occasions he had gone in with two San Francisco men to develop the
property. The San Francisco men had persuaded him to form a stock
company of certain capitalisation. In two deals they had "frozen out"
Peter completely, and reorganised on a basis which is paying them good
dividends. Returning overwhelmed with sophistries and "explanations"
from his expostulatory interview, Peter decided he knew more about
quartz leads than about business and the disgorging of gains, so he went
over into Idaho to try again. There he found the famous Antelope Gap
lode. This time he determined to sell outright and have nothing more to
do with the matter after the transfer of the property. He drew up the
deeds, received a small amount down, and took notes for the balance.
When the notes came due he could not collect them. The mine had been
resold to third parties. Peter had no money to contest the affair; and
probably would not have done so if he had. He knew too little--or too
much--of law; but the instinct was his, so he moved one State farther
east to Montana for his third trial. This resulted in the Eagle Ridge.
And for the third time he was swindled by a persuasive man and a lying
one-sided contract.
A sordid, silly enough little tale, is it not? but that is why men
wondered at Peter's survival, marvelled at the recuperative force that
made possible his fourth attempt, speculated with a certain awe over
that cheerful disposition which had earned him, even in his adversity,
the sobriquet of Happy Peter.
All of these phenomena, had they but known it, resulted from one simple
cause. Peter's mental retrospect for a considerable space would have
conjured up nothing but a succession of grand sweeps of mountains,
singing pines, rare western skies, and the simplicity of a
frontiersman's log-cabin; and yet to his inner vision over the border of
that space lay a very different scene. It was the scene he saw the
oftenest. Oftenest? he saw it always; across the mountains, through the
pines, beyond the skies. As time went on, the vision simplified itself
to Peter, as visions will. It came to have two phases, two elements,
which visited him always together.
One of these was a house; the other a girl. The house was low,
white-painted, with green blinds and a broad stoop. Its front yard was
fragrant with lilacs, noisy with crickets, fluttering with butterflies
of sulphur yellow. About it lay a stony, barren farm, but lovely with
the glamour of home. The girl was not pretty, as we know girls; but she
had straight steady eyes, a wide brow, smooth matronly bands of hair,
and a wholesome, homely New England character, sweet, yet with a tang to
give it a flavour, like the apples on the tree near the old-fashioned,
long-armed well. Peter could gain no competence from the stony farm, no
consent from the girl. It was to win both that he had come West.
In those days, around the western curve of the earth, every outlook
borrowed the tints of sunset. Nothing but the length of the journey
stood between a man and his fortune.
"I love you dearly, Peter," she had said, both hands on his shoulders,
"and I do not care for the money. But I have seen too much of it
here--too much of the unhappiness that comes from debt, from poverty.
Misery does not love the company of those it loves. Go make your
fortune, Peter, bravely, and come back to me."
"I will," replied Peter, soberly. "I will, God help me. But it may be
long. I don't know; I have not the knack; I am stupid about people,
about men."
She smiled, and leaned over to kiss his eyes. "People love you, Peter,"
she said, simply. "I love you, and I will wait. If it were fifty years,
you will find me here ready when you come."
Peter knew this to be true. And so to the unpeopled rooms of the little
old Vermont farmhouse Peter's gentle thoughts ever swarmed, like homing
bees. In his vision of it the lilac-bush outside the window always
smelled of spring; she always sat there beside the open sash,
waiting--for him. What wonder that he survived when so many others went
down? What wonder that he persevered? What wonder that his patient soul,
comparing the eternity of love's happiness with the paltry years of
love's waiting, saw nothing in the condition of affairs to ruffle its
peaceful serenity? And yet to most the time would have seemed very, very
long. Men may blunder against rich pockets or leads and wealthy say
farewell to a day which they greeted as the poorest of the poor. So may
men win fortunes on a turn of the wheat market. But the one is no more
prospecting than the other is business. True prospecting has only the
normal percentage of uncertainties, the usual alloy of luck to brighten
its toil with the hope of the unexpected. A man must know his business
to succeed. A bit of rock, a twist of ledge, a dip of country, an
abundance or an absence of dikes--these and many others are the symbols
with which the prospector builds the formula that spells gold. And after
the formula is made, it must be proved. It is the proving that bends the
back, tries the patience, strains to the utmost the man's inborn
Instinct of the Metal. For that is the work of the steel and the fire,
the water and the power of explosion. Until the proof is done to the
Q.E.D., the man must draw for inspiration on his stock of faith. In the
morning he sharpens his drills at a forge. In the afternoon he may, by
the grace of labour, his Master, have accomplished a little round hole
in the rock, which, being filled with powder and fired, will tear loose
into a larger hole with debris. The debris must be removed by pick and
shovel. After the hole has been sufficiently deepened, the debris must
be loaded into a bucket, which must then be hauled to the surface of the
ground and emptied. How long do you calculate the man will require to
dig in this manner, fifty, a hundred feet? How long to sink one or two
such shafts on each and every claim he has staked? How long to excavate
the numerous lateral tunnels which the Proof demands?
And besides this, from time to time the shaft must be elaborately
timbered in order to prevent its caving in and burying work and workman
together--a tedious job, requiring the skill alike of a woodsman, a
carpenter, a sailor, and a joiner. The man must make his trips to town
for supplies. He must cook his meals. He must meet his fellows
occasionally, or lose the power of speech. The years slip by rapidly. He
numbers his days by what he has accomplished; and it is little. He
measures time by his trips to camp; and they are few. It is no small
thing to make three discoveries--and lose them. It is a greater thing to
find courage for a fourth attempt.
After the Eagle Ridge fiasco, Peter, as cheerful as ever, journeyed over
into Wyoming to try his luck once more. He moved up into the hills,
spent a month in looking about him, narrowed his localities to one
gulch, and built himself a log cabin in which to live. Then he made his
general survey. He went on foot up every gulch, even every little
transverse wrinkle that lay tributary to his valley, to the shallow top
of it filled with loose stones; he followed the sky-line of every ridge
which bordered and limited these gulches; he seized frequent
opportunities of making long diagonals down the slopes. Nothing escaped
him. In time he knew the general appearance of every bit of drift or
outcrop in his district. Then he sat down in his cabin and carefully
considered the probabilities. If they had not happened to please him, he
would have repeated the whole wearisome process in another valley; but
as in this case they did, he proceeded to take the next step. In other
words, he went over the same ground again with a sampling-pick and a
bundle of canvas bags. Where his theories or experience advised, he
broke off quantities of rock from the ledges, which he crushed and mixed
in the half of an old blanket; dividing, and recrushing again and again,
until an "average" was obtained in small compass. The "average" he took
home, where he dumped it into a heavy iron mortar, over which he had
suspended a pestle from a springy sapling. By alternately pulling down
and letting up on the sapling he crushed the quartz fragments with the
pestle into fine red and white sand. The sand he "panned out" for
indications of free gold.
The ledges whose averages thus showed the colour, he marked on his map
with a cross. Some leads which did not so exhibit gold, but whose other
indications he considered promising, he exploited still further,
penetrating to a layer below the surface by means of a charge or so of
powder. Or perhaps he even spent several weeks in making an irregular
hole like a well, from which he carried the broken rock in bags,
climbing up a notched tree. Then he selected more samples. This is hard
work.
Thus Peter came to know his country, and when he knew it thoroughly,
when he had made all his numerous speculations as to horses, blowouts,
and slips--then, and not until then, did he stake out his claims; then,
and not until then, did he consider himself ready to _begin_ work.
He might be quite wrong in his calculations. In that case, it was all to
do over again somewhere else. He had had this happen. Every prospector
has. The claims which Peter selected were four in number. He started in
without delay on the proof. Foot by foot the shafts descended through
the red, the white, vein matter. One by one the spider arms of the
tunnels felt out into the innermost crevices of the lode. Little by
little Peter's table of statistics filled; here a pocket, there a
streak, yon a clear ten feet of low-grade ore. The days, the months,
even the years slipped by. Summers came and went with a flurry of
thunder-showers that gathered about Harney, spread abroad in long bands
of blackness, broke in a deluge of rain and hail and passed out to
dissipate in the hot air of the prairies. Autumns, clear-eyed and
sweet-breathed, faded wanly in the smoke of their forest fires. Winters
sidled by with constant threat of arctic weather which somehow never
came; powdering the hills with their snow; making bitter cold the
shadows, and warm the silver-like sun. Another spring was at hand. Like
all the rest, it coquetted with the season as a young girl with her
lover; smiling with the brightness of a western sun; frowning with the
fierceness of a sudden snow-squall, strangely out of place in contrast
to the greenery of the mountain "parks"; creeping slowly up the gullies
from the prairie in staccato notes of bursting buds; at last lifting its
many voices in the old swelling song of delight over the birth of new
loves and new desires among its creatures.
Like all the rest, did I say? No, not quite. To Peter this particular
spring was a rare thing of beauty. Its gilding was a little brighter,
its colours a little fresher, its skies a little deeper, its songs rang
a little truer than ever the gilding or colours or skies or songs of any
spring he had ever known. For he was satisfied. Steadily the value of
the property had proved itself. One clear, cold day he collected all his
drills and picks and sledges and brought them back to camp, where he
stacked them behind the door. It was his way of signing Q.E.D. to the
proof.
The doubtful spot on the _Jim Crow_ was not a blow-out, but a "horse."
He had penetrated below it. The mines were rich beyond his dreams. Yet
he sat there at his noon meal as cheerful, as unexcited, as content as
ever. When one has waited so long, impatience sleeps soundly, arouses
with the sluggishness of unbelief itself. Outside he saw the sun, for
the first time in weeks, and heard the pines singing their endless song.
Inside, his fire sparkled and crackled; his kettle purred like a
fireside cat. Peter was tired; tired, but content. The dream was very
near to him.
When he had finished his meal he got up and examined himself in his
little square mirror. Then he did so again. Then he walked heavily back
to his table and sat down and buried his face in his hands. When he had
looked the first time he had seen a gray hair. When he had looked the
second time he had discovered that there were many. With a sudden pang
Peter realised that he was getting to be an old man. He took a picture
from a pocket-case and looked at that. Was she getting to be an old
woman?
It was fearful what a difference that little thought suddenly made. A
moment ago he had had the eternities before him. Now there was not an
instant to be wasted. Every minute, every second even, that he sat there
gazing at the faded old picture in his hand was so much lost to him and
to its original. Not God himself could bring it and its possibilities
back to him. Until now he had looked about him upon Youth; he must
henceforth look back to it--back to the things which might have been,
but could never be--and each pulse-beat carried him inevitably farther
from even the retrospective simulacrum of their joys. He and she could
never begin young now. They must take up life cold in the moulds, ready
fashioned. The delight of influencing each other's development was
denied such as they; instead, they must find each other out, must throw
a thousand strands of loving-kindness to span the gap which the patient
years had sundered between them, a gap which should never have widened
at all. Again that remorseless hurry of the moments! Each one of them
made the cast across longer, increased the need for loving-kindness,
demanded anew, for the mere pitiful commonplace task of understanding
each other--which any mother and her child find so trivially easy--the
power of affection which each would have liked to shower on the other
undictated except by the desires of their hearts. Peter called up the
image of himself as he had been when he had left the East, and set it
remorselessly by the side of that present image in the mirror. Then he
looked at the portrait. Could the years have changed her as much? If so,
he would hardly know her!
Those miserable years of waiting! He had not minded them before, but now
they were horrible. In the retrospect the ceaseless drudgery of rock and
pick and drill loomed larger than the truth of it; his patience, at the
time so spontaneous a result of his disposition, seemed that of a man
clinging desperately to a rope, able to hang on only by the
concentration of every ounce of his will. Peter felt himself clutching
the rope so hard that he could think of nothing, absolutely nothing,
else. He proved a great necessity of letting go.
And for her, these years? What had they meant? By the internal
combustion which had so suddenly lighted up the dark corners of his
being, he saw with almost clairvoyant distinctness how it must have
been. He saw her growing older, as he had grown older, but in the dull
apathy of monotony. She had none of this great filling Labour wherewith
to drug herself into day-dreams of a future. The seasons as they passed
showed her the same faces, growing ever a little more jaded, as dancers
in the light of dawn. Perhaps she had ceased counting them? No, he knew
better than that. But the pity of it! washing, scrubbing, mending;
mending, scrubbing, washing to the time of an invalid's complaints.
To-day she was doing as she had done yesterday; to-morrow she would do
the same. To-morrow?
"No, by God!" cried Peter, starting to his feet. "There shall be no more
to-morrow!"
He took from the shelf over the window a number of pieces of quartz,
which he stuffed into the pockets of a pair of saddle-bags lying near
the door. In the corral was Jenny, a sleek, fat mare. He saddled Jenny
and departed with the saddle-bags, leaving the door of his cabin open to
the first comer, as is the hospitable Western way.
At Beaver Dam he spread the chunks of rock out on the bar of the
principal saloon and invited inspection. He did not think to find a
purchaser among the inhabitants of Beaver Dam, but he knew that the
tidings of his discoveries would arouse interest and attract other
prospectors to the locality of his claims. In this manner his property
would come prominently on the market.
The discoveries certainly were accorded attention enough. Peter was well
known. Men were perfectly sure of his veracity and his mining instinct.
If Peter said there existed a good lode of the stuff he exhibited to
them, that settled it.
"Hum," said a man named Squint-eye Dobs, after examining a bit of the
transparent crystal through which small kernels of yellow metal shone.
Then he laid down the specimen, and walked quietly out the door without
further comment. He had gone to get his outfit ready.
To others, not so prompt of action, Peter explained at length, always in
that hesitating, diffident voice of his.
"I have my claims all staked," said he; "you boys can come up and hook
onto what's left. There's plenty left. I ain't saying it's as good as
mine; still, it's pretty good. I think it'll make a camp."
"Make a camp!" shouted Cheyenne Harry. "I should think it would! If
there's any more like that up country you can sell a 'tater-patch if it
lays anywheres near the district!"
"Well, I must be goin', boys," said Peter, sidling toward the door; "and
I 'spect I'll see some of you boys up there?"
The boys did not care to commit themselves as to that before each other,
but they were all mentally locating the ingredients of their prospecting
outfits.
"Have a drink, Happy, on me," hospitably suggested the proprietor.
Peter slowly returned to the bar.
"Here's luck to the new claim, Happy," said the proprietor; "and here's
hoping the sharps doesn't make all there is on her."
The men laughed, but not ill-naturedly. They all knew Peter, as has been
said.
Peter turned again to the door.
"You'll have a reg'lar cyclone up thar by to-morrow!" called a joker
after him; "look out fer us! There'll be an unholy mob on hand, and
they'll try to do you, sure!"
Peter stopped short, looked at the speaker, and went out hurriedly.
The next morning the men came into his gulch. He heard them even before
he had left his bunk--the _clink_, creak, creak! of their wagons. By the
time he had finished breakfast the side-hills were covered with them.
From his window he could catch glimpses of them through the straight
pines as patches of red, or flashes of light reflected from polished
metal. In the canon was the gleam of fires; in the air the smell of
wood-smoke and of bacon broiling; among the still bare bushes and
saplings the shine of white lean-tops; horses fed eagerly on the young
grasses and the browse of trees, raising their heads as the creak of
wheels farther down the draw told of yet new-comers. The boom was under
way.
Peter knew that the tidings of the discovery would spread. To-morrow a
new town would deserve a place on the map. Men would come to the town,
men with money, men anxious to invest. With them Peter would treat.
There was to be no chance of a careless bargain this time. He would take
no chances. And yet he had thought that before.
Peter began to forestall difficulties in his mind. The former experience
suggested many, but he drew from the same source their remedies. It was
the great unknown that terrified him. In spite of his years, in spite
of his gray hairs, in spite of his memories of those former failures, he
had to confess to himself that he knew nothing, absolutely nothing of
sharpers and their methods. They could not fleece him again in precisely
the way they had done so before; but how could he guess at the tricks
they had in reserve? Eight years out of a man's life ought surely to
teach him caution as thoroughly as twelve. Yet he walked into the Eagle
Ridge trap as confidently as he had into the Antelope Gap. He had made
it twelve years. What was to prevent his making it sixteen? There is no
fear like that of the absolutely unknown. You cannot forestall that; you
must depend upon your own self-confidence. Self-confidence was just what
Peter did not possess.
Then in a flash he saw what he should have done. It was all so
ridiculously simple--a mere question of division of labour. He, Peter,
knew prospecting, but did not understand business. Back in his old
Vermont home were a dozen honest men who knew business, but understood
nothing of prospecting. Nothing would have been easier than to have
combined these qualities and lacks. If Peter had returned quietly to his
people, concealing his discoveries from the men of Beaver Dam, he could
have returned in three weeks' time equipped for his negotiations. Now it
was too late. The minute his back was turned they would jump his claims.
Peter's mind worked slowly. If he had felt himself less driven by the
sight of those gray hairs, he might have come in time to another
idea--that of wiring or writing East for a partner, pending whose
arrival he could merely hold possession of the claims. As it was, the
terror and misgiving, having obtained entry, rapidly usurped the
dominion of his thoughts. He could see nothing before him but the
inevitable and dread bargaining with unknown powers of dishonesty,
nothing behind him but the mistake of starting the "boom."
As the morning wore away he went out into the hills to look about him.
The men were all busily enough engaged in chipping out the shallow
troughs of their "discoveries," piling supporting rocks about their
corner and side stakes, or tacking up laboriously composed mining
"notices." They paid scant attention to the man who passed them a
hundred yards away. Peter visited his own four claims. On one he found a
small group anxiously examining the indications of the lead. He did not
join it. The parting words flung after him at the saloon came to his
mind. "Look out for us! There'll be an unholy mob on hand, and they'll
try to do you, sure."
Peter cooked himself a noon meal, but he did not eat much of it.
Instead, he sat quite still and stared with wide, blind eyes at the
wavering mists of steam that arose from the various hot dishes. From
time to time he got up with apparent purpose, which, however, left him
before he had taken two steps, so that his movement speedily became
aimless, and he sat down again. Late in the afternoon he went the rounds
of his claims again, but saw nothing unusual. He did not take the
trouble to cook supper. During the evening some men looked in for a
moment or so, but went away, because the cabin was empty. Peter was at
the moment of their visit walking back and forth, back and forth, away
up high there on the top of the ridge, in a little cleared flat space
next the stars. When he came to the end, he whirled sharp on his heels.
It was six paces one way and five the other. He counted the steps
consciously, until the mental process became mechanical. Then the count
went on steadily behind his other thoughts--five, six; five, six; five,
six; over and over again, like that. About ten o'clock he ceased opening
and shutting his hands and began to scream, at first under his breath,
then louder in the over tone, then with the full strength of his lungs.
A mountain lion on another slope answered him. He stretched his arms up
over his head, every muscle tense, and screamed. And then, without
appreciable transition, he sank to the rock and hid his face. For the
moment the nerve tension had relaxed.
The clear western stars, like fine silver powder, seemed to glimmer in
some light stronger than their own, as dust-motes in the sun. A breeze
from the prairie rested its light, invisible hands on the man's bent
head. Certain homely night-sounds, such as the tree-toads and crickets
and the cries of the poor wills, stole here and there through the
pine-aisles like living creatures on the wing. A faint, sweet odour of
the woods came with them. Peter arose, and drew a deep breath, and went
to his cabin. The peace of nature had for the moment become his own.
But then, in the darkness of his low bunk, the old doubts, the old
terrors returned. They perched there above him and compelled him to look
at them until his eyes were hot and red. "_Do, do, do!_" said they,
until Peter arose, and there, in the chill of dawn, he walked the three
miles necessary for the inspection of his claims. Everything was as it
should be. The men in the gulch were not yet awake. From the _Jim Crow_
a drowsy porcupine trundled away bristling.