THE line of retreat from the valley, called by Jeffard "of dry bones,"
to the possible land of promise in the Mosquito, lay through Leadville;
not the teeming, ebullient, pandemoniac mining-camp of the early
carbonate era, but its less crowded, less effervescent, though no less
strenuous successor of the present.
On the march across the sky-pitched mountains it had been agreed
between them that there should be one bivouac in the city of the bleak
altitudes. That is to say, Garvin proposed it, and Jeffard assented,
though not without a premonition that the halt would be fatal to the
proposed Mosquito sequel to the campaign in the Saguache. He knew at
least one of Garvin's weaknesses, and that it was akin to his own.
There were the beast of burden and the dispensable moiety of the
camping outfit to sell, and provision to buy; and Jeffard weighed his
companion in the balances of his own shortcomings. He was well assured
that he could not trust himself with money in his hand in any such city
of chanceful opportunity as the great carbonate camp; and arraigning
Garvin at the bar of the same tribunal, he judged him before the fact.
It was a measure of the apathetic indifference which possessed Jeffard
that the premonition gave him scant concern. He marveled inwardly when
the fact of indifference defined itself. Aside from any promptings of
common human gratitude evolving themselves into friendly solicitude for
the man who had twice saved his life,--promptings which he found dead
because he looked to find them dead,--there was this: If his companion
should stumble and spill the scanty residue in the common purse the
wolf-pack of famine and distress would be at their heels in a single
sweep of the clock-hands. And yet the fact remained.
Jeffard was cogitating vaguely this curious manifestation of mental
and moral inertia when the city of the altitudes came into view over
the crest of the final ascent in the toilsome journey. The smoke from
the smelters was trailing lazily toward the distant Mosquito, and a
shifting cumulus of steam marked the snail-like advance of a railway
train up the steep grade from Malta. California Gulch and the older
town were hidden behind the mountain of approach; but the upper town
and its western environs lay stark in the hazeless atmosphere, with the
snow-splotched background of the nearer range, uptilted and immense,
dwarfing the houses into hutch-like insignificance. Dreary as is this
first view of the Mecca of wealth-seekers, it has quickened the pulse
and brightened the eye of many a wayworn pilgrim of the mountain
desert; but Jeffard's thought was in his question to Garvin.
"Is it as near as it looks? or is it as far away as this cursed
no-atmosphere removes everything?"
"It's a good ten mile 'r so, yet. If we get a move on, we'll make it by
sundown, maybe."
They tramped on in silence, the singing silence of the crystalline
heights, measuring mile after mile at the heels of the patient burro,
and reaching the scattering outposts of the western suburb while
yet the sun hung hesitant above the peaks of the main range. The
nearer aspect of the great mining-camp was inexpressibly depressive
to Jeffard. The weathered buildings, frankly utilitarian and
correspondingly unbeautiful; the harsh sterility of the rocky soil;
the ruthless subordination of all things to the sordid purposes of
money-getting; these were the stage-settings of a scene which moved
him curiously, like the fumes of a mingled cup, intoxicating, but
soul-nauseating, withal. The nausea was a consequent of the changed
point of view, and he knew it; but it was no whit less grievous.
Wherefore he groped in the pool of indifference until he found a small
stone of protest.
"Let us do what we have to do and get away from here quickly, Garvin,"
he said, flinging the stone with what precision there was in him.
They had turned into the principal street, and the burro became
reluctant. Garvin smote the beast from behind, and took a turn of the
halter around its jaw.
"Goin' to gig back for the crowd, ain't you?" he growled,
apostrophizing the jack; and then to Jeffard: "Makes you sort o'
town-sick, I reckon. I know the feel of it; used to catch it, reg'lar,
ever' time I'd get in from the range. It'll wear off after a day 'r
so; but, as you say, the quick way to do it up is to light out ag'in,
suddint."
"The sooner the better," said Jeffard. "The atmosphere of the place is
maddening."
Garvin took the word literally and laughed. "'T ain't got no atmosphere
to speak of,--that's what's the matter with it; too blame' high up for
any use."
They were in the thick of the street traffic by this time, and
it required their united malisons joined to what of energy and
determination the long day's march had left them to keep the ass from
planting itself monument-wise in the middle of the street.
"Dad burn a canary, anyhow!" grumbled the man of the wilderness, when
they were resting a moment in front of a shackly building on the
corner of a cross street. "For ornerary, simon-pure, b'iled-down,
soul-killin'"--His vocabulary of objurgatory expletives ran short, and
he wrought out the remainder of the malediction with a dumb show of
violence.
Jeffard smiled in spite of his mood, which was anything but farcical,
and pointed to the haversack of specimens dangling from the loosened
pack.
"We're about to lose the samples," he said.
Garvin regained his wonted good-humor at a plunge.
"That'd be too blame' bad, wouldn't it, now; they're so blazin'
precious! S'pose you lug 'em acrost yonder to that there assay-shop
whilst I toll the canary down to the corral. When you get shut o' the
rocks, come on round to the boardin'-house,--'Miner's Rest,'--a block
furder along and two to your right. I'll meet you there bime-by, if
there's anything left o' me after I get through with this dad-burned,
lop-eared totin'-machine."
Jeffard shouldered the bag of samples, but before he could reply the
opportunity fled clamorous. The lop-eared one, finding itself free for
the moment, gave heed to a foolish bee buzzing in its atomic brain, and
went racing down the cross street, with the big miner in hot pursuit.
"Exit James Garvin," quoth Jeffard, moved to smile again; and he
crossed the avenue to the shackly building with the sign of the assayer
besprent upon the windows.
When he tried the door and found it locked, and the littered room
beyond it empty, he was minded to go on to the rendezvous while
daylight served. But when he reflected that Garvin would be sure to
await an assayer's verdict on the samples, and so prolong their stay in
the city of banality, he decided to conclude the business affair first.
So he went up and down and around and about, and found all the assay
offices closed for the day save one, whose occupant, a round-bodied
little German, with the face of a cherub, martialized by the huge
mustachios of a cuirassier, was still at his bench. Jeffard guessed at
the little man's nationality, and made a shrewd bid for celerity.
"_Guten abend, mein Herr_," he said, unslinging his haversack.
The cherubic face of the expatriated one responded quickly to the
greeting in the loved mother-tongue.
"_Wie geht's, wie geht's, mein guter Herr_," he rejoined; and then
in broken English: "I haf not dot Cherman before heard spoken in dis
Gott-forsaken blaces. You haf some sambles _gebracht_?"
"_Ja, mein Herr._"
"_Gut!_ I vill of dem de tests maig. _Nicht wahr?_"
"_Gefälligst, mein lieber Herr_;" and quickly,--"we must go on our way
again to-morrow."
"So qvick? _Ach! das ist nicht sehr gut._ You vill der poor olt
assay-meister maig to vork on der nide. But because you haf der goot
Cherman in your moud I vill it do. Vat you haf?"
Jeffard unwrapped the samples one by one, and the assayer examined them
with many dubious head-shakings. The amateur made haste to anticipate
the preliminary verdict.
"I know they're valueless," he admitted, "but I have a partner who will
require your certificate before he will be convinced. Can you let us
know to-morrow?"
"Because you haf der Cherman, yes. But it vill be no goot; der silwer
iss not dere"--including the various specimens in a comprehensive
gesture.
Jeffard turned to go, slinging the lightened haversack over his
shoulder. At the door he bethought him of the curious fragment of
quartz picked up on the dump of the abandoned tunnel. It was in his
pocket, and he rummaged till he found it.
"Can you tell me anything about this?" he asked. "It seems to be a
decomposed quartzite, matted on a base of some sort,--a metal, I should
say."
The little German snatched the bit of quartz, and ogled it eagerly
through his eye-glass.
"_Mein Gott im Himmel!_" he cried; and the eye-glass fell to the floor
and rolled under the bench. "Iss it possible dot you know him not? Dot
iss golt, _mein lieber freund_,--vire golt, reech, reech! Vere you got
him? Haf you got some more _von_ dis?"
Jeffard took it in vaguely, and tried to remember what he had done with
the handful of similar fragments gathered at the same time. It came
to him presently. He had emptied his pocket into the haversack on the
morning of the departure from the valley what time Garvin was seeking
the strayed burro.
He unslung the canvas bag and poured the handful of gravel on the
bench. The assayer, trembling now with repressed excitement, examined
the snuff-colored quartz, bit by bit, with a guttural ejaculation for
each. "_Donnerwetter!_ He gifs me feerst der vorthless stones to maig
of dem de assay, und den he vill ask me von leedle qvestion about
dis--dis maknificend bonansa! _Ach! mein freund!_ haf you got _viel_ of
dis precious qvartz?"
"Why, yes; there's a good bit of it, I believe," replied Jeffard,
still unawake to the magnitude of the discovery.
"Und you can find der blaces again? Dink aboud it now--dink hardt!"
Jeffard smiled. "Don't get excited, _mein Herr_. I know the place very
well, indeed; I left it only three days since."
"_Gut; sehr gut!_ Now go you; go und leef me to _mein_ vork. Come you
back in der _morgen_, und I vill tell you dot you are reech, reech! Go,
_mein freund_, mit der goot Cherman in your moud--und Gott go mit you."
Jeffard felt his way down the dark stair, and so on out into the
lighted street, still only in the middle ground between realization
and the bare knowledge of the fact. He was conscious of some vague
recurrent effort to surround the incredible thing; and conscious, too,
that it grew and spread with each succeeding attempt to measure it
until no mere human arms could girdle it.
Not yet did it occur to him to place himself at the nodus of discovery
and possession. The miraculous thing was for him quite a thing
apart; and when he had advanced far enough into the open country of
realization to look a little about him, his thought was wholly for
Garvin and the effect upon him of this sudden projection into the
infinite. He tried to imagine the simple-hearted prospector as a man
of affluence, and laughed aloud at the grotesque figure conjured up by
the thought. What would Garvin do with his money? Squander it royally,
like a loyal son of fortune, and think the world well lost, Jeffard
decided.
The hissing gasoline torch of a street fakir flared gustily in the
keen night wind sweeping down from the Mosquito, and the scintillant
arc-stars at the corners began to take on frosty aureoles of prismatic
hues. The crowds on the resonant plank sidewalks streamed boisterous
and masterful, as if the plangent spirit of time and place were abroad.
Jeffard came to earth again in the rude jostling of the throng. While
he speculated, Garvin--Garvin the inexpectant--was doubtless awaiting
him at the place appointed. He must hasten thither to be the bearer of
the good news to the unspoiled one.
Looking about him to get his bearings, he found himself in front of
the deserted assay office on the spot where he had parted from Garvin.
"One square down and two to the right," he said, repeating Garvin's
directions; and he set out to trudge them doggedly, lagging a little
from honest leg-weariness. In the last half of the third square there
was a screened doorway, and the click of celluloid counters came to his
ears from the brilliantly lighted room beyond. At the sound the embers
of the fire kindled months before glowed afresh and made his heart hot.
"Ah, you're there yet, are you?" he said, speaking to the stirring
passion as if it were a sentient entity within him. "Well, you'll have
to lie down again; there's no meat on the bone."
At the designated corner he found the rendezvous. It was a hostelry
of the baser sort, with a bar-room dominant, and eating and sleeping
conveniences--or inconveniences--subsidiary. The clatter of knives and
forks on ironstone china came from the ill-smelling dining-room in the
rear, and the bar-room held but one occupant. It was Garvin; he was
sitting at one of the card-tables with his head in his arms. He looked
up when Jeffard entered, and his smile was of fatigue.
"Hello, there; thought you'd gone and got lost in the shuffle. Get shut
of 'em?"
Jeffard nodded.
"No good, I reckon?"
"No; nothing that we've found this summer. But you're a rich man, just
the same, Garvin."
"Yes; I've cashed in on the outfit, and I've got twenty dollars in my
inside pocket. Let's go in and chew before them fellers eat it all up."
"Don't be in a hurry; the kind of supper we'll get here can wait. I
said you are a rich man, and I meant it. You remember the old hole up
in the hillside above the camp,--the one you struck a 'dike' in two
years ago?"
"Reckon I ain't likely to forget it."
"Well, that 'dike' was decomposed quartz carrying free gold. I was
curious enough to put a handful of the stuff into my pocket and bring
it out. The assayer's at work on it now, and he says it'll run high--up
into the hundreds, I imagine. Is there much of it?"
The effect of the announcement on the unspoiled one was like that
of an electric shock. He staggered to his feet, went white under the
bronze, and flung his arms about Jeffard.
"Hooray!" he shouted; "that old hole--that same derned old hole 'at
I've cussed out more'n a million times! Damn my fool soul, but I knew
you was a Mascot--knew it right from the jump! Come on--let's irrigate
it right now, 'fore it's a minute older!"
It was out of the depth of pure good-fellowship that Jeffard went to
the bar with the fortune-daft miner. Not all the vicissitudes of the
breathless rush down the inclined plane had been sufficient to slay the
epicure in him; and the untidy bar reeked malodorous. But the occasion
was its own excuse.
Garvin beat upon the bar with his fist, and the roar of his summons
drowned the clatter of knives and forks in the adjacent dining-room.
The bartender came out, wiping his lips on the back of his hand.
"What'll it be, gents?"
"The best you've got ain't good enough," said Garvin, with unwitting
sarcasm. "Trot her out--three of a kind. It's on me, and the house is
in it."
The man spun two glasses across the bar, and set out a black bottle of
dubious aspect. Knowing his own stock in trade, he drew himself a glass
of Apollinaris water.
Jeffard sniffed at the black bottle and christened his glass sparingly.
The bouquet of the liquor was an entire round of dissipation with the
subsequent headache thrown in. Garvin tilted the bottle with trembling
hand, and filled his glass to the brim. The object-lesson was not
thrown away upon the epicure.
"Here's to the derned old hole with a cold million in it," said the
miner, naming the toast and draining his glass in the same breath. And
then: "Come again, barkeep'; drink water yourself, if you want to, but
the red likker's good enough for us. What do ye say, pardner? We're in
it at last, plum up to the neck, and all on account o' that derned old
hole 'at I've cussed out a mil-- Here's lookin' at ye."
Jeffard merely moistened his lips the second time, and the
object-lesson exemplified itself. Garvin had brimmed his glass again,
and the contents of the black bottle were adulterant poisons. Wherefore
he cut in quickly when Garvin would have ordered again.
"That'll do, old man; a little at a time and often, if you must, but
not on an empty stomach. Let's get the money before we spend it."
The latter part of the warning had special significance for the
bartender, who scowled ominously.
"Lemme see the color o' yer money," he commanded. "If youse fellies are
runnin' futures on me"--
Now Garvin had been living the life of an anchoret for many weeks, and
the fumes of the fiery liquor were already mounting to his brain. For
which cause the bartender's insinuation was as spark to tow.
"Futures?" he yelled, throwing down a ten-dollar bill with a mighty
buffet on the bar; "them's the kind o' futures we're drinkin' on right
now! Why, you thick-lipped, mealy-mouthed white nigger, you, I'll come
down here some day and buy the floor out from in under your feet; see?
Come on, pardner; let's mog along out o' here 'fore I'm tempted to mop
up his greasy floor with this here"--
There was hot wrath in the bartender's eyes, and Jeffard hustled the
abusive one out of the place lest a worse thing should follow. On the
sidewalk he remembered what Garvin had already forgotten, and went
back for the change out of the ten-dollar bill, dropping it into his
pocket and rejoining his companion before the latter had missed him.
Thereupon ensued a war of words. The newly belted knight of fortune was
for making a night of it; and when Jeffard would by no means consent to
this, Garvin insisted upon going to the best hotel in the city, where
they might live at large as prospective millionaires should.
Jeffard accepted the alternative, and constituted himself bearward in
ordinary to the half-crazed son of the wilderness. He saw difficulties
ahead, and the event proved that he did not overestimate them. What a
half-intoxicated man, bent upon becoming wholly intoxicated, may do to
make thorny the path of a self-constituted guardian Garvin did that
night. At the hotel he scandalized the not too curious clerk, and
became the centre of an appreciative group in the rotunda what time
Jeffard was pleading the mitigating circumstances with the hesitant
deputy proprietor. In the midst of the plea, when Jeffard had consented
to assume all responsibility for his companion's vagaries, Garvin broke
cover in the direction of the bar-room, followed by a tail of thirsty
ones.
"You say you know him?" said the clerk tentatively.
"Know him? Why, yes; he is my partner. We are just in from the range,
and he has struck it rich. It's a little too much for him just now, but
he'll quiet down after a bit. He is one of the best fellows alive, when
he's sober; and this is the first time I've ever seen him in liquor.
Two drinks of bad whiskey did it."
"Two drinks and a surfeit of good luck," laughed the clerk. "Well,
we'll take him; but you must keep him out of the way. He'll be crazy
drunk in less than an hour. Been to supper?"
"No."
"Better have it sent to your room. He isn't fit to go to the
dining-room."
"All right; have a bell-boy ready, and I'll knock him down and drag him
out, if I can."
That was easier said than done. Jeffard found the foolish one in the
bar-room, drinking _ad libitum_, and holding forth to a circle of
interested hearers. Garvin had evidently been recounting the history
of the abandoned claim, and one of the listeners, a hawk-faced man,
with shifty black eyes, was endeavoring to draw him aside. He succeeded
just as Jeffard thrust his way into the circle, and the self-elected
bearwarden caught the whispered question and its answer.
"You say you located her two years ago?" queried the hawk-faced one.
"No; that's the joke o' the whole shootin'-match,--thess like I was
a-tellin' ye." Garvin's speech ran back to its native Tennessee idiom
at the bidding of intoxication. "She ain't nev' been located _yit_;
and if it hadn't 'a' been for that derned little sharp-eyed pardner o'
mine"--
The questioner turned quickly to the bar.
"Drinks all round, gentlemen--on me." Then to Garvin in the cautious
undertone: "You said she was over in Stray Horse Valley, didn't you?"
Garvin fell into the trap headlong. "Not much I didn't! She's
a-snugglin' down under one o' the bigges' peaks in the Saguache, right
whar she can listen to the purlin' o' the big creek that heads in"--
There was no time for diplomatic interference. Jeffard locked his arm
about Garvin's head, and dragged the big man bodily out of the circle.
"You fool!" he hissed. "Will you pitch it into the hands of the first
man that asks for it? Come along out of this!"
Garvin stood dazed, and a murmur of disapproval ran through the group
of thirsters. The hand of the hawk-faced one stole by imperceptible
degrees toward his hip pocket. Jeffard stopped it with a look.
"You have had fun enough with my partner for one evening, gentlemen,"
he said sternly. "Come on, Jim; let's go to supper."
And the thirsters saw them no more.