IV
TheAugust sun had dropped behind a high-pitched horizon of saw-tooth peaks and broken ranges, leaving the upper air still shot through with a golden glow that was like the dome lighting of a vast celestial theater, by the time two young men, whose burro packs of camp equipment, supplies and digging tools marked them as prospectors, had picked their way down the last precipitous rock slide into a valley hemmed in by the broken ranges. At the close of a hard day’s march the straggling procession was heading for running water and a camp site; the water being a clear mountain stream brawling over its rocky bed in the valley bottom. Reaching the stream before the upper-air effulgencies had quite faded into the smoke-gray of twilight, a halt was made and preparations for a night camp briskly begun.
Two full months had elapsed since the partnership bargain had been struck in the lobby of the American House in Denver, and during the greater part of that interval Philip and the play-boy had prospected diligently in the foot-hills and eastern spurs of the Continental Divide, combing the gulches in the vicinity of Fair Play and Alma, and finding nothing more significant than an occasional abandoned tunnel or shaft, mute evidences that others had anticipated their own disappointment in this particular field. Drifting southwestward,past Mount Princeton, they had ascended Chalk Creek, crossed the range over a high pass into Taylor Park, and were now in new ground on the western side of the Divide.
“This side of the world looks better; or at least a little less shopworn,” Bromley remarked, after they had cooked and eaten their supper and were smoking bed-time pipes before the camp fire. “I think we have outrun the crowd, at last, and that is something to be thankful for.”
Philip opened his pocket knife and dug with the blade into the bowl of his pipe to make it draw better. The two months of outdoor life and hard manual labor had done for him what the treasure search was doing for many who had never before known what it was to lack a roof over their heads at night, or to live on a diet of pan-bread and bacon cooked over a camp fire. With the shedding of the white collar and its accompaniments and the donning of flannel shirt, belted trousers and top boots had come a gradual change in habits and outlook, and—surest distinguishing mark of the tenderfoot—a more or less unconscious aping of the “old-timer.” Since his razor had grown dull after the first week or two, he had let his beard grow; and for the single clerkly cigar smoked leisurely after the evening meal, he had substituted a manly pipe filled with shavings from a chewing plug.
Bromley had changed, too, though in a different way. Two months’ abstention from the hectic lights and their debilitating effects had put more flesh and better on his bones, a clearer light in his eyes and a springy alertness in his carriage; and though his clothes wereas workmanlike as Philip’s, he contrived to wear them with a certain easy grace and freedom, and to look fit and trim in them. Also, though his razor was much duller than Philip’s, and their one scrap of looking-glass was broken, he continued to shave every second day.
“I’ve been wondering if a later crowd, with more ‘savvy’ than we have, perhaps, won’t go over the same ground that we have gone over and find a lot of stuff that we’ve missed,” said Philip, after the pipe-clearing pause.
“‘Savvy,’” Bromley chuckled. “When we started out I was moved to speculate upon what the wilderness might do to you, Phil; whether it would carve a lot of new hieroglyphs on you, or leave you unscarred in the security of your solid old Puritan shell. ‘Savvy’ is the answer.”
“Oh, go and hire a hall!” Philip grumbled good-naturedly. “Your vaporings make my back ache. Give us a rest!”
“There it is again,” laughed the play-boy. “Set the clock back six months or so and imagine yourself saying, ‘Go hire a hall,’ and ‘Give us a rest!’ to a group of the New England Trasks.”
“Humph! If it comes to that, you’ve changed some, too, in a couple of months,” Philip countered.
“Don’t I know it? Attrition—rubbing up against the right sort of thing—will occasionally work the miracle of making something out of nothing. You’ve rubbed off some of your New England virtues on me; I’m coming to be fairly plastered with them. Thereare even times when I can almost begin to look back with horror upon my young life wasted.”
“Keep it up, if you feel like it and it amuses you,” was the grunted comment. “I believe if you were dying, you’d joke about it.”
“Life, and death, too, are a joke, Philip, if you can get the right perspective on them. Have you ever, in an idle moment, observed the activities of the humble ant, whose ways we are so solemnly advised to consider for the acquiring of wisdom? Granting that the ant may know well enough what she is about, according to her lights, you must admit that her apparently aimless and futile chasings to and fro—up one side of a blade of grass and down the other, over a pebble and then under it—don’t impress the human beholder as evidences of anything more than mere restlessness, a frantic urge to keep moving. I’ve often wondered if we human ants may not be giving the same impression to any Being intelligent enough to philosophize about us.”
“This feverish mineral hunt, you mean?”
“Oh, that, and pretty nearly everything else we do. ‘Life’s fitful fever,’ Elizabethan Billy calls it—and he knew. But in one way we have the advantage of the ant; we can realize that our successive blades of grass and pebbles are all different.”
“How, different?”
“We put the day that is past behind us and step into another which is never the same. Or, if the day is the same, we are not. You’ll never be able to go back to the peace and quiet of a railroad desk, for example.”
“Maybe not. And you?”
“God knows. As I have said, you’ve rubbed off some of your virtues on me—suffering some little loss of them yourself, I fancy. We’ll see what they will do to me. It will be something interesting to look forward to.”
“Umph!” Philip snorted; “you’re getting grubby again—maggoty, I mean. Which proves that it’s time to hit the blankets. If you’ll look after the jacks and hobble them, I’ll gather wood for the fire.”
Bromley sat up and finished freeing his mind.
“Philip, if anybody had told me a year ago that within a short twelve-month I’d be out here in the Colorado mountains, picking, shovelling, driving jack-asses, cooking at least half of my own meals, and liking it all ... well, ‘liar’ would have been the mildest epithet I should have chucked at him. Comical, isn’t it?” And with that he went to valet the burros.
The first day after their arrival in the western valley was spent in exploring, and they finally settled upon a gulch not far from their camp of the night before as the most promising place in which to dig. Though they had as yet mastered only the bare rudiments of a trained prospector’s education, the two summer months had given them a modicum of experience; enough to enable them to know roughly what to look for, and how to recognize it when they found it.
The gulch in which they began operations was a miniature canyon, and the favored site was indicated by the half-hidden outcropping of a vein of brownish material which they could trace for some distance up the steep slope of the canyon wall. During the day’s explorations they had frequently tested the sands ofthe stream bed for gold “colors,” washing the sand miner-fashion in their frying pan, and it was upon the hint given by the “colors” that they had pitched upon the gulch location. Below the gulch mouth microscopic flakes of gold appeared now and again in the washings. But the sands above were barren.
“It looks as if we may have found something worth while, this time,” Philip hazarded, after they had cleared the rock face to reveal the extent of the vein. “The ‘colors’ we’ve been finding in the creek sand come from a lode somewhere, and this may be the mother vein. We’ll put the drills and powder to it to-morrow and see what happens.”
Accordingly, for a toilsome fortnight they drilled and blasted in the gulch, and by the end of that time the prospect had developed into a well-defined vein of quartz wide enough to admit the opening of a working tunnel. Having no equipment for making field tests, they could only guess at the value of their discovery, but the indications were favorable. The magnifying glass showed flecks and dustings of yellow metal in selected specimens of the quartz; and, in addition, the ore body was of the character they had learned to distinguish as “free milling”—vein-matter from which the gold can be extracted by the simplest and cheapest of the crushing processes.
Taking it all in all, they had good reason to be hopeful; and on the final day of the two weeks of drilling and blasting they skipped the noonday meal to save time and were thus enabled to fire the evening round of shots in the shallow tunnel just before sunset. A hasty examination of the spoil blown out removed alldoubt as to the character of the material in which they were driving. The vein was gold-bearing quartz, beyond question; how rich, they had no means of determining; but there were tiny pockets—lenses—in which the free metal was plainly visible without the aid of the magnifier.
That night, before their camp fire, they held a council of war. Though it seemed more than likely that the lode was a rich one, they were now brought face to face with the disheartening fact that the mere ownership of a potential gold mine is only the first step in a long and uphill road to fortune. In the mining regions it is a common saying that the owner of a silver prospect needs a gold mine at his back to enable him to develop it, and the converse is equally true.
“Well,” Bromley began, after the pipes had been lighted, “it seems we’ve got something, at last. What do we do with it?”
“I wish I knew, Harry,” was the sober reply. “If the thing turns out to be as good as it looks, we’ve got the world by the tail—or we would have if we could only figure out some way to hold on. But we can’t hold on and develop it; that is out of the question. We have no capital, and we are a good many mountain miles from a stamp-mill. Unless the lode is richer than anything we’ve ever heard of, the ore wouldn’t stand the cost of jack-freighting to a mill.”
“That says itself,” Bromley agreed. “But if we can’t develop the thing, what is the alternative?”
“There is only one. If our map is any good, and if we have figured out our location with any degree of accuracy, we are about thirty miles, as the crow flies,from Leadville—which will probably mean forty or fifty the way we’d have to go to find a pass over the range. We have provisions enough to stake us on the way out, but not very much more than enough. I cut into the last piece of bacon to-night for supper.”
“All right; say we head for Leadville. We’d have to do that anyway, to record our discovery in the land office. What next?”
“Assays,” said Philip. “We’ll take a couple of sacks of the quartz along and find out what we’ve got. If the assays make a good showing, we’ll have something to sell, and it will go hard with us if we can’t find some speculator in the big camp who will take a chance and buy our claim.”
“What?—sell out, lock, stock and barrel for what we can get, and then stand aside and see somebody come in here and make a million or so that ought to be ours?” Bromley burst out. “Say, Philip—that would be death by slow torture!”
“I know,” Philip admitted. “It is what the poor prospector gets in nine cases out of ten because, being poor, he has to take it. If we had a mine, instead of a mere prospect hole, we might hope to be able to capitalize it; but as it is—well, you know what’s in the common purse. My savings are about used up; we came in on a shoe-string, in the beginning.”
“Yes, but, land of love, Philip!—to have a thing, like this may turn out to be, right in our hands, and then have to sell it, most likely for a mere song! ... why, we’d never live long enough to get over it, neither one of us!”
Philip shook his head. “It’s tough luck, I’ll admit; but what else is there to do?”
Bromley got up and kicked a half burnt log into the heart of the fire.
“How nearly broke are we, Phil?” he asked.
The financing partner named the sum still remaining in the partnership purse, which, as he had intimated, was pitifully small.
“You said, just now, if we had a mine to sell, instead of a bare prospect,” Bromley went on.... “We’ve got nerve, and two pairs of hands. Suppose we stay with it and make it a mine? I know good and well what that will mean: a freezing winter in the mountains, hardships till you can’t rest, half starvation, maybe. Just the same, I’m game for it, if you are.”
Philip rapped the ashes from his pipe and refilled it. From the very beginning of the summer Bromley had been offering a series of grateful surprises: dogged endurance, cheerfulness under privations, willingness to share hard labor—a loyal partner in all that the word implied. Slow to admit any one to the inner intimacies of friendship, as his Puritan heritage constrained him to be, Philip had weighed and measured the play-boy coldly, impartially, and before they had been many weeks together he was honest enough to admit that Bromley was as tempered steel to his own roughly forged iron; that it had been merely a lack of an adequate object in life that had made him a spendthrift and a derelict.
“You’d tackle a winter here in these mountains rather than let go?” he said, after the refilled pipewas alight. “It will be hell, Harry. You remember what those fellows in Chalk Creek told us about the snows on this side of the range.”
“I’m discounting everything but the kind of hell that will be ours if we should let go and see somebody else come in and reap where we’ve sown.”
“All right; let’s see what we’ve got to buck up against. First, we’ll have to go out for the recording, the assays, and the winter’s provisions. We’d have to buy at least one more burro to freight the grub-stake in; and then one of us will have to take the jacks out for the winter. They’d starve to death here. All this is going to take time, and the summer is already gone. And that isn’t all; we’ll have to build a cabin and cut the winter’s wood. It will be a fierce race against time to get holed in before we’re snowed under.”
“Still I’m game,” declared Bromley stoutly. “If it turns out that we have something worth fighting for—and the assays will say yes or no to that—I’m for the fight.”
Philip scowled amiably at the transformed play-boy. “You nervy little rat!” he exclaimed in gruff affection. “Think you can back me down on a fighting proposition? I’ll call your bluff. We’ll put in one more day setting things to rights, and then we’ll pull out for Leadville and that starvation winter grub-stake.”
“Setting things to rights,” as Philip phrased it, did not ask for an entire day. By noon they had cached their tools and what remained of the stock of provisions after enough had been reserved to supply them on the journey; had filled a couple of ore sacks withsamples for the assay; and had paced off and re-staked their claim, posting it with the proper notice and christening it the “Little Jean,”—this at Philip’s suggestion, though he did not tell Bromley why he chose this particular name.
With nothing more to be done, Philip was impatiently eager to break camp at once, but Bromley pleaded for a few hours’ rest.
“It’s Sunday,” he protested. “Can’t you possess your soul in patience for one little afternoon? This bonanza of ours—which may not be a bonanza, after all—won’t run away. I’d like to sleep up a bit before we strike out to climb any more mountains.”
The impatient one consented reluctantly to the delay; and while Bromley, wearier than he cared to admit, slept for the better part of the afternoon, Philip dumped the sacked ore and spent the time raking over the pile of broken rock and vein-matter blasted out of the shallow opening, selecting other samples which he thought might yield a fairer average of values. Beside the camp fire that evening he stretched himself out with the two sacks of ore for a back rest; and Bromley, awake now and fully refreshed, noted the back rest and smiled.
“Like the feel of it, even in the rough, don’t you, Phil?” he jested. Then: “I’m wondering if this treasure hunt hasn’t got under your skin in more ways than one. At first, you were out for the pure excitement of the chase; but now you are past all that; you are plain money-hungry.”
“Well, who isn’t?” Philip demanded, frowning intothe heart of the fire. “Still, you’re wrong. It isn’t the money so much, as what it will buy.”
“What will it buy—more than you’ve always had? You won’t be able to eat any more or any better food, or wear any more clothes, or get more than one tight roof to shelter you at a time,—needs you have always had supplied, or have been able to supply for yourself.”
Getting no reply to this, he went on. “Suppose this strike of ours should pan out a million or so—which is perhaps as unlikely as anything in the world—what would you do with the money?”
For the moment Philip became a conventional, traditional worshipper at the altar of thrift.
“I think I should emulate the example of the careful dog with a bone; go and dig a safe hole and bury most of it.”
Bromley’s laugh came back in cachinnating echoes from the gulch cliffs.
“Not on your life you wouldn’t, Philip. I can read your horoscope better than that. If it does happen to happen that we’ve really made a ten-strike, I can see you making the good old welkin ring till the neighbors won’t be able to hear themselves think, for the noise you’ll make.”
“I don’t know why you should say anything like that,” Philip objected morosely.
“Of course you don’t. You’d have to have eyes like a snail’s to be able to see yourself. But just wait, and hold my little prophecy in mind.”
Philip, still staring into the heart of the fire, remembered a similar prediction made by his desk-mate in the Denver railroad office. “I know your kind....”Middleton had said. What was there about his kind that made other people so sure that the good thread of self-control had been left out in his weaving?
“I’ll wait,” he said; and then: “You haven’t said what you’d do in case it should turn out that we’ve made the improbable ten-strike.”
“I?” queried the play-boy. “Everybody who has ever known me could answer that, off-hand. You know my sweet and kindly disposition. I wouldn’t want to disappoint all the old ladies in Philadelphia. And they’d be horribly disappointed if I didn’t proceed to paint everything within reach a bright, bright shade of vermilion.”
Philip looked at his watch.
“Nine o’clock,” he announced, “and we start at daybreak, sharp. I’m turning in.”
In strict accordance with the programme of impatience, the start was made at dawn on the Monday morning. Their map, though rather uncertain as to the smaller streams, seemed to enable them to locate their valley and its small river, and their nearest practicable route to Leadville appeared to be by way of the stream to its junction with a larger river, and then eastward up the valley of the main stream, which the map showed as heading in the gulches gashing the western shoulder of Mount Massive.
A day’s tramping behind the two diminutive pack beasts brought them to the larger stream, and the third evening found them zigzagging up the slopes of the great chain which forms the watershed backbone of the continent. Philip had been hastening the slow march of the burros all day, hoping to reach the passover the range before night. But darkness overtook them when they were approaching timber line and they were forced to camp. It was at this high camp that they had the unique experience of melting snow from a year-old snowbank at the end of summer to water the burros and to make coffee over their camp fire. And even with double blankets and the tarpaulins from the packs, they slept cold.
Pushing on in the first graying light of the Thursday dawn, they came to the most difficult stretch of mountain climbing they had yet encountered: a bare, boulder-strewn steep, gullied by rifts and gulches in which the old snow was still lying. At the summit of the rugged pass, which they reached, after many breathing halts, a little before noon, there was a deep drift, sand-covered and treacherous, and through the crust of this the animals broke and floundered, and finally did what over-driven burros will always do—got down and tried to roll their packs off. It was then that Philip flew into a rage and swore savagely at the jacks; at which Bromley laughed.
“You’re coming along nicely, Phil,” he chuckled. “A few more weeks of this, and you’ll be able to qualify for a post-graduate course in the higher profanities. Not but what you are fairly fluent, as it is.”
Philip made no reply; he was silent through the scarcely less difficult descent into a wide basin on the eastern front of the range. On the lower level the going was easier, and in the latter half of the afternoon they came to the farther lip of the high-pitched basin from which they could look down into the valley of the Arkansas; into the valley and across it to a distant,shack-built camp city spreading upward from a series of gulch heads over swelling hills with mighty mountains for a background—the great carbonate camp whose fame was by this time penetrating to the remotest hamlet in the land. A yellow streak winding up one of the swelling hills marked the course of the stage road, and on it, in a cloud of golden dust, one of the rail-head stages drawn by six horses was worming its way upward from the river valley.
“Think we can make it before dark?” Bromley asked.
“We’ve got to make it,” Philip declared doggedly; adding: “I’m not going to wait another day before I find out what we’ve got in that hole we’ve been digging. Come on.”
The slogging march was resumed, but distances are marvelously deceptive in the clear air of the altitudes, and darkness was upon them before the lights of the big camp came in sight over the last of the hills. Bromley, thoroughly outworn by the three-days’ forced march coming upon the heels of two weeks of drilling and blasting and shovelling, had no curiosity sharp enough to keep him going, after the burros had been stabled and lodgings had been secured in the least crowded of the hotels; but Philip bolted his supper hastily and announced his intention of proceeding at once in search of an assay office.
“You won’t find one open at this time of night,” the play-boy yawned. “There’s another day coming, or if there isn’t, it won’t matter for any of us.”
“I tell you, I’m not going to wait!” Philip snapped impatiently; and he departed, leaving Bromley tosmoke and doze in the crowded and ill-smelling hotel office which also served as the bar-room.
It was perhaps an hour later when Bromley, who, in spite of the noise and confusion of the place, had been sleeping the sleep of utter exhaustion in his chair in the corner of the smoke-befogged bar-room, was awakened by a shot, a crash of glass and a strident voice bellowing, “Yippee!That’s the kind of a hellion I am! Walk up, gen’lemen, an’ le’s irrigate; the drinks’re on me. Th’ li’l’ ol’ prospect hole’s gone an’ turned an ace an’ I’m paintin’ the town.Yippee!Line up, gen’lemen, an’ name yer pizen. Big Ike’s buyin’ fer th’ crowd!”
Vaguely, through the smoke fog, Bromley saw a burly miner, bearded like a fictional pirate, beckoning the bar-room crowd up to the bar, weaving pistol in hand. Possibly, if he had been fully awake, he would have understood that the easy way to avoid trouble with a manifestly drunken roisterer was by the road of quietly following the example of the others. But before he could gather his faculties the big man had marked him down.
“Hey, there—yuh li’l’ black-haired runt in th’ corner! Tail in yere afore I make yuh git up an’ dance fer th’ crowd!” he shouted. “I’m a rip-snortin’ hell-roarer fr’m ol’ Mizzoo, an’ this is my night fer flappin’ my wings—yippee!”
Bromley was awake now and was foolish enough to laugh and wave the invitation aside airily. Instantly there was a flash and crash, and the window at his elbow was shattered.
“L-laugh at me, will yuh!” stuttered the half-crazedcelebrator. “Git up an’ come yere! I’m goin’ to make yuh drink a whole durn’ quart o’ red-eye fer that! Come a-runnin’, I say, afore I——”
The door opened and Philip came in. He had heard the shot, but was wholly unprepared for what he saw; Bromley, his partner, white as a sheet and staggering to his feet at the menace of the revolver in the drunken miner’s fist; the shattered window and bar mirror; the group of card players and loungers crowding against the bar, and the barkeeper ducking to safety behind it.
In the drawing of a breath a curious transformation came over him. Gone in an instant were all the inhibitions of a restrained and conventional childhood and youth, and in their room there was only a mad prompting to kill. At a bound he was upon the big man, and the very fierceness and suddenness of the barehanded attack made it successful. With his victim down on the sawdust-covered floor, and the pistol wrested out of his grasp, he swung the clubbed weapon to beat the fallen man over the head with it and would doubtless have had a human life to answer for if the bystanders had not rushed in to pull him off with cries of “Let up, stranger—let up! Can’t you see he’s drunk?”
Philip stood aside, half-dazed, with the clubbed revolver still grasped by its barrel. He was gasping, not so much from the violence of his exertions as at the appalling glimpse he had been given of the potentialities within himself; of the purely primitive and savage underman that had so suddenly risen up to sweep away the last vestiges of the traditions, to make his tongue like a dry stick in his mouth with a mad thirst for blood.
It was Bromley who drew him away, and nothing was said until they had climbed the rough board stair and Bromley was lighting the lamp in the room they were to share. Then, in an attempt to lessen the strain under which he knew his companion was laboring, he said: “It’s lucky for me that you didn’t have your real fighting clothes on, that night when I tried to hold you up, Philip. There wouldn’t have been anything left of me if you had really meant business. Did you find an assay shop?”
Philip dropped into a chair and nodded. “A sampling works that runs night and day. We’ll get the results in the morning.”
“For richer?—or poorer?”
“I wish to God I knew! I showed the assayer some of the quartz, but he wouldn’t commit himself; he talked off; said you could never tell from the looks of the stuff; that the bright specks we’ve been banking on might not be metal at all. God, Harry!—if it were only morning!” he finished, and his eyes were burning.
“Easy,” said Bromley soothingly. “You mustn’t let it mean so much to you, old man. You’ve worked yourself pretty well up to the breaking point. There are plenty of other gulches if ours shouldn’t happen to pan out. Get your clothes off and turn in. That’s the best thing to do now.”
Philip sprang up and began to walk the floor of the small bed-room.
“Sleep!” he muttered, “I couldn’t sleep if the salvation of the whole human race hung upon it.” Then: “We’re simpletons, Harry; damned tenderfoot simpletons! We never ought to have left that claim—bothof us at once. How do we know that there isn’t a land office nearer than Leadville where it can be registered? How do we know we won’t find claim jumpers in possession when we go back?”
“Nonsense! You know you are only borrowing trouble. What’s the use?”
“It’s the suspense.... I can’t stand it, Harry! Go to bed if you feel like it; I’m going back to the sampling works and see that quartz put through the mill—see that they don’t work any shenanigan on us. I believe they’re capable of it. That slant-eyed superintendent asked too many questions about where the stuff came from to suit me. Go on to bed. I’ll bring you the news in the morning.”