The five men shut in the mine with Chet’s father were all married and
their wives and children made the noisiest group of all at the mouth of
the Silent Sue mine. The rough men standing about tried to comfort them;
but there was not much of a comforting nature to say.
There were plenty of men for the work of rescue; indeed, there were so
many in each two-hour shift that they got in each other’s way. Chet
Havens had put the situation concisely and to the point: It would take
more than a week to dig down to the opening of Number Two tunnel;
meanwhile, how would the entombed miners live without food or water?
Mr. Fordham had not returned and there was nobody for the two boys to
confer with. The mine foreman was doing all that seemed possible. It was
a question whether what he did was of much use.
Six men in a stoppered tunnel, with no ventilation and nothing to eat or
drink, were not going to live long. Chet doubted if any of them would be
alive at the week’s end.
“Wait till father comes,” Dig said, almost sobbing, and seeing how badly
his chum felt. “Perhaps he’ll know some other way to get into that
drift.”
“What way?” demanded Chet. “He doesn’t know any more about the mine than
we do.”
“Maybe from the old upper level—”
“Bah! you know better,” Chet said sharply. “The pay-streak they followed
first in this mine is only fifty feet down. It petered out before your
father and mine bought into the Silent Sue—you know that, Dig.
“No chance! The two levels have never been connected, save by the shaft
itself. Your father can’t dig any faster than these men are digging. If
there were only a way—
“Say, Dig! there’s the Crayton Shaft. Don’t you remember it? Father told
me the Number Two tunnel on the lower level was pretty close to the old
Crayton diggings. He always said that if the Crayton people had kept on,
they’d have struck pay-ore again. But they got cold feet and father
bought a share in the claim cheap. Now there’s been a fellow around
after it. I heard father talking about it.”
“What good will it do to go down the Crayton shaft?” demanded Dig
hopelessly.
“I don’t know—I don’t know,” admitted Chet. “But I can’t stand here
idle. I’ll go crazy—_crazy!_ I must do something! Maybe the wall
between the tunnel of the Crayton mine and our Number Two is not very
thick. I’ve got a compass, and I know this hill like a book. So do you.
Let’s take a pick and shovel and ride over there.”
“Oh, Chet! I’m afraid you’re stirring yourself all up over nothing,”
returned his chum. “I’ll help you, of course; but I’m afraid it won’t
help us any to go over there.”
“We’ll not know till we try.”
“Will you take some of the men to help us?”
“Two can do all that can be done,” answered Chet, rather shrinking from
taking even Rafe Peters into his confidence. It seemed such a forlorn
hope!
“If the blast went off at the end of the tunnel, it’ll be full of
rubbish and take a lot of digging to get through it.”
“No. Our tunnel isn’t going head-on into the Crayton drift. I understood
father to say that Number Two tunnel passed the old diggings by. My
goodness! if he only remembers it, and knows just where the Crayton
tunnel is, maybe he and the boys will start digging that way at once.
Come on, Dig! Let’s ride over.”
Chet ran to the tool shed and seized a pick and shovel; the latter he
tossed to his chum and then sprang astride Hero with the pick in his
hand. This time his friend had no trouble in getting Poke, for he had
fastened that uneasy animal.
There was so much excitement around the mouth of the shaft that nobody
noticed the two boys riding away into the woods trail. They knew the way
perfectly. Indeed, there were not many trails in the vicinity of Silver
Run and the mountain that towered over it which were not familiar to
Chet Havens and Dig Fordham.
This mountain had been deeply scarred by the miners of the old days. One
side of the hill had been eaten away by the hydraulic mining which was
carried on when gold was first discovered here. How much of the rich
silver ore, which the early prospectors did not recognise, had been
wasted in the first excitement of finding gold, will never be known.
For this really was a hill of silver. The veins of ore streaked it like
the arteries in a human body. The Silent Sue claim chanced to contain
seemingly exhaustless veins; while the old Crayton mine soon petered
out.
Once the wall of the forest had shut out the view of the shaft
buildings, the boys were likewise out of sight of all human habitations.
The old trail was rough and in places washed away, or filled up with
leaves or other litter.
Now and again as they rode along they came to deep excavations in the
hillside, old pits which had been abandoned almost as soon as dug. There
was neither gold nor silver in these places, although the indications on
the surface had toled the early miners on to make the excavations.
At first the prospectors had been after gold, and gold alone. The gold
dust was mixed with a black, rotten ore that the early miners did not
recognise as sulphuret of silver, which is nothing more than the pure
metal in a decomposed state. The prospectors complained loudly of the
“nuisance” of this black stuff. It was worse than the black sand found
always in gold diggings, for such sand does not interfere with the
amalgamation of the gold ore.
This “black stuff” interfered with the mining of gold, and the diggings
got a bad name because of it. It was some years after the cessation of
gold digging in the mountain above Silver Run (which was not then on the
map) that the nature of this rotten silver ore began to be understood.
The Comstock Lode had then excited world-wide attention, and men who had
been among those who had worked the claims on this mountain remembered
that the same kind of ore that proved so rich in the Comstock claim had
been thrown aside and anathematised by the miners in these old diggings.
So there was another “rush.” Silver Run was established. In some
relocated claims the silver ore was seen to be almost inexhaustible, as
in the Silent Sue, the mine owned by the fathers of Chet and Digby.
Silver Run had become a town of some importance. There were other
industries besides mining. It was a well governed town, and although on
the verge of the wilderness it had easy communication with cities in a
more advanced state of civilisation.
When the boys were about two miles from the Silent Sue mine, they came
upon one of the abandoned camps. There was little left to mark its
occupancy by the prospectors of the old regime save several caved-in
shafts and some rusted, corrugated-iron shacks.
From the rusty stove-pipe chimney of one of these, smoke was curling,
and Digby said:
“I bet that’s where the lame Indian hangs out. You know, he’s old
Scarface’s grandson.”
“I know. John Peep. That’s what the boys used to call him when he came
to school.”
“You don’t want to call him that to his face,” chuckled Dig. “It makes
him madder’n a hen on a hot skillet. He’s got some fancy Indian name
that he prefers to be called by. Oh, he’s a reg’lar blanket Indian—and
Scarface does odd jobs of cleaning out cellars and whitewashing!”
“Poor fellow!” said Chet, scarcely giving his mind to the matter of the
Indian youth. “It must be tough to limp around on a game leg. One’s
shorter than the other. You don’t often hear of a lame Indian.”
“No. Father says that in the old days if an Indian baby was born
deformed they got rid of it right away. And when Indians used to fight
they fought so hard that they usually killed each other. That’s why
there were seldom cripples among them.
“But this chap—Ah! there he is.”
A figure appeared at the open door of the shack. It was that of a tall,
slim boy, very dark, with red under the skin on his cheekbones, and
straight, long black hair. His “scalp lock” was braided; the rest of the
hair was well greased and hung to his shoulders.
The shoulders of the Indian youth were bare. Indeed, he wore nothing at
all in the way of a garment above his waist. Dig waved his hand to the
Indian, and shouted:
“Hello, John! You livin’ up here all alone?”
The Indian youth made no immediate reply, but walked out to the trail on
which the boys were riding. Chet was impatient of delay, but Dig pulled
in his horse. The lame boy stepped between the chums and Chet looked
back, restraining Hero.
“What are you boys doing up this way?” asked John.
“We’re in a hurry,” said Chet quickly. “Going over to the Crayton
shaft.”
“What for?”
“Say! you’re kind of nosey, I think,” said Dig frankly. “What do you
want to know for?”
But John Peep was looking at Chet and seemed to expect his answer to
come from that individual.
“There’s been an accident at the shaft of my father’s mine,” Chet said.
“There is a cave-in, and my father and five other men are shut down in
the mine. We’re going to see if we can’t get into the Silent Sue mine
from the old Crayton shaft. You know the Crayton shaft, John?”
“I know,” said the Indian boy, nodding. “You can’t get down there.”
“Why can’t we?” cried Dig explosively. “You don’t know what you’re
talking about!”
“You can’t get down there,” repeated the lame Indian, but stepping out
of the way when Dig urged Poke along the trail.
“Why not?” asked Chet again.
“You can’t get down there,” said the Indian for a third time, and then
he turned and hobbled back toward the shack.
“You can’t get any sense out of _him_,” grumbled Dig, in disgust. “He’s
got some bug in his head. Maybe he thinks this whole mountain belongs to
him because it used to belong to his tribe. Old Scarface told me this
mountain was ‘bad medicine’ and nobody used to come here but the Indian
medicine men in the old days. You couldn’t hire Scarface to come up
here.”
The two white boys were riding steadily on over the rough trail. Chet
kept looking back at the abandoned camp, for he was puzzled. He wondered
what John Peep could have meant.
“There!” he exclaimed suddenly. “See that?”
“See what?” demanded his chum, twisting his neck in order to look behind
him.
“There’s a man with that fellow—a white man.”
“With the lame Indian?” queried Digby. “Why, so there is! Funny! Can’t
be one of the boys following us?”
“Of course not. Nobody could follow us so fast on foot. There! They are
staring after us. I never saw that man before; did you?”
“I don’t remember. He’s not a miner—or, he isn’t in working togs. Give
it up, Chet.”
So did Chet. He had something much more important to think of. While the
men at the shaft of the Silent Sue were endeavouring to hoist out the
rubbish that had fallen into the bottom of the shaft, the young chap
believed there was a better chance to get into the lower tunnel of the
mine by following the old drift of the abandoned diggings.
In half an hour the two lads reached the mouth of the Crayton shaft.
Neither of the boys had been this way for a year.
Something had happened since their last visit to the spot. The old log
windlass was overturned, and when they left their horses and ran to the
mouth of the shaft they saw that a part of the shoring had given way and
hundreds of tons of earth and rock had fallen into the pit, completely
choking the way to the old mine.