TOMATOES AND PEACHES
Pretty stiff from their forced march and the chill of the night spent
on the cold mountain top without fire, the three castaways――for so
they were now calling themselves――were up with the dawn. Now that they
had daylight to show them their surroundings, they saw that by going a
little farther along the mountain to the left they might have camped in
timber and had wood for a fire.
“More spilt milk,” Dick lamented when he saw how they had missed what
little comfort they might have had. “I guess we are more or less
tenderfoots yet.” And then he went over to the clump of dwarfed trees
and gathered some wood for the coffee fire, coffee being the only thing
they had to cook.
Inasmuch as they were by this time pretty well starved out on a diet
of tomatoes and peaches, they agreed to call this breakfast on the
mountain top the emergency they had been economizing for; so Purdick
opened the can of corned beef and served it with potato chips.
Fortified by a breakfast which was at least stimulating in quality,
even if it did lack something in quantity, they prepared for the
descent of the western slope.
From the western brow of the mountain they had a magnificent view of
the world at large, as Dick phrased it: mountains and plains, and
then more mountains and plains, stretching away almost to infinity
and backgrounded in the dim distance by the serrated range of the San
Miguels. But it was the immediate foreground that interested them
most. At the foot of the peak upon which they were standing there was
a range of hogback hills, looking, from their height, no larger than
a plow-turned furrow in the landscape; and just beyond the hogback,
on the edge of a bare plain that was exactly the color of well-tanned
buckskin, lay the little cattle-shipping station of Natrolia, a
collection of odd-shaped dots, with one round dot larger than the rest
which they took to be the railroad water tank.
“There she is,” said Dick. “If we only had an aeroplane, or even a
bunch of gliders, it wouldn’t take us very long to coast down there. It
looks as if a good gun ought to be able to drop a bullet on that water
tank from here.”
“It’s a lot farther than it looks,” Larry put in.
“Don’t you know it!” said Purdick; and then: “Say, isn’t that a
railroad train just coming into the town?”
What he was pointing at looked like a tiny worm barely moving along a
dimly defined line on the borders of the buckskin plain, and trailing
off from the head of the worm there was a thin black smudge――the smoke
from the engine’s stack.
“Our east-bound Flyer,” Dick said, naming the train. Then: “It doesn’t
seem believable that that crawling worm of a thing will be in Brewster
by dinner-time this evening, does it? But we can’t stay here all
morning admiring the scenery, grand as it is,” he went on. “Which way
do we aim for the go-down, Larry――north or south?”
The question was asked because it was perfectly apparent that they had
to aim either one way or the other in order to find a place where the
descent could be made. In the straight-ahead line there was nothing
doing. As far as they could see in either direction――which wasn’t very
far because the mountain summit was as crooked as a snake――the western
slope was as near to being an abrupt precipice as it could be and still
figure as a slope.
Larry shook his head, and it surely was a tricksy fate that led him
to say: “There doesn’t seem to be much choice; perhaps we’d better go
south.” This when, all unknown to them, less than half a mile distant
to the north lay that excellent trail by which they could have reached
Natrolia early in the afternoon――and by so doing would have changed the
entire complexion of any number of things.
But of the trail and its possibilities they knew nothing, so they
turned――fatefully, as we say――to the southward, skirting the brow of
the mountain, without gaining a single foot of descent, for two long
hours before they came to a slope which seemed at all practicable for
the burros. Even then their progress was exasperatingly slow. Time and
again one of the jacks would slip and roll down into some gulch from
which it took no end of time and labor to rescue it; and when that
didn’t happen, they would be heading canyons too steep to be crossed,
or going a mile or so out of their way to find a gulch through which
they could chimney down from one bench of the great mountain to another.
Struggling manfully with all these difficulties, and even cutting out
the noon halt to save time, night overtook them long before they were
low enough down to get another sight of the Natrolia hogback, and they
had to camp.
“Thank goodness, we’re down in the grass altitudes again, anyway,”
said Dick as he pulled the packs from the burros’ backs and turned the
little beasts loose to graze. “I don’t know how long a jack can go
without feeding, but we’ve certainly given Fishbait and Lop-ear a tough
siege of it since yesterday noon.”
Larry grinned. “‘A fellow-feeling makes us wondrous kind,’ doesn’t it?”
he quoted. “Nothing like an empty tummy to make you sympathize with
other things that can’t get enough to eat. How about it, Purdy? Where
do we land for supper?”
“Tomatoes and peaches. I’ll cook the tomatoes, if you’d rather have ’em
hot.”
“Oh, my suffering ancestors!” Dick groaned. “I’ll never be able to look
a peach-tree or a tomato-vine in the face after this! I’m as hollow as
the biggest bass drum that was ever built, and you tell me you’ll pass
me a plate of sloppy peaches with tomatoes on the side! Let’s have a
barbecue and roast old Fishbait.”
They joked one another about it over the camp-fire, as good sportsmen
should, but the hard work and slender fare were really beginning to
take hold. And the worst of it was, the battle wasn’t won yet; a
fact upon which Larry enlarged to Dick after the camp-fire had been
back-logged for the night, and Purdick, once more wearied to the point
of collapse, was asleep in his blankets.
“I didn’t want to load Purdy up any heavier than he is loaded already,”
was the way Larry began on the disturbing fact, “but I have a horrible
suspicion that we are a good way from Natrolia and a fresh supply of
eats yet. I’ve been kind of keeping tab on our side-steppings all day,
and we’ve made a pretty stiff lot of southing. Don’t you think so?”
“I know it,” Dick replied gloomily.
“You’re still up to it, aren’t you?” Larry asked.
“Up to another day of it, I guess, though I’ll have to confess that I
don’t feel much thicker than a sheet of paper through the middle.”
“My fix, too,” said Larry. “But that’s all right; we’re tough and we
can stand it. Purdy’s the lad I’m worrying about. Did you notice that
he was eating almost nothing at supper?”
Dick nodded. “You’d say a fellow couldn’t possibly starve past the
getting-hungry point on two days of short rations; but Purdy isn’t
normal yet――not outdoor normal. We’ll have to watch him to-morrow, and
if we see he’s breaking, we’ll just dump one of the burro loads and
make him ride.”
Larry shook his head. “You don’t know Purdy as well as I do. That
little rat is the clearest kind of grit, all the way through. He’ll
drop dead in his tracks before he’ll ever let us help him over the
bumps.”
“Huh!” said Dick, spreading his blankets for the night. “When the time
comes, we won’t ask his royal permission. We’ll just hog-tie him on old
Fishbait’s back, if we have to. Good-night. I’m going to dream of all
the good things there are to eat in this world.”
The morning of the third day of enforced abstinence dawned as
beautifully as nearly all of their mornings had, thus far, and for
breakfast they finished the canned things and――figuratively speaking
at least――licked the cans. Purdick seemed all right again after his
night’s rest, but neither Dick nor Larry guessed what an effort he had
to make to swallow his small share of the peaches and tomatoes.
“Feeling equal to a few more miles this morning, Purdy?” Larry asked,
as they were putting the pack saddles on the burros.
“I’m still staying with you,” returned the small one gamely. Then:
“You mustn’t worry about me, Larry. There have been times in the past
when I had to go short on the eats for a good deal more than two days
hand-running, and I never thought anything of it. I’ll get my second
wind, after a little.”
“I’m not worrying,” said Larry; but that was not strictly true.
With a start fairly made, Dick took careful compass bearings, utilizing
every open space they came to as a lookout from which to determine,
if possible, the amount of southing they had made during the previous
day. As the day wore on without bringing anything that looked like a
familiar landmark into view, the case began to look rather desperate.
By the middle of the afternoon they were down in a region of foot-hills,
and the going was much easier; but though they still kept working
persistently north and west, no gap in the hills opened to show them the
buckskin-colored plain they had seen from the mountain top. By this
time, Dick and Larry both were growing more than anxious about Purdick.
Twice Dick had made that suggestion about unloading one of the jacks and
turning it into a riding animal, but Purdick had stoutly fought the
idea, saying that he was getting along all right. But both of his
hardier companions could see plainly that he was putting one foot before
the other by a sheer effort of will.
At four o’clock Larry called a halt, ostensibly to let the burros feed
upon a patch of luxuriant grass in the ravine they were at that time
traversing, but really to give Purdick a chance to throw himself down
and rest――which he promptly did. When it came time to go on again, the
small one said his say briefly.
“I’m all in, fellows,” he said. “You leave me a couple of the blankets
and go on without me. When you find the town――if you ever do find
it――you can come back after me. As things stand now, I’m only a drag on
the wheels.”
“Yes; I think I see us leaving you!” Dick scoffed. “You’re going to get
up and climb on old Fishbait’s back. We can’t be far from Natrolia now,
and he’ll carry you all right.”
Purdick sat up and his pale cheeks flushed suddenly.
“What do you take me for?” he snapped, but there was something
suspiciously like a sob at the end of the snap. “I told you both before
we came west that I was no good, and now I’m proving it. It――it just
_kills_ me to think that I can’t stand up and take things like other
fellows――like you two do!” And with that, he whirled over and buried
his face in the grass.
Larry drew Dick aside and spoke in low tones.
“It’s up to us,” he said. “He won’t ride, and I doubt if he could stick
on the burro’s back if he tried. Stay here with him while I scout up to
the top of that knob over there and see if I can find out where we are.”
Left alone with Purdick, Dick sat down and waited. For a long five
minutes Purdick lay on his face and made no sign, but at last he
turned over and raised himself on an elbow.
“Where’s Larry?” he asked.
Dick pointed. “There he is――climbing to the top of that hill for a
look-see. Feeling any better?”
Purdick sat up and locked his fingers around his knees.
“I’m so mad I can’t see straight, Dick. It’s fierce to be tied down to
a no-account body like mine. I’m not worth the powder it would take to
blow me up!”
“Oh, hold on!” Dick protested. “This has been a pretty stiff tug for
all of us. I’m not feeling so very much of a much, myself, just now,
and neither is Larry.”
“But you’re not beefing about it, either of you,” Purdick put in.
“Neither are you,” Dick asserted. “When it comes down to pure sand,
you’ve got more than either of us. You’ve been tramping on sheer nerve,
all day long. I know it, and Larry knows it.”
By this time, Larry was coming back down the hill, and he didn’t look
as if he had seen anything encouraging from the top of it.
“What luck?” Dick asked; and Larry shook his head.
“Nothing but more hills and hollows. No sign of any plain, any town, or
any railroad.”
Little Purdick heaved himself to his feet, getting up like a camel――one
pair of joints at a time.
“Come on,” he said. “There are only a few more hours of daylight left,
and I’ll make myself last that long if it kills me.”
When he said this, neither of the others tried to argue with him. They
knew it wouldn’t do any good. So the line of march was taken up again,
upon a course as nearly due north as the nature of the region would
permit. By holding this direction they knew absolutely that they must
come to the railroad, sooner or later; and once in touch with that,
they wouldn’t, or couldn’t, be very far from the town.
Much to Dick’s surprise, though not so much to Larry’s――for Larry knew
him best――Purdick held out bravely; and when it was finally decided
that they must camp for the night, which they did just before dark,
Purdick helped gather wood, and himself made the fire for the boiling
of the coffee water: a final brewing of coffee being the only thing
they had left in the stripped commissary.
After the warm drink had been served out, and the jacks picketed for
the night, there was nothing more to do, and they all turned in to let
a long night’s sleep do what it would toward relieving the hunger ache
and fitting them for another surge on the morrow.
It was maybe a couple of hours later that Purdick, always a light
sleeper, and now particularly so when even the slightest doze-off made
him dream of banquets, found himself sitting bolt upright and listening
to a noise that was not unlike the never-to-be-forgotten earth-shaking
thunder of the cloud-burst in the canyon. While he was trying in a
bewildered half daze to determine what it was, a bright glare of light
flashed among the trees, the noise deepened to a crashing clamor that
brought the two others out of their blankets with a bound, and all
three of them saw, at a distance of not over two hundred yards at the
farthest, a long passenger-train shooting past the mouth of the little
ravine in which they were camped.
“E-e-yow!” Dick yawned, as the noise scuttled away in the western
distance. “Wouldn’t that pinch your ear good and hard? Here we stopped
two short steps and a jig dance from the railroad track and never knew
it! Listen!”
What they heard this time was the mellow shout of a locomotive whistle
blown in a station signal.
“Natrolia,” said Larry. “And it can’t be more than a couple of miles
away, at that! What time is it, Dick?”
Dick, being nearest the firelight, looked at his wrist watch.
“Five minutes of nine,” he announced.
Larry shook himself out of his blankets and stood up.
“I’m the biggest of the bunch――and the toughest, I guess. You two
fellows lie down and take another cat-nap while I saunter into town and
buy a few morsels of grub. If our whistle guess is right, I ought to be
back inside of an hour.”
Of course, there was a generous protest to this, urged immediately by
both of the others, but Larry argued them down. There was no need of
all going when one could easily bring out provisions for a single meal,
and if they should all go, they’d have to take the jacks, making the
tired beasts stumble along for whatever distance it might be over the
ties and ballast of a railroad track in the dark. So Larry had his way
and went alone, taking the haversack.
Left to themselves, Purdick and Dick didn’t go to sleep again; they
groped around and got more wood and built up a good fire so as to
have a bed of cooking coals if Larry should happen to bring something
that needed cooking. That done, they sat around and waited, and about
the time they were thinking that Larry might possibly have reached
Natrolia, he came tramping back into the circle of firelight, with the
haversack loaded to bursting dimensions, and with an armful of packages
besides.
“Already?” Dick shouted, jumping up to relieve the burden-bearer.
“You said it. It’s less than a mile――just around the shoulder of this
butte behind us. The store was shut, but I found the proprietor over at
the hotel, and he opened up for me. Get out your pots and pans, Purdy.
I’ve got some stuff here that’ll warm the cockles of your cookee heart.”
Charles Purdick, Lawrence Donovan and Richard Maxwell, junior, may
live to sit down to many banquets――at least we hope they may――but it
is safe to say that that late supper, cooked and eaten under the stars
in the little valley back of Natrolia, will always figure for them as
the most gorgeous meal of a lifetime. Larry had not stinted his buying.
There were potatoes to fry, and a thick, juicy beefsteak to be cut into
squares and broiled on forked twigs, hunter fashion, before the fire,
and more coffee to brew, with sugar to sweeten it and the unheard-of
luxury of a can of condensed milk for cream, and bread――two loaves of
good, home-made bread that the storekeeper’s wife had made Larry take
when she heard his story of their starving time. And to top off with,
Purdick fried flapjacks made out of the carton of prepared pancake
flour that Larry had thoughtfully added to the haversack load.
By all the rules of the eating game they should have made themselves
beautifully sick, stuffing this way at the end of three days of short
rations and no rations. But youth, Mother Nature, and a healthy,
vigorous, outdoor life――taking them all together――can sometimes defy
all rules; and the only result of the big feed was to make the feeders
sleep like logs; and even Purdick, the lightest sleeper of the three,
didn’t awaken until a long freight train, clattering past on the
near-by track a little after sunrise, aroused him.
Being so near to Natrolia, they decided not to wait to cook a camp
breakfast, and, loading the jacks, they trailed into the little
cattle-shipping town, gave the burros a feed in the shipping corral,
and then made an assault upon the so-called “hotel,” taking it by storm
and putting away a breakfast of ham and eggs and potatoes and coffee
and cakes with near-maple syrup quite as heartily as if the gorgeous
banquet of the night before had already vanished into a limbo of dim
but precious memories.
After breakfast came the re-stocking of provisions for a return to
the field on the other side of the mountains, and from the genial,
“old-timer” storekeeper who supplied them they learned that they had
gone a long way around to miss a perfectly good and practicable trail
over the Little Hophras; one which would take them back――as it would
have brought them over――in something less than a day’s tramping.
Dick laughed when the good-natured, bearded man behind the counter told
them this. “I guess we ought to be bored for the hollow-horn, all of
us, Mr. Wilkins,” he said, “for not looking around a little before we
struck out. But the Government maps don’t show any such trail.”
“No,” replied the storekeeper; “there wasn’t any when the maps were
made.”
“You’re sure it’s passable?” Larry asked.
“Plum’ sure. Three men came in over it two days ago, did just what you
boys are doin’――stocked up――and went back. They’re prospectin’, like
yourselves, I take it.”
All three of the boys exchanged glances at this mention of three men.
“Did you know any of those men, Mr. Wilkins?” Larry inquired.
“No; kind of a rough-lookin’ bunch, and one of ’em was a cripple,
though he got around on one leg and a crutch sprier than either of the
other two.”
Larry took Dick aside while Purdick was checking the list of supplies
with the storekeeper.
“They’re our three,” Larry said in low tones. And then, impatiently:
“I wish there were some way of letting those scamps know that they are
barking up the wrong tree; that we don’t know any more about the Golden
Spider than they do!”
[Illustration: “I wish there were some way of letting those scamps know
that they are barking up the wrong tree.”]
“There doesn’t seem to be any way,” Dick countered. “But I can tell you
one thing, Larry: I’m not going back into the mountains where they are
without something to defend myself with, if it’s nothing more than a
potato popgun.”
“I’m with you on that,” said Larry. “Let’s look over Mr. Wilkins’s gun
showcase and see if we can find anything that we can afford to buy.”
They moved up to the front of the store, where there was a wall-case of
guns and pistols. Almost at once they saw three Winchesters standing
side by side in the rack, all alike, and all looking as if they were
second-hand. Larry went closer and examined the stock of one of the
guns carefully.
“That’s my rifle, Dick,” he whispered. “There’s that bruise on the
stock that it got that day last week when old Fishbait rolled down
among the rocks with it in the pack. And the other two are yours and
Purdy’s!”
“Gee!” said Dick, his eyes widening. “Those rascals stole them and sold
them to Mr. Wilkins! Shall we tell him?”
Larry’s answer was the kind he usually made when the emergency demanded
action. Going back to the counter where the storekeeper was still
figuring with Purdick, he said:
“Mr. Wilkins, we didn’t tell you all that happened to us at that camp
of ours over in the back country. The bear that tore us up was a pretty
sly old Silver-tip. Besides eating up most of our grub, he took our
guns and all of our ammunition.”
The bearded storekeeper laughed.
“What’s this you’re givin’ me now?” he asked.
“Straight goods,” said Larry soberly. “We had three Winchesters of the
latest model, chambered for high-powered ammunition, and a good supply
of cartridges for them.”
For a minute or so the big storekeeper didn’t say anything. Then:
“You ain’t stuffin’ me with that bear story, are ye?”
“No; there was a bear, all right, and it was the bear that ate our grub
and tore things up for us.”
“But after that, some other kind of a bear come along and swiped your
guns and ca’tridges?”
“That is the way it looks to us,” Larry said.
“Well, what you goin’ to do about it?”
“We are going to buy those three second-hand Winchesters you have
up in that case at the front,” Larry answered, looking the big man
squarely in the eyes.
The good-natured storekeeper laughed rather grimly.
“I reckon you’ve got me dead to rights,” he said; “and I ought to
’a’ knowed better. I bought them guns from the three scalawags I was
tellin’ you about; the three that was here day before yesterday. They
allowed they didn’t need ’em and was tired o’ luggin’ ’em around.”
“We’ll buy them back from you,” said Dick, going into his shirt after
his money belt.
But at this the big man shook his head.
“Nope, I reckon I can’t let you do that. I ain’t tried to live honest
for fifty years to begin bein’ a ‘fence’ for crooks at my time o’ life.
If them guns are yours, you take ’em.”
There was some little haggling over this part of it, Dick saying that
the storekeeper wasn’t to blame, and all that. But the big man was
immovable; he had bought stolen goods, and it was up to him to pay the
penalty. So he made them take the guns without money and without price,
and threw in the cartridge belts and the ammunition, which, it seemed,
had been sold with the rifles.
What with all this chaffering and buying and talking, and the time it
took Larry and Dick to write letters to their folks in Brewster (which
letters, as may be imagined, didn’t say anything about the hardships of
the past three days), it was the middle of the forenoon before they got
a start up the perfectly good trail, considerably past noon when they
stopped to eat on top of the range, and quite late at night before they
left the trail and made camp in a wooded ravine not very far from the
place where they had located the vanadium deposit, though much higher
up the mountain. And on all that long faring they had neither seen nor
heard any signs of the three hold-ups who, according to the Natrolia
storekeeper’s account, had preceded them over the same trail not more
than twenty-four hours earlier.
Around the camp-fire that night they canvassed the situation as it
had been revealed to them by the events of the past few days, and
determined upon their course of action.
“It’s all tom-foolishness of the worst kind,” was the way Larry the
practical summed it up. “These crooks are going upon the supposition
that we know something that we don’t know. If they could be convinced
that we don’t know anything more about this mythical gold mine than the
man in the moon, and that we haven’t the slightest intention of trying
to find it, they’d drop us like a hot cake.”
“That is all true enough,” Dick cut in. “But how are we going to
convince them?”
“We can’t, unless they’ll show up and give us a chance to talk to them.
As long as they’re not convinced, I suppose they’ll go on dogging us
around. I hate to have to turn in every night with the feeling that we
may wake up in the morning to find that we’ve been robbed again, but I
guess there is no help for it.”
It was little Purdick who suggested the helpful plan.
“We mustn’t take any chances,” he said; “and, since there are three of
us, we needn’t. You two bunk down and I’ll take the first night watch.
At midnight I’ll wake you, Dick, and at three o’clock you can call
Larry. It runs in my mind that we’ve been sleeping too much, anyway.”
Both Larry and Dick grumbled a little at this sort of war-like
messing-up of their vacation when, as a matter of fact, it was, or
ought to be, utterly needless. But they agreed to Purdick’s plan in the
end as being the really sensible thing to do, and shortly afterward
they turned in and left the small one sitting with his back to a tree
and his rifle across his knees, determined to stay awake if the thing
were humanly possible.
For an hour or more he found it entirely possible. Apart from the deep
breathing of his two sleeping companions and the nibbling noises made
by the grazing burros, there were no sounds to disturb the solemn
silence of the immensities. Having to study pretty hard for what he was
getting in college, Purdick had a pretty safe recipe for keeping awake.
It took the form of memory exercises; the recalling, word for word, of
certain formulas like this: “If the point of suspension of a pendulum
have an imposed simple vibration of _y_ equals _a_ cosine _st_ in a
horizontal line, the equation of small motion of the bob is _mx_ equals
minus _mg_ times _x_ minus _y_; over _l_”――things like that.
Just now, being intensely interested in the science of mineralogy, he
was repeating the names of all the “ites” he could remember by their
different groups, with the chemical composition of each; and he had
just got as far as, “Pyrargyrite: silver three atoms, antimony one
atom, sulphur six atoms,” when he sat up and rubbed his eyes and began
to wonder if, after all, he had gone to sleep and was dreaming.
For while he stared and stared again, the camp-fire, with its back-log
and bed of glowing coals, began to sink slowly into the ground, the
unburnt ends of the back-log uprearing as the fire sank away. Before
he had time to gasp twice, there was a gurgle and a hiss, and the fire
disappeared as if by magic, leaving the tree-shadowed ravine in total
darkness.