ZED’S TREASURE TROVE
“The best rainbow trout we get around here are in Lost Chance Gulch,”
remarked Mrs. Murray, the following morning at the breakfast table, and
she looked up in surprise as a ripple of mirth went round the table.
“It isn’t anything, motherie,” Jean said, “only that we were all
thinking of the Gulch, and then you spoke of it. Do you want some of the
trout to-day?”
“It would make a fine mess for supper, Jeanie.”
“Then we’ll go over and get some. I think we’d better take the surrey,
girls, instead of riding. We can drive up pretty close to the cabin, and
it will be easier.”
About an hour later, they started off, with a well-filled lunch basket,
and smaller ones for trout.
“I hope we’ll catch more prehistoric bones than fish,” said Sue,
happily.
“That’s right, hoodoo us from the start,” Ted protested. “Hunt for your
old bones. I shall fish diligently.”
It was pleasant riding in the old surrey, with Peanuts and Clip going at
a lively pace over the road. They had to take a different route from the
riding trail in order to find a way down into the gulch, but an hour’s
journey brought them to the cabin where old Zed had lived and died.
Through the deep gulch ran the creek, over rocks, and half-sunken trees
here and there. Cottonwoods grew in the cool stretch of land between the
high walls on either side of limestone, and blue shale, and sandstone.
You could trace the course of the creek by the cottonwoods, and already
their seeds had spread air-planes of down, and were turned into wind
travelers.
As the land struck sharply into the towering palisades of rock, the
pines grew thickly wherever they could find a foothold. Down in the
gulch the bright sunlight never struck with full force. Both its heat
and radiance were tempered by the green gloom of the spruces, and the
great ferns that grew everywhere.
The door of the little low cabin was unlocked, and the girls entered it
with curious feelings of respect, almost as if it had been a shrine.
There were three windows, and many shelves around the one room. A rock
fireplace was built into the wall. There was an old pipe on the shelf
above it, and a Bible bound in calf, the back stitched in place where it
had been torn. Polly opened it, and read aloud the inscription on the
fly leaf.
“Zeddidiah Reed, from his grandmother, Comfort Annabel Reed, on his
twentieth birthday.”
“What a darling name,” exclaimed Isabel, “Comfort Annabel! Can’t you see
her, girls, with a little lace cap on, and silk half mitts.”
“Silk half mitts. What would a pioneer’s wife be doing with silk half
mitts,” said Ruth, teasingly. “That’s like the miner in Arizona, whose
Boston cousin sent him fur ear muffs for a Christmas present.”
“No squabbling allowed down here,” protested Polly, seriously. “Here are
all his books, girls. Wasn’t he careful of them? Here’s a pickaxe, too.”
“That’s an old-time poll pick,” said Jean, examining it. “You don’t find
them any more. We’d better take it for investigations while we’re on the
hunt for bones.”
“These upturned rocks that seem to stand on end,” Ruth said, when they
left the cabin and started along the bed of the creek, “look like
Stonehenge, or the rocks in the Garden of the Gods, don’t they, Miss
Jean?”
“I think they may have come from the same era, or system,” answered
Jean. “It is in the limestone, I know, that the remains of mammals were
first discovered.”
“Sandstone and shales,” Ruth said. “It’s all the same age, but the
systems are different.”
“How do you know so much about it?” asked Ted, suspiciously. “Have you
been looking it up while we slept, grandma?”
“I love rocks,” Ruth replied, with her slow, whimsical smile, and little
uplift of her chin as she looked through her glasses at them. “I think
they are the first primer of the world, where we get our A B C’s, don’t
you, Miss Jean?”
“Oh, won’t the Doctor have a good time prowling around with Ruth,” Polly
exclaimed. She clambered ahead of the rest, trying to keep up with
Peggie, who went like a mountain goat from rock to rock, and up the
steep inclines.
“How about trout?” called Sue. “Who said trout?”
“We’ll have time on our way back. How far is it, Peg?” called Miss
Murray.
“Most there now,” came back Peggie’s voice far up among the rocks.
At last they caught up with her. It was directly under a great,
beetle-browed crag, with mats of ferns overhanging from its edges like
lace. There had been a wash-out, or some sort of natural force that had
carried away with it a mass of the hillside at this point. The great
roots were exposed, with earth clinging to them still, and vegetation
trying to get a foothold. But Peggie did not stop. As soon as she caught
sight of the girls coming through the undergrowth towards her, she
turned and dipped into the cavernous mouth of the great earth opening.
“This is what I meant looked like big bone spools,” she told them. “Don
and I found them.”
Not a word did any of the others speak, but stood in the great opening,
and stared at Peggie’s find. Still imbedded in the earth and rock they
were, but they certainly were bones, and most gigantic bones at that.
Polly and Ruth went up, and examined them closely, and so did Miss
Murray.
“It isn’t a dinosaur,” Ruth said, judiciously. “It’s a something else.”
“I should say it was,” cried Sue. “If that’s only part of its backbone,
I should not like to have had it chase me over the range. I think it’s a
cave bear.”
“That is certainly a section of vertebræ, Polly,” Jean said. “How
strange it is to stand and think how many years ago it was alive.”
“They are very valuable,” Polly replied.
“Leave it to Polly to find the red silk thread that leads to the pot of
gold,” laughed Ted. “I know that’s a mixed-up metaphor, but who cares.
Let’s go back and fish now, with peaceful minds, and send word to the
Doctor that we have a specimen worth thousands.”
“We?” Sue repeated. “Goose! This belongs to Chief Sandy, and Peggie gets
the reward for finding it. Isn’t that so, Miss Jean?”
Jean laughed, but said nothing. It really seemed so strange and unreal
to her that she could not think directly what the end would be. She had
known, of course, that Wyoming was the only known haunt of the
prehistoric dinosaur in America, and had been duly proud of it. Also,
she had always rather objected to New York walking away with the best
specimen found, but Jean was State proud, as her mother said, and
believed that the spoils belonged to the original owners on a strict
basis of equity.
“We’ll ride over to the Alameda to-morrow, girls,” she said, “and tell
Mrs. Sandy and the Chief, as Sue calls him. That’s a splendid name for
him too, by the way, Sue. He is the Chief, and we’ll call him that.”
“Chief Scout,” suggested Polly.
“Yes. It will please him, too. Now let’s go back to the creek, and start
our trouting.”
But Polly hesitated.
“I wish I could send the Doctor just a little piece of the bone, so he’d
know for sure.”
“Send him some of the rock around it, and just a splinter,” suggested
Ruth.
It was hard knocking pieces off, but they finally got a small bit of the
blue shale, and a piece of the smaller bone, only a splinter, but enough
to show an expert eye what was there.
Then back they climbed down the steep walls into the gulch again, and
rested for a while in the cabin, as it had been a long and tiresome
climb through the underbrush, and over the high rocks. Polly took a
pail, and went after water, clear and cold from the spring they could
hear falling back of the cabin. Old Zed had chosen his home site with an
eye to comfort and convenience. After a good rest, and something to eat
from the lunch basket, they started out to try their luck for the first
time as trouters.
Peggie was chief instructor now, and enjoyed her office thoroughly. She
showed the girls how to select their flies from the store Don had put in
the baskets for them.
“I heard him talking about the flies, and I thought he meant real ones
for bait,” said Isabel soberly, as she adjusted a neat little red
snapper of a fly. “I haven’t as much respect for trout as I had if
they’re taken in by these things.”
“You’ll respect them when you eat them,” said Peggie. “Come ’way out on
the rocks the way I do, just as far as you can. Why don’t you take off
your shoes and stockings, Polly? You may get a wetting before we’re
through. I always do. Sue, don’t stand still. You have to troll, and
move up-stream. Look at me.”
The girls watched her as she cast in, and played the fly lightly,
choosing the best spots, and making her way from rock to rock up-stream
slowly. Pretty soon they were deep into the delicious art of trolling,
and each one at once developed individual taste in the proper way to
catch trout. Polly was a regular gamester, like Peggie. With Ted
following her, she chose the sun-dappled spots where the water was
rather quiet, to cast in. Finally, Jean drew out the first trout, and
they all went back to take a look at it, for, as Ruth said, in her dry
way, it was a good idea always to know what you were fishing for, and
how it looked.
After that, the basket began to grow heavier. Ruth and Jean took turns
carrying it, slung in sportsmanlike fashion over their shoulders by a
strap, and Peggie and Polly proved the best fishers. Ted and Sue were
too fond of the rough water, although they also landed several trout.
After a time they went back to the cabin, and took the lunch basket out
on the rustic log-bench Zed had made in front of his spring. It seemed
as though a lunch had never tasted better than that one, Polly declared,
and the conversation was a lively mixture of rainbow-trout tactics and
the right way to dig out a possible dinosaur from its antediluvian
resting place.
“Do you suppose it has been there since the flood?” asked Ruth,
earnestly.
“Now, Ruth, I object,” protested Ted, eating her last cucumber and
lettuce sandwich with relish. “Of course it’s been here since the flood,
and long before. Let’s ask the Doctor when he comes when it is correct
to hold a birthday anniversary for a dinosaur.”
“What mystic law,
Oh, Dinosaur,
Has cast you at our very door?”
said Polly, slowly picking out her rhyme, and Ted picked it up joyously.
“Give us thy paw,
Dear Dinosaur,
We’ll give it a friendly rub,—”
“Rub?” queried Ruth.
“I want it to rhyme with club. Now, you’ve knocked it all out of my
head, and it’s so hard for me to get an inspiration.” Ted retired into a
melancholy reverie, and kept repeating under her breath,
“Rub-tub-club-dub-hub.”
“Time to go, girls,” Jean said. “Wait a minute. Let’s gather some wild
flowers, and put in a tumbler on old Zed’s table.”
It was a beautiful tribute they left to the old man’s memory, wild
roses, and ferns, and wild convolvulus mingling with the rich dark green
of spruce boughs over the mantel. The only sounds in the gulch were the
songs of birds, and the falling water. It was so beautiful and quiet,
the girls could hardly bear to break the charm by leaving, but the sun
was slipping westward, and it was a long trip back.
“We’ll ride over to the ranch to-morrow, and tell the Chief,” said Jean,
and on that promise they went back, each in her own way building a
day-dream out of the bones of the gulch treasure.