THE GOLDEN SPIDERCHAPTER IIN LOST CANYON
THE GOLDEN SPIDER
There wasn’t much suggestion of a canyon, lost or found, in the handsomely furnished office in the Brewster National Bank building where three young fellows in flannel shirts, belted corduroys and hob-nailed lace boots were waiting for the owner of the office to make his appearance.
Of the three, only the middle-sized one, a good-looking chap whose rough outing clothes fitted him as if they were tailor-made, was showing signs of impatience. The biggest of the three, a square-shouldered young athlete with good gray eyes set wide apart, and a shock of dark-red, curly hair, was standing at a window which commanded a magnificent view of the high, forested mountain range lifting the skyline to the westward, while the other member of the trio, an undersized fellow with a thin, eager face and pale blue eyes, was examining the mineral specimens in a corner cabinet.
“Gee! I wish Uncle Billy would come!” said the impatientone, jumping up to make a restless circuit of the room. “We don’t want to miss that train.”
The big fellow turned from his window. “You’re sure he got in last night?” he said.
“Oh, yes; they came in on the Flyer. Aunt Stella called mother over the ’phone after the train got in—just to let us know. But I wish he’d come. We don’t want to lose another single day of this bully weather.”
Dick Maxwell’s impatience was not altogether unreasonable. Ten days earlier Mr. William Starbuck—the “Uncle Billy” in question—had made a short stop in the Middle-Western college town where Dick and his two companions were just winding up their Freshman year, and had asked Dick how he was meaning to spend the long vacation. One thing had brought on another, and the upshot of the talk was an offer on the part of “Uncle Billy” to send Dick, and any two of his college-mates he might pick out, on a summer prospecting trip in the Hophra Mountains, the object in view being the possible discovery, not especially of silver or gold, but more particularly of new sources of supply of the rare metals, tungsten, vanadium, molybdenum, and the like, used in the arts and manufactures.
Dick hadn’t wasted a moment in choosing the first of his companions for the summer outing. Larry Donovan—the big fellow at the office window—son of a crippled locomotive engineer on the home railroad, had been his chum from their grade-school days in Brewster, and the two had spent the preceding summer together as “cubs” on the engineering staff of the railroad of which Dick’s father was the general manager, so Larry was promptly elected as Number Two in the prospectingtrip. For the third member they had both picked upon Charles Purdick—Larry’s roommate in college—for several reasons: for one thing, “Little Purdy” was a pretty good plain cook; and for another, he needed the wages that Mr. William Starbuck was going to pay each member of the prospecting party irrespective of the success of the trip in the discovery of any new mineral deposits.
But there was a third reason for Purdick’s invitation which was still stronger. “Purdy,” who, until he became the beneficiary of a certain mysterious scholarship in Old Sheddon, had been working his way through college, was the orphan son of a steel worker, and had grown up in a mill town, under-fed, neglected, kicked about and overworked. He had never been West; had never known what it was to have a real vacation in the open; and both Dick and Larry had decided at once that he was to be Number Three, even if they should have to knock him down and handcuff him to bring him along. But Purdy hadn’t needed any handcuffing.
Larry laughed good-naturedly at Dick’s miserly remark about the wasting of the “bully weather.”
“Don’t you worry about the weather, old scout,” he said. “We’ll take that as it comes, and you know well enough that we’re likely to have a lot more good weather than bad, in the summer months.”
“Oh, I guess yes,” was Dick’s rejoinder. “I’m just sweating to be off to the tall hills, that’s all.” Then to Purdick, who was busily writing in his notebook at the mineral cabinet: “What are you finding over there, Purdy?”
Purdick’s answer was forestalled by the entrance of Dick’s uncle by marriage, a bronzed, upstanding manwho looked as if he might be a retired cattle king, and who really had been a range-rider in his younger days.
“Well, well! Here you are!” he said, shaking hands with the three. “Ready to go out and hit the high spots, are you? All right; sit down and we’ll round up the preliminaries—what few there are. Got your dunnage kits made up?”
Dick answered for the three.
“The packs are down at the station. Dad told us what we’d need—and what we wouldn’t need. I guess he hasn’t let us make any tenderfoot mistakes about loading up with a lot of the luxuries.”
“That’s good. Now for my part of it. I’ve wired ahead to Nophi, and Mr. Broadwick, the smelter superintendent, is the man you want to see. He’ll have a couple of burros for you, with your camping outfit and grub packed and ready on the arrival of your train. All you’ll have to do when you get there will be to hike out; take your foot in your hand and go.”
“Right!” said Dick, bubbling over with excitement. And then: “In your letter from New York you said something about maps, Uncle Billy. Have you got them here?”
The “grub-staking” uncle got up and took an envelope of folded maps from a pigeonhole in the office safe.
“Here you are—sections of the Geodetic Survey covering most of the territory where you are going. From Nophi you head up Lost Canyon to Mule-Ear Pass. After you cross the first range, the country is all yours. When, or if, you find any mineral, stake your claims and jot the locations down on the map. Are you carrying a copy of Dana’s ‘System’?”
“Got it in the dunnage,” Dick answered; “it, and a blowpipe field-test outfit. We’ve all been boning the ‘Dana’ for a week, and Mr. Ransom, out at the ‘Little Alice,’ has been showing us how to make tests.”
“Good. The ‘Dana’ will help you in making the simple tests that can be made in the field, and, of course, when you find anything that looks right promising, you’ll bring samples of it back with you for a laboratory assay. That’s about all, I think. If you have a chance to send us word during the summer, do it; but if not, don’t worry, and we won’t. I’m betting confidently that you are all able to take care of yourselves, and of one another. How about arms?”
Again it was Dick Maxwell who answered.
“Dad has made each of us a present of a light Winchester. They’re down at the station with the packs.”
“You probably won’t need the artillery. It’s the closed season for game, but it won’t hurt to have the guns along. If you get tired of carrying them, you can put them in the jack packs.”
Dick was nervously looking at his watch. It still wanted a full half-hour of train time, but we all know how that is when we are about to start out upon a wonderful voyage of discovery.
“Well, Uncle Billy,” he said, “I guess we’ll have to be moving along.” So the handshaking was repeated, and they were heading for the door, when the grub-staking uncle called them back.
“This is rather a humdrum job you’ve undertaken for the summer—looking for the industrial metals,” he said, with a twinkle in the shrewd gray eyes. “I’ve a mind to throw in a bit of romance, just for good measure. Howwould you like to keep an eye out for a lost gold mine—a real bonanza?”
“A lost gold mine?” Dick queried eagerly. “Who lost it?”
The ex-cowboy uncle was smiling quizzically. “It is a pretty long story, and if you’ve got to hurry to your train——” he began; but Dick cut in quickly.
“Tell us about it, Uncle Billy. We’ll catch the train all right.”
“Think you can take time to listen? I’ll make it short. Three years ago, James Brock, an old prospector whom I knew well, was found at the mouth of Lost Canyon, dying of hunger and exposure. I had him brought down to Brewster and taken to the hospital. He lived only a few days, but during that time he told me his story. He said he had discovered a fabulously rich gold lode in the Little Hophras, and, staying to work it, the winter had caught him. He had been snow-bound for weeks with little or nothing to eat, but had finally made his way out over Mule-Ear Pass, half starved and with his feet and hands frozen.”
“Poor old duffer!” said Dick sympathetically. “But go on, Uncle Billy. What became of the mine?”
“Nobody knows. Brock had no maps, and he couldn’t describe the locality well enough to enable any one to find it. I don’t know how plentiful the ore is, but it is wonderfully rich, as you can see for yourselves,” and from a drawer in his desk he took a small piece of disintegrated quartz, shot through and held together by a wire-like mass of the precious metal.
As one person, the three boys crowded around the desk to examine the beautiful specimen, and none of themheard the office door open or knew that there was an intruder present until Mr. Starbuck suddenly covered the bit of quartz with his hand and said: “Well, my man—what can I do for you?”
As one person again, they all three wheeled and saw the man who had come in so quietly that none of them had heard him. Tramp or beggar, or whatever he was, he seemed to be an object of pity, dirty, unshaven, and a cripple, walking with a crutch and with one leg drawn up in a curiously twisted deformity. And he had a face—as Dick afterward phrased it—that would scare the rats out of a corn bin.
“I’m lookin’ f’r Mister Bradley, th’ employmint man,” was the way the intruder accounted for himself.
Mr. Starbuck shook his head. “Mr. Bradley’s office is on the floor below,” he replied; and at that, the man hobbled out, leaving the door open when he passed into the corridor.
Dick Maxwell was again consulting his watch. “We have a few minutes more, Uncle Billy,” he said hurriedly. “Is that all you can tell us about the lost mine?”
“Not quite all. James Brock told me how he came to discover the vein. He had camped one evening at the foot of a small cliff with a crevice in it. The cliff faced the east, and in the morning he saw that the crevice was curtained with a great wheel of a spider-web, and in the center of the web was an immense spider with a body that looked, with the sun shining on it, as if it were made out of pure gold. Brock took it as an omen. He dug in the crevice and found his mine, which he called ‘The Golden Spider.’ So there is your bit of romance. Findthe Golden Spider and maybe you will all come back rich.”
“But if we should find it, it wouldn’t be ours,” put in little Purdick, speaking for the first time.
“I’ll make my right and title over to the three of you,” said the grub-staking uncle, with the quizzical smile again wrinkling at the corners of his eyes. “When old Jimmie Brock found he wasn’t going to live, he made me this little pencil sketch of the place”—taking a folded paper from the drawer which had held the specimen—“and told me to go and take his bonanza for my own—made me his heir, in fact.”
“And you never found it?” Dick asked.
The quizzical smile turned itself into a quiet laugh.
“No. I spent a good month of the following summer looking for it; and after the story got out, others looked for it, too. It has never been found, and probably never will be unless some prospector just happens to stumble upon it accidentally. One mountain is very much like another in the Little Hophras, and Brock couldn’t name his mountain, or describe it so that it could be recognized. You may take his sketch map along with you if you like, though it won’t help you any more than it did me. If I were going to try again, I shouldn’t bother about maps or mountains; I should look for a crack in a cliff, and a golden-bodied spider hanging in its web. Now you see what an excellent chance you have of finding the lost bonanza! But I mustn’t keep you any longer listening to these old fairy tales. Good-by, and good luck to you. Don’t forget to send word back any time you happen to meet anybody coming out of the hills.”
Since the time was now really growing pretty short,the three did not stand upon the order of their going. As they ran through the corridor toward the elevators, they saw the crippled man hobbling along in the same direction, and making as good speed with the long crutch-stride and hop as they did in a dog-trot. That being the case, the cripple caught the same descending elevator that they did; but on the sidewalk they lost him quickly; were a bit astonished to see him climb nimbly into a waiting taxi and get himself whirled away down the avenue.
“Huh!” said Dick, as they hurried along toward the railroad station. “‘If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.’ That fellow looks like a beggar, but he rides in a taxi, just the same. I wonder where he is going in such a tearing hurry?”
There was obviously no answer to this, and the incident was presently forgotten in their arrival at the station. The westbound train was in, and both the Maxwell and Donovan families were on hand to see the prospectors off for the summer. Little Purdick, having nobody to see him off, got the packs and rifles and put them aboard, and when he had finished this job the leave-takings were over and the train was pulling out.
“‘Good-by, everybody; good-by, everything!’” Dick sang, hanging out of the last-left-open vestibule; and when he went in to join his two companions he was brimming over with enthusiasm.
“Hey, you old stick-in-the-muds!” he cried. “She’s begun at last—the good old summer out-of-doors! We’re due in Nophi at one o’clock, and to-night we’ll be sleeping out under the stars! Wouldn’t that jar you, Purdy—you old factory-town rat!”
But little Purdick did not answer, because, just at thatmoment, he had caught sight of a roughly dressed man with a crutch settling himself in a seat at the far end of the day-coach in which they were riding, and the singular prevalence of cripples in this part of the Far West struck him as being so odd that he scarcely heard what Dick was saying.
The two-hour train rush down the Timanyoni, through Little Butte, and up a wide mountain valley to the little smelter town of Nophi, nestling fairly under the shadow of the Greater Hophras, was a journey made without incident—unless dinner in the dining-car, their last civilized meal, as Dick named it, could be called an incident. When the boys left the train they found that a telegram from Brewster had outrun them, and Uncle Billy’s smelter-superintendent friend was at the platform to meet them; also, that the two burros, already packed with the provisions, tools and camping outfit, were waiting under a near-by ore shed.
As they were preparing to start, Mr. Broadwick gave them a hint or two.
“The snow is just breaking up on the main range, and you’ll find the trail for two or three miles each side of Mule-Ear Pass pretty hard to negotiate with the jacks unless you can catch it while it is frozen,” he told them. “Late as it is in the season, it freezes every night on the range, and if you’ll take my advice, you’ll push as far up toward the pass as you can this afternoon, camp early, and turn out in the morning early enough to cross the range before the sun gets a melting chance at it. If you don’t do that, you’re likely to have a lot of trouble with the burros. They’re pretty sure-footed little beasts, but they will slip off a thawing trail once in a while.”
Larry was the only one who was thoughtful enough to ask if anybody had been over the trail since the thawing began.
“Yes,” said the smelter superintendent, “two men went over yesterday with supplies for the Little Eagle mine in Dog Gulch. They were experienced packers, and they told us they had to wait for the freeze before they could make it, coming out.”
They promised to do as the superintendent advised, and five minutes later, under a sun that seemed hot enough to make all thoughts of frost and snow troubles a sheer absurdity, they were trailing out the single street of the small smelter settlement and heading for the Lost Canyon portal.
Just as they were leaving the last shacks of the town behind, Purdick, to whom all this wild western stuff was as strange as a glimpse into an entirely different world, happened to look back down the street. What he saw meant nothing to him at first: there were a few stragglers in the street, workmen returning to the smelter after the noon hour, some children playing in the dust, and the usual number of stray dogs foraging for something eatable in the empty tin cans littering the roadway.
But in front of a tar-papered building labeled “Hotel Nophi” three horses were hitched, and as Purdick looked back, three men came out of the hotel to unhitch and mount them. That, in itself, was nothing remarkable, of course, and Purdick wouldn’t have given it a second thought if he hadn’t happened to see, or think he saw, one of the three stick something that looked like a crutch under his saddle leather before he climbed to the back of his riding animal.
“Well, I’ll be jiggered!” he exclaimed, wholly to himself. But when Dick said: “What for?” Purdick’s reply was perfectly non-committal. “Nothing,” he returned, with a laugh. “I guess the altitude’s getting on my eye nerves and making me see double—or triple.”
As he spoke, the street, which had now dwindled to a rocky bridle path, turned sharply to the left and entered the narrow mouth of the canyon; whereupon the brawling stream thundering through the gorge swallowed up all other sounds, even as the cliff-like walls shut out all sights save that of the sky overhead. Nevertheless, as the patient little pack animals plodded steadily on, their tinkling hoofbeats hardly audible above the noise made by the stream, Purdick fancied he could hear heavier hoofbeats clinking upon the stones far to the rear.
That first afternoon’s hike up a canyon trail, which at times scarcely afforded footing for the plodding little beasts under the pack-saddles, came as near to “getting” Purdick as anything he had ever experienced. Having never had time—or the spare energy—to do any athletic work in college, the toiling tramp, with a blanket roll and a gun to carry, made him realize, as he never had before, the handicap of untrained muscles and sinews, and as he dragged along at the tail of the little procession he was chopping out a vow to make the summer outing a turning point for a fellow named Charles Purdick in one respect at least: if hard work and grit would do it, the end of the summer should find him better fitted for man-sized, outdoor work or he’d know the reason why.
Notwithstanding this fine resolution, he heaved a mighty sincere sigh of relief when the five-hour trudge up the canyon came to an end in one of the park-like wideningsof the gorge which had been recurring with increasing frequency during the past hour or so, and Dick called to Larry: “Well, old sock; how about it? Isn’t this far enough up so that we can hit the pass in the frosty dawn?”
Larry, who had been leading the foremost burro, stopped and gave the landscape the once over.
“Couldn’t be much better,” he decided. “Plenty of wood, good water, and fir boughs for the shake-downs. Alabama!”
“Huh?” said Dick. “What’s Alabama got to do with it?”
Larry gave a wide-mouthed grin.
“Dig up your U. S. History, sonny. ‘Alabama’ means ‘Here we rest.’ All hands on deck to make camp.”
They went at it like old-timers—or at least two of them did. Though they hadn’t had much to do with the actual camp-making in their railroad construction experience of the summer before, Larry and Dick had learned pretty well how to make themselves at home in the wilderness. While the setting sun—long since gone behind the towering western ranges—was still filling the upper air with a flood of golden radiance, they unpacked the jacks and picketed them to graze on the lush grass of the little park, built the camp-fire, and chopped enough of the fragrant fir tips for the beds.
It was after the fire had burned down to a bed of coals that little Purdick began to shine. Out of the hard experience of his strugglesome boyhood he had brought a pretty good knowledge of plain cooking, and in a little time he dished up a supper that made his two camp-mates pound him on his tired back and bombard him with all sorts of jollying praise.
“We sure got a gilt-edged prize when we picked you off the limb, Purdy,” said Dick warmly. “Whatever else you can’t do, you sure can cook. I see where you’re elected for the whole summer—unless you get your back up and go on strike and make us two poison ourselves with our own skillet messes. Pretty tired after the hike?”
“A little,” Purdick admitted.
“All right; after we get over the Pass, we won’t push it so hard. What say, Larry?”
“There won’t be any need of pushing it,” was Larry’s rejoinder, mumbled through a mouthful of Purdick’s delicious, skillet-baked corn bread. “We’re not out to see how many miles we can do in a day.”
With supper eaten and the tin dishes washed in the crystal-clear stream, and with the last tints of the sun glow gone and the stars coming out in a black bowl of the heavens that seemed almost near enough to reach up and touch, the three rolled themselves in their blankets with their feet to the fire, Dick mumbling something about a day well spent earning a night’s repose, and falling asleep almost as soon as he had stretched himself out.
But little Purdick did not find it quite so simple. For one thing, he was too tired to go to sleep at once, and for another the unfamiliar surroundings, the black shadows of the trees, the hollow drumming of the little river among the boulders in its bed, the high-mountain silence which was otherwise unbroken, the stately procession of the stars in a sky that was like an arch of black velvet—all these things conspired to make him wakeful, and after a time he got up, dug out the mineralogy book from Larry’s pack, stirred the fire to make it give light enoughto read by, and was presently deep in the mysteries of sylvanite and sphalerite and chalcopyrite, B.B. tests, acid reactions, and the like.
In a little time he began to realize that even a June night at altitude eight or nine thousand feet can be pretty chilly, so he wrapped himself in his blankets and put his back against a tree. In the new position the firelight wasn’t very good for the reading purpose, and before long he found his eyes growing heavy and finally the “Dana” slipped from his grasp and he was asleep.
This was the last he knew until he awoke with a start some time farther along in the night; came broad awake with a conviction that a noise, other than that of the brawling stream, had broken into the high-mountain silence. Rubbing the sleep out of his eyes, he looked around. The fire had died down to a pile of white-ashed embers, but the starlight, as strong in the clear atmosphere of the heights as modified moonlight, enabled him to see the dim outlines of his surroundings.
While he looked and listened, the noise which had aroused him came again; a measured tapping alternating with the crunch of slow footfalls. Straining his eyes, he soon made out a shadowy figure dodging along from tree to tree and working its way cautiously toward the dying camp-fire.
Purdick’s first impulse was to call Dick and Larry; his next was to half close his eyes and pretend to be still asleep. Nearer and nearer came the tap and shuffle, until at last he was able to get a fair sight of the midnight intruder. It was a man with a crutch, and the watcher under the big fir-tree didn’t have to look twice to decide that his errand wasn’t neighborly. For now the man wasdown on hands and knees and was crawling up as noiselessly as a snake.
Thinking it over afterward, Purdick could never tell why he didn’t immediately raise an alarm. A yell would have awakened his sleeping camp-mates, and would probably have sent the intruder flying. But instead of flinging off his blanket and shouting to Larry and Dick, little Purdick merely tried to give a better imitation of a sleeping sentinel and let the crippled man come on.
What happened after that was wholly unexplainable to the watcher under the fir-tree. Creeping silently into the diminished circle of firelight, the cripple possessed himself first of Larry’s pack and then of Dick’s, going through them rapidly but painstakingly, as if in search of something. Next, Purdick saw his own pack going through the same process. Like a suddenly illuminating flash of lightning, the explanation blazed into Purdick’s brain. The cripple was the man who had come into Mr. Starbuck’s office just as they were about to leave. He had overheard the talk of the Golden Spider, the lost gold mine, and he was searching for old Jimmie Brock’s map!