IN his westward sweep over the Titanic playground of farther Colorado,
the sun looks down into a narrow valley through which tumbles a
brawling stream whose waters, snow-born within rifle-shot, go to
swell the canyoned flood of the Gunnison River. Fir-clad mountains,
sombre green to timber-line and fallow dun or dazzling white above
it, according to the season, stand like a cordon of mighty sentinels
around and about; and the foot of civilized man treading the sward of
the park-like valley must first have measured many weary miles of the
mountain wilderness.
Notwithstanding its apparent inaccessibility, and its remoteness from
any hoof-worn trail, the valley had once been inhabited. The evidences
were a rude log cabin, with its slab door hanging by a single leathern
hinge, buttressing a weathered cliff on the western bank of the stream;
and, in the opposing mountain slope, a timbered opening bearded with a
gray dump of débris, marking the entrance to a prospect tunnel.
Cabin and tunnel were both the handiwork of James Garvin. On one of his
many prospecting tours he had penetrated to the shut-in valley; and
finding a promise of mineral deposits in the slopes of the sentinel
mountains, had gone into permanent camp and driven the prospect tunnel
into the rocky hillside. When he had done something more than the
development work necessary to hold the claim, two things conspired
to drive him forth of the valley. His provisions ran low; and the
indications in the tunnel, which had pointed to a silver-bearing lode
of graphic tellurium, changed suddenly at a "dike" in the strata, and
disappeared altogether.
Garvin was a stubborn man, and the toxin of the prospector's fever was
in his blood. Wherefore he put himself upon siege rations and delved
against time. When he had baked his last skillet of panbread and
fired his last charge of dynamite in the heading, the dike was still
unpenetrated. After that, there was nothing for it but retreat; and he
reluctantly broke camp and left the valley, meaning to return when he
could.
Two years elapsed and the opportunity still tarried; but Garvin kept
the shut-in valley in mind, and it was thitherward he turned his face
when Stephen Elliott's liberal "grub-stake," and the hastily formed
partnership with Jeffard, provided the means and the help necessary to
sink a shaft.
It was in the afternoon of a cloudless August day that Jeffard had his
first glimpse of the park-like valley lying in the lap of the sentinel
mountains. The air was crisp and thin-edged with the keen breath of the
altitudes, but the untempered heat of the sun beat pitilessly upon the
heads of the two men picking their laborious way over the rock-ribbed
shoulder of the least precipitous mountain.
"Well, pardner, we've riz the last o' the hills," quoth Garvin,
stepping aside to let the burro, with its jangling burden of camp
utensils and provisions, precede him. "How d'you stack up by this time?"
Jeffard's tongue clave to the roof of his mouth. Frantic plunges into
the nether depths are not conducive to good health, moral or physical,
and nature was exacting the inevitable penalty. For three days he had
been fighting a losing battle with an augmenting army of ills, and
but for the rough heartening of his companion he would have fallen by
the wayside more than once during the breath-cutting march over the
mountain passes. Wherefore his answer to Garvin's question was the
babblement of despair.
"I'm a dead man, Garvin. You'll only have me to bury if you persist in
dragging me any farther. I'm done, I tell you."
Garvin stroked his stubbly chin and hid his concern under a ferocious
scowl.
"No, you ain't done, not by a long shot. You needn't to think I'm goin'
to let you play off on me that-a-way--with the promised land cuddlin'
down yonder in that gulch a-waitin' for us. Not much, Mary Ann. You're
goin' to twist the crank o' that there win'lass a-many a time afore you
get shut o' me."
The burro wagged one ear and sat upon its haunches preparatory to
a perilous slide down a steep place in the trail. Garvin saved the
pack by darting forward and anchoring both beast and burden by main
strength. While the big man was wrestling with the burro, Jeffard
stumbled and fell, rose wavering to his knees and fell again, this time
with his teeth set to stifle a groan. Garvin threw the pack-animal with
dexterous twitch of its foreleg, and hoppled it with a turn of the
lariat before going back to Jeffard.
"Now then, up you come," he said, trying to stand Jeffard upon his
feet; but the sick man collapsed inertly and sank down again.
"Let me alone," he enjoined, in a sudden transport of feeble
truculence. "I told you I was done, and I am. Can't you go about your
business and leave a man to die in peace?"
"Oh, you be damned," retorted Garvin cheerfully. "All you need is a
little more sand. Get up and mog along now, 'fore I run shy o' patience
and thump the everlastin' daylights out o' you." And he stooped again
and slipped his arm under Jeffard's shoulders.
The sick man's head rocked from side to side. "Don't," he groaned,
this time in gentler protest. "I'd do it if I could--if only for your
sake. But it isn't in me; I've been dying on my feet for the last three
hours. I couldn't drag myself another step if the gates of Heaven stood
open down yonder and all hell were yapping at my heels. Go on and leave
me to fight it out. You can come back to-morrow and cover up what the
buzzards have left."
Garvin straightened up and drew the back of his hand across his eyes.
"Listen at him!" he broke out, in a fine frenzy of simulated rage.
"Just listen at the fool idjit talk, will you? And me standin' over him
a-pleadin' like a suckin' dove! By crucifer! if it wasn't for throwin'
away good ammynition, I'd plug him one just for his impidence--blame my
skin if I wouldn't!" And being frugal of his cartridges, Garvin flung
himself upon the prostrate burro, dragged it to its feet, cast the
jangling burden, pack-saddle and all, and lifted Jeffard astride of the
diminutive mount.
"There you are," he said, with gruff tenderness. "Now then, just lop
your head on my shoulder and lay back ag'inst my arm, and play you
was a-coastin' down the hill back o' the old schoolhouse on a greazed
streak o' lightnin', with your big brother a-holdin' you on. We'll make
it pretty middlin' quick, now, if the canary don't peg out." And thus
they made entrance into the shut-in valley, and won across it to the
log cabin whose door hung slantwise by the single hinge.
Then and there began a grim fight for the life of a man, with an
untutored son of the solitudes, lacking everything but the will to do,
pitted against a fierce attack of mountain fever which was aided and
abetted by the devitalizing effects of Jeffard's hard apprenticeship
to evil. In the end the indomitable will of the nurse, rather than
any conscious effort on the part of the patient, won the battle.
Garvin cursed his luck and swore pathetically as day after day of the
short mountain summer came and went unmarked by any pick-blow on the
slopes of the mountains of promise; but his care of the sick man was
unremitting, and he was brutally tender and wrathfully soft-hearted by
turns until Jeffard was well beyond the danger line.
It was a lambent evening in the final week of August when Garvin
carried the fever-wasted convalescent to the door of the cabin and
propped him in a rustic chair builded for the occasion.
"How's that?" he demanded, standing back to get the general effect of
man and chair. "Ain't I a jack-leg carpenter, all right? Now you just
brace up and swaller all the outdoors you can hold while I smoke me a
pipe."
He sat down on the doorstep and filled and lighted his pipe. After a
few deep-drawn whiffs, he said, "Don't tire you none to be a-settin'
up, does it?"
"No." Jeffard turned slowly and sniffed the pungent fragrance of the
burning tobacco with a vague return of the old craving. "Have you
another pipe?" he queried. "I believe I'd enjoy a whiff or two with
you."
"Now just listen at that, will you?" Garvin growled, masking his joy
under a transparent affectation of disgust. "Me takin' care of him like
he was a new-borned baby, and him a-settin' there, cool as a blizzard,
askin' for a pipe! If I wasn't a bloomin' angel, just waitin' for my
wings to sprout, I'd tell him to go to blazes, that's about what I'd
do."
None the less, he went in and found a clean corncob, filling it and
giving it to Jeffard with a lighted match. The convalescent smoked
tentatively for a few minutes, pausing longer between the whiffs until
the fire and the tobacco-hunger died out together. After which he said
what was in his mind.
"Garvin, old man, you must begin work to-morrow," he began. "I can take
care of myself now, and in a few days I hope I'll be able to take hold
with you. You've lost too much time tinkering with me. I'm not worth
it."
"We'll find out about that when we get you on to the crank o' that
win'lass," said Garvin sententiously. "Man's a good deal like a
horse,--vallyble accordin' to location. They tell me that back in God's
country, where I was raised, horses ain't worth their winter keep since
the 'lectric cars come in; but out yere I've seen the time when a
no-account, gristly little bronco, three parts wire and five parts pure
cussedness, 'u'd a-been worth his weight in bullion."
Jeffard picked the application out of the parable, and smiled.
"You've got your bronco," he asserted. "When you're a little better
acquainted with me you'll find your definition isn't far wrong. I used
to think I was a halfway decent sort of fellow, Garvin, but I believe
the last few months have flailed all the whole wheat out of me, leaving
nothing but the musty chaff."
"Oh, you be hanged!" laughed Garvin, with the emphasis heartening.
"You're off your feed a few lines yet and your blood needs thickenin',
that's all. I'll risk but what you'll assay up to grade in the
mill-run."
Silence came and sat between them for a little space, holding its own
until Jeffard's eye lighted upon the débris-bearded tunnel-opening in
the opposite hillside.
"What is that?" he asked, pointing the query with an emaciated finger.
"That's my old back number that I was tellin' you about on the way in,"
Garvin explained. "I thought I'd struck a lead o' tellurides up there,
sure, but it petered out on me."
"When was that?" Jeffard's recollection of all things connected with
the fever-haunted jornada across the ranges was misty and fragmentary.
"Two year ago this summer," rejoined the miner; and filling his pipe
afresh he retold the story of his earlier visit to the valley.
"It's a dead horse," he added, by way of conclusion. "I ought to knowed
better. I'm old enough at the business to savvy tellurides when I see
'em, and that lead never did look right from the start."
"Did you ever locate it?" asked Jeffard.
"Not much! I never got any furder along that-a-way than to stake it off
and make a map of it." Garvin found a pack of thumbed and grimy papers
in his pocket and worked his way through it till he came upon the map.
"You're an engineer," he said: "how's that for a jack-leg entry map?"
Jeffard examined the rude sketch and pronounced it good enough; after
which he folded the paper absently and put it in his pocket. Garvin did
not notice his failure to return it,--if, indeed, he thought or cared
anything further about it,--and went on talking of his own unwisdom in
driving a tunnel on a lode which did not "look right."
"We'll know better, this trip," he asserted, as somewhat of a salve to
the former hurt. "We'll go higher up the gulch and sink a shaft; that's
about what we'll do."
And this, in the fullness of time, was what they did. After a few days,
Jeffard was able to inch his way by easy stages to the new location;
and by the time Garvin had dug and blasted himself into a square pit
windlass-deep, the convalescent was strong enough to take his place at
the hoist.
From the very first, Jeffard was totally unable to share Garvin's
enthusiastic faith in the possibilities of the new cast for fortune.
Ignorant of the first principles of practical metal-digging, he was,
none the less, a fairly good laboratory metallurgist; while Garvin, on
the other hand, knew naught of man's, but much of nature's, book. Hence
there arose many discussions over the possibilities; Jeffard contending
that the silver-bearing lodes of the valley were not rich enough to
bear pack-train transportation to the nearest railway point; and Garvin
clinging tenaciously to the prospectors' theory that a "true-fissure"
vein must of necessity prove a very Golconda once you had gone deep
enough into its storehouse.
When all was said, the man of the laboratory won a barren victory. At
thirty feet the lode in the shaft had dwindled to a few knife-blade
seams, and the last shot fired in the bottom of the excavation put an
end to the work of exploitation by letting in a flood of water. Since
they had no means of draining the shaft so suddenly transformed into
a well, Garvin gave over, perforce, but proposed trying their luck
elsewhere in the valley before seeking a new field. Jeffard acquiesced,
with the suggestion that they save time by prospecting in different
directions; and this they did, Garvin taking the upper half of the
valley and Jeffard the lower. At the end of a week, Jeffard gave up
in disgust; and when his companion begged for yet one other day, was
minded to stay in camp and invite his soul in idleness until the
persevering one should be convinced.
As a matter of course, Garvin's day multiplied itself by three, and
Jeffard wore out the interval as best he might, tramping the hillsides
in the vicinity of the cabin to kill time, and smoking uncounted pipes
on the doorstep in the cool of the day while waiting for Garvin's
return.
It was in the pipe-smoking interregnum of the third day that the
abandoned tunnel in the opposite hillside beckoned to him. Oddly
enough, he thought, Garvin had never referred to it since the retelling
of its history in the reminiscent pauses of their first outdoor
evening together. Jeffard's eye measured the dump appraisively. It was
a monument to the heroic perseverance of the solitary prospector.
"That hole must be thirty or forty feet into the hill," he mused. "And
to think of his worrying it out alone!" Here idle curiosity nudged
him with its blunt elbow, and he rose and knocked the ashes from his
pipe. "I believe I'll go up and have a look at it. It'll kill another
half-hour or so, and they're beginning to die rather hard."
He crossed the stream on Garvin's ancient foot-log, and clambered
leisurely to the toe of the dump. The snows of two winters had washed
the detritus free of soil, and Jeffard bent, hand on knee, to look for
specimens of the ore-bearing rock.
"Gangue-rock, most of it, with a sprinkling of decomposed quartz along
at the last," he said reflectively. "The quartz was the dike he struck,
I suppose. He was wise to give it up. There's no silver in that stuff."
He picked up a bit of the snuff-colored rock and crumbled it in
his hand. It was quite friable, like weathered sandstone, but when
the fragment was crushed the particles still clung together as if
matted with invisible threads. Jeffard was too new to the business
of metal-hunting to suspect the tremendous significance of the small
phenomenon, but he was sufficiently curious to gather a double handful
of the fragments of quartz, meaning to ask Garvin if he had noticed the
peculiarity. And when he had climbed to the tunnel and explored it to
its rock-littered heading by the light of a sliver splintered from one
of the pitchy logs of the timbering, he sauntered back to the cabin
beneath the western cliff and made a fire over which to prepare supper
against Garvin's return.