn and turn about--for one of us.
Though I am not, and never have been, save in the parole starvation time,
what one would call a weakling, my first trip to town with eighty-five
pounds of ore on my back nearly killed me. A thousand times, it seemed
to me, I had to stop and rest; and when I got down it was always an open
question whether or not I could ever get up again with the back load in
position.
As it came about, in the regular routine, mine was the third turn at the
carrying, and by this time the superintendent of the sampling works was
beginning to have his curiosity aroused.
"So there are three of you, are there?" he commented, when he had
examined and recognized the sacked samples. "Any more?"