THE August sun had dropped behind a high-pitched horizon of saw-tooth
peaks and broken ranges, leaving the upper air still shot through with
a golden glow that was like the dome lighting of a vast celestial
theater, by the time two young men, whose burro packs of camp
equipment, supplies and digging tools marked them as prospectors, had
picked their way down the last precipitous rock slide into a valley
hemmed in by the broken ranges. At the close of a hard day’s march
the straggling procession was heading for running water and a camp
site; the water being a clear mountain stream brawling over its rocky
bed in the valley bottom. Reaching the stream before the upper-air
effulgencies had quite faded into the smoke-gray of twilight, a halt
was made and preparations for a night camp briskly begun.
Two full months had elapsed since the partnership bargain had been
struck in the lobby of the American House in Denver, and during the
greater part of that interval Philip and the play-boy had prospected
diligently in the foot-hills and eastern spurs of the Continental
Divide, combing the gulches in the vicinity of Fair Play and Alma,
and finding nothing more significant than an occasional abandoned
tunnel or shaft, mute evidences that others had anticipated their own
disappointment in this particular field. Drifting southwestward, past
Mount Princeton, they had ascended Chalk Creek, crossed the range over
a high pass into Taylor Park, and were now in new ground on the western
side of the Divide.
“This side of the world looks better; or at least a little less
shopworn,” Bromley remarked, after they had cooked and eaten their
supper and were smoking bed-time pipes before the camp fire. “I think
we have outrun the crowd, at last, and that is something to be thankful
for.”
Philip opened his pocket knife and dug with the blade into the bowl
of his pipe to make it draw better. The two months of outdoor life
and hard manual labor had done for him what the treasure search was
doing for many who had never before known what it was to lack a roof
over their heads at night, or to live on a diet of pan-bread and bacon
cooked over a camp fire. With the shedding of the white collar and its
accompaniments and the donning of flannel shirt, belted trousers and
top boots had come a gradual change in habits and outlook, and--surest
distinguishing mark of the tenderfoot--a more or less unconscious aping
of the “old-timer.” Since his razor had grown dull after the first week
or two, he had let his beard grow; and for the single clerkly cigar
smoked leisurely after the evening meal, he had substituted a manly
pipe filled with shavings from a chewing plug.
Bromley had changed, too, though in a different way. Two months’
abstention from the hectic lights and their debilitating effects had
put more flesh and better on his bones, a clearer light in his eyes
and a springy alertness in his carriage; and though his clothes were
as workmanlike as Philip’s, he contrived to wear them with a certain
easy grace and freedom, and to look fit and trim in them. Also, though
his razor was much duller than Philip’s, and their one scrap of
looking-glass was broken, he continued to shave every second day.
“I’ve been wondering if a later crowd, with more ‘savvy’ than we have,
perhaps, won’t go over the same ground that we have gone over and find
a lot of stuff that we’ve missed,” said Philip, after the pipe-clearing
pause.
“‘Savvy,’” Bromley chuckled. “When we started out I was moved to
speculate upon what the wilderness might do to you, Phil; whether it
would carve a lot of new hieroglyphs on you, or leave you unscarred in
the security of your solid old Puritan shell. ‘Savvy’ is the answer.”
“Oh, go and hire a hall!” Philip grumbled good-naturedly. “Your
vaporings make my back ache. Give us a rest!”
“There it is again,” laughed the play-boy. “Set the clock back six
months or so and imagine yourself saying, ‘Go hire a hall,’ and ‘Give
us a rest!’ to a group of the New England Trasks.”
“Humph! If it comes to that, you’ve changed some, too, in a couple of
months,” Philip countered.
“Don’t I know it? Attrition--rubbing up against the right sort of
thing--will occasionally work the miracle of making something out of
nothing. You’ve rubbed off some of your New England virtues on me; I’m
coming to be fairly plastered with them. There are even times when I
can almost begin to look back with horror upon my young life wasted.”
“Keep it up, if you feel like it and it amuses you,” was the grunted
comment. “I believe if you were dying, you’d joke about it.”
“Life, and death, too, are a joke, Philip, if you can get the right
perspective on them. Have you ever, in an idle moment, observed the
activities of the humble ant, whose ways we are so solemnly advised to
consider for the acquiring of wisdom? Granting that the ant may know
well enough what she is about, according to her lights, you must admit
that her apparently aimless and futile chasings to and fro--up one side
of a blade of grass and down the other, over a pebble and then under
it--don’t impress the human beholder as evidences of anything more than
mere restlessness, a frantic urge to keep moving. I’ve often wondered
if we human ants may not be giving the same impression to any Being
intelligent enough to philosophize about us.”
“This feverish mineral hunt, you mean?”
“Oh, that, and pretty nearly everything else we do. ‘Life’s fitful
fever,’ Elizabethan Billy calls it--and he knew. But in one way we have
the advantage of the ant; we can realize that our successive blades of
grass and pebbles are all different.”
“How, different?”
“We put the day that is past behind us and step into another which is
never the same. Or, if the day is the same, we are not. You’ll never be
able to go back to the peace and quiet of a railroad desk, for example.”
“Maybe not. And you?”
“God knows. As I have said, you’ve rubbed off some of your virtues
on me--suffering some little loss of them yourself, I fancy. We’ll
see what they will do to me. It will be something interesting to look
forward to.”
“Umph!” Philip snorted; “you’re getting grubby again--maggoty, I mean.
Which proves that it’s time to hit the blankets. If you’ll look after
the jacks and hobble them, I’ll gather wood for the fire.”
Bromley sat up and finished freeing his mind.
“Philip, if anybody had told me a year ago that within a short
twelve-month I’d be out here in the Colorado mountains, picking,
shovelling, driving jack-asses, cooking at least half of my own meals,
and liking it all ... well, ‘liar’ would have been the mildest epithet
I should have chucked at him. Comical, isn’t it?” And with that he went
to valet the burros.
The first day after their arrival in the western valley was spent in
exploring, and they finally settled upon a gulch not far from their
camp of the night before as the most promising place in which to dig.
Though they had as yet mastered only the bare rudiments of a trained
prospector’s education, the two summer months had given them a modicum
of experience; enough to enable them to know roughly what to look for,
and how to recognize it when they found it.
The gulch in which they began operations was a miniature canyon, and
the favored site was indicated by the half-hidden outcropping of a
vein of brownish material which they could trace for some distance up
the steep slope of the canyon wall. During the day’s explorations they
had frequently tested the sands of the stream bed for gold “colors,”
washing the sand miner-fashion in their frying pan, and it was upon
the hint given by the “colors” that they had pitched upon the gulch
location. Below the gulch mouth microscopic flakes of gold appeared now
and again in the washings. But the sands above were barren.
“It looks as if we may have found something worth while, this time,”
Philip hazarded, after they had cleared the rock face to reveal the
extent of the vein. “The ‘colors’ we’ve been finding in the creek sand
come from a lode somewhere, and this may be the mother vein. We’ll put
the drills and powder to it to-morrow and see what happens.”
Accordingly, for a toilsome fortnight they drilled and blasted in the
gulch, and by the end of that time the prospect had developed into
a well-defined vein of quartz wide enough to admit the opening of a
working tunnel. Having no equipment for making field tests, they could
only guess at the value of their discovery, but the indications were
favorable. The magnifying glass showed flecks and dustings of yellow
metal in selected specimens of the quartz; and, in addition, the ore
body was of the character they had learned to distinguish as “free
milling”--vein-matter from which the gold can be extracted by the
simplest and cheapest of the crushing processes.
Taking it all in all, they had good reason to be hopeful; and on the
final day of the two weeks of drilling and blasting they skipped the
noonday meal to save time and were thus enabled to fire the evening
round of shots in the shallow tunnel just before sunset. A hasty
examination of the spoil blown out removed all doubt as to the
character of the material in which they were driving. The vein was
gold-bearing quartz, beyond question; how rich, they had no means of
determining; but there were tiny pockets--lenses--in which the free
metal was plainly visible without the aid of the magnifier.
That night, before their camp fire, they held a council of war. Though
it seemed more than likely that the lode was a rich one, they were
now brought face to face with the disheartening fact that the mere
ownership of a potential gold mine is only the first step in a long and
uphill road to fortune. In the mining regions it is a common saying
that the owner of a silver prospect needs a gold mine at his back to
enable him to develop it, and the converse is equally true.
“Well,” Bromley began, after the pipes had been lighted, “it seems
we’ve got something, at last. What do we do with it?”
“I wish I knew, Harry,” was the sober reply. “If the thing turns out to
be as good as it looks, we’ve got the world by the tail--or we would
have if we could only figure out some way to hold on. But we can’t hold
on and develop it; that is out of the question. We have no capital, and
we are a good many mountain miles from a stamp-mill. Unless the lode is
richer than anything we’ve ever heard of, the ore wouldn’t stand the
cost of jack-freighting to a mill.”
“That says itself,” Bromley agreed. “But if we can’t develop the thing,
what is the alternative?”
“There is only one. If our map is any good, and if we have figured out
our location with any degree of accuracy, we are about thirty miles,
as the crow flies, from Leadville--which will probably mean forty or
fifty the way we’d have to go to find a pass over the range. We have
provisions enough to stake us on the way out, but not very much more
than enough. I cut into the last piece of bacon to-night for supper.”
“All right; say we head for Leadville. We’d have to do that anyway, to
record our discovery in the land office. What next?”
“Assays,” said Philip. “We’ll take a couple of sacks of the quartz
along and find out what we’ve got. If the assays make a good showing,
we’ll have something to sell, and it will go hard with us if we can’t
find some speculator in the big camp who will take a chance and buy our
claim.”
“What?--sell out, lock, stock and barrel for what we can get, and then
stand aside and see somebody come in here and make a million or so that
ought to be ours?” Bromley burst out. “Say, Philip--that would be death
by slow torture!”
“I know,” Philip admitted. “It is what the poor prospector gets in
nine cases out of ten because, being poor, he has to take it. If we
had a mine, instead of a mere prospect hole, we might hope to be able
to capitalize it; but as it is--well, you know what’s in the common
purse. My savings are about used up; we came in on a shoe-string, in
the beginning.”
“Yes, but, land of love, Philip!--to have a thing, like this may turn
out to be, right in our hands, and then have to sell it, most likely
for a mere song! ... why, we’d never live long enough to get over it,
neither one of us!”
Philip shook his head. “It’s tough luck, I’ll admit; but what else is
there to do?”
Bromley got up and kicked a half burnt log into the heart of the fire.
“How nearly broke are we, Phil?” he asked.
The financing partner named the sum still remaining in the partnership
purse, which, as he had intimated, was pitifully small.
“You said, just now, if we had a mine to sell, instead of a bare
prospect,” Bromley went on.... “We’ve got nerve, and two pairs of
hands. Suppose we stay with it and make it a mine? I know good and well
what that will mean: a freezing winter in the mountains, hardships till
you can’t rest, half starvation, maybe. Just the same, I’m game for it,
if you are.”
Philip rapped the ashes from his pipe and refilled it. From the very
beginning of the summer Bromley had been offering a series of grateful
surprises: dogged endurance, cheerfulness under privations, willingness
to share hard labor--a loyal partner in all that the word implied.
Slow to admit any one to the inner intimacies of friendship, as his
Puritan heritage constrained him to be, Philip had weighed and measured
the play-boy coldly, impartially, and before they had been many weeks
together he was honest enough to admit that Bromley was as tempered
steel to his own roughly forged iron; that it had been merely a lack
of an adequate object in life that had made him a spendthrift and a
derelict.
“You’d tackle a winter here in these mountains rather than let go?” he
said, after the refilled pipe was alight. “It will be hell, Harry. You
remember what those fellows in Chalk Creek told us about the snows on
this side of the range.”
“I’m discounting everything but the kind of hell that will be ours if
we should let go and see somebody else come in and reap where we’ve
sown.”
“All right; let’s see what we’ve got to buck up against. First,
we’ll have to go out for the recording, the assays, and the winter’s
provisions. We’d have to buy at least one more burro to freight the
grub-stake in; and then one of us will have to take the jacks out for
the winter. They’d starve to death here. All this is going to take
time, and the summer is already gone. And that isn’t all; we’ll have
to build a cabin and cut the winter’s wood. It will be a fierce race
against time to get holed in before we’re snowed under.”
“Still I’m game,” declared Bromley stoutly. “If it turns out that we
have something worth fighting for--and the assays will say yes or no to
that--I’m for the fight.”
Philip scowled amiably at the transformed play-boy. “You nervy little
rat!” he exclaimed in gruff affection. “Think you can back me down on a
fighting proposition? I’ll call your bluff. We’ll put in one more day
setting things to rights, and then we’ll pull out for Leadville and
that starvation winter grub-stake.”
“Setting things to rights,” as Philip phrased it, did not ask for an
entire day. By noon they had cached their tools and what remained of
the stock of provisions after enough had been reserved to supply them
on the journey; had filled a couple of ore sacks with samples for the
assay; and had paced off and re-staked their claim, posting it with the
proper notice and christening it the “Little Jean,”--this at Philip’s
suggestion, though he did not tell Bromley why he chose this particular
name.
With nothing more to be done, Philip was impatiently eager to break
camp at once, but Bromley pleaded for a few hours’ rest.
“It’s Sunday,” he protested. “Can’t you possess your soul in patience
for one little afternoon? This bonanza of ours--which may not be a
bonanza, after all--won’t run away. I’d like to sleep up a bit before
we strike out to climb any more mountains.”
The impatient one consented reluctantly to the delay; and while
Bromley, wearier than he cared to admit, slept for the better part of
the afternoon, Philip dumped the sacked ore and spent the time raking
over the pile of broken rock and vein-matter blasted out of the shallow
opening, selecting other samples which he thought might yield a fairer
average of values. Beside the camp fire that evening he stretched
himself out with the two sacks of ore for a back rest; and Bromley,
awake now and fully refreshed, noted the back rest and smiled.
“Like the feel of it, even in the rough, don’t you, Phil?” he jested.
Then: “I’m wondering if this treasure hunt hasn’t got under your
skin in more ways than one. At first, you were out for the pure
excitement of the chase; but now you are past all that; you are plain
money-hungry.”
“Well, who isn’t?” Philip demanded, frowning into the heart of the
fire. “Still, you’re wrong. It isn’t the money so much, as what it will
buy.”
“What will it buy--more than you’ve always had? You won’t be able to
eat any more or any better food, or wear any more clothes, or get more
than one tight roof to shelter you at a time,--needs you have always
had supplied, or have been able to supply for yourself.”
Getting no reply to this, he went on. “Suppose this strike of ours
should pan out a million or so--which is perhaps as unlikely as
anything in the world--what would you do with the money?”
For the moment Philip became a conventional, traditional worshipper at
the altar of thrift.
“I think I should emulate the example of the careful dog with a bone;
go and dig a safe hole and bury most of it.”
Bromley’s laugh came back in cachinnating echoes from the gulch cliffs.
“Not on your life you wouldn’t, Philip. I can read your horoscope
better than that. If it does happen to happen that we’ve really made
a ten-strike, I can see you making the good old welkin ring till the
neighbors won’t be able to hear themselves think, for the noise you’ll
make.”
“I don’t know why you should say anything like that,” Philip objected
morosely.
“Of course you don’t. You’d have to have eyes like a snail’s to be able
to see yourself. But just wait, and hold my little prophecy in mind.”
Philip, still staring into the heart of the fire, remembered a similar
prediction made by his desk-mate in the Denver railroad office. “I know
your kind....” Middleton had said. What was there about his kind that
made other people so sure that the good thread of self-control had been
left out in his weaving?
“I’ll wait,” he said; and then: “You haven’t said what you’d do in case
it should turn out that we’ve made the improbable ten-strike.”
“I?” queried the play-boy. “Everybody who has ever known me could
answer that, off-hand. You know my sweet and kindly disposition. I
wouldn’t want to disappoint all the old ladies in Philadelphia. And
they’d be horribly disappointed if I didn’t proceed to paint everything
within reach a bright, bright shade of vermilion.”
Philip looked at his watch.
“Nine o’clock,” he announced, “and we start at daybreak, sharp. I’m
turning in.”
In strict accordance with the programme of impatience, the start was
made at dawn on the Monday morning. Their map, though rather uncertain
as to the smaller streams, seemed to enable them to locate their valley
and its small river, and their nearest practicable route to Leadville
appeared to be by way of the stream to its junction with a larger
river, and then eastward up the valley of the main stream, which the
map showed as heading in the gulches gashing the western shoulder of
Mount Massive.
A day’s tramping behind the two diminutive pack beasts brought them
to the larger stream, and the third evening found them zigzagging up
the slopes of the great chain which forms the watershed backbone of
the continent. Philip had been hastening the slow march of the burros
all day, hoping to reach the pass over the range before night. But
darkness overtook them when they were approaching timber line and they
were forced to camp. It was at this high camp that they had the unique
experience of melting snow from a year-old snowbank at the end of
summer to water the burros and to make coffee over their camp fire. And
even with double blankets and the tarpaulins from the packs, they slept
cold.
Pushing on in the first graying light of the Thursday dawn, they
came to the most difficult stretch of mountain climbing they had yet
encountered: a bare, boulder-strewn steep, gullied by rifts and gulches
in which the old snow was still lying. At the summit of the rugged
pass, which they reached, after many breathing halts, a little before
noon, there was a deep drift, sand-covered and treacherous, and through
the crust of this the animals broke and floundered, and finally did
what over-driven burros will always do--got down and tried to roll
their packs off. It was then that Philip flew into a rage and swore
savagely at the jacks; at which Bromley laughed.
“You’re coming along nicely, Phil,” he chuckled. “A few more weeks of
this, and you’ll be able to qualify for a post-graduate course in the
higher profanities. Not but what you are fairly fluent, as it is.”
Philip made no reply; he was silent through the scarcely less difficult
descent into a wide basin on the eastern front of the range. On the
lower level the going was easier, and in the latter half of the
afternoon they came to the farther lip of the high-pitched basin from
which they could look down into the valley of the Arkansas; into the
valley and across it to a distant, shack-built camp city spreading
upward from a series of gulch heads over swelling hills with mighty
mountains for a background--the great carbonate camp whose fame was
by this time penetrating to the remotest hamlet in the land. A yellow
streak winding up one of the swelling hills marked the course of the
stage road, and on it, in a cloud of golden dust, one of the rail-head
stages drawn by six horses was worming its way upward from the river
valley.
“Think we can make it before dark?” Bromley asked.
“We’ve got to make it,” Philip declared doggedly; adding: “I’m not
going to wait another day before I find out what we’ve got in that hole
we’ve been digging. Come on.”
The slogging march was resumed, but distances are marvelously deceptive
in the clear air of the altitudes, and darkness was upon them before
the lights of the big camp came in sight over the last of the hills.
Bromley, thoroughly outworn by the three-days’ forced march coming
upon the heels of two weeks of drilling and blasting and shovelling,
had no curiosity sharp enough to keep him going, after the burros had
been stabled and lodgings had been secured in the least crowded of
the hotels; but Philip bolted his supper hastily and announced his
intention of proceeding at once in search of an assay office.
“You won’t find one open at this time of night,” the play-boy yawned.
“There’s another day coming, or if there isn’t, it won’t matter for any
of us.”
“I tell you, I’m not going to wait!” Philip snapped impatiently; and
he departed, leaving Bromley to smoke and doze in the crowded and
ill-smelling hotel office which also served as the bar-room.
It was perhaps an hour later when Bromley, who, in spite of the
noise and confusion of the place, had been sleeping the sleep of
utter exhaustion in his chair in the corner of the smoke-befogged
bar-room, was awakened by a shot, a crash of glass and a strident
voice bellowing, “_Yippee!_ That’s the kind of a hellion I am! Walk
up, gen’lemen, an’ le’s irrigate; the drinks’re on me. Th’ li’l’ ol’
prospect hole’s gone an’ turned an ace an’ I’m paintin’ the town.
_Yippee!_ Line up, gen’lemen, an’ name yer pizen. Big Ike’s buyin’ fer
th’ crowd!”
Vaguely, through the smoke fog, Bromley saw a burly miner, bearded like
a fictional pirate, beckoning the bar-room crowd up to the bar, weaving
pistol in hand. Possibly, if he had been fully awake, he would have
understood that the easy way to avoid trouble with a manifestly drunken
roisterer was by the road of quietly following the example of the
others. But before he could gather his faculties the big man had marked
him down.
“Hey, there--yuh li’l’ black-haired runt in th’ corner! Tail in yere
afore I make yuh git up an’ dance fer th’ crowd!” he shouted. “I’m a
rip-snortin’ hell-roarer fr’m ol’ Mizzoo, an’ this is my night fer
flappin’ my wings--_yippee!_”
Bromley was awake now and was foolish enough to laugh and wave the
invitation aside airily. Instantly there was a flash and crash, and the
window at his elbow was shattered.
“L-laugh at me, will yuh!” stuttered the half-crazed celebrator. “Git
up an’ come yere! I’m goin’ to make yuh drink a whole durn’ quart o’
red-eye fer that! Come a-runnin’, I say, afore I----”
The door opened and Philip came in. He had heard the shot, but was
wholly unprepared for what he saw; Bromley, his partner, white as a
sheet and staggering to his feet at the menace of the revolver in the
drunken miner’s fist; the shattered window and bar mirror; the group of
card players and loungers crowding against the bar, and the barkeeper
ducking to safety behind it.
In the drawing of a breath a curious transformation came over him. Gone
in an instant were all the inhibitions of a restrained and conventional
childhood and youth, and in their room there was only a mad prompting
to kill. At a bound he was upon the big man, and the very fierceness
and suddenness of the barehanded attack made it successful. With his
victim down on the sawdust-covered floor, and the pistol wrested out of
his grasp, he swung the clubbed weapon to beat the fallen man over the
head with it and would doubtless have had a human life to answer for if
the bystanders had not rushed in to pull him off with cries of “Let up,
stranger--let up! Can’t you see he’s drunk?”
Philip stood aside, half-dazed, with the clubbed revolver still
grasped by its barrel. He was gasping, not so much from the violence
of his exertions as at the appalling glimpse he had been given of the
potentialities within himself; of the purely primitive and savage
underman that had so suddenly risen up to sweep away the last vestiges
of the traditions, to make his tongue like a dry stick in his mouth
with a mad thirst for blood.
It was Bromley who drew him away, and nothing was said until they had
climbed the rough board stair and Bromley was lighting the lamp in the
room they were to share. Then, in an attempt to lessen the strain under
which he knew his companion was laboring, he said: “It’s lucky for me
that you didn’t have your real fighting clothes on, that night when I
tried to hold you up, Philip. There wouldn’t have been anything left of
me if you had really meant business. Did you find an assay shop?”
Philip dropped into a chair and nodded. “A sampling works that runs
night and day. We’ll get the results in the morning.”
“For richer?--or poorer?”
“I wish to God I knew! I showed the assayer some of the quartz, but he
wouldn’t commit himself; he talked off; said you could never tell from
the looks of the stuff; that the bright specks we’ve been banking on
might not be metal at all. God, Harry!--if it were only morning!” he
finished, and his eyes were burning.
“Easy,” said Bromley soothingly. “You mustn’t let it mean so much to
you, old man. You’ve worked yourself pretty well up to the breaking
point. There are plenty of other gulches if ours shouldn’t happen to
pan out. Get your clothes off and turn in. That’s the best thing to do
now.”
Philip sprang up and began to walk the floor of the small bed-room.
“Sleep!” he muttered, “I couldn’t sleep if the salvation of the whole
human race hung upon it.” Then: “We’re simpletons, Harry; damned
tenderfoot simpletons! We never ought to have left that claim--both
of us at once. How do we know that there isn’t a land office nearer
than Leadville where it can be registered? How do we know we won’t find
claim jumpers in possession when we go back?”
“Nonsense! You know you are only borrowing trouble. What’s the use?”
“It’s the suspense.... I can’t stand it, Harry! Go to bed if you feel
like it; I’m going back to the sampling works and see that quartz put
through the mill--see that they don’t work any shenanigan on us. I
believe they’re capable of it. That slant-eyed superintendent asked too
many questions about where the stuff came from to suit me. Go on to
bed. I’ll bring you the news in the morning.”
V
THE level rays of the morning sun were struggling in through a dusty
and begrimed bed-room window when Bromley awoke to find Philip in
the room; a Philip haggard and hollow-eyed for want of sleep, but
nevertheless fiercely, exultantly jubilant.
“Wake up!” he was shouting excitedly. “Wake up and yell your head off!
We’ve struck rich pay in that hole in the gulch!--do you hear what I’m
saying?--pay rock in the ‘Little Jean’!”
Bromley sat up in bed, hugging his knees.
“Let’s see where we left off,” he murmured, with a sleepy yawn. “I was
headed for bed, wasn’t I? And you were chasing back to the assay shop
to hang, draw, quarter and gibbet the outfit if it shouldn’t give us a
fair shake. I hope you didn’t find it necessary to assassinate anybody?”
“Assassinate nothing!”--the news-bringer had stripped off coat and
shirt, and was making a violent assault upon the wash-stand in the
corner of the room. “Didn’t you hear what I said? We’ve struck
it--struck it big!” Then, punctuated by vigorous sluicings of cold
water: “The ‘Little Jean’s’ a thundering bonanza ... six separate
assays ... one hundred and sixty-two dollars to the ton is the lowest
... the highest’s over two hundred. And it’s free-milling ore, at
that! Harry, we’re rich--heeled for life--or we are going to be if we
haven’t lost everything by acting like two of the most footless fools
on God’s green earth.”
“‘We have left undone those things which we ought to have done, and
we have done those things which we ought not to have done, and there
is no health in us,’” quoted the play-boy, thrusting his legs out of
bed and groping for his clothes. “For what particular sin do we pray
forgiveness?”
“For leaving that claim of ours out of doors with nobody to watch
it,”--this out of the mufflings of the towel. “It gives me a cold sweat
every time I think of what may have happened since we left; what may be
happening right now, for all we know!”
“What could happen?” Bromley queried. “It is our discovery, isn’t
it? And we have posted it and are here to record it and file on it
according to law.”
“Yes, but good Lord! Haven’t you been in these mountains long enough to
know that possession is nine points of the law where a mining prospect
is concerned? I knew it, but I took a chance because I thought we had
that country over across the range pretty much to ourselves.”
“Well, haven’t we?”
“No; the woods are full of prospectors over there, so they told me at
the sampling works; we just didn’t happen to run across any of them.
Did you ever hear of a man named Drew?”
“You mean Stephen Drew, the man who bought the ‘Snow Bird’ for five
millions?”
“That’s the man. He happened to be down at the sampling works this
morning when our assays were handed out. I guess I made a bleating
idiot of myself when I saw what we had. Anyway, Mr. Drew remembered
meeting me in the railroad offices in Denver and he congratulated me.
One word brought on another. He asked me if we wanted to sell the
claim, and I told him no--that we were going back to work it through
the winter. He said that was the proper thing, if we could stand the
hardships; that if we did this and pulled through, he’d talk business
with us next spring on a partnership or a lease.”
“Good--immitigably good!” chirruped Bromley. “And meanwhile?”
“Meanwhile, we take out our legal papers and get back to that gulch
as quick as the Lord will let us. Mr. Drew shook his head when I told
him how we had left things. He said we’d be lucky if we didn’t find a
bunch of mine jumpers in possession when we got back; that there were
plenty of thugs in the mountains who wouldn’t scruple to take a chance,
destroy our posted notice and stick up one of their own, and then fight
it out with us when we turned up, on a basis of might making right. I
mentioned our rights and the law, and he smiled and said: ‘You are a
long way from the nearest sheriff’s office over there, and you know the
old saying--that possession is nine points of the law. Of course, you
could beat them eventually, but the courts are slow, and you would be
kept out of your property for a long time. Take my advice, and get back
there as soon as you can.’ I told him we’d go back right away and be
there waiting for him next spring.”
“Oh, Lord!” Bromley groaned in mock dismay; “have we got to hit that
terrible trail again without taking even a couple of days to play
around in?”
“Hit it, and keep on hitting it day and night till we get there!” was
the mandatory decision. “If you are ready, let’s go and eat. There is a
lot to be done, and we are wasting precious time.”
It was at the finish of a hurried breakfast eaten in the comfortless
hotel dining-room that Bromley took it upon himself to revise the
programme of headlong haste.
“You may as well listen to reason, Phil,” he argued smoothly. “The land
office won’t be open until nine o’clock or after; and past that, there
is the shopping for the winter camping spell. You are fairly dead on
your feet for sleep; you look it, and you are it. You go back to the
room and sleep up for a few hours. I’ll take my turn now--do all that
needs to be done, and call you when we’re ready to pull our freight.”
Philip shook his head in impatient protest. “I can keep going all right
for a while longer,” he asserted obstinately.
“Of course you can; but there is no need of it. We can’t hope to start
before noon, or maybe later; and it won’t take more than one of us to
go through the motions of making ready. You mog off to your downy couch
and let me take my turn at the grindstone. You’ve jolly well and good
had yours.”
“Well,” Philip yielded reluctantly. Then: “Late in the season as it is,
there will be a frantic rush for our valley as soon as the news of the
‘Little Jean’ discovery leaks out. Mr. Drew warned me of this, and he
cautioned me against talking too much here in Leadville; especially
against giving any hint of the locality. You’ll look out for that?”
Bromley laughed. “I’m deaf and dumb--an oyster--a clam. Where can I
find this Mr. Stephen Drew who is going to help us transmute our hard
rock into shiny twenty-dollar pieces next spring?”
Philip gave him Drew’s Leadville address, and then went to climb the
ladder-like stair to the room with the dirty window, where he flung
himself upon the unmade bed without stopping to undress, and fell
asleep almost in the act. When next he opened his eyes the room was
pitchy dark and Bromley was shaking him awake.
“What’s happened?” he gasped, as Bromley struck a match to light the
lamp; and then: “Good God, Harry!--have you let me waste a whole day
sleeping?”
“Even so,” was the cheerful reply. “I’ll tell you about it while you’re
sticking your face into a basin of cold water. To make it short--the
way you did this morning--the cat’s out of the bag. This whole town
knows that there has been a big gold strike made on the other side of
the range. What it hasn’t found out yet is who made the strike, or
where it is located. Mr. Drew put me on.”
“Good Lord!” Philip groaned. “And we’ve lost hours and hours!”
“They’re not lost; they’ve only gone before. Friend Drew is
responsible. He said, since the news had got out, we would better wait
until after dark to make our start, and then take the road as quietly
as we could; so I let you sleep. So far, as nearly as Mr. Drew could
find out, we haven’t been identified as the lucky discoverers.”
“That will follow, as sure as fate!” Philip predicted gloomily.
“Maybe not. While there’s life there’s hope. I’ve paid our bill here
at the hotel, and we’ll go to a restaurant for supper. Everything is
done that needed to be done; claim recorded, grub-stake bought, jacks
packed and ready to move, and a couple of tough little riding broncos,
the horses a loan from Mr. Drew, who pointed out, very sensibly, that
we’d save time and shoe-leather by riding in, to say nothing of leg
weariness. Drew has one of his hired men looking out for us at the
livery stable where the horses and jacks are put up, and this man will
give us a pointer if there is anything suspicious in the wind. If you
are ready, let’s go.”
As unobtrusively as possible they made their way down the steep stair
to pass out through the office-bar-room. As they entered the smoky,
malodorous public room Philip thought it a little odd that there were
no card players at the tables. A few of the evening habitués were lined
up at the bar, but most of them were gathered in knots and groups
about the rusty cast-iron stove in which a fire had been lighted. With
senses on the alert, Philip followed Bromley’s lead. There was an air
of palpitant excitement in the place, and, on the short passage to the
outer door, snatches of eager talk drifted to Philip’s ears; enough to
make it plain that the new gold strike was responsible for the group
gathering and the excitement.
“I’ll bet a hen worth fifty dollars that Hank Neighbors--that big cuss
leanin’ up ag’inst the bar--knows who struck it, and whereabouts it’s
located,” was one of the remarks that he overheard; and, glancing back
from the door, he saw the man to whom the reference was made--a tall,
loose-jointed man, with deep-set, gloomy eyes and a curling brown beard
that masked something more than half of his face.
Upon leaving the hotel, Bromley led the way down Harrison Avenue
toward a restaurant not far from the stable where their outfit waited
for them. With the mining excitement now at its most populous height,
and the sidewalks filled with restless throngs of men, there was
curiously little street disorder; this though the saloons, dance-halls
and gaming rooms of a wide-open mining-camp city were running full
blast, their garishly lighted entrances lacking even the customary
slatted swing doors of concealment. For the greater part, the crowds
were good-natured and boisterously hilarious; and where the not too
infrequent drunken celebrator came weaving along, the sidewalk jostlers
gave him room, shouting such encouragements as “Walk a chalk, old boy!”
or “Go it while you’re young--when you’re old you can’t!” One of the
staggerers who bumped against Philip and his partner was repeating
monotonously: “’Rah for Jimmie Garfield--canal boy, b’gosh--nexsht
presh’dent!” an exotic injection of the politics of a campaign year
into an atmosphere as remote as that of another planet from matters
political or governmental.
In the side-street restaurant Philip chose a table in a corner and sat
with his back to the wall so that he could see the length and breadth
of the room. The hour was late, and the tables were no more than half
filled; but where there were groups of two or more, there was eager
talk.
“It’s here, too,” Philip commented in low tones, indicating the eager
and evidently excited groups at the other tables.
“It is everywhere, just as I told you. The town is sizzling with it.
When I was a little tad I used to sit goggle-eyed listening to the
tales of a cousin of ours who was one of the returned California
Forty-niners. I remember he said it was that way out there. A camp
would be booming along fine, with everybody happy and contented, until
word of a new strike blew in. Then the whole outfit would go wild and
make a frantic dash for the new diggings. It’s lucky nobody has spotted
us for the discoverers. We’d be mobbed.”
“I wish I could be sure we haven’t been spotted,” said Philip, a wave
of misgiving suddenly submerging him.
“I think we are safe enough, thus far,” Bromley put in, adding: “But
it was a mighty lucky thing that we came in after dark last night with
those sacks of samples. If it had been daytime----”
The Chinese waiter was bringing their order, and Bromley left the
subjunctive hanging in air. Philip sat back while the smiling Celestial
was arranging the table. As he did so, the street door opened and
closed and he had a prickling shock. The latest incomer was a tall man
with sunken eyes and a curly brown beard masking his face; the man who
had been leaning against the bar in the Harrison Avenue hotel, and who
had been named as Hank Neighbors.
“What is it--a ghost?” queried Bromley, after the Chinaman had removed
himself.
“It is either a raw coincidence--or trouble,” Philip returned. “A
fellow who was in the bar-room of the hotel as we passed through has
just come in. He is sitting at a table out there by the door and
looking the room over ... and trying to give the impression that he
isn’t.”
“Do you think he has followed us?”
“It is either that or a coincidence; and I guess we needn’t look very
hard for coincidences at this stage of the game.”
“Don’t know who he is, do you?”
“No, but I know his name. It’s Neighbors. Just as we were leaving the
hotel, one of the bar-room crowd named him; pointed him out to his
fellow gossips as a man who probably knew who had made the new gold
strike, and where it is located.”
“Well,” Bromley began, “if there is only one of him----”
“If there is one, there will be more,” Philip predicted. Then, at a
sudden prompting of the primitive underman: “I wish to goodness we had
something more deadly than that old navy revolver we’ve been lugging
around all summer.”
Bromley’s smile was cherubic.
“As it happens, we are perfectly well prepared to back our judgment--at
Mr. Drew’s suggestion. Our arsenal now sports a couple of late model
Winchesters, with the ammunition and saddle holsters therefor. I bought
’em and sneaked ’em down to the stable this afternoon.”
Philip looked up with narrowed eyes. “Would you fight for this chance
of ours if we’re pushed to it, Harry?”
Bromley laughed.
“I’ll shoot any man’s sheep that’ll try to bite me. Have you ever
doubted it?”
“I didn’t know.”
“How about you?”
“I have never fired a rifle in my life; not at anything--much less at a
man. But if I had to----”
“I know,” said Bromley with a grin. “You’re a chip off the old Puritan
block. If the occasion should arise, you’d tell your New England
conscience to look the other way, take cold-blooded aim, pull trigger
and let the natural law of expanding gases take its course. But we
mustn’t be too blood-thirsty. If we are followed to-night it needn’t be
a foregone conclusion that the trailers are going to try to take our
mine away from us. It is much more likely they’ll be tagging along to
do a little hurry stake-driving of their own, after we’ve shown them
the place.”
Philip had drained his second cup of coffee. “If you are through?” he
said; and as they left the restaurant he shot a quick glance aside at
the man who either was, or was not, a coincidence. To all appearances,
suspicion had no peg to hang upon. The Neighbors person was eating his
supper quietly, and he did not look up as they passed him on their way
to the street.
At the stable they found Drew’s man; a young fellow who looked like a
horse-wrangler, and who dressed the part, even to a pair of jingling
Mexican spurs with preposterous rowels, and soft leather boots with
high heels.
“Everything lovely and the goose hangs high,” he told them; and as they
were leading the loaded jacks and the saddle animals out: “The big boss
said I was to ride herd on yuh till yuh got out o’ town. He allowed
it’d be safer if yuh didn’t go pee-radin’ down the Avenoo.”
In silence they followed their mounted guide through the lower part of
the town and so came, by a rather long and dodging detour, into the
rutted stage road at some distance beyond the last of the houses. Here
their pace-setter turned back and they went on alone. It was a moonless
night, but they had no trouble in following the well-used road over the
hills and down to the valley of the Arkansas.
At the river crossing, however, the difficulties began. Though hardly
more than a mountain creek at this short distance from its source,
the river still held hazards in places for a night crossing with
loaded pack animals, and it was some little time before they found the
shallows through which they had led the burros the previous evening.
Just as they reached and recognized the crossing place they heard the
sound of galloping hoofs, and Philip jerked his rifle out of its saddle
scabbard and began to fumble the breech mechanism.
“Don’t shoot!” Bromley warned; and when the single horseman closed up
they saw that he was the guide who had piloted them out of Leadville.
“Sashayed out to tell yuh there’s a bunch a-trailin’ yuh,” he announced
laconically. “Five of ’em, with Hank Neighbors headin’ the procession.
Must’ve got onto yuh, some way.”
“Did you see them?” Philip asked.
“Passed ’em as I was goin’ back, and circled round to get ahead of ’em.”
“What sort of a man is this Neighbors?”
“Minin’ man, is what he lets on to be.”
“Straight or crooked?”
“You can’t prove nothin’ by me. But if I was you-all, I’d try to make
out to lose him and his pardners in the shuffle somewheres betwixt here
and wherever it is you’re a-headin’ for. I shore would.”
“Have they horses?” Bromley inquired.
“Yep; and three jacks, packed same as yourn.”
“Then they can’t make any better time than we can,” Philip put in.
“That depends on how much time yuh make and how much yuh lose. But that
don’t make no difference. They can trail yuh, if yuh don’t figger out
some trick to throw ’em off.”
“Are they armed?” Philip asked.
The horse-wrangler chuckled at the tenderfoot naïveté of the question.
“Folks don’t trail round much in this neck o’ woods without totin’
their artillery. Leastways, a _hombre_ like Hank Neighbors don’t. Far
as that goes, you-all seem to be pretty well heeled yourselves.”
“We’ll try to hold up our end of the log,” Philip boasted. Then: “If
they’re chasing us, I guess we’d better be moving along. Much obliged
for your trouble--till you’re better paid. Get hold of that canary’s
halter, Harry, and we’ll pitch out.”
The river crossing was made in safety, and, to their great relief,
they had little difficulty in finding their way to the high basin.
Since the trail threaded a dry gulch for the greater part of the
ascent, there were only a few stretches where they had to dismount and
lead the horses, so not much time was lost. Nevertheless, it was past
midnight when they reached the easier travelling through the basin
toward the pass of the crusted snowdrifts. Riding abreast where the
trail permitted, they herded the jacks before them, pushing on at speed
where they could, and slowing up only in places where haste threatened
disaster.
“What’s your notion, Phil?” Bromley asked, when, in the dark hour
preceding the dawn, they found themselves at the foot of the
precipitous climb to the pass. “Don’t you think we’d better camp down
and wait for daylight before we tackle this hill?”
Philip’s reply was an emphatic negative. “We can make it; we’ve got to
make it,” he declared. “If those people are chasing us, they can’t be
very far behind, and if we stop here they’ll catch up with us. And if
we let them do that, we’d never be able to shake them off.”
“As you like,” Bromley yielded, and the precipitous ascent was begun.
With anything less than tenderfoot inexperience for the driving power,
and the luck of the novice for a guardian angel, the perilous climb
over a trail that was all but invisible in the darkness would never
have been made without disaster. Convinced by the first half-mile
of zigzagging that two men could not hope to lead five animals in a
bunch over an ascending trail which was practically no trail at all,
they compromised with the necessities and covered the distance to
the summit of the pass twice; once to drag the reluctant broncos to
the top, and again to go through the same toilsome process with the
still more reluctant pack animals. It was a gruelling business in the
thin, lung-cutting air of the high altitude, with its freezing chill;
and when it was finished they were fain to cast themselves down upon
the rocky summit, gasping for breath and too nearly done in to care
whether the animals stood or strayed, and with Bromley panting out,
“Never again in this world for little Henry Wigglesworth! There’ll be
a railroad built over this assassinating mountain range some fine day,
and I’ll just wait for it.”
“Tough; but we made it,” was Philip’s comment. “We’re here for sunrise.”
The assertion chimed accurately with the fact. The stars had already
disappeared from the eastern half of the sky, and the sharply outlined
summits of the distant Park Range were visible against the rose-tinted
background of the coming dawn. In the middle distance the reaches of
the great basin came slowly into view, and in the first rays of the
rising sun the ground over which they had stumbled in the small hours
of the night spread itself map-like below them. Far down on the basin
trail a straggling procession of creeping figures revealed itself, the
distance minimizing its progress so greatly that the movement appeared
to be no more than a snail’s pace.
“You see,” Philip scowled. “If we had camped at the foot of this hill
it would have been all over but the swearing.”
Bromley acquiesced with a nod. “You are right. What next?”
“We have our lead now and we must hold it at all costs--get well down
into the timber on the western slope before they can climb up here. Are
you good for more of the same?”
“A bit disfigured, but still in the ring,” said the play-boy, with his
cheerful smile twisting itself, for very weariness, into a teeth-baring
grin. Then, as the sunlight grew stronger, he made a binocular of his
curved hands and looked back over the basin distances. As he did so,
the twisted smile became a chuckling laugh. “Take another look at that
outfit on the trail, Phil,” he said. “It’s my guess that they have a
pair of field-glasses and have got a glimpse of us up here.”
Philip looked, and what he saw made him scramble to his feet and shout
at the patient jacks, lop-eared and dejected after their long night
march. The group on the distant trail was no longer a unit. Three of
the dots had detached themselves from the others and were coming on
ahead--at a pace which, even at the great distance, defined itself as a
fast gallop.