CHAPTER IVDADDY LONGBEARD
When Dick Maxwell was left alone on the summit of Mule-Ear Pass, he watched his two companions running along the spur ridge as long as he could see them. But after they were fairly out of sight he began to get ready for the descent of the western trail.
When he attacked it, he found the downward trail on the western slope much less difficult than that over which they had gained the pass from the east. So, by the time the daily thaw was setting in, Dick had his two-jack train well down into the timber and was casting about for a good place in which to camp and wait for Larry and Purdick.
Oddly enough, as he thought, the good places were slow in revealing themselves. Upon leaving the snow slopes and entering the timber, the little-used trail, after crossing and recrossing the little torrent in the gulch a number of times, seemed to fade out gradually. Being only a sort of apprentice pathfinder, Dick didn’t notice the fading at first. What he was looking for was a bit of grass for the burros in a place where Larry and Purdick would have no trouble in finding it, and him, when they should come over the mountain.
It was getting pretty well along toward noon when Dick began to wonder if something wasn’t wrong. Forone thing, the trail seemed to have disappeared entirely, and for another, he suddenly realized that the noise of the stream, which he had been holding in the back of his mind as a guide, had been gradually growing fainter and fainter until now he couldn’t hear it at all.
Plainly, it was time to call a halt and do a little thinking. Though he had been taking it easy, and letting the jacks do the same, he knew he must have covered considerable distance in the course of the forenoon. And every added mile he was traveling was making it just that much harder for Larry and Purdick to overtake and find him. Moreover, the little pack beasts couldn’t go on forever without feeding. He must find grass, and find it soon, or the burros would suffer.
Having reached that sensible conclusion, he hitched the patient little animals to a tree, and made a wide circuit in search of a patch of grass. Luckily, he soon found one in a little open glade, and to this he drove the burros, relieved them of the packs, and turned them loose to graze.
Munching his own midday meal while the jacks were feeding, Dick did some more thinking. Little by little the conviction that he had lost his way grew upon him, and the consequences began to loom up. Since he himself had packed their haversack, he knew that Larry and Purdick had barely enough for two meals. If he and the provisions were lost so that the two who had been left behind couldn’t find them, they’d go hungry.
Confronted by this nettlesome fact, Dick ate his own dinner hurriedly. The only thing to do was to turn back and find out where he had left the trail. But when he came to consider this matter of back-tracking, confusionset in. In which direction had he wandered? Was the stream he had been following to the left or to the right?
He was swallowing the last mouthful of biscuit and cold bacon when the confusion of ideas climaxed in the admission that he didn’t know which side of the stream he had crossed to last. There had been a number of the crossings, and he hadn’t taken any notice of the particular direction he was going. It was a bemuddling state of affairs, but the need for action was none the less pressing. Larry and Purdick mustn’t be left to wander all over the lot, famine-stricken, just because their provision freighter hadn’t had sense enough to stay where he could be found.
Dick got the packs ready and waited impatiently for the burros to fill up. They were doing their hungry best; anybody could see that. Still, it was taking time.
“Chew—chew fast, you little beggars!” he grumbled at them, stretching himself out on a bed of fir needles and watching them as they cropped. “We’ve got to be making tracks out of this, if you did but know it.”
Now, when one has lost half a night’s sleep, and, on the heels of the loss, has tramped up one side of a mountain and down the other, a bed of dry conifer needles is likely to prove a pretty subtle temptation—not to go to sleep, of course, with the urgencies making it perfectly plain that one really mustn’t do that, but just to close one’s eyes and doze for a minute or two. Dick locked his hands under his head and lay gazing at the industrious burros. He had to look down his nose to see them, and that, too, is dangerous, if one doesn’t mean to go to sleep. Two or three times he found his eyes closing automatically; and at last, with the thought that he might just aswell doze off for the half-hour that it would take the jacks to fill themselves up, he was gone.
That was that. But, unlike Larry, Dick had no alarm clock in the back part of his head that he could set to go off promptly at the end of half an hour. Quietly in the silence of the little glade, which was broken only by the industrious grazing of the little pack beasts, the half-hour slipped by, and then another and yet another.
The burros had finished the filling-up process and were beginning to sniff the air for water. Inch by inch the tree shadows lengthened as the good old earth turned over in its daily wallop, and still Dick slept on. When he was finally awakened by one of the jacks nosing him over to find out if he were anything that a donkey could top off with by way of dessert, he leaped up with a yell and looked at his watch. It was nearly five o’clock. He had lost over four hours of the day!
Reproaching himself remorsefully for having been so heedless as to go to sleep on his job, Dick hustled the pack saddles into place, loaded them, and was ready to hike. Since all directions looked alike to him, he set off, with the westering sun at his back, thinking that that course must at least take him, sooner or later, to the upper edge of the timber where at the worst he could get a wider look at things than could be had in the forest.
But he had scarcely got the small procession in motion before he began to have trouble with the jacks. Though they had hitherto gone on amiably enough in any direction they happened to be headed, they now seemed determined to edge away to the left. Again and again Dick pushed and dragged them back into the uphill path, but before he could take his place at the tail of theprocession they would be crabbing aside and circling—always in the same direction.
“Aye—Fishbait; what’s the matter with you?” he shouted at the leading burro; and then, all at once, he knew. The jacks had had a feed, but no water. And now they were smelling water somewhere to the left and wanted to go to it.
“All right, little donks!” he said, laughing at his own dullness; “I guess you know what’s what better than I do. Find the creek and get your drink, and then we’ll follow it back to where the trail begins to show up for us again.”
As it turned out, it was only a short distance, as wilderness distances go, to the water the burros had been so anxious to reach; but, by the same token, the sun was now sinking pretty fast, and Dick saw that he would have to hurry if he wanted to get anywhere before the early forest dusk should overtake him. Accordingly, as soon as the burros had had their drink, he headed them up the stream, congratulating himself that the way out of the lost tangle had been found so easily.
Again that was that. But before he had gone very far in the new direction that old saying about not laughing until you are out of the wood began to suggest itself. He tried to tell himself that it was all right; that he had found the creek, and if he should follow it up far enough it was bound to take him back to the trail. Just the same, there was nothing at all familiar in the surroundings, and the creek itself looked different.
Still, there was nothing to do but to push on, and he was doing it industriously a full hour later when the daylight quit on him and he saw that it was no use tryingto go much farther. Camping for the night seemed the only thing left for him to do, but when he thought of stopping he was a good bit worried. There were still no signs of the lost trail, and nothing in the least rememberable in what he could see of the landscape.
This was the condition of affairs when, rounding a sharp turn in the creek ravine, he saw a light up ahead. In the distance it looked as if it might be a fireplace fire shining out through the open door of a cabin. A fire and a cabin meant at least two mighty welcome things, just then: human companionship, and a chance to find out where he had wandered to.
Being Western born and bred, Dick thought he was pretty well prepared for anything that might jump up in the woods, however strange it might appear at first sight. But the man who came to the cabin door at his shouted: “Hello, the house!” presented a picture that was almost startling. Tall, stoop-shouldered, with a shock of hair as white as snow, and a great white beard that reached fully to his waist, Dick could think of nothing to compare him to except a picture in the “Arabian Nights”—the Old Man of the Sea. But the resemblance to that horrific personage vanished instantly when a voice, as gentle as a woman’s, said:
“Well, hello, stranger! ’Light and come in. Ye’re welcome as sunshine. I hain’t seed a livin’ human sence the good Lord knows when!”
Dick didn’t know what he was to alight from, being already on his feet, but he did know the customary Southern salutation which usually applies to a person on horseback.
“You’re not any gladder than I am,” he laughed. “Iguess I’m lost good and plenty. Wait until I can take the packs off the burros, and——”
“Shore enough!” said the gentle old voice. “Didn’t see that ye had a couple o’ jacks. Reckon my old eyes ain’t so good as they used to be.” And he hobbled out and helped Dick to get the packs off.
Once in the cabin and seated before the open fire, Dick unburdened himself—partly. He told how he and his companions had come over the pass together and that Larry and Purdick had gone back after a book that had been overlooked when they broke camp in Lost Canyon. But he didn’t say anything about the race with the would-be hold-ups.
The old man was chuckling gravely when the tale was finished.
“So ye rambled round in the woods and got lost, did ye? Well, now—ye shore did it right and proper! You’re a good ten mile from the Mule-Ear trail, right this minute. Been travelin’ away from it ever sence ye got down the mount’in, I reckon.”
Dick jumped as if he had been shot.
“Good goodness!” he ejaculated. And then: “I’ve got to get back to it some way, to-night! Those fellows will have a fit if they don’t find me! Besides, they took only a snack with them and they won’t have anything to eat. I’ve got all the camp duffle and grub! I thought, all the time, I was working back toward the trail as I came up the creek.”
“Ye would’ve been, if ye’d hit the right creek,” said the patriarch mildly. “This ain’t Silver Creek—that comes down from the pass gulch; it’s a branch that runs into Silver about twelve mile west. Reckon ye must’vecrossed over from one to t’other when ye was ramblin’.”
“Sure!” said Dick, astonished and provoked to think that he hadn’t had any better sense of direction. “But you see how it is? I’ve got to get back, dark or no dark, and if you’ll just let me cook a pot of coffee over your fire——”
“Sho, now!” said the old man; “you lemme talk a spell. I could p’int ye right, but ye neverwouldfind your way over to Silver in the dark; ain’t right shore I could do it myself. You listen to ol’ Daddy Longbeard: you jest camp down with me for the night, and right early in the mornin’ I’ll set ye on your way. Them boys ye tell about’ll make out to take care o’ theirselves for one night, I reckon.”
Dick hesitated. Now that he had found somebody who could direct him, at least in a general way, it seemed all the more needful that he should eat and run. But on the other hand, the burros had had a long day, counting from the start out of Lost Canyon, and they needed the night halt—to say nothing of himself. Again, there was something almost pathetic in the way the old man pressed his invitation. Dick tried to imagine how it would seem to him if he hadn’t seen a living human since the good Lord knew when.
“I guess maybe you’re right,” he said at length. “It’s more than likely that I’d get lost again in the dark. If you’re sure it won’t be any trouble to you to have me stay——”
“Trouble? None such! I’ll shore take it mighty handsome if ye’ll stay and lemme see if I’ve forgot how to talk to folks. But I reckon ye’re hongry. Set down and I’ll give ye what I’ve got, and right welcome.”
“Nothing like that!” said Dick. “We’ll open the packs and the supper will be on me. We’re grub-staked for a good long time.”
That was the beginning of a real, old-time, sociable evening. Over the supper which was presently cooked, Dick told his old entertainer all about the plans for the summer outing, what the three were going to look for—and hoped they might be able to find.
“Jest listen!” said the patriarch musingly, after Dick had rattled off the names of half a dozen of the rare metals, tungsten, molybdenum, vanadium, chromium and so on. “All them there minerals that I never even heerd the names of. Us old back numbers don’t know nothin’ but gold and silver, and maybe copper and lead. The world shore do move. How are ye aimin’ to tell these here what-you-may-call-’em minerals when you find ’em?”
At this, Dick gave a little class-room lecture on field tests; how one examined a specimen by its lustre, hardness, color, streak and weight, and how a few simple blowpipe tests could also be made with no more apparatus than any prospector might easily carry with him.
To all of this the old man listened with a sort of wistful curiosity. Though he had said little about himself, Dick knew, of course, that he must be either a miner or a prospector; there could be no other reason for his living a hermit life in the mountains. From his earliest childhood Dick had been hearing stories of men who buried themselves in the wilds, digging year after year in some prospect shaft or tunnel, and coming out to the towns only when the “grub-stake” was exhausted and money had to be earned to buy more. The interior of the little log cabin had every appearance of age and long occupancy.The rafters were smoke-begrimed and the fireplace showed the wear and tear of many fires.
“Ye shore are tellin’ me a heap o’ things I never knowed, son,” said the old man, when Dick paused, “and I jest been a-wonderin’. Are ye too nigh wore out to take a li’l’ climb up the hill?”
“Not at all,” said Dick; then, with his own good-natured grin: “Want to show me your mine?”
“Huh!” said the patriarch; “how’d ye know I got a mine?”
“That’s easy,” Dick laughed. “You wouldn’t be living out here alone if you hadn’t.”
Without another word the old man took down an old-fashioned lantern from its peg on the wall and lighted it.
“I’m allowin’ maybe you might help me some,” he said, in the same half-wistful tone. “You’re a sort of a minin’ ingineer, ain’t ye?”
“Nothing like it,” Dick denied, with another laugh. “I’ve just finished my first year in college, and I’m not taking ‘Mining,’ at that. But my father owns a half-interest in a gold mine in the Timanyoni, so I’m not exactly a tenderfoot. If I can help you, I’ll be glad to.”
“Lemme show ye,” said his host, and together they left the cabin and, turning aside from the bed of the little stream, climbed a rocky steep beside a huge dump which looked, even in the starlight, like an enormous gray beard hanging from the mountain side.
At the top of the dump the old man led the way into a tunnel, a sizable hole driven, as the lantern light showed, into the solid granite. Once they were fairly inside, the old man lighted a miner’s candle and put the lantern aside. With the better illumination they pushed on intothe heart of the mountain. As they went deeper and deeper, Dick marveled at the proof of tireless industry the tunnel exhibited. It was roomy enough to admit of the old man’s walking upright in it, tall as he was, and Dick could see that the rock through which it was driven was of the hardest. Some two hundred feet back from the entrance the drift widened out into an irregular-shaped cavern, and the old man stopped and waved his candle to show the size of the opening.
“Right here’s where I lost the vein—pinched out on me slick and clean,” he explained. “If I hadn’t been plum’ shore she was a true fissure, I reckon I might’ve quit short off. But I kep’ on till she showed up again, away over here,” and he led Dick to a corner of the cavern where the tunnel began again, this time pitching down as well as on into the mountain.
Another two hundred feet was covered down the steepish incline before they came to the end of things, and Dick wondered how the old man ever stood it to wheelbarrow the broken-rock “spoil” up the long grade and out to the dump. But nothing is too hard for one who has been bitten by the precious-metal bug, and that the old hermit had been so bitten was shown by the eager enthusiasm with which he passed the candle flame over the face of the rock wall in which the tunnel ended, making the light follow the crooked course of a thin, dark-colored seam that extended diagonally up and down it.
“There she is,” he said excitedly. “That’s what I’ve been follerin’ for four solid years—takin’ out the winters that I’ve had to work in the smelter to get money for to buy the grub-stakes.”
Dick wasn’t particularly soft-hearted, but the thing almost moved him to tears. Here was a man, evidently nearing the end of a long life, digging and burrowing in the heart of a great mountain year after year, working tremendously, as one must to make any headway in solid rock, and with only this thin, knife-blade seam of a vein to lead him on.
“Good goodness!” he exclaimed, catching his breath; then, forgetting his grammar completely: “Is that all the thicker it is?”
“Right now it is,” said the old man. “But it’s been a heap thicker’n that sometimes; been as much as a half-inch in two-three places.”
“But see here!” Dick exploded; “a half-inch of ore isn’t anything! Why, good gracious—it would have to be all pure gold or silver to pay with that thickness!”
“Shore; I know,” said the patriarch serenely. “But I’m hopin’ she’s a true fissure. I allowed maybe, with your book-learnin’, ye could tell me for certain shore if sheisa true fissure.”
“I can’t,” said Dick; “but what difference does it make whether it is or isn’t a true fissure?”
“Huh!” said the old man patiently. “Hain’t yer schoolin’ teached ye that? Don’t ye know that a true fissurealluswidens out if ye go down deep enough on it?”
True enough, Dick did know; not, indeed, the fact as the old miner stated it, but the other fact that a great many of the older prospectors firmly believed it. But he hadn’t the heart to say that modern mining studies had proved that the “widening” didn’t always follow as a necessity.
“Black sulphuret of silver—argentite—isn’t it?” hesaid, digging a bit of the vein matter from the seam with the point of his pocket knife.
“You named her right, son. And she’s all-fired rich, what there is of her. Some o’ these days, maybe, one o’ the holes I’m drillin’ ’ll bring her down a foot wide, and then——”
Dick, born and brought up in a region where mines and mining were as the daily bread, knew well the picture of ease and comfort and luxury the “and then” was bringing up in the old man’s mind. Taking the candle, he passed it up and down the face of the heading. At no point was the vein of argentite much thicker than the back of his knife blade.
“Here’s hoping good and hard that it will widen out for you one of these fine mornings,” Dick said; and then the old man took the candle and led the way back up the incline.
It was in the cavern-like place where the vein had been lost that Dick asked his guide to wait a minute and let him look around. The break in the continuity of the vein of argentite was evidently caused by what is technically known as a “fault,” a crack in the earth’s crust made by some volcanic upheaval. In many such cracks one side or the other has slipped up or down or sidewise, and there had apparently been some such a slip here.
“You had lots of courage to go on digging when you struck this ‘fault,’” said Dick. “We struck one in our mine in the Timanyoni, and it was forty feet thick.”
“Uh-huh,” said the old man; “a lime-horse. That’s what this was.”
Dick stooped down and picked up a bit of the broken rock stuff with which the crack had been filled in somelater convulsion than that which had opened the gash in the earth’s crust.
“Doesn’t look quite like a lime-horse,” he commented, examining the fragment by the light of the candle. “Seems too heavy for any of the calcareous rocks. Ever have it assayed?”
The old man shook his head. “Naw; it ain’t nothin’ but rock—fault-fillin’.”
Dick put the bit of stuff in his pocket, meaning to look at it again by the better light of the cabin lamp. And with that the matter rested, for the time being.
When they were back in the cabin the patriarch lighted his corn-cob pipe and wanted to hear more about the “queer” metals the three young prospectors were going to look for. Dick did his best by way of explaining, telling of the uses of some of the metals—tungsten in electric lamps, vanadium as an alloy for steel, carnotite as the source of the wonder-working radium.
The old man chuckled.
“Reckon ye wouldn’t bother to locate a gold mine ’r a silver mine if ye was to find one, would ye?” he said in gentle raillery.
“Oh, yes, we would,” said Dick, laughing.
“Well, if ye do, don’t go and do like pore old Jim Brock did—get yourselves holed in for the winter a-workin’ it and starve t’ death.”
At this mention of Brock, the discoverer—and loser—of the Golden Spider, Dick pricked up his ears.
“Did you know James Brock?” he asked.
“Shore I did. Him and me was pardners for a couple o’ summers.”
“Then you know about the Golden Spider?”
“I know that’s what Jim called his gold strike that he made over in the Little Hophras,” was the reply which seemed to be made guardedly.
“It’s a lost mine,” said Dick. “Nobody’s ever been able to find it. Did you know that?”
“I heerd it, last winter, down at Nophi. I reckon nobody hain’t looked in the right place.”
“Where is ‘the right place’?”
Daddy Longbeard shook his head.
“I’m too old to go skyhootin’ round the mount’ins lookin’ for somebody else’s mine, when I got one o’ my own,” he said evasively.
“But could you find the Golden Spider, if you should look?” Dick queried eagerly.
“Maybe,” was the short reply, and there wasn’t another word added to it.
“Did you know that my uncle, Mr. William Starbuck, took care of James Brock for the little while he lived, and that Brock gave him the mine?”
“Yep; I heerd that, too.”
Without knowing at all why it should be so, Dick felt that he was treading upon forbidden ground in questioning his host about James Brock’s mine, so he stopped short, and, just for a diversion, began to examine, by the better light of the cabin lamp, the piece of rock picked up in the “fault.” In appearance it was a little like a fragment of steel-gray limestone, yet it seemed heavier than any non-metallic rock.
“Did you ever think that this stuff might be ore of some kind?”he asked.
“Did you ever think that this stuff might be ore of some kind?”
“Did you ever think that this stuff might be ore of some kind?”
“Did you ever think that this stuff might be ore of some kind?”
The old miner wagged his beard in denial.
“There ain’t nothin’ in it,” he replied. “It’s just crack-fillin’.”
Dick went over to where the packs had been placed, opened one of them and got out the box containing the blowpipe set.
“Huh!” said the old prospector. “Tote your assayin’ outfit right along with ye, do ye?”
“Oh, no,” Dick qualified; “only a few things to help us make field tests. I can’t tell you anything about quantities—values—because it takes a real assay to do that, but we can at least find out whether or not there is any metal in this stuff, which seems too heavy to be just common rock.”
Getting out the blowpipe, its alcohol-turpentine lamp, the small porcelain mortar and pestle, and the little hammer, he proceeded to break a few chips from the specimen and grind them in the mortar, with the old prospector looking on curiously while he worked. Adding a little borax for a flux, Dick put the tiny sample on the block of prepared charcoal, lighted the lamp and began to blow.
In a short time the sample fused to a dark-gray globule and the charcoal around it was covered with a white coating. Carefully withdrawing the tip of the blowpipe so as to make the blast produce the reducing flame, Dick saw the white coating disappear, giving a bluish color to the flame. Filling his cheeks again, he kept on blowing, and, after quite a prolonged heating, the dark-gray globule turned to a tiny yellow metallic button, and at this Dick put the blowpipe down and blew out the lamp flame.
“What did you do with the stuff that you took out ofthat ‘fault’ while you were hunting for the lost argentite vein?” he asked.
“Wheelbarrered it out and threw it on the dump,” was the old man’s answer.
“Well,” said Dick definitely, “it’s kind of lucky there is plenty more of it left in the ‘fault.’ See this little button that’s left on the charcoal?”
The old man squinted his eyes and tried to see, but the button was no larger than a very small pinhead.
“Take the glass,” said Dick, handing him the pocket magnifier.
“Shore! I see it now. What-all is it?” asked the squinter.
“Silver and gold,” said Dick calmly. “That ‘lime-horse’ of yours isn’t a lime-horse at all; it’s a vein of sylvanite, according to the blowpipe test. Didn’t you see that white stuff on the charcoal go off in a blue flame when I heated it? That was the tellurium in the ore. You’ve struck a telluride mine without knowing it, and you’ve probably thrown a small fortune away in the stuff that you wheelbarrowed out and threw on the dump. But, as I say, there seems to be plenty more of it. Gee! You’re a rich man, and you never suspected it!”
“But—but, how can you tell?” stammered the old prospector. “That li’l’ speck o’ metal ain’t no bigger than a gnat’s ear!”
“Of course it isn’t,” said Dick. “But when you remember that it came out of a sample that you could hold on your thumbnail ... why, good goodness! the stuff’s simply got to be rich in either silver or gold, or both!”
The old man turned in his home-made chair and sat perfectly still for quite a little while, staring intently intothe heart of the fire on the rude stone hearth. When he spoke again it was to say: “I ain’t heerd ye say nothin’ about me goin’ havers with you, son.”
“Why, no!” said Dick. “Why should I say anything like that?”
“Most fellers would. They’d go into court and swear thattheymade the discovery. You did make it, ye know. I might ’a’ gone on diggin’ in that mount’in till kingdom come, without ever payin’ any attention to anything but that streak o’ sulphurets.”
“That’s all right,” Dick hastened to say. “I’m mighty glad I happened to think of testing the stuff, and you don’t owe me anything at all. Why, good land—I’m yourguest!”
Slowly the old man heaved himself out of his chair, and, crossing the room, he began to arrange Dick’s bed in the single built-in bunk. Dick protested at once, saying that he could roll himself in his blankets before the fire. But the newly made bonanza king wouldn’t have it that way.
“No,” he said; “the best I’ve got ain’t none too good for you, son. Besides, I reckon I don’t want to go to bed, nohow. I reckon I got to set up and think a spell afore I can ever go to sleep again.”
Seeing that it would be a real charity to give the old man a chance to “set up and think,” Dick made ready to turn in. It was not until he was sitting on the edge of the bunk to take his lace boots off that the old man fished in a grimy cigar-box and brought out a printed map so old and worn that it was falling apart in the creases. Spreading the map out on Dick’s knees, he pointed to apencilled circle enclosing a certain area that looked as if it were all mountain and canyon.
“I let on to you that Jim Brock and me had been pardners once, son, and so we was. I don’t know where Jim’s mine is, but I do know some’eres near where he was prospectin’ when he found it. That circle’s maybe five mile acrosst it, and I reckon if you was to look close enough inside of it, maybe you’d find the Golden Spider. Put the map in your pocket. It’s your’n.”