NOTICE TO QUIT
While the three young prospectors, standing just within the mouth of
the cliff crevice, stared at the spider-web with its eight-legged
globule of molten gold hanging in the center, a small cloud drifted
across the face of the rising sun and instantly the golden illusion
vanished. The halo-like wheel of silken silver became just an ordinary
spider-web, and the big spider changed its hue to a dusty brown. Dick
drew a long breath.
“It sure got me for a minute,” he said. “For about two shakes of a dead
lamb’s tail I thought we were looking at old Jimmie Brock’s golden
spider――thought we’d blundered into his lost mine by the back door.”
“Well, see here,” said Larry, looking around curiously. “Are you right
sure that we haven’t?”
“Of course we haven’t. That spider is only a coincidence. Uncle Billy
didn’t say anything about the mine being in a cave.”
Larry was holding the candle, which he had not yet blown out, up to the
side wall of the crevice. On the smooth surface of the rock there were
marks; letters and words partly obliterated but still traceable. “Look
here!” he called quickly; and this――filling in a missing letter or so
here and there――was what they read:
THE GOLDEN SPIDER LODE
The undersigned claims sixty days to drive discovery tunnel and
three months to record on this vein.
James Brock, Discoverer.
Dated October 16, ――――.
The year number was effaced, but they knew that the hand that had
scrawled this notice on the rock had been dead for nearly three years,
so they could easily supply that.
“For mercy’s sake!” gasped Dick; “old Jimmie’s ‘discovery’ notice!
It _is_ the mine, after all. Talk about your miracles――why, great
gracious! if that roof hadn’t happened to tumble down back yonder and
fairly _made_ us come and look for some other way to get out――――”
“And to think that I was right here at the foot of this slide
yesterday, and never once thought of its being a mine dump!” Purdick
gulped.
They all stepped out and looked down. The situation of the mine mouth,
or cave mouth, was rather peculiar. The cliff which formed the western
boundary of the gulch was not perpendicular; it was in steps or ledges;
and the cave opening was on a level with one of these ledges, which
was, perhaps, eight or ten feet wide in front of the cave mouth,
forming a sort of dooryard to the opening. From that ledge to the steep
slope below, there was a drop of maybe twelve or fifteen feet, and this
had made a convenient dumping arrangement for the old prospector. All
he had had to do was to shove his waste diggings out to the edge of the
ledge and let them drop.
Larry looked over the dumping edge at the heap of broken rock below.
“It isn’t any wonder you didn’t connect that pile of rock with this
hole up here, Purdy,” he said. “It doesn’t look much like the ordinary
mine dump.”
“But whereabouts is the vein?” Dick demanded, and he was so excited
that he could hardly talk straight.
Turning back into the cave, they were not long in finding the lode of
decomposed quartz. At a point in the natural cavern not more than a
dozen feet from the entrance, another and smaller crevice branched off,
pitching up-hill at quite a sharp incline and stopping abruptly against
a wall of rock at a little distance from its branching point. In this
pocket-like tunnel they came upon a worn shovel and a miner’s pick;
a hammer with a broken handle, and three stubby rock drills: Brock’s
tools, left behind when he had sallied out to begin the desperate
struggle for life through the snows. The quartz vein itself was not
over a foot wide, but it was exceedingly rich in spots――“lenses,” the
mineralogists call them. Even by the poor light of their single candle
the boys could see fine, wire-like threads of native gold here and
there in the brown mass of the rotten quartz.
For a little time they all lost their heads. It was such a bewildering,
astounding thing that the lost mine, which they had all been regarding
as more or less of a myth, so far as they were concerned, should turn
up this way as a sequel to an adventure into which, as Dick had said,
they had been fairly driven by the falling roof in the cave.
“Great Land!” he ejaculated. “Think of this thing lying here unclaimed
and unowned for nearly three long years――and with probably dozens of
people besides Uncle Billy looking for it! And think of the thousand
and one chances we had of missing it! If our camp-fire hadn’t just
happened to melt a hole in that ice a month ago; or if we hadn’t gone
back yesterday to have a look at the cave; or if――oh, gee! there’s
simply no end to the ‘ifs’!”
“I――I guess it just was to be,” said little Purdick, who was not half
so much of a fatalist as this remark would seem to indicate. “We were
just kicked into it, as you might say.”
“Well,” Dick broke in, all a-nerve to get action of some sort, “what
do we do, Larry? Can we post a notice, calling it our discovery, and
hustle out to a land office and record it? Or do we have to stay here
and do a lot of work on it before we can claim it in our names?”
“I’m not enough of a mine lawyer to know,” Larry confessed. “The law
says that the discoverer of a lode must either dig a shaft ten feet
deep on it or, if he tunnels, his tunnel must go in far enough so that
the vertical distance from the heading to the surface outside must
be ten feet or more. Brock was the discoverer, and he did more than
the law requires, as we can easily see. But that was three years ago.
Whether we, as re-locators, will have to begin all over again, I don’t
know.”
“That’s all right,” Dick put in; “in that case we’re not going to take
any chances. We can stay here a week and still get out in time to start
back to college; and we can do work enough in that time to satisfy
the law if we get busy and don’t loaf on the job. We’ve dynamite
enough left, luckily, and we can sharpen the drills the way we’ve been
sharpening them――in a wood fire. Breakfast first, fellows; and after
we get the jacks down to where they can feed, we’ll go at it for blood!”
This programme, or at least the first part of it, was agreed to and set
in motion promptly. Going back into the crevice cave, they brought up
the burros and packs, and, not to lose time gathering wood for a fire,
they made coffee and broiled bacon over the last of the solidified
alcohol cooking candles.
The breakfast was cooked and eaten just inside the mouth of the natural
tunnel, and after they had finished the hasty meal, they all went out
on the dump-head ledge to determine the best way of getting the burros
down to some grazing ground where they could be picketed out.
“Say!” Dick exclaimed, looking over the mountain-scaling difficulties
that presented themselves, “it’s going to be some whale of a job
getting the little beasties down there, if you’ll listen to what I’m
telling you. And if we do get them down, they’ll stay down; we could
never make ’em climb up here again in the wide world――that’s a cinch.”
“That won’t make any difference. We wouldn’t want to get them back up
here,” Larry answered. “We’ll most likely want to camp in the gulch
ourselves, as long as the weather holds good.”
During this little colloquy Purdick had stood aside. He was shading
his eyes from the sun and looking the mountain-narrowed prospect over
thoughtfully.
“Well, I’ll be jiggered!” he broke in. “Don’t you know, we’ve actually
come back to within a few hundred yards of the place where we camped
night before last! When we ran that test on the piece of quartz that
I found, we were almost right here _at_ the Golden Spider! See that
butte with a bald spot on top up yonder?”――pointing to the right. “That
lies right opposite the mouth of the little gulch where we made camp
that night. Don’t you remember it?”
Now that it was pointed out, they all remembered it. Also, Larry
remembered something else.
“That isn’t all,” he said. “That clay-and-rock slide where I found the
crutch prints must be right up above us somewhere. I remember, now,
there was a broken cliff, just like this, lying below it.”
This mention of the crutch prints made Purdick shade his eyes and look
again. Dick and Larry went along the ledge a little way to the left
to see if there were any practicable descent for the burros in that
direction. When they came back they found that Purdick had Dick’s
field-glass and was focusing it upon a point farther down the wooded
gulch.
“Seeing things, Purdy?” Dick asked jocularly.
“I’m afraid I am,” was the low-toned reply. “Take the glass and hold it
on the mouth of that little pocket ravine away down there to the left.”
Dick took one glance――which was all that he needed.
“Smoke!” he exclaimed. “Wood smoke――a camp-fire!” and he handed the
glass to Larry.
Larry looked long and earnestly. When he passed the glass back to
Purdick, the good gray eyes were narrowing.
“I guess that means trouble in chunks,” he announced soberly. “Of
course, it may not be the crowd that has been camping on our trail
all summer, but the chances are that it is. Those crutch tracks that
I found were pointing down that way. Let’s get inside, out of sight,
before they spot us.”
In the shelter of the crevice cave they held an immediate council
of war. After a little hurried talk it was decided that there were
two courses open to them. They could post a re-location notice――for
whatever effect that might have upon any one who should find the
mine after they left it――and slip away quietly in the hope that the
“jumpers” would follow them and so be drawn away from the vicinity;
or――――
“Wait a minute,” Dick interrupted, when Larry had got that far. “You
said a while ago that you didn’t know what the law is about doing
‘discovery’ work on re-locations of abandoned claims――which is what
this one is. If we leave the mine without doing the proper amount of
work on it, we lose it anyway, don’t we?”
“I was coming to that,” Larry went on. “We can post a notice and map
the location so that somebody else can find it. Then, when we get back
to Brewster, your uncle can send somebody in to do the work, and make
the proper record. Of course we’d take a chance doing that. If anybody
should come along after we go away, and be dishonest enough to destroy
our notice, we’d lose out.”
“All right; that is one thing we can do,” said Purdick. “What’s the
other?”
Larry frowned and looked away at the forested mountain framed in the
crevice opening.
“The other is the surest thing, if we’ve got nerve enough to pull it
off. If we quit on the job before it’s finished, any one of a dozen
things may happen to knock us out. Maybe we can’t throw these fellows
off the track so easily. If they’re keeping any kind of a lookout,
they’ll be pretty sure to see us getting the jacks and our dunnage down
from this perch. That would mean, of course, that they’d wait until
we were out of the way, and then they’d come up here, find the mine,
and ‘jump’ it. They could do that, and get their claim recorded, long
before we could get back to Brewster and send somebody in here to make
our ownership stick.”
“Well,” Dick cut in impatiently, “go on; what else can we do?”
Larry shook his head.
“The other thing is sort of scary, I’ll admit; or, anyway, it’s full
of stumps that I don’t see any way to get over. It’s to stay right
here and do the work that we meant to do, and stand them off if they
come interfering with us: fight it out with ’em, I mean. They don’t
know that we’ve got to hike out at the end of a week, and if we can
put up a good bluff they may think we’re here to stay. Trouble is,
we’ll be cooped up in here like rats in a trap. They’ll hear the
dynamiting――can’t help hearing it――and we won’t dare show ourselves
outside. Worse than that, the jacks will starve――and I’d rather starve
myself than starve them.”
To the keen surprise of the two others it was little Purdick, pale but
determined, who rose first to the demands of the occasion.
“I vote to stay and hang on and fight it out,” he said, and if his
voice were a bit husky it wasn’t from fear. “If we let go――but we just
mustn’t let go, that’s all! I’m not saying this because I need the
money worse than you two do: for that matter, I think the mine ought to
belong to Mr. Starbuck, anyway. But for us to sneak out and leave it to
a wide-open chance, after we’ve found it.... You know your uncle, Dick,
and I hardly know him at all; but I’m sure he’ll think mighty small
of us if we go back and tell him that we found the Golden Spider and
didn’t have sand enough to stay and hold on to it.”
Dick pounded the small one on the back.
“You’re the right old stuff, Purdy――you sure are!” he broke out
heartily, and then he chuckled: “And you’re the one who said a little
while back that you’d be no good in a scrap! I’m with you, right from
the jump, and I know Larry is, too. Let’s get busy. We don’t even know
that that smoke down yonder means anything more than some harmless old
prospector’s cooking fire; and if it does mean anything else, we’re
not exactly babies to let somebody take our candy away from us without
raising a squawk. Let’s have a look at the drills, Larry, and see if
they’re usable.”
That settled it, of course. But there were still some knotty details to
be worked out.
“We’ve got grub enough, and we can get water by going back in the cave
to where the torrent disappears,” Larry said. “But we’ve got to have
fire, and for the fire we must have fuel. It strikes me that our first
job――before these hold-ups get wind of us――is to get in a good supply
of wood, and at the same time see if we can’t find something for the
jacks to eat.”
Not to lose any of the time which had suddenly become precious, they
fell to work at once. First, they clambered down to the gulch level,
taking the axe and the guns with them. In a series of little glades
along the small torrent which drained the deep ravine they found plenty
of grass, but as they had nothing but their pocket-knives with which to
cut it, they found it was going to take a good while to harvest enough
to amount to anything. After a bit, they gave up trying to haggle it
off with the knives and took to pulling it up by the roots, and in this
way they soon gathered quite a quantity.
Hurrying as fast as they could, and half expecting every moment to be
interrupted, they rushed the pile of green hay over to the ledge foot
by armfuls, and with two of them on the ledge to hoist, and one at the
bottom to load the picket-rope sling, they shortly had the jack-feed
stored in the crevice.
That done, they flung themselves upon the job of wood gathering. This
took more time, and was a lot harder work; but in a couple of hours
they had accumulated a fairly good stock of fuel, dragging it up the
ledge precipice as they had the grass, an armful at a time in the rope
sling.
Though they worked like salvagers at a fire, the job of getting ready
to stand a siege cut deeply into the forenoon, but still they neither
heard nor saw anything of the men they were momently expecting to have
to deal with. It was not until after they were preparing to begin work
in the gold vein that Larry hit upon the probable reason for their
immunity thus far.
“Here’s my guess,” he offered. “We have fairly good proof that they’ve
been trailing us from day to day, and it’s been easy because we haven’t
tried to cover up our tracks. Their permanent camp is probably down
yonder where we saw that smoke, and some one of the three has chased
out to see where we went yesterday. He’d have no trouble in tracking us
up to the place where we began to burrow in the ground.”
Dick chuckled.
“No trouble up to that point, but a whole lot of it afterward. Do you
think he could track us into the crevice?”
Larry shook his head. “I don’t know. I suppose he could, if he’s any
kind of a tracker. But when he comes to the place where the roof fell
down, he’ll quit and go back; you can bet on that.”
“Gee!” said Dick, “if this gold vein were only a little farther back in
the cave, where we could drill and blast without being heard from the
outside, we’d be as safe as a clock. Nobody would ever think of looking
down here for the outlet to that crack away yonder up the mountain.”
“You can’t tell,” Larry demurred; and then: “You’re right about the
drilling and blasting, though. We needn’t think we’re going to be
able to do any great amount of mining in here without being found
out, if there’s anybody around who wants to find out. That being the
case, we’ve got to watch out sharp. We’ll work changing shifts in the
heading; two on and one off; and the man that’s resting can stand guard
at the cave mouth.”
While Larry was sharpening the drills, with a flat stone for an anvil,
and with Purdick working the bicycle-pump blower for him, Dick moved
the green hay back to the enlargement of the crevice where they were
keeping the burros, and piled the stock of wood where it would be out
of the way. Next the question of spoil disposal came up. What were they
to do with the broken rock and vein matter as they blasted it out?
“There is one sure thing,” Larry said. “That stuff is too rich to be
thrown out on the dump. We’ll have to pile our diggings here in the
cave and sort the ore by hand the best way we can. It would be like
throwing twenty-dollar gold pieces away to pitch it into the gulch.”
“You said a mouthful, that time,” Dick agreed. “But it will clutter us
up awfully if we have to pile the spoil in here.”
“We can sort it, as I say,” Larry pointed out, “saving only the vein
matter and shoveling the barren rock out over the ledge. But we won’t
do that until we’re sure we’re not going to be molested. When we begin
making a fresh dump outside, that will be telling anybody that may
happen along just what we’re doing in here. And if we don’t do the
sorting mighty carefully one look at the dump will tell any prospector
that we’re working a quartz gold vein. We want to keep this thing
quiet, if we can. Saying nothing about the three hold-ups, it would be
a fierce temptation for anybody to ‘jump’ it after we’re gone――take
down our notice and throw it away and pretend that the place was an
abandoned claim.”
“But nobody could make a barefaced robbery like that hold in law,”
Purdick protested.
Dick smiled grimly.
“If you had lived in a mining country as long as Larry and I have,
you’d know that a law-suit over a mine is about the last thing in
the world that any peaceable person wants to get mixed up in, Purdy.
When you once begin, there’s simply no end to it. You see, there’s no
way of getting any real proof that will satisfy a judge and jury. We
might swear that we discovered this vein on a certain date and posted
our notice. Then the other fellow would get up and swear that he had
discovered it at an earlier date and posted _his_ notice. So there you
are.”
“Let’s be doing,” Larry broke in; and he and Purdick went into James
Brock’s tunnel and began drilling the holes for the first round of
blasts, while Dick, with his rifle across his knees, took the first
guard watch, sitting at the crevice mouth and looking down into the
gulch through which any intruder must approach.
As the short shifts were planned, each one of the three had an hour on
and a half-hour off, the watcher taking the place of one of the two
in the heading at the end of each thirty minutes. Nothing happened
during Dick’s half-hour at the cave mouth. The faint smoke wreath that
had been distinguishable in the early morning over the little ravine
farther down the gulch had disappeared, and the stillness of the
mountain immensities brooded over the scene. Carefully and at frequent
intervals Dick swept the surroundings with the field-glass, but there
was nothing to indicate that there was a human being, or, indeed, any
living thing, within miles of his sentry-box on the face of the broken
cliff.
At the end of one shift all around they knocked off for dinner. The
fire had been kept going, and Purdick made up and cooked enough
pan-bread to last for a couple of days.
“That’s because we’ve got to go light on our wood pile,” he said. “It’s
too much hard work to get the stuff up here.” Then to Larry, who had
had the last half-hour at the cave’s mouth: “Anything stirring outside?”
“Nothing. We might be the only people between the two ranges of the
Hophras, so far as any sign of life in the gulch goes.”
“But we know pretty well we’re not,” Dick put in, making himself
a sandwich of bacon and hot pan-bread. “I’ve been figuring and
calculating on about how long it would take a man to climb from the
gulch to the place where we ducked into the cave, find out all there is
to be found out there, and get back. What do you say, Larry?”
Larry laughed. “Anybody’s guess is as good as mine. But that doesn’t
cut any figure. If their camp is down yonder where we saw that smoke
this morning, and there is anybody left in it, our first round of
blasts will give us away. They can’t miss hearing the dynamite at that
distance.”
“What will they do?” Dick asked.
“You tell――if you know,” Larry returned.
Dick nodded. “I’ve been trying to figure that out, too. Of course, they
can climb up on the ledge at the place around to the left where we
shinned up and down――that is, the two with good legs can. But will they
take a chance on doing that?”
“A chance of getting shot, you mean? I don’t think they’ll be much
afraid of that. They’re taking us for a bunch of kids――what Purdick
heard over there in Lost Canyon proves that――and they’ll probably think
they can scare us off.”
“That brings it right down to brass tacks,” said Dick. “I think we
ought to make up our minds just what we’re going to do if the pinch
comes. I’ll say, right now, that I’m not much good with a rifle. If
I should shoot and try to cripple one of ’em, just as likely as not
my hand would shake and I’d kill him. And I wouldn’t want to kill the
worst scamp in the world unless I was sure it was the only way to save
my own life.”
“I guess we all feel pretty much the same way,” Larry put in.
“And I’ll have to admit that I’m with you on the poor marksmanship
proposition, too, Dick. You know how it was last summer when Bob
Goldrick used to give us an afternoon off in the Tourmaline and let us
take his rifle for target practice.”
“I sure do,” said Dick, with a sheepish grin. “Seemed as if neither one
of us could hit the side of a barn.”
It was just here that little Purdick surprised his two camp-mates for
the second time in one day.
“I can shoot, and shoot straight,” he slipped in quietly.
“You?” queried Dick. “How did you ever learn to handle a gun――in a
rolling-mill town?”
Purdick’s smile was reminiscent of some pretty hard times in the past.
“I’ve done mighty nearly everything in the world to earn a living,
first and last, as both of you know,” he explained. “One summer I
helped in a shooting-gallery, and when business was slack the boss let
me practice. When he found out that I had a sort of good eye for it,
he’d make me go out in front and start the game――just to show customers
how easy it was to make bull’s-eyes. It is easy, too, after you get the
knack of it.”
“You’re elected,” said Dick; “that is, if you don’t mind being the
goat.”
Purdick’s smile broadened into a grin.
“You fellows will have to call the shots――say where you want ’em
placed. That’ll put the responsibility on you.”
It was about four o’clock in the afternoon when they made ready to fire
the first round of blasts on the gold vein. Larry, the careful one of
the three, did the fuse fixing and tamping of the holes, and when all
was ready he applied the match and they all retreated to safety in the
upper part of the natural cavern. There was the usual thunder burst of
noise, or rather four of them coming in quick succession, the queer
sensation which every deep-shaft miner knows; a feeling as if one’s
neck were suddenly pulled out to goose-neck length and then snapped
back like a retracting rubber band; the rush of compressed air forced
inward by the expanding gases, followed by the suction of the reaction;
and the thing was over.
Having had considerable experience with dynamite during the summer,
they waited for the air to clear. As soon as it became breathable, they
crept forward to see what the explosive had done. The round of shots
was a handsome success. The little tunnel was filled with the broken
rock and vein matter, and the heading, or tunnel end, had been advanced
the length of the deepest drill hole.
“That’s business,” said Dick. “We can walk her back into the hill any
old distance we want to――give us time. Now let’s see if the racket has
stirred up anything exciting on the outside.”
Apparently it hadn’t. Looking out of the cave mouth, they saw no change
in the surroundings; no indication that there had been any ears but
their own to hear the roar of the dynamite. Dick wanted to go to work
at once, clearing away and sorting the ore thrown down while there
was still daylight enough to enable them to see, but Larry counseled
patience.
“Let’s give those sneak thieves time enough to come, if they’re going
to come,” he advised, so they all three stood guard at the mouth of the
cave for a full quarter of an hour, six eager eyes searching every
detail of the gulch for signs of an approaching enemy and finding none
at all.
“False alarm,” said Dick at last. “We’d better get busy before we have
to light candles to see by. With the sun over behind the mountain, it’s
going to get dark early in this hole.”
Not to miss any of the precautions they had so firmly agreed upon, it
was decided that two of them should sort the ore from the rock while
the other stood guard at the crevice mouth. This arrangement functioned
all right until Dick, who was one of the two sorters, began to go
into hilarious ecstasies over the prodigious richness of some of the
“lenses” that had been shot down, shattered bits of the rotten quartz
held together by wire-like lacings of native gold. After a time, his
ravings got to be too much even for Larry, who was doing the guard
stunt. Again and again he was tempted away from his place at the cave
mouth by Dick’s, “Oh, gee-whiz, Larry! Duck in here just for a second
and see _this_ piece! There never was anything like it in this world!”
And then――for the fifth or sixth time Larry had dodged back from his
post at Dick’s call, and all three of them had their heads together
over the most beautiful of all the specimens that had yet been dug out
of the heap of shattered rock. Suddenly the waning daylight sifting in
through the narrow crevice entrance was cut off, and a raucous voice
bellowed:
“Say! What the blazes are youse fellows doin’ in our mine, I’d like to
know? Climb down out o’ this, the bunch o’ yuh, afore I drill yuh so
full o’ holes that your own mothers won’t know yuh!”