FOOTLOOSE AND FREE
When Larry and Purdick thought they had found the place where Dick had
stopped and made a fire, and had then had some mysterious thing happen
to him, they soon realized that they couldn’t hope to trail the burro
hoofprints very far in the growing dusk. But they did manage to follow
them to the nearest crossing of the little stream, and here, where
a patch of wash sand made the record as plain as a book page, Larry
heaved a sigh of relief.
“If we didn’t have such good forgetteries――both of us――we needn’t have
been scared up so badly, Purdy,” he said. “Don’t you remember what Mr.
Broadwick told us yesterday――about two men coming over here ahead of us
with supplies for the Little Eagle in Dog Gulch? They are the fellows
who made the fire and didn’t put it out――not Dick.”
“How can you tell?” asked the town-bred one.
“You can see for yourself,” Larry returned, pointing down at the bed of
damp sand. “There were at least four burros making those tracks, and
Dick has only two. See how the hoofprints overlap, again and again?”
Purdick looked and saw.
“That’s better; that means that Dick is still somewhere on ahead of
us.”
“Yes, and we won’t catch up with him before morning. We can’t follow
this trail in the dark. We’ll just have to camp for the night and make
the best of it.”
Since this seemed to be the only sensible thing to do, they picked out
a place with a big cliff-like boulder for a background. Here, after
they had lopped some tree branches for a bed and built a fire which,
reflected from the big rock at their backs, promised to supply the
warmth of the blankets they didn’t have, they ate the two remaining
bacon sandwiches.
“Not much of a supper,” Larry commented, munching his share of the
short ration; “not after the tramp we’ve had. But it’s a lot better
than none.”
“If it didn’t sound like trying to be funny, I’d say you said a
mouthful――both ways from the middle,” said little Purdick with a grin.
“I was just thinking what a beautiful fix we’ll be in if we don’t
happen to find Dick and the eats in the morning.”
“Yes,” said Larry. “We brag a good deal about our civilization, and
how much we’ve gained on the old cavemen; but I’ve often wondered what
would happen to one of us up-to-date folks if he were dropped down in
the middle of a wilderness like――well, like this, for instance, with
no tools or weapons and nothing to eat. Would we have to go hungry
to-morrow if we shouldn’t find Dick?”
“Golly!” said Purdick, “I’m sure _I_ should. Why, we haven’t seen a
single eatable thing since we started out yesterday noon!”
“Game, you mean? I suppose that’s because we weren’t looking for
it. But there is plenty of game in these mountains, just the same;
big game, at that. What I’ve wondered is if the up-to-date man,
bare-handed, could manage to catch any of it.”
“Not this one,” laughed Purdick.
“Fish, then?” Larry suggested. “These clear mountain streams are full
of trout, you know.”
“Yea!” Purdick chuckled. “Imagine a fellow catching trout with his
hands!”
“I’ll bet it could be done――if the fellow were hungry enough,” Larry
maintained. “But I’m not going to sit up and argue with you. I’m all
set to turn in and sop up a little more sleep.” And with that he
burrowed in the tree-branch bed and turned his back to the fire.
It was deep in the night that Larry, sleeping the sleep of the seven
sleepers, felt himself shaken by the shoulder.
“Wake up!” Purdick was saying, and his teeth were chattering. “L-l-look
over there――across the creek!”
Larry raised his head and looked. The camp-fire, backed up by a
good-sized windfall log they had dragged down to it, was burning quite
brightly, but its circle of light did not reach much beyond the little
stream brawling and splashing a few feet away. On the opposite side of
the stream a thicket of young cedars came down close to the water’s
edge, and in the heart of the thicket two balls of green fire appeared,
steady and unflickering.
“Speaking of game,” Larry whispered; and then: “Keep perfectly still
until we see what it is.” And, as a measure of safety, he reached
cautiously for the short-handled axe.
They did not have to wait long. In a moment there was a little stir
in the thicket and the balls of fire began to move slowly. Larry,
more wood-wise than his bedmate, knew that what they were seeing were
the eyes of some animal that had been attracted by the light of the
camp-fire, but he couldn’t tell what it was. If it should happen to be
a bear, lean and famished from its winter hibernation――as Larry well
knew, there were still grizzlies to be found in the Hophras.... But at
this point he pulled himself together and let good old common sense get
in its word. The eyes were too high up from the ground to be those of a
bear, unless the animal were standing upon its hind legs, and, besides,
they were too large to figure as the little pig-like eyes of any kind
of a bear, even a grizzly.
While they kept perfectly still and looked, the animal to which the
eyes belonged came out of the thicket and advanced cautiously to the
water’s edge. It proved to be a mule-deer, a full-grown buck, easily
recognizable by its large ears, brown-and-white face, and short,
black-tipped tail. After staring fixedly at the camp-fire for a few
moments, it drank at the stream and then moved away, vanishing as
silently as it had come.
“Gee!” said Purdick, as the deer disappeared, “are they as tame as all
that?”
“Tame enough, when they don’t get the human scent,” Larry replied. “The
wind was wrong for him. Dick and I saw them often last summer in the
Tourmaline. How about the fire? Are you sleeping warm enough?”
“Toasty,” Purdick asserted, and with that they burrowed again.
The dawn was breaking golden in the upper air when they turned out
the next morning and Larry regretfully dipped water with his hat to
extinguish the splendid bed of coals that should have figured as their
breakfast fire.
“It’s a rotten shame to spoil a fire as good as this,” he said, “but we
haven’t anything to cook on it.”
“How many miles to breakfast?” Purdick asked.
“You tell, if you can,” Larry laughed, and they started out to follow
the trail.
Fortunately for the empty stomachs, they didn’t have to go very far
before they saw Dick and the burros coming over a wooded hill to the
right. At the “reunion,” as Dick called it, they quickly built a fire;
and while the coffee water was heating and the bacon sizzling in the
pan, Dick told how he had lost his way and found a hermit.
“We were up before day, and Daddy Longbeard――I don’t know any other
name for him――came along with me far enough to make sure that I
wouldn’t get off the track again,” he wound up. “When he left me, two
or three miles back yonder in the woods, he was still acting like a man
half stunned――over what I told him last night about his mine.”
“Sure you didn’t make any mistake about that ore, are you?” Larry
inquired.
“Not a chance! It’s a telluride, all right enough, and plenty rich, I
should say, from the size of the button I got out of one small test
sample.”
“Well, I guess you paid for your night’s lodging, anyway,” Purdick put
in; but Dick Maxwell laughed and shook his head.
“No; it was the other way round; the old man paid me for telling him
about his bonanza. See here what he gave me.” And he showed them the
worn map with the magic circle on it.
Of course, this revival of the romantic possibilities wrapped up in
the summer’s outing stirred up some excitement, and the coffee boiled
over and threatened to put the fire out while they were studying the
old map. It was Larry who reached up and took hold of things and
brought them down to the every-day level again.
“The Golden Spider is all right, fellows, if we should happen to run
across it, but we all know that there isn’t one chance in a million,
not even with the help of Daddy Longbeard’s circle――which, after all,
is only a guess, as he said it was. We don’t want to get bitten by
the gold prospector’s bug and go crazy like so many of ’em do. We’re
out for good old practical business, and we mustn’t forget that Mr.
Starbuck is paying the bills. Let’s eat breakfast and then hit the grit
for the summer work field.”
“Right you are, Larry, old scout!” said Purdick, getting back on his
job of frying the breakfast flapjacks. “I can begin to see now how easy
it is for people to go nutty on this gold proposition. Turn to and eat
these pancakes while they’re hot――they’ll stay with you longer that
way.”
By and large, it was Larry’s summing-up of their job that morning
that set the pace for the next three weeks. During that interval
they crossed the inter-mountain region by easy stages, prospecting
in the hills as they went, and learning, by actual contact with it,
something of the wonderful geological structure of the country they
were traversing. In no part of the United States does the earth’s
crust exhibit more marvelous wrinklings and upheavals and apparent
contradictions than in the mountain regions of western Colorado and
eastern Utah, and each day brought new discoveries and fresh problems
to attack.
“How in the world anybody with no schooling could hope to find anything
valuable in these rocks and clays is beyond me,” said little Purdick,
one evening when, by the light of the camp-fire, they had been poring
over the “System of Mineralogy,” and trying by blowpipe and acid tests
to identify what seemed to be a specimen of wolframite, the base which
furnishes the metal tungsten.
“That’s easy,” Dick returned. “The average prospector is like old Daddy
Longbeard. He is looking for gold or silver, and he is able to identify
a few of the commoner ores by sight. But a good many of his discoveries
have been by sheer accident, like that of the lead carbonates at
Leadville.”
“How was that?” Purdick wanted to know.
“The way I’ve heard it was that the man who made the discovery was
looking for gold-bearing quartz. One way to find a ‘mother’ vein is to
take a stream that shows gold ‘colors’ when you pan out the sand in it,
following this trail of ‘colors’ up-stream until you come to a place
where the ‘colors’ don’t show any more, and then you prospect in the
hills roundabout.
“This prospector was working up one of the streams east of Mount
Massive, and he noticed that when he washed for gold ‘colors’ there
were leavings in his pan; a black sand that was too heavy to wash over
with the common sand when he shook the pan. Just out of curiosity, he
saved some of this sand and threw it into his specimen sack along with
some quartz samples he had; did that and then forgot it. Afterward,
when he took his samples to an assayer to have them tested, he dumped
the sack on the bench in the laboratory, black sand and all, and the
assayer was thorough enough to test the sand as well as the quartz. And
that’s what made the city of Leadville.”
“But good land!” said Purdick, “there are more gold-and-silver-bearing
‘ites’ in this book than anybody could ever learn to know by sight
unless he crammed for them!”
“Sure,” Dick replied. “There was old Daddy Longbeard, digging for
goodness only knows how long in rich gold ore without ever so much as
suspecting it.”
Larry Donovan grinned. “All of which is interesting, but unimportant,”
he put in. “The fact remains that we’ve been out three weeks and
haven’t yet found anything worth staking a claim on.”
Dick stretched his arms over his head and yawned luxuriously.
“But the other fact remains that we’re having one bully good time.
Purdy, you old rat, you’re actually putting some flesh on your bones.
And I’ll bet a hen worth fifteen cents that not an ounce of it is
fat――nothing but good old hard, stringy muscle.”
Purdick drew a long breath. “It’s the greatest thing that ever happened
to me,” he said. “The hardest thing I’m going to have to learn when we
go back to the towns is how to sleep under a roof again. But speaking
of finding things: I picked up a queer-looking piece of stuff down
there by the creek where I went to get a drink this afternoon. I forgot
to show it to you,” and he took the specimen from his pocket and passed
it around.
Looked at through the magnifier, or even without the glass, the
specimen was a very beautiful thing. It looked like a sliver of
limestone, one side of which was covered with a thick incrustation of
fine little red crystals, six-sided prisms glowing with a peculiar
lustre that was neither garnet nor ruby, but a shade between. Since
they were out to test every unfamiliar substance they came across, the
blowpipe was put into service once more, and Dick blew until his cheeks
ached.
Heated in the original mass there was nothing doing, so they powdered
a few of the crystals in the porcelain mortar, mixed the powder with
borax and salt of phosphorus, and tried it again. In the oxidizing
flame――the hottest flame that can be produced with the blowpipe――a
clear glass bead, dark yellow in the heat, was quickly formed, and this
bead, when cooled, turned to a light yellow color.
Larry was turning the leaves of the mineralogy book and running a
finger over the subject heads.
“I was reading about something that did that way, just the other day,”
he said, “but I can’t remember what it was. By jing!――what the dickens
was it? Something that’s dark yellow, hot, and light yellow when it
cools. Shucks! If I didn’t have such a good forgettery――――”
Purdick had been watching the experiment narrowly. “Try it in the
reducing flame, Dick,” he suggested.
Dick did it. With the tip of the blowpipe withdrawn just outside of the
candle flame he held the yellow glass bead inside of the tip of the
inner cone of combustion that is intensified by this manner of blowing.
Almost at once the bead turned a brownish color, and Dick carefully
withdrew it to see what the cooling reaction would be. The change which
took place was marvelous and very beautiful. As it lost its heat the
little bead turned to a brilliant chrome green.
“I’ve got it!” snapped Purdick. “Larry, look in the index for
vanadinite!”
Larry searched, found, turned to the proper page.
“It says that vanadates, in the absence of other colored metallic
compounds, may be detected by their reaction with borax and salt of
phosphorus before the blowpipe――and goes on to describe just what we’ve
been looking at.”
“Hooray!” Dick applauded, “a vanadium mine! This begins to look like
business. Think you could find the place again, Purdy?”
“I’m sure I can,” was the ready answer. “It’s about a mile back over
our trail of to-day. You remember when we were coming along on that
little mesa bench above the creek, and I scrambled down the slope to
get a drink and joined you again about a quarter of a mile farther
along? Well, that was the place――right along the creek.”
“We’ll go back there to-morrow morning, shan’t we, Larry?” Dick asked.
“If this stuff is there in any workable quantity we ought at least to
stake off a claim. What’s vanadium worth as an alloy for tool steel and
such?”
Larry took a well-thumbed little note-book from the pocket of his shirt
and consulted it.
“Don’t know what it’s worth now; but a while back, ferrovanadium,
carrying thirty-five to fifty per cent. of vanadium, ran from two
dollars and a half to five and a half a pound――some valuable little
metal, I’ll say!”
“It sure is!” exclaimed Purdick, with his eyes widening. “If we can
only find enough of it to make it worth while.... I wish I’d had sense
enough to look around a little when I found that bit. But I didn’t.”
“Never mind; there’s another day coming,” said Larry, “or if there
isn’t, all the vanadium in the world won’t make any difference to us or
to anybody,” and he began to fix the fire for the night and to unroll
the blankets, while Dick put the testing apparatus away in its leather
carrying case.
Their camping place for that night was in a small pocket gulch rimming
in a little flat watered by a trickling rill that dripped over a low
cliff at the back of the pocket. The flat afforded good grazing for
the pack animals, there was wood on the rocky slopes for the fire, and
red-fir tips for the beds.
In the morning, while Purdick was getting breakfast, Larry and Dick
prepared the notices to post on the vanadium claim, leaving blanks
in which to write in the boundaries and landmarks when they should
determine what they were. As Larry was sharpening the stakes to be
driven to mark the claim, Dick called attention to the narrow entrance
to the pocket gulch, and said, “Say, Larry; what’s the matter with
cutting one of those lodge-pole pines out of that clump up there and
letting it fall across this doorway? That’ll make a corral out of the
gulch, and we can leave the burros and the camp dunnage when we go back
to stake off the claim. Everything will be perfectly safe here.”
Larry looked up from his stake trimming. What Dick said was quite true.
With a tree felled across the gulch entrance for a barrier, the burros
wouldn’t stray, though of that there was little danger anyway, so long
as there were grass and water in the pocket. As to the safety of the
camp dunnage there was even less question. With the exception of a few
abandoned prospect holes, the inter-mountain wilderness in which they
had been tramping and camping for three weeks had yielded no signs of
human occupancy, past or present. Still, Larry hesitated. The first of
the unwritten laws of the camper in any region is never to separate
himself very far from his supplies and his means of transportation.
“I don’t know about that, Dick. Maybe I’m a lot too cautious, but――――”
“Pshaw!” Dick broke in, “everything will be as safe as a clock! We
haven’t seen a sign of a human being for three weeks, and I’ll bet
there isn’t one within forty miles of us this very minute. If we fix
it so the jacks can’t stray off, there isn’t a thing that can happen.
Besides, we may want to stay down there at that place of Purdy’s
projecting around for a good part of the day, and if we do, we’ll have
our camp ready to come back to without having to make it again.”
Larry laughed.
“You’re just too lazy to draw your breath, Dickie; that’s all that is
the matter with you,” he said; but he didn’t offer any more objections
to Dick’s plan, and after breakfast the tree was cut down to block the
gulch entrance, and the three of them started back for the vanadium
prospect, leaving the camp just as it was, save that they were woodsmen
enough to put out the camp-fire, and thoughtful enough to wrap up the
rifles and the dunnage and put the packs oh top of a flat boulder where
the jacks wouldn’t trample on them in their grazing ramblings. For the
day’s work they carried only a pick, a shovel, the geologist’s hammer
and the short-handled axe.
Notwithstanding Purdick’s confident assertion, it proved to be a good
bit more than a mile back to the mesa foot where he had picked up the
bit of vanadinite. Worse than that, after they reached the approximate
place he found that he couldn’t identify the spot where he had found
the specimen. It was a limestone outcrop, and there was a stretch of
a quarter of a mile or so along the creek edge where one place looked
very much like another.
So, when the time came for them to sit down and eat the noon snack they
had brought with them, they were still looking for the deposit of which
the specimen was a fragment and were beginning to wonder why it was so
hard to find.
“You’re a hoodoo, Purdy,” said Dick, joshing the town-bred one. “Are
you right sure it was yesterday, and not the day before, when you
picked up that piece of stuff?”
“Of course I am!” was the indignant reply. “And it was right along
here, too. If I’d had any idea it was ore――――” He stopped short and
made a dive for something lying at his feet. “There!” he broke out
triumphantly, “here’s another piece of it, right now!”
There was no mistaking the fact. There are few crystals in the world
more beautiful than those of the lead vanadates, and once seen, they
are not easily forgotten. The newly found fragment was evidently a chip
off the same block, as Dick put it, and, hurriedly finishing the snack,
they renewed their search for the “mother vein.”
After all, the vein or deposit was not so hard to locate, now that
they knew where to look for it. Of course, they had no means of
ascertaining the extent of the deposit or its commercial value, if
it had any, in a place so remote from civilization. None the less,
they staked it off accurately, located it as well as they could on
the Geodetic Survey map upon which they were carefully tracing their
wandering course from day to day, and posted the notice, protecting
it as well as they could by digging a niche in the shaley cliff and
pegging the notice at the back of it where it would be at least a
little sheltered from the weather.
All this business of stepping off and measuring, and finding landmarks,
and making a sketch of the mesa and creek bottom, and searching
carefully over the surrounding area for other possible deposits of the
mineral, took most of the afternoon. And after all was done, Larry was
pessimistic enough to say that it was probably a day wasted.
“I did a good bit of reading-up on these rare metals last week while we
were waiting for Mr. Starbuck,” he said, “and from what I could learn,
the reduction processes――getting the metal out of the ore――is the long
end of the pole with all of them; vanadium and all the rest. So, unless
your mine is big enough to warrant the building of a reduction plant on
the spot――and not many of them are――you’re up against the proposition
of transporting a ton of the stuff to some chemical works, and out of
the ton they’ll get maybe a pound or so of the metal.”
“Well,” said Dick, “what of that?”
“Use your old bean,” Larry invited. “Suppose your vanadium is worth
five dollars and a half a pound――which is the highest price I found
quoted. We’re at least forty miles from the nearest railroad, which
means forty miles of jack-freighting for the ore. How far would five
dollars and a half, or twice or three times that much, go toward
paying the cost of jack-freighting a ton of stuff over forty miles of
no-trail-at-all?”
“Oh, gosh!” said Dick. “When it comes to throwing cold water, you
can beat a hydraulic mining outfit! Let’s go back to camp and cook
us a real supper. I’m hungry enough to eat a piece of boiled dog.
We can come back to-morrow with the tools and dig the ten-foot deep
‘discovery’ hole that we’ll have to make before we can record the
claim.”
The return mile-and-considerable-more seemed even longer now than it
had in the morning. In the search for the vanadium deposit they had
done a good deal of scrambling and climbing, and the mild excitement
of the search had kept them from realizing how much ground they were
covering.
“I’ll bet you couldn’t wake me with a dynamite blast after I turn in
to-night,” Dick was saying as they approached the entrance to the
pocket gulch, “and I wouldn’t lug this pick another mile if it was the
only one in the world. But see here! What’s been happening?”
They had reached the pine-tree which had been felled to block the
entrance to the pocket gulch, and it looked as if somebody had driven
an army truck over it. Its branches were broken down and twisted off,
and the trunk itself was scarred and barked as if the suppositious
truck wheels had been shod with spurs.
Thoroughly alarmed at the evidence of so much violence, they forgot
their weariness and hurried on into the gulch. What they found when
they reached the camp site was as appalling as it was bewildering. The
packs had been dragged from the top of the big flat rock where they had
left them in the morning and were literally torn to pieces, with their
contents scattered all over the place; that is, what wasn’t gone was
scattered.
For when they came to look, they found that many things were missing.
The entire stock of bacon was gone, the flour and meal sacks had been
torn open and their holdings spilled and trampled into the ground,
the few boxes of hard biscuits they had been saving against a bread
emergency had been broken open and rifled, the salt lay in the ashes of
the camp-fire, the sugar was gone, and the cotton sack in which it had
been carried looked as if it had been ground through a sausage mill; in
short, all the food supplies they had, excepting only those that were
in tight tin cans, had been either stolen or destroyed.
“Well!――of all the blithering earthquakes!” Dick gasped. “Who or what
under the sun would do a thing like this to us?”
Larry did not speak. His eyes were blazing, and he seemed to be holding
his breath. Deep down inside of him the Donovan temper, a wild,
Berserk rage that had given him no end of trouble in his boyhood, was
struggling to get the upper hand. But little Purdick was still able to
talk.
“And even this isn’t the worst of it!” he said. “The burros are gone!”