THE beginning of the week after the clash with the claim jumpers found
the routine which the owners of the “Little Jean” hoped to maintain
through the winter catching its stride. True, Bromley was out of the
activities for the time being; but even as a cripple he contributed his
part by refusing to let Philip or Garth make a trip afoot to Leadville
on the slender chance of being able to persuade a doctor to cross the
ranges in the perilous edge of the closed season. As to this, however,
a second snowfall, coming almost upon the heels of the first, shut them
off conclusively from the outer world, and their isolation was complete.
“It’s perfectly all right,” Bromley maintained cheerfully. “I’m
doing fine--couldn’t be doing any better if I had all the doctors in
Leadville. The only thing that nags me is the fact that I’m tied down
and can’t pull my weight in the boat.”
“You have good and well earned all the time you have to lose,” was
Philip’s retort to this plaint; and with Garth as an able team-mate
he completed the preparations for the winter, cutting down trees for
firewood, setting up a third bunk in the cabin, and building a small
lean-to for the storing of the provisions and explosives.
When it came to a resumption of the mining operations, Philip found
that they had acquired much more than a mere day-laborer in the
experienced mining man. Quite apart from his great strength and
apparently unlimited capacity for hard work, Garth’s practical
knowledge of development processes proved invaluable, and it was at his
suggestion that the tunnel was straightened and enlarged, its future
drainage and ventilation provided for, and a rough-and-ready process of
hand-picked ore-sorting made a part of each day’s task.
“You got to look ahead a mile ’r so in this here minin’ game,” was the
experienced one’s business-like argument. “You let on like you boys
ain’t got the spondulix to buy a stamp-mill and tote it in over the
mount’ins, so you either got to make a stock comp’ny o’ this bonanza
o’ yourn ’r else lease it. Either way the cat jumps, it’s a-goin’ to
pay big if yuh’ve got a sure-enough mine, with rich ore on the dump, to
show up next spring.”
For two tenderfoots to whom, as yet, all things mining-wise were
unknown quantities, this practical advice was as water to the thirsty,
so the development work was planned accordingly. By the time Bromley’s
wound had healed and he was able to take his shift as third man in
the heading, the work of drilling and blasting had been expertly
systematized, and the stock of selected ore was growing day by day.
Speculations as to what had become of the would-be jumpers died out
after the first heavy snowfall, which blocked, not only the mountain
passes, but the high-lying valley as well. Garth had argued from the
first that, with at least one wounded man in the party, Neighbors
would not try to hold his footing in the snowbound western wilderness
through the winter.
“Now that he knows whereabouts them high-grade assays o’ yourn come
from, he’ll know how to beat the rush that’s shore goin’ to come
chargin’ in here the minute the passes are open in the spring,” was
Garth’s answer to the speculations; and since the snow blockade, daily
added to, shut all intrusion out, no less effectually than it shut the
occupants of the lonely log cabin in, the stirring incidents of the
night of battle became only a memory, and the day’s work filled the cup
of the days to overflowing for the three who had elected to brave the
winter in the solitudes.
The severity of the winter of 1880-81 in the mountains of Colorado
had--and still has--for its reminiscent chroniclers all those who
endured the rigors of that Arctic season. The trio in the high-pitched
valley of the Saguache were not the only mineral-mad gold-hunters who,
deliberately or in tenderfoot hardihood, disregarded the warnings
of the old-timers and stayed afield, many of them without adequate
supplies, and lacking the skill and experience necessary to successful
pioneering in a snowbound wilderness. As a consequence, the hard winter
took its toll on many a mountain side and in many an isolated gulch.
Snow slides swept precariously situated log cabins from bare slopes, or
buried them fathoms deep in débris in the gulches. In the ill-provided
camps starvation stalked abroad; and though there was game to be had,
it could not be pursued without snow-shoes; and few, indeed, were the
neophytes who had had the foresight to include snow-shoes in their
winter camp kits.
As for the three burrowing in the gulch of the “Little Jean,” the
hardships played no favorites, though Garth’s fund of experience stood
them in good stead, tiding them over many of the exigencies. Before
they became entirely shut in, the big man stalked and shot a deer:
the meat was smoke-cured and added to the store of provisions, and
the skin, Indian-tanned, served for an extra bunk cover in the cold
nights. But with the coming of the heavier snows deer-stalking became
impossible, so that source of food supply was cut off for the future.
Fortunately, by the middle of December, by which time zero-and-below
temperatures were clamping the western slope wilderness in an icy
vise, they had driven the mine tunnel to a depth to which the outdoor
frigidities only partly penetrated; hence they were still able to carry
on the mining operations. But the deepening drifts in the gulch were
now threatening to bury the small cabin, chimney and all, and no little
of their daylight time was spent in keeping the snow shovelled from
the roof, and the paths open to the tunnel, to the woodpile and to the
creek from which they were still obtaining their drinking water.
Life under such conditions--complete and unbreakable isolation,
day-long toil, much of which must be squandered in a bare struggle
for existence, and the constant and wearing demand upon fortitude and
endurance--exacts penalties in whatever coin the debtor may be able
to pay. For Philip Trask, his uneventful youth and early manhood,
with its years running in the well-worn grooves of tradition and the
conventional, faded and became as the memory of a dream--a memory
which was dimming day by day and withdrawing into a more and more
remote distance.
It was in the long winter evenings before the hearth fire in the
half-buried cabin that he began to understand that Bromley was humanly
and socially the better man; that there was in him a fine strain
of gentle breeding which not only enabled him to rise superior to
environment and association, but also gave him an outlook upon life
unattainable by the under-gifted. From the beginning the play-boy
had struck up a friendship, or rather an affectionate comradeship,
with Garth that he, Philip, could not bring himself to share, try
as he might. Little things, even the mountain man’s crudities of
speech, jarred upon him. It was quite in vain that he called himself
hard names, asking himself why he, of all men, should yield to the
nudgings of an intellectual or social snobbishness. But the fact
remained. Bromley could bridge the social gap between himself and Garth
apparently without effort; could and did. In the pipe-smoking hours
before the cabin fire it was the play-boy and the bearded frontiersman
who were companions, while Philip found himself sitting apart and
brooding.
“How do you do it, Harry?” he asked, one evening when Garth, who
thought he had seen deer tracks in the snow, had gone out to the water
hole in the creek to try for a moonlight shot at more meat.
“Do what--chum in with Big Jim? Why shouldn’t I? He’s a man, isn’t he?”
“Yes; but you and he have absolutely nothing in common. Garth washes
his face occasionally and calls it a bath; keeps his fingernails in
mourning; shovels his food with a knife; rolls into his bunk with his
boots on if he happens to forget to take them off.”
Bromley smiled and relighted his pipe.
“You have some queer notions in that narrow old Puritan head of yours,
Phil. Don’t you know that humanity is all common?”
“Is it?--from your point of view?”
“It’s the surest thing you know. ‘For a’ that an’ a’ that, a man’s a
man for a’ that.’ Big Jim is a diamond; an uncut diamond, I grant you,
but the pure quill is there, just the same.”
“Think so? By his own tell he is a spendthrift drunkard and gambler
when he has the means to buy or bet.”
“Well, what of that? Does the foolish evil cancel all the wise good?
When it comes to that, how many of us have a clean slate? I’m sure I
haven’t, for one. How about you?”
Philip was silent for a time, and when he spoke again it was to say,
rather complacently: “I think you have seen the worst of me, Harry.”
Bromley smiled again and shook his head. “I’ve seen the best of you,
Phil. I’m only fearing the worst.”
“Thanks”--curtly; “you have said something like that before. Make it
plainer.”
“I don’t know that I can; or that you’d thank me if I could. It is
merely the potentialities, I guess.”
“My potentialities for evil?”
“Both ways. You are, or you have been, virgin ground. This gold hunt is
the first thing that has ever put the plow into you. It remains to be
seen what kind of soil it is going to turn up. Don’t you feel that,
yourself?”
“I don’t know why it should turn up anything different.”
“I suppose you don’t: no man has ever seen the back of his own neck--or
the close limitations of his own rut. But the furrow is already
started. You are not the man you were when we took to the tall hills
last summer.”
“Better, or worse?”
“Let us say different. The man you are now would never go back to
school-teaching in New Hampshire.”
Philip nodded morosely. “I admitted that, a good while ago, if you’ll
remember. But we were talking about Garth. What are we going to do with
him after the winter is over? Pay him his wages and tell him to go?”
“I have been thinking about that. It occurs to me that we already owe
him more than wages. If you hadn’t met him on the way out with the
ponies and brought him back with you----”
“I know; you couldn’t have held out alone against the Neighbors gang
very long; and if I had come back by myself, there might have been a
different story to tell. When I made the bargain with Garth, he said
all he’d ask would be a chance to locate a claim near ours.”
“Anybody who gets here first can have that.”
“That is what I told him. Never mind; we’ll see about his case when
spring comes. I’ll agree if you think we ought to do something better
than day-wages for him.”
Further talk about Garth and his deserts was halted by the incoming of
the man himself, empty-handed.
“No good,” was his grumbling comment on the night deer stalking.
“Reckon we don’t get us no more deer meat this winter. I like to got
bogged down myself, gettin’ out to the water hole. There shore is one
big heap o’ snow in this neck o’ woods, if you’ll listen at me. _And_
more a-comin’.”
“Another storm?” said Philip.
“Shore as you’re a foot high. And that makes me say what I does. I
don’t like the looks o’ the way she’s pilin’ up on the spur back o’
this wickiup of ourn. The timber up there ain’t thick enough to hold
’er if she gets much heavier. There’s two ways it can slide; down
to-wards the creek, ’r straight down thisaway. Here’s hopin’.”
This was disturbing news. They had already seen one slide come down
on the opposite, thinly wooded side of the gulch, and it had afforded
an object-lesson as convincing as it was startling. Garth had had
hair-raising stories to tell of prospectors’ cabins crushed and buried
under thousands of tons of snow and débris, and their cabin site had
been chosen wholly without reference to safety from this peril.
“Can’t we do anything more than hope?” Philip asked, making room for
the giant before the fire.
“Could, maybe, if we had snow-shoes.”
“How?” It was Bromley who wanted to know.
“Shuffle up yonder and start the slide sideways with a blast. But we
ain’t got the shoes; and there ain’t nobody goin’ to h’ist hisself
up on that li’l’ hill without ’em. Yuh can bet your bottom dollar on
that.”
Garth’s prediction of another storm had its fulfilment within the next
few hours; and for two days and nights the feathery burden sifted down
almost continuously, adding unmeasured depths to the already heavy
blanketing of a whitened wilderness. Trees that had withstood the
storms of many years came crashing down under the added load, and for
the first time in the winter the three cabin dwellers were forced to
resort to melted snow for their drinking and cooking water; it was
impossible to keep the trail open to the creek; indeed, for the two
days of storm they found it useless to try to work in the mine.
During the period of enforced idleness, Garth busied himself hewing and
whittling out a pair of skis, for which the light spruce they had cut
for firewood furnished the material. Asked what he meant to do with
his footgear, he was non-committal, merely saying that he wanted to be
doing something, and that the skis might be handy to have around if the
spring should be late in coming.
“We’re chawin’ a mighty big hole in the grub-stake,” he added. “Maybe
we’ll have to take to the woods, yit, for more meat.”
But a starker use for the skis presented itself two nights later, when
they were all awakened by a muffled crash that made the solidly built
cabin rock as if shaken by an earthquake shock. Garth was the first to
leap afoot and give the alarm.
“Grab for yer clothes and blankets and run for it!” he shouted. “It’s
the slide a-comin’ down!”
Struggling into their clothes in frantic haste, the two who were the
most unready to fly for their lives joined Garth in the small cleared
area they had been keeping open in front of the cabin. It was a bright,
moonlit night, clear, calm and deadly cold. From the shovelled areaway
they could see that the low cliff behind the cabin had disappeared, its
place being taken by a slanting snowbank reaching up to the steep slope
of the mountain above. On the height they could plainly see the gash
left by the sliding mass that was now filling the space between the
cliff and the cabin and heaping itself well up toward the ridge-pole on
the roof.
“There she is,” said Garth, pointing. “If that other chunk lets go,
it’ll be hell and repeat for the cabin! We got to get a hump on us,
mighty sudden!”
“But what can we do?” Philip demanded.
“Ain’t but one thing. That snow mount’in a-hangin’ up there over us’ll
have to be eased down slaunchwise, ’r we’ll have it on top of us, shore
as shootin’. Come inside and dig out the powder and fuse whilst I’m
riggin’ for it!”
A handful of brush thrown into the fireplace blazed up, illuminating
the interior of the cabin fitfully. In the firelight they could
see that the rafters on the side facing the cliff were buckling
dangerously. Opening the door communicating with the lean-to where they
stored the provisions and explosives, they found the roof crushed in
and the contents of the small room half buried in snow. Garth had flung
the deerskin over his shoulders and was belting it about his waist.
“One of you get them skis down,” he commanded.
It was Philip who took the skis from their pegs on the wall, but it was
the play-boy who cut in quickly to say: “See here, Jim; it isn’t your
job to go up there and shoot that drift! Let me have those skis.”
“Like hell I will!” was the brusque refusal. “Didn’t you tell me,
t’other day, that you’d never had ’em on? Gimme that powder and fuse.”
“But there’s nothing like this in your contract,” Bromley insisted.
“Contract be damned! You goin’ to stand there chewin’ the rag till that
drift comes down and chokes you off? Gimme that stuff!”
“The dynamite will be frozen--it’s frozen now,” said Philip.
“It’ll be thawed out good-and-plenty, time I get up there,” Garth
asserted, cramming the coil of fuse into a pocket and opening his shirt
to thrust the dynamite cartridges in his armpit next the bare skin.
“Open the door and lemme out!”
Bitter cold as it was, they sallied out with him and watched him as he
“crabbed” over the drifts sidewise and began the ascent on the nose
of the spur. There was nothing they could do. Until the menace of the
overhanging avalanche should be removed, it would be a mere flirting
with death to try to relieve the cabin roof of its buckling burden. In
a few minutes Garth became a shapeless, climbing blot in the moonlight
on the bare slope, the muffling deerskin making him look like a clumsy
animal. That he could reach the critical point, impeded as he was by
the awkward foot-rigging, seemed incredible to the anxious watchers
below. Yet without the skis to support his weight, he could have done
nothing.
“Th-there goes a brave man, if you’ll l-listen to me!” stammered
Bromley between his teeth chatterings. Then: “D-did you say something a
time ago about dirty fingernails and such small matters?”
“_Don’t!_” exclaimed Philip sharply. And after a breath-holding moment:
“I’m a cad and a coward, Harry. I let you try to make him turn that job
over to you a few minutes ago, and I never said a word: I was scared
crazy for fear you’d insist upon the three of us drawing straws for it
and the lot would fall to me! That is God’s truth. Now and then I get
a glimpse of the real man inside of me, and then I know I’m not fit to
live in the same world with you and Jim Garth.”
“Easy,” Bromley deprecated. “After all, if the thing can be done, Garth
is the one who can come the nearest to pulling it off. We both know
that--and he knows it, too.”
The big man had climbed out of sight behind a clump of trees, but
now he reappeared higher up the slope and not far from the impending
mass that was threatening to break down upon the cabin. They saw him
prodding in the snow with the staff he carried and knew he was planting
the dynamite.
“Good Lord!” groaned Bromley, “why doesn’t he get above it? If he fires
it from where he is now, it will catch him, sure!”
“It’s the drift; he can’t get above it--don’t you see how it lips out
over his head? Besides, it’s got to be shot from that side. If it
isn’t, it will come straight down this way.”
“But, _Philip_! It’s suicide for him to shoot it from where he is now!”
“It looks that way. But that’s what he is doing. He is lighting the
fuses now--don’t you see them sputtering?”
Garth had risen to his feet, but now they saw him stoop again, as if he
were adjusting the fastenings of the skis. In the brilliant moonlight
they saw, or fancied they could see, the thin, wavering curls of smoke
rising from the burning fuses. Still the big man was crouching within
arm’s-reach of the blasts he had planted and set alight.
“God in heaven! Why doesn’t he get away from there?” The words stuck
in Philip’s throat and became an almost inarticulate cry. Garth was
up again and was evidently trying to edge away along the steep snow
slope. It was plainly apparent that something had gone wrong with one
of the long, unmanageable skis. For two or three of the edging steps he
contrived to keep it under him; then it came off and slid away down the
slope, and the two watchers saw him fall sidewise, buried to the hip on
the side that had lost its support.
With terrifying distinctness they saw him struggle as a man fighting
desperately for life. With one ski gone, the other was only a shackle
to hold him down. Fiercely he strove to kick the manacling thing off,
beating frantically with his bare hands, meanwhile, at the sputtering
fuses in an effort to extinguish them before the fire should reach the
dynamite. At last he gave over trying to free himself from the one
encumbering ski, and struggling out of the snowy pit into which his
exertions had sunk him, sought to roll aside out of the path of the
impending avalanche.
Given a few more precious seconds of time he might have made it. But
the reprieve was too short. Before he had floundered a dozen yards the
snow dam holding the huge cliff-top drift in leash leaped into the air
like a spouting geyser to the muffled cough of a triple explosion,
and an enormous white cataract poured into the gulch a short distance
valley-wards of the half-buried cabin.
“Shovels!” Bromley yelped; and together the two horrified witnesses
raced up to the tunnel for digging tools. When they ran back they had
to wallow waist deep in the yielding mass to reach the spot where the
tip of an up-ended ski marked the grave of the buried man; and they
had little hope of finding him alive as they burrowed desperately to
uncover him.
But Big Jim’s time to die had not yet come. When he had found himself
going, he had had the presence of mind to draw a fold of the deerskin
over his face, holding it with a crooking arm. He was all but
asphyxiated when they dragged him out of his snowy grave, but the fresh
air soon revived him; apart from a wrenched ankle owed to the too-well
fastened ski, he seemed to be unhurt.
None the less, back in the cabin and hovering over a roaring fire
in an attempt to thaw himself out, the big man began to shake as if
in an ague fit, paying the penalty of his violent exertions in a
teeth-rattling chill. In buying the winter’s supplies in Leadville,
Bromley had included a bottle of whiskey for emergencies. Philip
searched for the bottle in the wrecked storeroom, found it unbroken,
and poured a drink for Garth. The effect was magical. The chill
subsided and Garth begged for another drink, the single potation
making him loose-tongued and volubly eloquent. Philip said “no”
firmly, and hid the bottle; after which, with Bromley’s help, he got
Garth out of his wet clothes and into his bunk.
The giant fell asleep at once, or seemed to; and after deciding that
the buckled cabin roof would hold until they could have daylight for
its unloading, the two who were still stirring dried themselves out
before the fire, covered the embers and went to bed. When they awoke,
the sun was shining in at the single small window of the cabin, and
Garth was still asleep, or he appeared to be. But the empty whiskey
bottle lying on the earthen floor beside his bunk told another story.
“Look at that! There’s your ‘rough diamond’--dead drunk!” Philip
commented scornfully, sitting up in his bed and pointing across to
the comatose figure in the opposite bunk. “He was only shamming after
we put him to bed last night. He waited until we were asleep and then
got up and found the liquor. I have no use for a man who has no more
self-control or decency than that!”
But the play-boy was shaking his head.
“‘Touching the righteousness which is in the law, blameless’,” he
quoted sardonically. “That’s you, Philip. It’s a gruesome thing to have
lived such a truly good life oneself that one can’t light a little
candle of charity for the poor sinners. I can’t forget that Big Jim
risked his life last night--and nearly lost it--to save us from being
turned out homeless and starving in this howling desert. Let’s get a
bite to eat and unload this roof while he’s sleeping it off.”
X
WITH the threat of the snow slides definitely removed, the routine of
ore-digging was resumed. Deeper and deeper the tunnel was driven into
the mountain, and each day saw the accumulation of ore and broken rock
on the dump grow in proportion. Nothing was said by any one of the
three about Garth’s night raid on the whiskey bottle; but Philip’s
attitude toward the big miner was stiffer for the lapse--as Bromley’s
was gentler. Since there was no more liquor in the stores, there were
no more lapses; and no fault could be found with the way Garth spent
himself in the drilling and shovelling, the ore-carrying and sorting.
After a fortnight of bright sunshine in January, with a thaw that
merely compacted the surface of the great snow blanket without
perceptibly thinning it, the cold weather came again; there were night
temperatures that made the green logs of the cabin walls crack and
snap with sounds like pistol shots, and the clay chinkings became
broad lines of hoar frost--this though the fire on the hearth was
never allowed to die down. With an ample supply of fuel they suffered
little from the cold; but by the middle of February the provisions were
running very low. Bromley’s turn at the cooking came in the final week
of the month, and it was he who found the bottom of their last sack of
potatoes.
“We can kiss the dear old Murphys good-by with this supper,” he
announced cheerfully, as he shook up and salted the last boiling in the
pot; adding: “And everything else in the chuck-hole is going the same
way,” Then to Garth: “You know a lot more about these mountain winters
than we do, Jim. How long is it going to be before we can break trail
for Leadville?”
“Wish I knowed,” was the sober answer. “Two year ago it was the last o’
May afore you could get over the range on most o’ the trails.”
Bromley gave a low whistle. “Two months, and more, of this? In less
than half that time we’ll be licking the skillet.”
Philip helped himself sparingly to the potatoes. “That means short
rations,” he thrust in morosely. “We ought to have had sense enough to
begin limiting ourselves long ago. Half quantities, from this time on,
Harry.”
Accordingly, the rationing was begun with the next meal, and thereupon
a grim battle with a foe hitherto unconfronted dragged its steadily
weakening length through the days and weeks. Day after day they toiled
doggedly in the tunnel, and night after night turned in hungry after
the long hours of hard work. As the hunger grew upon them they fell
silent; hours would pass without the exchange of a word; and a gloom,
which was not to be dispelled even by Bromley’s gallant attempts at
cheerfulness, settled down upon them.
It was in this famine time that the dour malady known as cabin
madness began to show its grisly head; the sickness that seizes upon
cabin dwellers shut in with one another and shut off from other human
contacts. As his ancestry and rearing would postulate, Philip was the
first to fall a victim to the splenetic mania, developing an increasing
irritability, with Garth for its principal target. As the hunger pangs
grew sharper, Bromley could see that the giant’s rough good nature was
slowly breaking down under Philip’s harsh girdings; that a time was
approaching in which surly bickerings would flare into open antagonism
and violence; and he did his best to stave off the evil day.
Unhappily, his best was not good enough. The volcanic outburst came one
evening while they were eating their scanty supper. Garth, who had dug
his home-made skis out of the slide, had climbed to the slope above
the mine to make sure that the tunnel portal and ore piles were not
menaced by another avalanche. While he was about it, Philip, coming out
of the mine to sharpen drills at the forge, had seen Garth working his
way cautiously along the upper slope of the spur. At supper he flatly
accused the mountain man of making an examination of the slide menace
an excuse for staking off a claim of his own which would intersect the
“Little Jean” at a certain depth in the hill.
“I’ve been keeping an eye on you!” he wound up harshly. “You may think
because we’re tenderfoots we can’t see through a millstone when there’s
a hole in it, but if you do, you’re missing it a thousand miles!”
“_Philip!_ You don’t know what you’re saying!” Bromley interposed
quickly. “Jim’s all right. Why, good Lord!----”
“You keep out of it!” Philip snapped back angrily. “You may be blind
but by God, I’m not!”
The big man was frowning sourly at his accuser.
“Say,” he growled in slow belligerence, “I been thinkin’, for quite a
li’l’ spell, that the time was a-comin’ when I’d have to take yuh over
my knee and larrup yuh a few. I reckon you’ve fetched it, now. You’re
the first livin’ live man that ever told Big Jim Garth to his face that
he wasn’t on the square; and when you say it, you’re a liar!”
Like a bolt from a crossbow, Philip hurled himself upon Garth, clearing
the hewn slab that served as a table at a bound. The attack was so
sudden that the big man was toppled off the block of wood upon which he
was sitting, and the two went down in a fierce clinch. Bromley sprang
up and strove to separate the combatants as they rolled over and over
upon the earth floor, striking and clutching madly at each other. But
the half-rations upon which they had all been starving for weeks proved
the better, or at least the more effectual, peacemaker. Breathless
exhaustion came speedily to both men to make the frenzied struggle
degenerate into a mere beating of the air; and when a sullen peace had
been patched up through Bromley’s urgings, Philip staggered outdoors to
hold a handful of snow to an eye that had stopped a blow from Garth’s
fist in the brief battle.
The aftermath of this savage flare-up marked an abysmal difference in
the characteristics of the two men; rather, perhaps, it served to mark
the distance Philip had come on the road to moral disintegration.
Having fought it out with his accuser in some sort, the rough
frontiersman was willing to let bygones be bygones; and he tried
patiently, in a blundering way, to make this plain. But Philip held
stubbornly aloof. With the cabin madness still souring in his veins he
had less and less to say to either of his fellow sufferers, and his
attitude toward Garth continued to be suspiciously hostile.
It was in the latter part of April, when the snow blanket had begun to
shrink visibly under the rays of the mounting sun, and the creek in the
valley had burst its icy bonds and was running bank full, that they
came to the famine end of things. A fortnight earlier even the short
working shifts in the mine to which weakness had reduced them had been
discontinued, and for days Garth, slipping and sliding on his home-made
skis had been going forth with his rifle in search of food, only to
return at night empty-handed and with the same growling lament.
“I’m jist so razzle-dazzled an’ no-account I ain’t fittin’ to do
nothin’ no more! They’s deer a-plenty in these here mount’ins--I see
’em every day; but I can’t see to shoot straight; never will get one
less’n it lets me come close enough to grab it by the neck and choke it
to death!”
With the beginning of the last week in April the losing battle with
hunger had become a grim waiting game, with their final reserves of
endurance pitted against the chance of the weather. If the thawing
weather should continue, if there should be no more storms, a few more
days might make foot travel over the passes possible. But even so, the
forty miles of snowy wilderness to be traversed loomed dismayingly.
Could they, in their weakened condition, fight their way out over the
slippery trails? It was an open question, and one which Philip, in whom
the cabin madness had now reached the stage of hopeless dejection,
answered in a gloomy negative.
“What’s the use of talking that way, Harry?” he raged weakly--this on
a day when Garth had once more gone out to waste powder and lead. “You
know well enough we couldn’t make five miles a day in the condition
we’re in now.” Then, with a jeering laugh: “This is the end of it....
With gold enough up there on the dump to sink a ship, we’re starving to
death. With a world full of food only thirty or forty miles away, we
can’t buy enough to keep us alive until the snows go.”
But Bromley, cheerful to the last, refused to be daunted. “While
there’s life, there’s hope,” he insisted. “The snow is melting fast
now.”
“It doesn’t make any difference to us how fast it melts; you and I will
never leave this gulch alive, Harry. As I’ve said, neither one of us
could tramp five miles in a day, even over a level trail. It’s the end.”
“You say ‘you and I’. Big Jim doesn’t complain much, but he is as badly
off as either of us.”
Philip, propped in his bunk, rocked his head on the blanket pillow.
“I don’t trust Garth,” he muttered. “One of these days, when he is sure
we’re too nearly dead to try to trail him, he’ll go and we’ll never see
him again.”
“Oh, give us a rest!” snapped Bromley, losing, for once in a way, the
cheerful equanimity which had enabled him to grapple sanely, thus far,
with the hardships and deprivations, “I wouldn’t have your narrow angle
on humanity for all the gold there is in the ‘Little Jean’! Why, good
Lord, man!--Jim has been loyalty itself, from start to finish! You’ve
simply got a crooked convolution in your brain, Philip!”
“Call it what you like; he’ll go, just the same. You’ll see. And after
he’s given us time to die properly, he’ll come back and take over the
mine.”
Bromley gave it up and crept from his bunk to the hearth to get a
light for his pipe, tobacco being the only provision supply that was
not completely exhausted. As the day wore away, the echo of distant
rifle shots penetrated to the cabin interior from time to time, but the
sounds meant nothing more to them than that Garth was trying again, as
he had heretofore, to kill something for the pot; trying and failing,
as a matter of course.
The sun had gone down and a cloudy twilight was filling the gulch with
shadows when Garth returned, dragging the hind quarters of a deer after
him. Gaunt, bush-bearded and long-haired, the giant was by this time a
mere bony framework of a man; and as he sank down upon his bunk he was
gasping for breath and whimpering like a hurt child.
“I got a doe, after the longest,” he choked; “an’ then I had to go an’
leave most o’ the meat for the coyotes and buzzards--durn ’em--’cause
I couldn’t tote it home! Time was when I could’ve took that li’l’ doe
across my shoulders and brought her in whole; but I ain’t no damn’ good
no more whatsoever!”
Bromley stumbled hastily out of his bunk.
“What’s that?--no good, did you say? By Jove, you’ve saved our lives,
just the same, old-timer! Don’t you worry a minute about what you had
to leave for the dogs and birds; half a deer is better than no meat.
You just stretch yourself out and rest your face and hands--and you,
too, Phil. I’ll call you both when supper’s ready.”
For the first time in many days they had a full meal for supper, and
under the stimulus of a couple of juicy venison steaks, hot from the
broiling twig, even Philip came out of his shell of hopelessness and
joined in the discussion of the ways and means of escape. It was Garth
who set the hopeful pace.
“With a couple o’ days feedin’ up, I believe we can try it,” he
ventured. “Snow’s deep yit, but it’s thawin’ days and freezin’ nights
so ’t there’s a crust early mornin’s that’ll hold a man. Weather’s the
only thing I’m afeard of.”
“Oh, good Lord!” Bromley groaned. “Don’t tell us there’s more snow
coming!”
The giant wagged his beard. “Looks mighty like it, over on the western
ranges. And the sun come up fire-red this mornin’. If it’ll only hold
off for a day ’r so, till we get a li’l’ stren’th in our bones....”
But the next morning when they turned out, the storm had come, silently
and as a thief in the night; there was half a foot of fresh snow in
their tiny dooryard, and the feathery flakes were still sifting down
endlessly from gray skies with no signs of a break in them. After
breakfast, Philip went back to his bunk and turned his face to the
wall, leaving Bromley and Garth to wash the dishes and shovel the snow
out of the small areaway.
“Winter’s been sort o’ hard on that pardner o’ yourn,” Garth remarked,
stopping to beat the snow from his battered hat. “Looks like he’d sort
o’ lost his sand lately.”
“We’re both tenderfoots, you must remember,” said the loyal play-boy.
“It’s all new to both of us, Jim. But Phil will come out all right.”
Then: “What is this fresh snow storm going to do to us?”
“Depends on how long it’s goin’ to keep up. There’s enough now to block
the trails for another week ’r so. I was afeard it was comin’.”
“Well, we have meat enough to last for a while, anyhow,” Bromley put in
hopefully. “And that’s thanks to you, Jim. We won’t say die till we’re
dead.”
All through the day the gray skies held their own and the snow sifted
down as though it would never stop. By nightfall the six inches of
new blanketing had grown to a foot, and the prospect of escape had
withdrawn into a remote distance. When Bromley raked the coals out and
made ready to broil the supper steaks, he was the only one of the three
who preserved even a semblance of cheerfulness. Philip was cursing the
weather bitterly; and Garth, stretched out in his bunk with a cold pipe
clamped between his teeth, was scarcely more companionable.
It was while the venison was sizzling over the coals that Bromley
cocked an ear and said: “Listen!” Into the silence thus commanded came
the muffled hoofbeats of a horse and then a shout of “Hello, the
cabin!” from without. Garth sprang up to unbar the door, and Philip
reached for a rifle, gasping out, “It’s Neighbors again!”
But the stocky figure that appeared in the doorway was not that of the
leader of the jumpers; it was a far more welcome apparition--the figure
of the man who, up to that time, had bought, sold and operated more
mines than any other promoter in Colorado--Stephen Drew.
“Well, well!” he said, coming in to shake the snow from his poncho and
to stamp it from his feet, “I thought I’d find you somewhere up in this
gulch! Found out what old winter can do to you in the Rockies, haven’t
you?” and he shook hands with the exiles, and not less heartily with
Garth than with the two younger men, saying: “You here, too, Jim? If I
had known that, I wouldn’t have been quite so anxious about these two
young tenderfoots.”
Philip sat down on his bunk and he was gasping again.
“Are--are the trails open, Mr. Drew?” he stammered.
“They were day before yesterday, when we crossed the main range, but
they will be blocked again for a few days, now. However, that doesn’t
matter. I knew you must be running short of supplies, so I brought a
pack train along. I left the outfit making camp in the valley below and
rode on ahead to see if I could locate you.”
Bromley laughed happily.
“You look like an angel out of heaven to us, Mr. Drew,” he bubbled.
“We’d eaten the last of our grub-stake and were starving when Jim
killed a deer and saved our lives. How did you find the way in?”
The promoter planted himself comfortably upon Garth’s bunk, and he was
smiling genially when he said: “We had to use a little diplomacy. One
of the Neighbors gang took one drink too many and spilled the beans.
We got hold of him and gave him his choice between going to jail and
coming along with us as a guide. He’s with the outfit now. But tell
me--have you got a mine to show me?”
It was Garth who got in the first word about the “Little Jean.”
“You’re shoutin’,” he said. “These boys’ve got a li’l’ bonanza, right!
There’s enough rich, free-millin’ ore on the dump to run you crazy.
We’re in a good piece on the vein, and she’s a-holdin’ up like a lady.
All these boys is a-needin’ now is somebody to back ’em with a li’l’
capital, and----”
“Easy, Jim,” laughed the promoter; “I know the color of your paints.
But never mind,”--this to Philip and Bromley. “If you’ve got something
that measures half-way up to those assays you had made last fall, I’m
ready to talk turkey with you. But we’ll have to talk fast and work
fast--if we want to protect ourselves. The rush for the new diggings
isn’t more than a day’s march behind us on the trail we’ve broken over
the range, and when it comes, we’ll be swamped. Jim, you old mossback,
see if you can’t carve a couple more steaks off that deer bone and
broil them for me. I’m as hungry as a hunter.”