CHAPTER VFOOTLOOSE AND FREE
When Larry and Purdick thought they had found the place where Dick had stopped and made a fire, and had then had some mysterious thing happen to him, they soon realized that they couldn’t hope to trail the burro hoofprints very far in the growing dusk. But they did manage to follow them to the nearest crossing of the little stream, and here, where a patch of wash sand made the record as plain as a book page, Larry heaved a sigh of relief.
“If we didn’t have such good forgetteries—both of us—we needn’t have been scared up so badly, Purdy,” he said. “Don’t you remember what Mr. Broadwick told us yesterday—about two men coming over here ahead of us with supplies for the Little Eagle in Dog Gulch? They are the fellows who made the fire and didn’t put it out—not Dick.”
“How can you tell?” asked the town-bred one.
“You can see for yourself,” Larry returned, pointing down at the bed of damp sand. “There were at least four burros making those tracks, and Dick has only two. See how the hoofprints overlap, again and again?”
Purdick looked and saw.
“That’s better; that means that Dick is still somewhere on ahead of us.”
“Yes, and we won’t catch up with him before morning. We can’t follow this trail in the dark. We’ll just have to camp for the night and make the best of it.”
Since this seemed to be the only sensible thing to do, they picked out a place with a big cliff-like boulder for a background. Here, after they had lopped some tree branches for a bed and built a fire which, reflected from the big rock at their backs, promised to supply the warmth of the blankets they didn’t have, they ate the two remaining bacon sandwiches.
“Not much of a supper,” Larry commented, munching his share of the short ration; “not after the tramp we’ve had. But it’s a lot better than none.”
“If it didn’t sound like trying to be funny, I’d say you said a mouthful—both ways from the middle,” said little Purdick with a grin. “I was just thinking what a beautiful fix we’ll be in if we don’t happen to find Dick and the eats in the morning.”
“Yes,” said Larry. “We brag a good deal about our civilization, and how much we’ve gained on the old cavemen; but I’ve often wondered what would happen to one of us up-to-date folks if he were dropped down in the middle of a wilderness like—well, like this, for instance, with no tools or weapons and nothing to eat. Would we have to go hungry to-morrow if we shouldn’t find Dick?”
“Golly!” said Purdick, “I’m sureIshould. Why, we haven’t seen a single eatable thing since we started out yesterday noon!”
“Game, you mean? I suppose that’s because we weren’t looking for it. But there is plenty of game in these mountains, just the same; big game, at that. What I’vewondered is if the up-to-date man, bare-handed, could manage to catch any of it.”
“Not this one,” laughed Purdick.
“Fish, then?” Larry suggested. “These clear mountain streams are full of trout, you know.”
“Yea!” Purdick chuckled. “Imagine a fellow catching trout with his hands!”
“I’ll bet it could be done—if the fellow were hungry enough,” Larry maintained. “But I’m not going to sit up and argue with you. I’m all set to turn in and sop up a little more sleep.” And with that he burrowed in the tree-branch bed and turned his back to the fire.
It was deep in the night that Larry, sleeping the sleep of the seven sleepers, felt himself shaken by the shoulder.
“Wake up!” Purdick was saying, and his teeth were chattering. “L-l-look over there—across the creek!”
Larry raised his head and looked. The camp-fire, backed up by a good-sized windfall log they had dragged down to it, was burning quite brightly, but its circle of light did not reach much beyond the little stream brawling and splashing a few feet away. On the opposite side of the stream a thicket of young cedars came down close to the water’s edge, and in the heart of the thicket two balls of green fire appeared, steady and unflickering.
“Speaking of game,” Larry whispered; and then: “Keep perfectly still until we see what it is.” And, as a measure of safety, he reached cautiously for the short-handled axe.
They did not have to wait long. In a moment there was a little stir in the thicket and the balls of fire began to move slowly. Larry, more wood-wise than his bedmate, knew that what they were seeing were the eyes ofsome animal that had been attracted by the light of the camp-fire, but he couldn’t tell what it was. If it should happen to be a bear, lean and famished from its winter hibernation—as Larry well knew, there were still grizzlies to be found in the Hophras.... But at this point he pulled himself together and let good old common sense get in its word. The eyes were too high up from the ground to be those of a bear, unless the animal were standing upon its hind legs, and, besides, they were too large to figure as the little pig-like eyes of any kind of a bear, even a grizzly.
While they kept perfectly still and looked, the animal to which the eyes belonged came out of the thicket and advanced cautiously to the water’s edge. It proved to be a mule-deer, a full-grown buck, easily recognizable by its large ears, brown-and-white face, and short, black-tipped tail. After staring fixedly at the camp-fire for a few moments, it drank at the stream and then moved away, vanishing as silently as it had come.
“Gee!” said Purdick, as the deer disappeared, “are they as tame as all that?”
“Tame enough, when they don’t get the human scent,” Larry replied. “The wind was wrong for him. Dick and I saw them often last summer in the Tourmaline. How about the fire? Are you sleeping warm enough?”
“Toasty,” Purdick asserted, and with that they burrowed again.
The dawn was breaking golden in the upper air when they turned out the next morning and Larry regretfully dipped water with his hat to extinguish the splendid bed of coals that should have figured as their breakfast fire.
“It’s a rotten shame to spoil a fire as good as this,” he said, “but we haven’t anything to cook on it.”
“How many miles to breakfast?” Purdick asked.
“You tell, if you can,” Larry laughed, and they started out to follow the trail.
Fortunately for the empty stomachs, they didn’t have to go very far before they saw Dick and the burros coming over a wooded hill to the right. At the “reunion,” as Dick called it, they quickly built a fire; and while the coffee water was heating and the bacon sizzling in the pan, Dick told how he had lost his way and found a hermit.
“We were up before day, and Daddy Longbeard—I don’t know any other name for him—came along with me far enough to make sure that I wouldn’t get off the track again,” he wound up. “When he left me, two or three miles back yonder in the woods, he was still acting like a man half stunned—over what I told him last night about his mine.”
“Sure you didn’t make any mistake about that ore, are you?” Larry inquired.
“Not a chance! It’s a telluride, all right enough, and plenty rich, I should say, from the size of the button I got out of one small test sample.”
“Well, I guess you paid for your night’s lodging, anyway,” Purdick put in; but Dick Maxwell laughed and shook his head.
“No; it was the other way round; the old man paid me for telling him about his bonanza. See here what he gave me.” And he showed them the worn map with the magic circle on it.
Of course, this revival of the romantic possibilitieswrapped up in the summer’s outing stirred up some excitement, and the coffee boiled over and threatened to put the fire out while they were studying the old map. It was Larry who reached up and took hold of things and brought them down to the every-day level again.
“The Golden Spider is all right, fellows, if we should happen to run across it, but we all know that there isn’t one chance in a million, not even with the help of Daddy Longbeard’s circle—which, after all, is only a guess, as he said it was. We don’t want to get bitten by the gold prospector’s bug and go crazy like so many of ’em do. We’re out for good old practical business, and we mustn’t forget that Mr. Starbuck is paying the bills. Let’s eat breakfast and then hit the grit for the summer work field.”
“Right you are, Larry, old scout!” said Purdick, getting back on his job of frying the breakfast flapjacks. “I can begin to see now how easy it is for people to go nutty on this gold proposition. Turn to and eat these pancakes while they’re hot—they’ll stay with you longer that way.”
By and large, it was Larry’s summing-up of their job that morning that set the pace for the next three weeks. During that interval they crossed the inter-mountain region by easy stages, prospecting in the hills as they went, and learning, by actual contact with it, something of the wonderful geological structure of the country they were traversing. In no part of the United States does the earth’s crust exhibit more marvelous wrinklings and upheavals and apparent contradictions than in the mountain regions of western Colorado and eastern Utah,and each day brought new discoveries and fresh problems to attack.
“How in the world anybody with no schooling could hope to find anything valuable in these rocks and clays is beyond me,” said little Purdick, one evening when, by the light of the camp-fire, they had been poring over the “System of Mineralogy,” and trying by blowpipe and acid tests to identify what seemed to be a specimen of wolframite, the base which furnishes the metal tungsten.
“That’s easy,” Dick returned. “The average prospector is like old Daddy Longbeard. He is looking for gold or silver, and he is able to identify a few of the commoner ores by sight. But a good many of his discoveries have been by sheer accident, like that of the lead carbonates at Leadville.”
“How was that?” Purdick wanted to know.
“The way I’ve heard it was that the man who made the discovery was looking for gold-bearing quartz. One way to find a ‘mother’ vein is to take a stream that shows gold ‘colors’ when you pan out the sand in it, following this trail of ‘colors’ up-stream until you come to a place where the ‘colors’ don’t show any more, and then you prospect in the hills roundabout.
“This prospector was working up one of the streams east of Mount Massive, and he noticed that when he washed for gold ‘colors’ there were leavings in his pan; a black sand that was too heavy to wash over with the common sand when he shook the pan. Just out of curiosity, he saved some of this sand and threw it into his specimen sack along with some quartz samples he had; did that and then forgot it. Afterward, when he took his samples to an assayer to have them tested, he dumpedthe sack on the bench in the laboratory, black sand and all, and the assayer was thorough enough to test the sand as well as the quartz. And that’s what made the city of Leadville.”
“But good land!” said Purdick, “there are more gold-and-silver-bearing ‘ites’ in this book than anybody could ever learn to know by sight unless he crammed for them!”
“Sure,” Dick replied. “There was old Daddy Longbeard, digging for goodness only knows how long in rich gold ore without ever so much as suspecting it.”
Larry Donovan grinned. “All of which is interesting, but unimportant,” he put in. “The fact remains that we’ve been out three weeks and haven’t yet found anything worth staking a claim on.”
Dick stretched his arms over his head and yawned luxuriously.
“But the other fact remains that we’re having one bully good time. Purdy, you old rat, you’re actually putting some flesh on your bones. And I’ll bet a hen worth fifteen cents that not an ounce of it is fat—nothing but good old hard, stringy muscle.”
Purdick drew a long breath. “It’s the greatest thing that ever happened to me,” he said. “The hardest thing I’m going to have to learn when we go back to the towns is how to sleep under a roof again. But speaking of finding things: I picked up a queer-looking piece of stuff down there by the creek where I went to get a drink this afternoon. I forgot to show it to you,” and he took the specimen from his pocket and passed it around.
Looked at through the magnifier, or even without the glass, the specimen was a very beautiful thing. It lookedlike a sliver of limestone, one side of which was covered with a thick incrustation of fine little red crystals, six-sided prisms glowing with a peculiar lustre that was neither garnet nor ruby, but a shade between. Since they were out to test every unfamiliar substance they came across, the blowpipe was put into service once more, and Dick blew until his cheeks ached.
Heated in the original mass there was nothing doing, so they powdered a few of the crystals in the porcelain mortar, mixed the powder with borax and salt of phosphorus, and tried it again. In the oxidizing flame—the hottest flame that can be produced with the blowpipe—a clear glass bead, dark yellow in the heat, was quickly formed, and this bead, when cooled, turned to a light yellow color.
Larry was turning the leaves of the mineralogy book and running a finger over the subject heads.
“I was reading about something that did that way, just the other day,” he said, “but I can’t remember what it was. By jing!—what the dickens was it? Something that’s dark yellow, hot, and light yellow when it cools. Shucks! If I didn’t have such a good forgettery——”
Purdick had been watching the experiment narrowly. “Try it in the reducing flame, Dick,” he suggested.
Dick did it. With the tip of the blowpipe withdrawn just outside of the candle flame he held the yellow glass bead inside of the tip of the inner cone of combustion that is intensified by this manner of blowing. Almost at once the bead turned a brownish color, and Dick carefully withdrew it to see what the cooling reaction would be. The change which took place was marvelous and verybeautiful. As it lost its heat the little bead turned to a brilliant chrome green.
“I’ve got it!” snapped Purdick. “Larry, look in the index for vanadinite!”
Larry searched, found, turned to the proper page.
“It says that vanadates, in the absence of other colored metallic compounds, may be detected by their reaction with borax and salt of phosphorus before the blowpipe—and goes on to describe just what we’ve been looking at.”
“Hooray!” Dick applauded, “a vanadium mine! This begins to look like business. Think you could find the place again, Purdy?”
“I’m sure I can,” was the ready answer. “It’s about a mile back over our trail of to-day. You remember when we were coming along on that little mesa bench above the creek, and I scrambled down the slope to get a drink and joined you again about a quarter of a mile farther along? Well, that was the place—right along the creek.”
“We’ll go back there to-morrow morning, shan’t we, Larry?” Dick asked. “If this stuff is there in any workable quantity we ought at least to stake off a claim. What’s vanadium worth as an alloy for tool steel and such?”
Larry took a well-thumbed little note-book from the pocket of his shirt and consulted it.
“Don’t know what it’s worth now; but a while back, ferrovanadium, carrying thirty-five to fifty per cent. of vanadium, ran from two dollars and a half to five and a half a pound—some valuable little metal, I’ll say!”
“It sure is!” exclaimed Purdick, with his eyes widening. “If we can only find enough of it to make it worthwhile.... I wish I’d had sense enough to look around a little when I found that bit. But I didn’t.”
“Never mind; there’s another day coming,” said Larry, “or if there isn’t, all the vanadium in the world won’t make any difference to us or to anybody,” and he began to fix the fire for the night and to unroll the blankets, while Dick put the testing apparatus away in its leather carrying case.
Their camping place for that night was in a small pocket gulch rimming in a little flat watered by a trickling rill that dripped over a low cliff at the back of the pocket. The flat afforded good grazing for the pack animals, there was wood on the rocky slopes for the fire, and red-fir tips for the beds.
In the morning, while Purdick was getting breakfast, Larry and Dick prepared the notices to post on the vanadium claim, leaving blanks in which to write in the boundaries and landmarks when they should determine what they were. As Larry was sharpening the stakes to be driven to mark the claim, Dick called attention to the narrow entrance to the pocket gulch, and said, “Say, Larry; what’s the matter with cutting one of those lodge-pole pines out of that clump up there and letting it fall across this doorway? That’ll make a corral out of the gulch, and we can leave the burros and the camp dunnage when we go back to stake off the claim. Everything will be perfectly safe here.”
Larry looked up from his stake trimming. What Dick said was quite true. With a tree felled across the gulch entrance for a barrier, the burros wouldn’t stray, though of that there was little danger anyway, so long as there were grass and water in the pocket. As to the safety ofthe camp dunnage there was even less question. With the exception of a few abandoned prospect holes, the inter-mountain wilderness in which they had been tramping and camping for three weeks had yielded no signs of human occupancy, past or present. Still, Larry hesitated. The first of the unwritten laws of the camper in any region is never to separate himself very far from his supplies and his means of transportation.
“I don’t know about that, Dick. Maybe I’m a lot too cautious, but——”
“Pshaw!” Dick broke in, “everything will be as safe as a clock! We haven’t seen a sign of a human being for three weeks, and I’ll bet there isn’t one within forty miles of us this very minute. If we fix it so the jacks can’t stray off, there isn’t a thing that can happen. Besides, we may want to stay down there at that place of Purdy’s projecting around for a good part of the day, and if we do, we’ll have our camp ready to come back to without having to make it again.”
Larry laughed.
“You’re just too lazy to draw your breath, Dickie; that’s all that is the matter with you,” he said; but he didn’t offer any more objections to Dick’s plan, and after breakfast the tree was cut down to block the gulch entrance, and the three of them started back for the vanadium prospect, leaving the camp just as it was, save that they were woodsmen enough to put out the camp-fire, and thoughtful enough to wrap up the rifles and the dunnage and put the packs oh top of a flat boulder where the jacks wouldn’t trample on them in their grazing ramblings. For the day’s work they carried only apick, a shovel, the geologist’s hammer and the short-handled axe.
Notwithstanding Purdick’s confident assertion, it proved to be a good bit more than a mile back to the mesa foot where he had picked up the bit of vanadinite. Worse than that, after they reached the approximate place he found that he couldn’t identify the spot where he had found the specimen. It was a limestone outcrop, and there was a stretch of a quarter of a mile or so along the creek edge where one place looked very much like another.
So, when the time came for them to sit down and eat the noon snack they had brought with them, they were still looking for the deposit of which the specimen was a fragment and were beginning to wonder why it was so hard to find.
“You’re a hoodoo, Purdy,” said Dick, joshing the town-bred one. “Are you right sure it was yesterday, and not the day before, when you picked up that piece of stuff?”
“Of course I am!” was the indignant reply. “And it was right along here, too. If I’d had any idea it was ore——” He stopped short and made a dive for something lying at his feet. “There!” he broke out triumphantly, “here’s another piece of it, right now!”
There was no mistaking the fact. There are few crystals in the world more beautiful than those of the lead vanadates, and once seen, they are not easily forgotten. The newly found fragment was evidently a chip off the same block, as Dick put it, and, hurriedly finishing the snack, they renewed their search for the “mother vein.”
After all, the vein or deposit was not so hard to locate,now that they knew where to look for it. Of course, they had no means of ascertaining the extent of the deposit or its commercial value, if it had any, in a place so remote from civilization. None the less, they staked it off accurately, located it as well as they could on the Geodetic Survey map upon which they were carefully tracing their wandering course from day to day, and posted the notice, protecting it as well as they could by digging a niche in the shaley cliff and pegging the notice at the back of it where it would be at least a little sheltered from the weather.
All this business of stepping off and measuring, and finding landmarks, and making a sketch of the mesa and creek bottom, and searching carefully over the surrounding area for other possible deposits of the mineral, took most of the afternoon. And after all was done, Larry was pessimistic enough to say that it was probably a day wasted.
“I did a good bit of reading-up on these rare metals last week while we were waiting for Mr. Starbuck,” he said, “and from what I could learn, the reduction processes—getting the metal out of the ore—is the long end of the pole with all of them; vanadium and all the rest. So, unless your mine is big enough to warrant the building of a reduction plant on the spot—and not many of them are—you’re up against the proposition of transporting a ton of the stuff to some chemical works, and out of the ton they’ll get maybe a pound or so of the metal.”
“Well,” said Dick, “what of that?”
“Use your old bean,” Larry invited. “Suppose your vanadium is worth five dollars and a half a pound—whichis the highest price I found quoted. We’re at least forty miles from the nearest railroad, which means forty miles of jack-freighting for the ore. How far would five dollars and a half, or twice or three times that much, go toward paying the cost of jack-freighting a ton of stuff over forty miles of no-trail-at-all?”
“Oh, gosh!” said Dick. “When it comes to throwing cold water, you can beat a hydraulic mining outfit! Let’s go back to camp and cook us a real supper. I’m hungry enough to eat a piece of boiled dog. We can come back to-morrow with the tools and dig the ten-foot deep ‘discovery’ hole that we’ll have to make before we can record the claim.”
The return mile-and-considerable-more seemed even longer now than it had in the morning. In the search for the vanadium deposit they had done a good deal of scrambling and climbing, and the mild excitement of the search had kept them from realizing how much ground they were covering.
“I’ll bet you couldn’t wake me with a dynamite blast after I turn in to-night,” Dick was saying as they approached the entrance to the pocket gulch, “and I wouldn’t lug this pick another mile if it was the only one in the world. But see here! What’s been happening?”
They had reached the pine-tree which had been felled to block the entrance to the pocket gulch, and it looked as if somebody had driven an army truck over it. Its branches were broken down and twisted off, and the trunk itself was scarred and barked as if the suppositious truck wheels had been shod with spurs.
Thoroughly alarmed at the evidence of so much violence, they forgot their weariness and hurried on intothe gulch. What they found when they reached the camp site was as appalling as it was bewildering. The packs had been dragged from the top of the big flat rock where they had left them in the morning and were literally torn to pieces, with their contents scattered all over the place; that is, what wasn’t gone was scattered.
For when they came to look, they found that many things were missing. The entire stock of bacon was gone, the flour and meal sacks had been torn open and their holdings spilled and trampled into the ground, the few boxes of hard biscuits they had been saving against a bread emergency had been broken open and rifled, the salt lay in the ashes of the camp-fire, the sugar was gone, and the cotton sack in which it had been carried looked as if it had been ground through a sausage mill; in short, all the food supplies they had, excepting only those that were in tight tin cans, had been either stolen or destroyed.
“Well!—of all the blithering earthquakes!” Dick gasped. “Who or what under the sun would do a thing like this to us?”
Larry did not speak. His eyes were blazing, and he seemed to be holding his breath. Deep down inside of him the Donovan temper, a wild, Berserk rage that had given him no end of trouble in his boyhood, was struggling to get the upper hand. But little Purdick was still able to talk.
“And even this isn’t the worst of it!” he said. “The burros are gone!”