CHAPTER VIITOMATOES AND PEACHES
Pretty stiff from their forced march and the chill of the night spent on the cold mountain top without fire, the three castaways—for so they were now calling themselves—were up with the dawn. Now that they had daylight to show them their surroundings, they saw that by going a little farther along the mountain to the left they might have camped in timber and had wood for a fire.
“More spilt milk,” Dick lamented when he saw how they had missed what little comfort they might have had. “I guess we are more or less tenderfoots yet.” And then he went over to the clump of dwarfed trees and gathered some wood for the coffee fire, coffee being the only thing they had to cook.
Inasmuch as they were by this time pretty well starved out on a diet of tomatoes and peaches, they agreed to call this breakfast on the mountain top the emergency they had been economizing for; so Purdick opened the can of corned beef and served it with potato chips. Fortified by a breakfast which was at least stimulating in quality, even if it did lack something in quantity, they prepared for the descent of the western slope.
From the western brow of the mountain they had a magnificent view of the world at large, as Dick phrasedit: mountains and plains, and then more mountains and plains, stretching away almost to infinity and backgrounded in the dim distance by the serrated range of the San Miguels. But it was the immediate foreground that interested them most. At the foot of the peak upon which they were standing there was a range of hogback hills, looking, from their height, no larger than a plow-turned furrow in the landscape; and just beyond the hogback, on the edge of a bare plain that was exactly the color of well-tanned buckskin, lay the little cattle-shipping station of Natrolia, a collection of odd-shaped dots, with one round dot larger than the rest which they took to be the railroad water tank.
“There she is,” said Dick. “If we only had an aeroplane, or even a bunch of gliders, it wouldn’t take us very long to coast down there. It looks as if a good gun ought to be able to drop a bullet on that water tank from here.”
“It’s a lot farther than it looks,” Larry put in.
“Don’t you know it!” said Purdick; and then: “Say, isn’t that a railroad train just coming into the town?”
What he was pointing at looked like a tiny worm barely moving along a dimly defined line on the borders of the buckskin plain, and trailing off from the head of the worm there was a thin black smudge—the smoke from the engine’s stack.
“Our east-bound Flyer,” Dick said, naming the train. Then: “It doesn’t seem believable that that crawling worm of a thing will be in Brewster by dinner-time this evening, does it? But we can’t stay here all morning admiring the scenery, grand as it is,” he went on. “Which way do we aim for the go-down, Larry—north or south?”
The question was asked because it was perfectly apparent that they had to aim either one way or the other in order to find a place where the descent could be made. In the straight-ahead line there was nothing doing. As far as they could see in either direction—which wasn’t very far because the mountain summit was as crooked as a snake—the western slope was as near to being an abrupt precipice as it could be and still figure as a slope.
Larry shook his head, and it surely was a tricksy fate that led him to say: “There doesn’t seem to be much choice; perhaps we’d better go south.” This when, all unknown to them, less than half a mile distant to the north lay that excellent trail by which they could have reached Natrolia early in the afternoon—and by so doing would have changed the entire complexion of any number of things.
But of the trail and its possibilities they knew nothing, so they turned—fatefully, as we say—to the southward, skirting the brow of the mountain, without gaining a single foot of descent, for two long hours before they came to a slope which seemed at all practicable for the burros. Even then their progress was exasperatingly slow. Time and again one of the jacks would slip and roll down into some gulch from which it took no end of time and labor to rescue it; and when that didn’t happen, they would be heading canyons too steep to be crossed, or going a mile or so out of their way to find a gulch through which they could chimney down from one bench of the great mountain to another.
Struggling manfully with all these difficulties, and even cutting out the noon halt to save time, night overtook them long before they were low enough down to getanother sight of the Natrolia hogback, and they had to camp.
“Thank goodness, we’re down in the grass altitudes again, anyway,” said Dick as he pulled the packs from the burros’ backs and turned the little beasts loose to graze. “I don’t know how long a jack can go without feeding, but we’ve certainly given Fishbait and Lop-ear a tough siege of it since yesterday noon.”
Larry grinned. “‘A fellow-feeling makes us wondrous kind,’ doesn’t it?” he quoted. “Nothing like an empty tummy to make you sympathize with other things that can’t get enough to eat. How about it, Purdy? Where do we land for supper?”
“Tomatoes and peaches. I’ll cook the tomatoes, if you’d rather have ’em hot.”
“Oh, my suffering ancestors!” Dick groaned. “I’ll never be able to look a peach-tree or a tomato-vine in the face after this! I’m as hollow as the biggest bass drum that was ever built, and you tell me you’ll pass me a plate of sloppy peaches with tomatoes on the side! Let’s have a barbecue and roast old Fishbait.”
They joked one another about it over the camp-fire, as good sportsmen should, but the hard work and slender fare were really beginning to take hold. And the worst of it was, the battle wasn’t won yet; a fact upon which Larry enlarged to Dick after the camp-fire had been back-logged for the night, and Purdick, once more wearied to the point of collapse, was asleep in his blankets.
“I didn’t want to load Purdy up any heavier than he is loaded already,” was the way Larry began on the disturbing fact, “but I have a horrible suspicion that we are a good way from Natrolia and a fresh supply of eatsyet. I’ve been kind of keeping tab on our side-steppings all day, and we’ve made a pretty stiff lot of southing. Don’t you think so?”
“I know it,” Dick replied gloomily.
“You’re still up to it, aren’t you?” Larry asked.
“Up to another day of it, I guess, though I’ll have to confess that I don’t feel much thicker than a sheet of paper through the middle.”
“My fix, too,” said Larry. “But that’s all right; we’re tough and we can stand it. Purdy’s the lad I’m worrying about. Did you notice that he was eating almost nothing at supper?”
Dick nodded. “You’d say a fellow couldn’t possibly starve past the getting-hungry point on two days of short rations; but Purdy isn’t normal yet—not outdoor normal. We’ll have to watch him to-morrow, and if we see he’s breaking, we’ll just dump one of the burro loads and make him ride.”
Larry shook his head. “You don’t know Purdy as well as I do. That little rat is the clearest kind of grit, all the way through. He’ll drop dead in his tracks before he’ll ever let us help him over the bumps.”
“Huh!” said Dick, spreading his blankets for the night. “When the time comes, we won’t ask his royal permission. We’ll just hog-tie him on old Fishbait’s back, if we have to. Good-night. I’m going to dream of all the good things there are to eat in this world.”
The morning of the third day of enforced abstinence dawned as beautifully as nearly all of their mornings had, thus far, and for breakfast they finished the canned things and—figuratively speaking at least—licked the cans. Purdick seemed all right again after his night’srest, but neither Dick nor Larry guessed what an effort he had to make to swallow his small share of the peaches and tomatoes.
“Feeling equal to a few more miles this morning, Purdy?” Larry asked, as they were putting the pack saddles on the burros.
“I’m still staying with you,” returned the small one gamely. Then: “You mustn’t worry about me, Larry. There have been times in the past when I had to go short on the eats for a good deal more than two days hand-running, and I never thought anything of it. I’ll get my second wind, after a little.”
“I’m not worrying,” said Larry; but that was not strictly true.
With a start fairly made, Dick took careful compass bearings, utilizing every open space they came to as a lookout from which to determine, if possible, the amount of southing they had made during the previous day. As the day wore on without bringing anything that looked like a familiar landmark into view, the case began to look rather desperate.
By the middle of the afternoon they were down in a region of foot-hills, and the going was much easier; but though they still kept working persistently north and west, no gap in the hills opened to show them the buckskin-colored plain they had seen from the mountain top. By this time, Dick and Larry both were growing more than anxious about Purdick. Twice Dick had made that suggestion about unloading one of the jacks and turning it into a riding animal, but Purdick had stoutly fought the idea, saying that he was getting along all right. But both of his hardier companions could see plainly that hewas putting one foot before the other by a sheer effort of will.
At four o’clock Larry called a halt, ostensibly to let the burros feed upon a patch of luxuriant grass in the ravine they were at that time traversing, but really to give Purdick a chance to throw himself down and rest—which he promptly did. When it came time to go on again, the small one said his say briefly.
“I’m all in, fellows,” he said. “You leave me a couple of the blankets and go on without me. When you find the town—if you ever do find it—you can come back after me. As things stand now, I’m only a drag on the wheels.”
“Yes; I think I see us leaving you!” Dick scoffed. “You’re going to get up and climb on old Fishbait’s back. We can’t be far from Natrolia now, and he’ll carry you all right.”
Purdick sat up and his pale cheeks flushed suddenly.
“What do you take me for?” he snapped, but there was something suspiciously like a sob at the end of the snap. “I told you both before we came west that I was no good, and now I’m proving it. It—it justkillsme to think that I can’t stand up and take things like other fellows—like you two do!” And with that, he whirled over and buried his face in the grass.
Larry drew Dick aside and spoke in low tones.
“It’s up to us,” he said. “He won’t ride, and I doubt if he could stick on the burro’s back if he tried. Stay here with him while I scout up to the top of that knob over there and see if I can find out where we are.”
Left alone with Purdick, Dick sat down and waited. For a long five minutes Purdick lay on his face and madeno sign, but at last he turned over and raised himself on an elbow.
“Where’s Larry?” he asked.
Dick pointed. “There he is—climbing to the top of that hill for a look-see. Feeling any better?”
Purdick sat up and locked his fingers around his knees.
“I’m so mad I can’t see straight, Dick. It’s fierce to be tied down to a no-account body like mine. I’m not worth the powder it would take to blow me up!”
“Oh, hold on!” Dick protested. “This has been a pretty stiff tug for all of us. I’m not feeling so very much of a much, myself, just now, and neither is Larry.”
“But you’re not beefing about it, either of you,” Purdick put in.
“Neither are you,” Dick asserted. “When it comes down to pure sand, you’ve got more than either of us. You’ve been tramping on sheer nerve, all day long. I know it, and Larry knows it.”
By this time, Larry was coming back down the hill, and he didn’t look as if he had seen anything encouraging from the top of it.
“What luck?” Dick asked; and Larry shook his head.
“Nothing but more hills and hollows. No sign of any plain, any town, or any railroad.”
Little Purdick heaved himself to his feet, getting up like a camel—one pair of joints at a time.
“Come on,” he said. “There are only a few more hours of daylight left, and I’ll make myself last that long if it kills me.”
When he said this, neither of the others tried to argue with him. They knew it wouldn’t do any good. So the line of march was taken up again, upon a course as nearlydue north as the nature of the region would permit. By holding this direction they knew absolutely that they must come to the railroad, sooner or later; and once in touch with that, they wouldn’t, or couldn’t, be very far from the town.
Much to Dick’s surprise, though not so much to Larry’s—for Larry knew him best—Purdick held out bravely; and when it was finally decided that they must camp for the night, which they did just before dark, Purdick helped gather wood, and himself made the fire for the boiling of the coffee water: a final brewing of coffee being the only thing they had left in the stripped commissary.
After the warm drink had been served out, and the jacks picketed for the night, there was nothing more to do, and they all turned in to let a long night’s sleep do what it would toward relieving the hunger ache and fitting them for another surge on the morrow.
It was maybe a couple of hours later that Purdick, always a light sleeper, and now particularly so when even the slightest doze-off made him dream of banquets, found himself sitting bolt upright and listening to a noise that was not unlike the never-to-be-forgotten earth-shaking thunder of the cloud-burst in the canyon. While he was trying in a bewildered half daze to determine what it was, a bright glare of light flashed among the trees, the noise deepened to a crashing clamor that brought the two others out of their blankets with a bound, and all three of them saw, at a distance of not over two hundred yards at the farthest, a long passenger-train shooting past the mouth of the little ravine in which they were camped.
“E-e-yow!” Dick yawned, as the noise scuttled away inthe western distance. “Wouldn’t that pinch your ear good and hard? Here we stopped two short steps and a jig dance from the railroad track and never knew it! Listen!”
What they heard this time was the mellow shout of a locomotive whistle blown in a station signal.
“Natrolia,” said Larry. “And it can’t be more than a couple of miles away, at that! What time is it, Dick?”
Dick, being nearest the firelight, looked at his wrist watch.
“Five minutes of nine,” he announced.
Larry shook himself out of his blankets and stood up.
“I’m the biggest of the bunch—and the toughest, I guess. You two fellows lie down and take another cat-nap while I saunter into town and buy a few morsels of grub. If our whistle guess is right, I ought to be back inside of an hour.”
Of course, there was a generous protest to this, urged immediately by both of the others, but Larry argued them down. There was no need of all going when one could easily bring out provisions for a single meal, and if they should all go, they’d have to take the jacks, making the tired beasts stumble along for whatever distance it might be over the ties and ballast of a railroad track in the dark. So Larry had his way and went alone, taking the haversack.
Left to themselves, Purdick and Dick didn’t go to sleep again; they groped around and got more wood and built up a good fire so as to have a bed of cooking coals if Larry should happen to bring something that needed cooking. That done, they sat around and waited, and about the time they were thinking that Larry might possiblyhave reached Natrolia, he came tramping back into the circle of firelight, with the haversack loaded to bursting dimensions, and with an armful of packages besides.
“Already?” Dick shouted, jumping up to relieve the burden-bearer.
“You said it. It’s less than a mile—just around the shoulder of this butte behind us. The store was shut, but I found the proprietor over at the hotel, and he opened up for me. Get out your pots and pans, Purdy. I’ve got some stuff here that’ll warm the cockles of your cookee heart.”
Charles Purdick, Lawrence Donovan and Richard Maxwell, junior, may live to sit down to many banquets—at least we hope they may—but it is safe to say that that late supper, cooked and eaten under the stars in the little valley back of Natrolia, will always figure for them as the most gorgeous meal of a lifetime. Larry had not stinted his buying. There were potatoes to fry, and a thick, juicy beefsteak to be cut into squares and broiled on forked twigs, hunter fashion, before the fire, and more coffee to brew, with sugar to sweeten it and the unheard-of luxury of a can of condensed milk for cream, and bread—two loaves of good, home-made bread that the storekeeper’s wife had made Larry take when she heard his story of their starving time. And to top off with, Purdick fried flapjacks made out of the carton of prepared pancake flour that Larry had thoughtfully added to the haversack load.
By all the rules of the eating game they should have made themselves beautifully sick, stuffing this way at the end of three days of short rations and no rations. But youth, Mother Nature, and a healthy, vigorous, outdoorlife—taking them all together—can sometimes defy all rules; and the only result of the big feed was to make the feeders sleep like logs; and even Purdick, the lightest sleeper of the three, didn’t awaken until a long freight train, clattering past on the near-by track a little after sunrise, aroused him.
Being so near to Natrolia, they decided not to wait to cook a camp breakfast, and, loading the jacks, they trailed into the little cattle-shipping town, gave the burros a feed in the shipping corral, and then made an assault upon the so-called “hotel,” taking it by storm and putting away a breakfast of ham and eggs and potatoes and coffee and cakes with near-maple syrup quite as heartily as if the gorgeous banquet of the night before had already vanished into a limbo of dim but precious memories.
After breakfast came the re-stocking of provisions for a return to the field on the other side of the mountains, and from the genial, “old-timer” storekeeper who supplied them they learned that they had gone a long way around to miss a perfectly good and practicable trail over the Little Hophras; one which would take them back—as it would have brought them over—in something less than a day’s tramping.
Dick laughed when the good-natured, bearded man behind the counter told them this. “I guess we ought to be bored for the hollow-horn, all of us, Mr. Wilkins,” he said, “for not looking around a little before we struck out. But the Government maps don’t show any such trail.”
“No,” replied the storekeeper; “there wasn’t any when the maps were made.”
“You’re sure it’s passable?” Larry asked.
“Plum’ sure. Three men came in over it two days ago, did just what you boys are doin’—stocked up—and went back. They’re prospectin’, like yourselves, I take it.”
All three of the boys exchanged glances at this mention of three men.
“Did you know any of those men, Mr. Wilkins?” Larry inquired.
“No; kind of a rough-lookin’ bunch, and one of ’em was a cripple, though he got around on one leg and a crutch sprier than either of the other two.”
Larry took Dick aside while Purdick was checking the list of supplies with the storekeeper.
“They’re our three,” Larry said in low tones. And then, impatiently: “I wish there were some way of letting those scamps know that they are barking up the wrong tree; that we don’t know any more about the Golden Spider than they do!”
“I wish there were some way of letting those scamps know that they are barking up the wrong tree.”
“I wish there were some way of letting those scamps know that they are barking up the wrong tree.”
“I wish there were some way of letting those scamps know that they are barking up the wrong tree.”
“There doesn’t seem to be any way,” Dick countered. “But I can tell you one thing, Larry: I’m not going back into the mountains where they are without something to defend myself with, if it’s nothing more than a potato popgun.”
“I’m with you on that,” said Larry. “Let’s look over Mr. Wilkins’s gun showcase and see if we can find anything that we can afford to buy.”
They moved up to the front of the store, where there was a wall-case of guns and pistols. Almost at once they saw three Winchesters standing side by side in the rack, all alike, and all looking as if they were second-hand. Larry went closer and examined the stock of one of the guns carefully.
“That’s my rifle, Dick,” he whispered. “There’s that bruise on the stock that it got that day last week when old Fishbait rolled down among the rocks with it in the pack. And the other two are yours and Purdy’s!”
“Gee!” said Dick, his eyes widening. “Those rascals stole them and sold them to Mr. Wilkins! Shall we tell him?”
Larry’s answer was the kind he usually made when the emergency demanded action. Going back to the counter where the storekeeper was still figuring with Purdick, he said:
“Mr. Wilkins, we didn’t tell you all that happened to us at that camp of ours over in the back country. The bear that tore us up was a pretty sly old Silver-tip. Besides eating up most of our grub, he took our guns and all of our ammunition.”
The bearded storekeeper laughed.
“What’s this you’re givin’ me now?” he asked.
“Straight goods,” said Larry soberly. “We had three Winchesters of the latest model, chambered for high-powered ammunition, and a good supply of cartridges for them.”
For a minute or so the big storekeeper didn’t say anything. Then:
“You ain’t stuffin’ me with that bear story, are ye?”
“No; there was a bear, all right, and it was the bear that ate our grub and tore things up for us.”
“But after that, some other kind of a bear come along and swiped your guns and ca’tridges?”
“That is the way it looks to us,” Larry said.
“Well, what you goin’ to do about it?”
“We are going to buy those three second-hand Winchestersyou have up in that case at the front,” Larry answered, looking the big man squarely in the eyes.
The good-natured storekeeper laughed rather grimly.
“I reckon you’ve got me dead to rights,” he said; “and I ought to ’a’ knowed better. I bought them guns from the three scalawags I was tellin’ you about; the three that was here day before yesterday. They allowed they didn’t need ’em and was tired o’ luggin’ ’em around.”
“We’ll buy them back from you,” said Dick, going into his shirt after his money belt.
But at this the big man shook his head.
“Nope, I reckon I can’t let you do that. I ain’t tried to live honest for fifty years to begin bein’ a ‘fence’ for crooks at my time o’ life. If them guns are yours, you take ’em.”
There was some little haggling over this part of it, Dick saying that the storekeeper wasn’t to blame, and all that. But the big man was immovable; he had bought stolen goods, and it was up to him to pay the penalty. So he made them take the guns without money and without price, and threw in the cartridge belts and the ammunition, which, it seemed, had been sold with the rifles.
What with all this chaffering and buying and talking, and the time it took Larry and Dick to write letters to their folks in Brewster (which letters, as may be imagined, didn’t say anything about the hardships of the past three days), it was the middle of the forenoon before they got a start up the perfectly good trail, considerably past noon when they stopped to eat on top of the range, and quite late at night before they left the trail and made camp in a wooded ravine not very far from the place where they had located the vanadiumdeposit, though much higher up the mountain. And on all that long faring they had neither seen nor heard any signs of the three hold-ups who, according to the Natrolia storekeeper’s account, had preceded them over the same trail not more than twenty-four hours earlier.
Around the camp-fire that night they canvassed the situation as it had been revealed to them by the events of the past few days, and determined upon their course of action.
“It’s all tom-foolishness of the worst kind,” was the way Larry the practical summed it up. “These crooks are going upon the supposition that we know something that we don’t know. If they could be convinced that we don’t know anything more about this mythical gold mine than the man in the moon, and that we haven’t the slightest intention of trying to find it, they’d drop us like a hot cake.”
“That is all true enough,” Dick cut in. “But how are we going to convince them?”
“We can’t, unless they’ll show up and give us a chance to talk to them. As long as they’re not convinced, I suppose they’ll go on dogging us around. I hate to have to turn in every night with the feeling that we may wake up in the morning to find that we’ve been robbed again, but I guess there is no help for it.”
It was little Purdick who suggested the helpful plan.
“We mustn’t take any chances,” he said; “and, since there are three of us, we needn’t. You two bunk down and I’ll take the first night watch. At midnight I’ll wake you, Dick, and at three o’clock you can call Larry. It runs in my mind that we’ve been sleeping too much, anyway.”
Both Larry and Dick grumbled a little at this sort of war-like messing-up of their vacation when, as a matter of fact, it was, or ought to be, utterly needless. But they agreed to Purdick’s plan in the end as being the really sensible thing to do, and shortly afterward they turned in and left the small one sitting with his back to a tree and his rifle across his knees, determined to stay awake if the thing were humanly possible.
For an hour or more he found it entirely possible. Apart from the deep breathing of his two sleeping companions and the nibbling noises made by the grazing burros, there were no sounds to disturb the solemn silence of the immensities. Having to study pretty hard for what he was getting in college, Purdick had a pretty safe recipe for keeping awake. It took the form of memory exercises; the recalling, word for word, of certain formulas like this: “If the point of suspension of a pendulum have an imposed simple vibration ofyequalsacosinestin a horizontal line, the equation of small motion of the bob ismxequals minusmgtimesxminusy; overl”—things like that.
Just now, being intensely interested in the science of mineralogy, he was repeating the names of all the “ites” he could remember by their different groups, with the chemical composition of each; and he had just got as far as, “Pyrargyrite: silver three atoms, antimony one atom, sulphur six atoms,” when he sat up and rubbed his eyes and began to wonder if, after all, he had gone to sleep and was dreaming.
For while he stared and stared again, the camp-fire, with its back-log and bed of glowing coals, began to sink slowly into the ground, the unburnt ends of the back-loguprearing as the fire sank away. Before he had time to gasp twice, there was a gurgle and a hiss, and the fire disappeared as if by magic, leaving the tree-shadowed ravine in total darkness.