load did not seem to be riding well, and at the beginning of the ascent
Green got out to investigate. He said the spring was out of order. The
wagon was what is known as a thorough-brace, which means that there are
two large loopy steel bands on which the wagon box rests; the loops are
filled in with countless strips of leather, forming a pad for the springs
to play on. (The Century Dictionary will please not copy this
definition.) The Deadwood stage coach was a thorough-brace, I believe.
Another interesting out-of-date detail in the construction of this wagon
was that the brake had no mechanical device for holding it in position
when it was put on hard, and the driver had to rely upon his strength of
limb to keep it in place. It seems that Green, in pounding these bits of
leather in the spring, had badly crushed his left hand. He said nothing
to me, and I did not notice that, contrary to custom, he was driving with
his right hand, which he usually reserved for the whip and the brake.
We crossed the shallow brook and started up the very steep and very
rocky road, when everything happened at once. Two of the horses refused
to pull and danced up and down in the one spot, a sickening thing for a
horse to do. This meant the instant application of the brake. We had
already begun to slip backward (the most uncomfortable sensation I know,
barring actual pain). Nimrod's horse, tied on behind, gave a frightened
snort and broke his rope. Green attempted to take the reins with his
left hand. They dropped from his grasp, and I saw that his fingers were
purple and black.
"Grab the lines, can you?" he said, as he seized the whip and put both
feet on the brake. The leaders were curveting back on the wheelers in a
way which meant imminent mix up, their legs over traces and behind
whiffle-trees. On the right, of us was solid rock up, on the left solid
rock down, one hundred feet to the stream, and just ahead was the sharp
turn the road made to a higher ledge in its zigzag up the mountain. I
had always intended to learn to drive four-in-hand, but this first lesson
left me no pleasure in the learning. There were no little triumphs of
difficulties mastered, no gentle surprises, no long, smooth, broad, and
level stretches with plenty of room to pull a rein and see what would
happen. I had to spring into the situation with knowledge, as Minerva did
into life, full grown. It was no kindergarten way of learning to drive
four-in-hand.
I grabbed the reins in both hands. There were yards of them, rods of
them, miles of them--they belonged to a six or sixteen horse set. I do
not know which. I sat on them. They writhed in my lap, wrapped around my
feet, and around the gun against my knee, in a hopeless and dangerous
muddle. Of course the reins were twisted. I did not know one from the
other. I gave a desperate jerk which sent the leaders plunging to the
right, where fortunately they brought up against the rock wall. Had they
gone the other way nothing but our destiny could have saved us from going
over the edge. _Crack_ went the whip in the right place.
"Slack the lines!" Green cried, as he eased the brake. A lash of the whip
for each wheeler, and we started forward, the horses disentangling
themselves from the harness as by a miracle, just as the rear wheels were
hovering over the bluff. Green dropped the whip (his left hand was quite
useless) and straightened out the reins for me.
"Can you do it?" he asked, grasping the whip, as the horses showed signs
of stopping again. To attend to the brake was physically impossible.
Green could not do it and drive with one hand.
"Yes," I said, "but watch me"--an injunction scarcely necessary.
[Illustration: WE STARTED FORWARD, JUST AS THE REAR WHEELS WERE HOVERING
OVER THE EDGE.]
If ever a woman put her whole mind to a thing, I did on that
four-in-hand. There was no place for mistakes. There was no place for
anything but the right thing, and do it I must or run the risk of
breaking my very dusty, very brown, but none the less precious neck.
A sharp turn in a steep road with rocks a foot high disputing the right
of way with the wheels, a heavy load, horses that do not want to pull,
and a green driver--that was the situation. If it does not appeal to you
as one of the horribles in life, try it once.
"Run your leaders farther up the bank--left, left! _Get up, Milo!
Frank, get out of that_! Now sharp to the right. _Whoa! Steady_!
Left--left, I say! _Milo, whoa_! Now to the right, quick! Let 'em on
the bank more. _Nellie, easy_--_Whoa! Steady, George_!" Crack went the
whip on the leaders.
"Hold your lines tighter. Pull that nigh leader. _Get out of that, Frank!
Now steady, boys_! Don't pull--there!"
Down went the brake; we were safely round the turn, and all hands rested
for a moment.
Thus we worked all that morning, Green with the brake, the whip, and his
tongue; I with the lines, what strength I had and mother wit in lieu of
experience.
There were stretches of two hundred feet of granite, smooth and polished
as a floor, where the horses repeatedly slipped and fell, and where the
wheels brought forth hollow mocking rumbles.
There were sections where the rocky ledges succeeded one another in
steps, and the animals had to pull the heavy wagon up rises from a foot
to eighteen inches high by sheer strength--as easy to drive up a flight
of brownstone steps on Fifth Avenue. There were places between huge
boulders where a swerve of a foot to the right or to the left would have
sent us crashing into the unyielding granite.
When we got to the top there was no place to rest--only rock, rock
everywhere. No water, no food for the exhausted horses, nothing to do but
to push on to the bottom--and such going! Have you ever felt the
shuddering of a wagon with brake hard on, as it poised in air the
instant before it dropped a foot or two to the next level, from hard rock
to hard rock? Have you ever tried to keep four horses away from under a
wagon, and yet sufficiently near it not to precipitate the crash? Have
you ever at the same time tried to keep them from falling on the rocks
ahead and from plunging over the bank as you turn a sharp curve on a
steep down grade? If you have, then you know the nature of my first
lesson in four-in-hand driving.
We got to the bottom at dusk. I was too tired to speak. Every muscle set
up a separate complaint and I had had nothing to eat since morning, as we
had expected to make camp by noon. The world seemed indeed a very drab
place. We found the hunters careering around searching for us. They
thought they had missed us--as they had done the bear.
I have driven, and been driven, hundreds of miles since, but there never
was a ride like those twelve, cruel, mocking, pitiless miles over
Granite Mountain, when necessity taught me a very pretty trick, which,
however, I have not yet been tempted to display at the Madison Square
Garden in November.
XVII.
_OUR_ MINE.
It now behooves me to state that, between the events of the last chapter
and this, Nimrod and I heard the hum, the wail, and the shriek that make
the song of the Westinghouse brake before we found ourselves deposited at
the flourishing mining camp of Red Ridge in the Arizona Rockies, nine
thousand feet in the air.
Did ever a tenderfoot escape from the mountains without at least having a
try at making his or her fortune in a mine--gold one preferred? We, of
course, had the chance of our lives, and who knows what might have
happened if only the fat woman and the lean woman had not gotten jealous
of each other, and thereby wrecked the company?
The gold is, or is not, in the fastnesses of the earth as before, but
where, oh, where, is the lean woman of lineage and the fat woman of
money? The lean woman had quality. She was the daughter of somebody
who had done something, but, unlike _Becky Sharp_, she had not been
successful in living richly in San Francisco on nothing a year. Nobody
knows whose daughter the fat woman was, but in her very comfortable
home in Kansas that had not mattered, and, besides, she had saved a
few hundreds.
These two women had husbands, who had entered into a mining scheme
together. The man from Frisco was a good-looking, well-educated, jovial
fellow, with the purses of several rich friends to back him up, and with
a great desire to replenish his purse with the yellow metal direct,
rather than to acquire it by the sweat of his brow. He was many other
things, but, to be brief, he was a promoter. The man from Kansas had the
pride of the uneducated, and a little money, and was also not averse to
getting rich fast.
Nimrod, the third partner, likewise encumbered with a wife on the spot,
desired to make _his_ everlasting fortune, retire from the painting of
pictures and the making of books, and grub in the field of science and
live happily ever after.
For two weeks we were all together at the only hotel at Cartersville, a
hamlet of perhaps thirty souls. It took only two weeks to wreck the
company. The mine was a mile and a half away, over a very up-and-down
mountain road which on the first day the fat woman and I walked with
our husbands, and which Mrs. Frisco and her husband had travelled in
Mrs. Kansas' phaeton--the result of a little way Mrs. Frisco had of
getting the best.
Three days of this calm appropriation of her carriage while she walked
ruffled Mrs. Kansas' temper. When she heard a rumour that Mrs. Frisco had
stated disdainfully to the landlady that there could be no thought of
recognising Mrs. Kansas socially, but that she must be tolerated because
of her money in the enterprise, her politeness grew frigid and the
trouble began to brew.
While perfectly willing to watch the logomachy when it should arrive, I
had no wish to take part. I was willing to make money, but not to make
enemies, so Nimrod and I removed ourselves as much as possible from the
Cartersville Hotel, took long walks and rides over the glorious Chihuahua
Mountains, poked around the abandoned mines, spied out the deer and
mountain lion and the ubiquitous coyote and all the indigenous beasts and
birds of the air thereof. We usually managed to arrive at the mine when
the partners and their wives were elsewhere.
The mine, _our_ mine, was a long horizontal hole in the mountain, with a
tiny leaf-choked stream trickling past the entrance, heavy timbers
propping up the inert mass of dirt and stone just above our heads, piles
of uninteresting rock dumped to one side, the "pay dirt." I had seen such
things before, and they had said nothing to me. But this was _our_ mine,
_our_ stream, _our_ dump.
McCaffrey, the foreman, put rubber boots on me in the little smithy which
formed a part of the entrance of the tunnel, and thus equipped I entered
the tunnel. The day shift, represented by two dancing lights far off in
the blackness, was preparing to blast.
I advanced uncertainly, my own candle blinding me. Water trickled from
the roof and walls of this rock-bound passage seven feet high and four
feet wide. A stream of it flowed by the tiny tram track. The hollow sound
of the mallet on the crowbar forcing its way into the stubborn wall grew
louder as we approached, until we stood with the miners in a foot or so
of water which showed yellow and shining in the flickering light of four
candles. Then we went back to the smithy to wait the result of the blast.
There was a horrid jarring booming sound. The miners listened intently.
McCaffrey said, "One." Another explosion in the tunnel followed--"Two."
Another--"Three." Then a silence. "That's bad," said McCaffrey, shaking
his head. "An unexploded cap."
"What do you mean?" I asked.
"There were four charges and should have been four explosions. It's
liable to go off when we go in there."
"Oh!" I said.
The miners waited a while for the fumes of the dynamite to be dissipated
and kept me away from the tunnel mouth, saying:
"If you ever get a dynamite headache you will never want to come near the
mine again. And, besides, that unexploded cap may do damage yet."
I went back to the smithy to wait, for it was the last of October, and
snow in the mountains at ten thousand feet is cold. I attempted to sit
down on a keg behind the little sheet-iron stove, which was nearly red
hot.
"You better not sit down on that kaig," said one of the men calmly,
without pausing in his work.
"Why?"
"Well, it's dirty, and, besides, it's nitro-glycerine."
"Nitro-glycerine! Why is it in _here_, and so close to the stove? Won't
it explode?" and I checked a desire to retreat in disorder.
"No, 't'ain't no danger, if it don't get too hot and ain't jarred. You
see, it won't go off if it's too cold, so we keep a little in here and
kind o' watch it."
The keg was within two feet of the stove. Suppose that a dog or something
were to knock it over! But miners do not suppose.
Just then a tremendous explosion in the tunnel seemed to make the whole
earth vibrate. It was followed by a rattling and crashing of rocks, which
told us that the last cap had gone off and had done good work.
Half an hour later, when it was safe from dynamite fumes, I went back to
our hole in the ground. Nimrod had left me, lured away by some fox tracks
trailing up the mountain. The weird scene was too interesting for me to
leave until the arrival of the fat and lean women (Mrs. Frisco had
persuaded Mrs. Kansas to drive her over) caused me to remember that the
parlour fire at the Cartersville Hotel must be very comfortable, and that
it was a mile and a half of tiresome snow away.
Evidently the wives of my husband's partners had disagreed on the way,
for the air was electric as they greeted me, and to avoid another
tête-à-tête they at once turned to accompany me out of the tunnel. I
was the last.
The scene was now properly set for a mining accident, so there was
nothing for a self respecting tunnel to do but to accordingly, which it
did. Just as the fat woman and the lean woman passed into the open air,
and I was nearly at the mouth of the tunnel, it caused its roof to cave
in so close behind me that, had I not instinctively rushed out, some of
the flying stones, timbers, and dirt must have knocked me to the ground.
[Illustration: THE TUNNEL CAUSED ITS ROOF TO CAVE IN CLOSE BEHIND ME.]
As it was, I landed sprawling in the snow outside, sweeping the lean
woman down with me. It was very like a dime novel. Three lone women who,
for purposes of intensification, may be called enemies, staring with
white faces at a wall of dirt, and trying to realise that a minute before
it had been a black hole. And at the other end of that hole now were two
men horribly imprisoned in a rock-walled tomb without air or food,
perhaps dead. We could not tell how much of a cave-in it was.
The lean woman rushed for Mrs. Kansas' horse and wagon and went to alarm
the hamlet. I dashed up the hill a quarter of a mile to awaken the night
shift, who were in their cabin sleeping. And the fat woman at a safe
distance wrung her hands and uttered exclamations of horror and ill
judged advice to our departing forms.
Between the fright, the altitude, and the hill I had no breath left to
speak with as I pounded on the door of the miner's hut. Mountaineers
sleep lightly and do not make toilets, so it was barely ten minutes from
the time of the cave-in when three men were working at the tunnel's mouth
with pickaxes and shovels.
The tunnel had not meant to be malicious, but merely to do the proper
thing (it had not even disturbed the nitro-glycerine in the smithy). Not
much earth had fallen, and in less than an hour we heard the shouts of
the imprisoned men; in two hours they crawled into the air unhurt, and
soon were helping the others to shore up the treacherous entrance, so
that such a stirring thing could not happen again.
There is not much more to tell. I believe that the tunnel is still there,
boring its way into the heart of the mountain, where, perhaps, the lovely
yellow gold is; but we no longer refer to it as _ours_, and Nimrod still
has to work for our daily jam. For the insolence of Mrs. Frisco in
leaving Mrs. Kansas stranded in the snow and obliging her to walk home on
the cave-in day developed the brewing storm into such proportions that
the next day their husbands did not speak as we gathered round the
morning coffee. And the Kansases moved away into one of the other five
houses in Cartersville. Mr. Kansas was not "going to see his wife
insulted by an upstart--not he: he'd soon show them," and he did so
effectively that the Red Ridge Mining Company was soon no more. We
docketed our golden dreams 'unusable,' stowed them away, and returned
with tranquil minds, if lighter purse, to milder and slower ways of
getting rich.
XVIII.
THE LAST WORD.
Now this is the end. It is three years since I first became a
woman-who-goes-hunting-with-her-husband. I have lived on jerked deer
and alkali water, and bathed in dark-eyed pools, nestling among vast
pines where none but the four footed had been before. I have been sung
asleep a hundred times by the coyotes' evening lullaby, have felt the
spell of their wild nightly cry, long and mournful, coming just as the
darkness has fully come, lasting but a few seconds, and then heard no
more till the night gives place to the fresh sheet of dawn. I have
pored in the morning over the big round footprints of a mountain lion
where he had sneaked in hours of darkness, past my saddle pillowed
head. I have hunted much, and killed a little, the wary, the beautiful,
the fleet-footed big game. I have driven a four-in-hand over corduroy
roads and ridden horseback over the pathless vasty wilds of the
continent's backbone.
I have been nearly frozen eleven thousand feet in air in blinding snow,
I have baked on the Dakota plains with the thermometer at 116 degrees,
and I have met characters as diverse as the climate. I know what it
means to be a miner and a cowboy, and have risked my life when need be,
_but_, best of all, I have felt the charm of the glorious freedom, the
quick rushing blood, the bounding motion, of the wild life, the joy of
the living and of the doing, of the mountain and the plain; I have
learned to know and feel some, at least, of the secrets of the Wild Ones.
In short, though I am still a woman and may be tender, I am a Woman
Tenderfoot no longer.
[Illustration: A MOUNTAIN LION SNEAKED PAST MY SADDLE-PILLOWED HEAD.]