“Well, I’ll be dawg-goned! Sure I ricollect! You’re the young feller I
told to hump hisself and go sit with the li’l’ black-eyed gal that had
the sick daddy. Put ’er there!” and he gave Philip’s hand a grip that
made the knuckles crack.
Philip slid from the saddle, smiling a sheepish apology.
“Sorry I had to come on the scene swearing like an abandoned pirate,
but these chicken-brained jacks have just about worn me out. Queer we
should stumble upon each other in this God-forsaken place. Where do you
come from?”
“Hoofed it up from the Aspen diggin’s. Aimin’ to get out o’ the woods
afore I get snowed under and can’t. You ain’t had all the bad luck.
Yiste’day I lost my canary, pack, blankets and all, in the Roarin’
Fork. Li’l’ cuss slipped and rolled into the creek and I didn’t get to
save nothin’ but the old Winchester I was totin’ and a li’l’ bite o’
bread and meat I had in my pockets. Box o’ matches went with the hide
and taller, and I’d ’a’ slep’ cold last night if I hadn’t run onto a
bunch o’ Leadville men back yonder a piece and hunkered down afore
their fire.”
Philip started at the mention of the Leadville men, but he deferred
the question that rose instantly to his lips.
“You are going out by way of the pass over the main range at the head
of Chalk Creek?” he asked.
“Aimin’ to get out thataway; yes.”
“All right; I’m headed that way, too, and, as you see, I have one more
horse than I can ride. I’ll give you a lift, if you say so.”
The big man’s laugh was like the rumbling of distant thunder.
“If I say so? Say, young feller me lad, I ain’t got but one mouth, but
I reckon if I had a dozen of ’em they’d all be sayin’ so at once,” he
affirmed gratefully. “Want to pitch out right now?”
“No; I’ll eat first. Didn’t want to stop until I got to the top of the
pass.”
Philip unslung his provision haversack and spread the contents on the
flat rock. Over the meal, which he invited the wayfarer to share with
him, he got the story of the bearded man’s summer; weary months of
prospecting in the western slope wilderness with nothing to show for
it, not even the specimens from the few putative discoveries he had
made, since these had gone to the bottom of the Roaring Fork with the
drowned burro.
“Hard luck,” Philip commented, when the brief tale of discouragement
had been told. “What will you do now?”
“Same as every busted prospector does: hunt me a winter job in a
smelter ’r stamp-mill and sweat at it till I get enough spondulix ahead
to buy me another grub-stake.”
“Go to work as a day-laborer?”
“You’ve named it. Minin’s the only trade I know; and the mills ain’t
payin’ miner’s wages for shovelin’ ore into the stamps.”
“Why don’t you try for a job in one of the big mines?”
The giant’s laugh rumbled again.
“Not me--I ain’t that kind of a miner--ain’t wearing no brass collar
for a corp’ration! Gone too long without it. But lookee here, you ain’t
told me nothin’ about yerself. I didn’t allow you was aimin’ to turn
into a mount’in man when I rid the cars with yuh last spring.”
“I wasn’t,” said Philip; and thereupon he gave a short account of the
summer’s wanderings up to, but not including, the discovery of the
“Little Jean,” and entirely omitting all mention of Bromley’s part in
the wanderings. That his story did not explain his presence on the
outward trail with two saddle horses, three jacks and no tools or camp
equipment, he was well aware; but the canny traditions were warning him
not to betray the carefully guarded secret of the “Little Jean” to a
chance travelling companion.
“Tough luck, all round,” said the big man half absently; and Philip
saw plainly enough that he was trying to fit the present moment’s
inconsistencies into the story. Then: “Still and all, somebody’s had
good luck over here in this hell’s back kitchen. I heard about it in
the camp o’ them Leadville pardners last night.”
“What did you hear?” Philip asked, and his nerves were prickling.
“They said two young fellers, tenderfoots, both of ’em, hoofed it into
Leadville two-three weeks ago with some stuff that run away up yonder
in the assays--rotten quartz and free gold.”
“Well,” said Philip, still with nerves on edge, “that sort of thing is
happening every day, isn’t it? What more did you hear?”
“They was talkin’ ’mongst theirselves--not to me. The news had leaked
out, like it always does, and they’d trailed the young fellers, a
ridin’ two broncs and herdin’ three loaded jacks, acrosst the range and
over here. Then they’d lost the trail somehow. From what I picked up,
I allowed they was aimin’ to stay till they found it ag’in, if it took
all winter.”
Philip’s tongue was dry in his mouth when he said: “Whereabouts were
these Leadville people camped?”
“About ten mile north, at the mouth of a li’l’ creek that runs into the
Fork.”
There was one more question to be asked, and Philip was afraid to ask
it. Yet he forced himself to give it tongue.
“You say you camped with these fellows last night. What kind of a crowd
was it?”
The big prospector was staring at the three jacks and two horses as if
he were mentally counting them.
“Jist betwixt you and me and the gate-post, it’s a sort o’ tough
outfit. Hank Neighbors is headin’ it, and if half o’ what they tell
about him is so, he’s plum bad medicine.”
“Not prospectors, then?”
“W-e-l-l, you might call ’em so; but I reckon they’re the kind that
lets other folks do most o’ the hard work o’ findin’ and diggin’.”
“You mean they’re ‘jumpers’?”
“Least said’s soonest mended. But if I had a right likely prospect
anywheres in these here hills, I’d shore hate like sin to have ’em run
acrosst it.”
Philip’s resolve was taken upon the instant. From what had been said he
knew precisely where the Neighbors camp was; it was only a few miles
below the gulch of the “Little Jean”; so few that the campers may well
have heard the crashes of the evening rifle practice. And Bromley was
standing guard alone.
“See here,” he began, suddenly reversing all former resolutions of
canny secrecy; “I don’t know you--don’t even know your name. But I
believe you are an honest man, and I’m going to tell you something: I’m
one of the tenderfoots Neighbors is trying to trail.”
The wayfaring prospector greeted the information with a wide-mouthed
smile.
“Yuh didn’t hardly need to tell me that--with them five critturs
standin’ there a-hangin’ their heads, and you without any camp stuff
’r tools, and with two saddle hosses where yuh didn’t need only one.
What’s yer game?”
Being fairly committed now, Philip went the entire length--with nothing
hopeful to build upon save the big miner’s rough chivalry as he had
seen it manifested in the Kansas Pacific day-coach months before.
Frankly filling the blanks he had left in his earlier account of the
summer’s experiences, he wound up with an anxious question:
“What am I to do? I can’t go on and leave my partner to stand off this
robber gang alone. They’ll find our claim before I could get back. It’s
our own creek they’re camping on, right now!” Then: “You say you are
going out by way of Chalk Creek. I have a little money left; it isn’t
much, but it’s all yours if you’ll take these horses and jades out to
Nachtrieb’s ranch in the South Park and leave them there. Then I can go
back from here and take my share of what’s coming to us.”
The big man got up and brushed the crumbs from his clothes.
“I can beat that all holler, if you’ll say the word. I sort o’ like
your looks--liked ’em last spring when I chucked yuh in the seat with
the li’l’ black-eyed gal. Yuh say yo’re aimin’ to hole up for the
winter and work yer claim. S’pose yuh give me a job along with you and
yer pardner and lemme go back with yuh? I can hold steel ’r pound it,
and han’le powder. More’n that, I can shoot middlin’ straight when I
aim to.”
“You mean you’d stand with us if the Neighbors bunch should try to jump
our claim?”
“Why, suree! Yuh don’t reckon I’d go back on my bread and meat, do yuh?”
“But these beasts--what’s to be done with them?”
“I was comin’ to that. There’s a li’l’ ranch six-seven mile in the
park ahead of us; it’s the place where I was aimin’ to get enough grub
to walk out on. Queer old squatter runs it; li’l’ mite cracked in his
upper story on religion, they say. He’ll winter the stock for yuh.”
“Still, that isn’t all,” Philip went on desperately. “We have laid in
provisions for the winter, my partner and I; all we could afford to
buy. The stake is enough for two, but if there are three of us, we’ll
go short before spring. Besides, we haven’t enough money left to pay
your wages.”
“Ne’m mind about the wages; they can wait. If half o’ what they’re
sayin’ about this here strike o’ yourn is so, there’ll be ore enough on
the dump, come spring, to pay all the bills--and then some, I reckon.
All I’ll ask’ll be a chance to stake a claim somewheres round next to
yourn, maybe.”
“You won’t have to ask anybody’s permission to do that,” Philip put in.
“But still there is the question of the short grub-stake.”
The big man grinned cheerfully. “Might trust in the Lord a li’l’ bit,
mightn’t we? Maybe He’ll send us a short winter. Anyhow, I’ll take my
chance o’ starvin’; it won’t be the first time by a long chalk. Whadda
yuh say? Is it a go?”
It was far enough from Philip’s normal promptings to decide anything so
momentous without due and thoughtful consideration. But the exigencies
had suddenly become urgent. In his mind’s eye he could see the
Neighbors gang of desperadoes besieging the log cabin, with its scanty
garrison of two untrained defenders. One additional loyal pair of eyes
and hands might turn the scale. Hasty decisions, headlong initiative,
were the very essence of the time, and of the treasure-seekers’
existence. Impulsively he thrust out a bargain-clinching hand.
“It’s a go, if you want to throw in with us, and I’ll promise you you
won’t lose anything by it,” he said. “What may I call you?”
“Name’s Garth--‘Big Jim,’ for short.”
“Mine is Philip Trask. We are strangers to each other, but that’s an
even stand-off. I’m banking on you for what you did for the little girl
on the train. Let’s hurry and find that park ranch you speak of. It’s
running in my mind that we can’t get back to the claim any too soon.”
It was after they had mounted and were herding the jacks down the
descending trail that Garth said: “What about the li’l’ gal with the
sick daddy? Ever see her again?”
“Just once,” Philip returned, “five or six weeks after they reached
Denver. The family was living in one of the tent colonies, and from
what was said, I judged the father was pretty badly off.”
“Uh-huh,” said Garth. “You hear a heap nowadays about what the dry
air’ll do for them lungers, but the health boosters tell only half o’
the story. That same old thin air kills ’em swift if they come too
late. It shore do.”
By pushing the animals as fast as the hazardous trail would permit,
the ranch in the inter-mountain park was reached in the shank of
the afternoon. Philip made a hurried bargain with the ranch owner,
a white-haired, white-bearded old man who might have figured as a
reincarnation of Elijah the Tishbite; and after a consultation with
Garth, refused the old man’s offer of a night’s lodging. Garth’s vote
was for an immediate return to the “Little Jean.” The skies were clear
and there would be a moon for at least the first half of the night.
“We’ve left a trail in the snow that a blind man could back-track on,”
he pointed out. “I’m hep for the night tramp, if so be you are.”
Stiff from the long day in the saddle, Philip would have welcomed a
blanket bed before the Tishbite’s hearth fire, but the urgencies were
still acutely upon him; also, he was beginning to acquire the pride of
the outdoor man. If Garth, who had already tramped miles before the
afternoon meeting on the high pass, could stand it to keep on going,
surely he could.
“We’ll tackle it,” he said shortly; and presently they were taking the
steep mountain trail in reverse, slipping and sliding in the dry snow,
but doggedly making their way toward the high, wind-swept pass.
Visioning that long night tramp in the moonlight, afterward, Philip
knew it would be an enduring memory after many other experiences had
faded and gone. The slippery trail; the black shadows of the trees
while they were still in the foresting, and the blacker shadows of
great rocks and gulch cliffs after they had climbed above timber line;
the keen night wind sweeping over the bleak pass where they paused for
a short halt in the lee of a sheltering boulder to eat a few mouthfuls
of food before hitting the downward trail; the perilous descent to the
headwater gulches of the Roaring Fork, where more than once he owed his
escape from a sudden plunge into unknown depths to the quick clutch of
the silent giant plodding along tirelessly behind him--no detail of the
deadening, soul-harrowing fight for endurance, lapsing finally into a
sheer effort of the will to thrust one foot before the other, would
ever be forgotten.
The moon had long since disappeared behind the uplifted skyline of
the western ranges by the time they were measuring the last of the
weary miles in the valley of the lucky strike. At the foot of one of
the jutting mountain spurs, Philip broke the slogging monotony to say:
“We’re almost there. The next gulch is ours.”
“Good enough,” was the muttered comment from the rear; and then,
suddenly: “Hold up--hold your hosses a minute!”
Philip turned and saw Garth stooping with his rifle held in the crook
of an arm. He was peering down at the hoof tracks they had been
following.
“What is it?” he asked.
Garth pushed his flap-brimmed hat to the back of his head and looked up.
“Thought yuh said a while back that this here was your trail--the one
yuh made comin’ out with the cavoyard this mornin’.”
“Well, isn’t it?”
“Not by a jugful--not unless yuh was walking the hull caboodle of ’em
back’ards.”
“What’s that?”
“Sure as shootin’. The critters that made this trail was goin’ the same
way we are. Get down and take a squint for yerself.”
Philip was about to comply when he saw a spurt of red flame leap out in
the up-valley distance, the flash followed quickly by the reverberating
echoes of a rifle shot. At the flash and crash Garth leaped afoot with
a growled-out imprecation and worked the lever of his repeating rifle
to throw a cartridge into the chamber.
“That means business, son! They’ve called the turn on us and got yer
pardner in the nine-hole! Limber up that old hoss-pistol o’ yourn and
p’int the way to get into your gulch without bustin’ in at the front
door. That’s our chance--if we’ve got any. Jump to it!”