IX

IX

Thebeginning of the week after the clash with the claim jumpers found the routine which the owners of the “Little Jean” hoped to maintain through the winter catching its stride. True, Bromley was out of the activities for the time being; but even as a cripple he contributed his part by refusing to let Philip or Garth make a trip afoot to Leadville on the slender chance of being able to persuade a doctor to cross the ranges in the perilous edge of the closed season. As to this, however, a second snowfall, coming almost upon the heels of the first, shut them off conclusively from the outer world, and their isolation was complete.

“It’s perfectly all right,” Bromley maintained cheerfully. “I’m doing fine—couldn’t be doing any better if I had all the doctors in Leadville. The only thing that nags me is the fact that I’m tied down and can’t pull my weight in the boat.”

“You have good and well earned all the time you have to lose,” was Philip’s retort to this plaint; and with Garth as an able team-mate he completed the preparations for the winter, cutting down trees for firewood, setting up a third bunk in the cabin, and building a small lean-to for the storing of the provisions and explosives.

When it came to a resumption of the mining operations, Philip found that they had acquired much morethan a mere day-laborer in the experienced mining man. Quite apart from his great strength and apparently unlimited capacity for hard work, Garth’s practical knowledge of development processes proved invaluable, and it was at his suggestion that the tunnel was straightened and enlarged, its future drainage and ventilation provided for, and a rough-and-ready process of hand-picked ore-sorting made a part of each day’s task.

“You got to look ahead a mile ’r so in this here minin’ game,” was the experienced one’s business-like argument. “You let on like you boys ain’t got the spondulix to buy a stamp-mill and tote it in over the mount’ins, so you either got to make a stock comp’ny o’ this bonanza o’ yourn ’r else lease it. Either way the cat jumps, it’s a-goin’ to pay big if yuh’ve got a sure-enough mine, with rich ore on the dump, to show up next spring.”

For two tenderfoots to whom, as yet, all things mining-wise were unknown quantities, this practical advice was as water to the thirsty, so the development work was planned accordingly. By the time Bromley’s wound had healed and he was able to take his shift as third man in the heading, the work of drilling and blasting had been expertly systematized, and the stock of selected ore was growing day by day.

Speculations as to what had become of the would-be jumpers died out after the first heavy snowfall, which blocked, not only the mountain passes, but the high-lying valley as well. Garth had argued from the first that, with at least one wounded man in the party,Neighbors would not try to hold his footing in the snowbound western wilderness through the winter.

“Now that he knows whereabouts them high-grade assays o’ yourn come from, he’ll know how to beat the rush that’s shore goin’ to come chargin’ in here the minute the passes are open in the spring,” was Garth’s answer to the speculations; and since the snow blockade, daily added to, shut all intrusion out, no less effectually than it shut the occupants of the lonely log cabin in, the stirring incidents of the night of battle became only a memory, and the day’s work filled the cup of the days to overflowing for the three who had elected to brave the winter in the solitudes.

The severity of the winter of 1880-81 in the mountains of Colorado had—and still has—for its reminiscent chroniclers all those who endured the rigors of that Arctic season. The trio in the high-pitched valley of the Saguache were not the only mineral-mad gold-hunters who, deliberately or in tenderfoot hardihood, disregarded the warnings of the old-timers and stayed afield, many of them without adequate supplies, and lacking the skill and experience necessary to successful pioneering in a snowbound wilderness. As a consequence, the hard winter took its toll on many a mountain side and in many an isolated gulch. Snow slides swept precariously situated log cabins from bare slopes, or buried them fathoms deep in débris in the gulches. In the ill-provided camps starvation stalked abroad; and though there was game to be had, it could not be pursued without snow-shoes; and few, indeed, were the neophytes who had had the foresight to include snow-shoes in their winter camp kits.

As for the three burrowing in the gulch of the “Little Jean,” the hardships played no favorites, though Garth’s fund of experience stood them in good stead, tiding them over many of the exigencies. Before they became entirely shut in, the big man stalked and shot a deer: the meat was smoke-cured and added to the store of provisions, and the skin, Indian-tanned, served for an extra bunk cover in the cold nights. But with the coming of the heavier snows deer-stalking became impossible, so that source of food supply was cut off for the future.

Fortunately, by the middle of December, by which time zero-and-below temperatures were clamping the western slope wilderness in an icy vise, they had driven the mine tunnel to a depth to which the outdoor frigidities only partly penetrated; hence they were still able to carry on the mining operations. But the deepening drifts in the gulch were now threatening to bury the small cabin, chimney and all, and no little of their daylight time was spent in keeping the snow shovelled from the roof, and the paths open to the tunnel, to the woodpile and to the creek from which they were still obtaining their drinking water.

Life under such conditions—complete and unbreakable isolation, day-long toil, much of which must be squandered in a bare struggle for existence, and the constant and wearing demand upon fortitude and endurance—exacts penalties in whatever coin the debtor may be able to pay. For Philip Trask, his uneventful youth and early manhood, with its years running in the well-worn grooves of tradition and the conventional, faded and became as the memory of a dream—amemory which was dimming day by day and withdrawing into a more and more remote distance.

It was in the long winter evenings before the hearth fire in the half-buried cabin that he began to understand that Bromley was humanly and socially the better man; that there was in him a fine strain of gentle breeding which not only enabled him to rise superior to environment and association, but also gave him an outlook upon life unattainable by the under-gifted. From the beginning the play-boy had struck up a friendship, or rather an affectionate comradeship, with Garth that he, Philip, could not bring himself to share, try as he might. Little things, even the mountain man’s crudities of speech, jarred upon him. It was quite in vain that he called himself hard names, asking himself why he, of all men, should yield to the nudgings of an intellectual or social snobbishness. But the fact remained. Bromley could bridge the social gap between himself and Garth apparently without effort; could and did. In the pipe-smoking hours before the cabin fire it was the play-boy and the bearded frontiersman who were companions, while Philip found himself sitting apart and brooding.

“How do you do it, Harry?” he asked, one evening when Garth, who thought he had seen deer tracks in the snow, had gone out to the water hole in the creek to try for a moonlight shot at more meat.

“Do what—chum in with Big Jim? Why shouldn’t I? He’s a man, isn’t he?”

“Yes; but you and he have absolutely nothing in common. Garth washes his face occasionally and calls it a bath; keeps his fingernails in mourning; shovelshis food with a knife; rolls into his bunk with his boots on if he happens to forget to take them off.”

Bromley smiled and relighted his pipe.

“You have some queer notions in that narrow old Puritan head of yours, Phil. Don’t you know that humanity is all common?”

“Is it?—from your point of view?”

“It’s the surest thing you know. ‘For a’ that an’ a’ that, a man’s a man for a’ that.’ Big Jim is a diamond; an uncut diamond, I grant you, but the pure quill is there, just the same.”

“Think so? By his own tell he is a spendthrift drunkard and gambler when he has the means to buy or bet.”

“Well, what of that? Does the foolish evil cancel all the wise good? When it comes to that, how many of us have a clean slate? I’m sure I haven’t, for one. How about you?”

Philip was silent for a time, and when he spoke again it was to say, rather complacently: “I think you have seen the worst of me, Harry.”

Bromley smiled again and shook his head. “I’ve seen the best of you, Phil. I’m only fearing the worst.”

“Thanks”—curtly; “you have said something like that before. Make it plainer.”

“I don’t know that I can; or that you’d thank me if I could. It is merely the potentialities, I guess.”

“My potentialities for evil?”

“Both ways. You are, or you have been, virgin ground. This gold hunt is the first thing that has ever put the plow into you. It remains to be seen whatkind of soil it is going to turn up. Don’t you feel that, yourself?”

“I don’t know why it should turn up anything different.”

“I suppose you don’t: no man has ever seen the back of his own neck—or the close limitations of his own rut. But the furrow is already started. You are not the man you were when we took to the tall hills last summer.”

“Better, or worse?”

“Let us say different. The man you are now would never go back to school-teaching in New Hampshire.”

Philip nodded morosely. “I admitted that, a good while ago, if you’ll remember. But we were talking about Garth. What are we going to do with him after the winter is over? Pay him his wages and tell him to go?”

“I have been thinking about that. It occurs to me that we already owe him more than wages. If you hadn’t met him on the way out with the ponies and brought him back with you——”

“I know; you couldn’t have held out alone against the Neighbors gang very long; and if I had come back by myself, there might have been a different story to tell. When I made the bargain with Garth, he said all he’d ask would be a chance to locate a claim near ours.”

“Anybody who gets here first can have that.”

“That is what I told him. Never mind; we’ll see about his case when spring comes. I’ll agree if you think we ought to do something better than day-wages for him.”

Further talk about Garth and his deserts was halted by the incoming of the man himself, empty-handed.

“No good,” was his grumbling comment on the night deer stalking. “Reckon we don’t get us no more deer meat this winter. I like to got bogged down myself, gettin’ out to the water hole. There shore is one big heap o’ snow in this neck o’ woods, if you’ll listen at me.Andmore a-comin’.”

“Another storm?” said Philip.

“Shore as you’re a foot high. And that makes me say what I does. I don’t like the looks o’ the way she’s pilin’ up on the spur back o’ this wickiup of ourn. The timber up there ain’t thick enough to hold ’er if she gets much heavier. There’s two ways it can slide; down to-wards the creek, ’r straight down thisaway. Here’s hopin’.”

This was disturbing news. They had already seen one slide come down on the opposite, thinly wooded side of the gulch, and it had afforded an object-lesson as convincing as it was startling. Garth had had hair-raising stories to tell of prospectors’ cabins crushed and buried under thousands of tons of snow and débris, and their cabin site had been chosen wholly without reference to safety from this peril.

“Can’t we do anything more than hope?” Philip asked, making room for the giant before the fire.

“Could, maybe, if we had snow-shoes.”

“How?” It was Bromley who wanted to know.

“Shuffle up yonder and start the slide sideways with a blast. But we ain’t got the shoes; and there ain’t nobody goin’ to h’ist hisself up on that li’l’ hill without ’em. Yuh can bet your bottom dollar on that.”

Garth’s prediction of another storm had its fulfilment within the next few hours; and for two days and nights the feathery burden sifted down almost continuously, adding unmeasured depths to the already heavy blanketing of a whitened wilderness. Trees that had withstood the storms of many years came crashing down under the added load, and for the first time in the winter the three cabin dwellers were forced to resort to melted snow for their drinking and cooking water; it was impossible to keep the trail open to the creek; indeed, for the two days of storm they found it useless to try to work in the mine.

During the period of enforced idleness, Garth busied himself hewing and whittling out a pair of skis, for which the light spruce they had cut for firewood furnished the material. Asked what he meant to do with his footgear, he was non-committal, merely saying that he wanted to be doing something, and that the skis might be handy to have around if the spring should be late in coming.

“We’re chawin’ a mighty big hole in the grub-stake,” he added. “Maybe we’ll have to take to the woods, yit, for more meat.”

But a starker use for the skis presented itself two nights later, when they were all awakened by a muffled crash that made the solidly built cabin rock as if shaken by an earthquake shock. Garth was the first to leap afoot and give the alarm.

“Grab for yer clothes and blankets and run for it!” he shouted. “It’s the slide a-comin’ down!”

Struggling into their clothes in frantic haste, the two who were the most unready to fly for their livesjoined Garth in the small cleared area they had been keeping open in front of the cabin. It was a bright, moonlit night, clear, calm and deadly cold. From the shovelled areaway they could see that the low cliff behind the cabin had disappeared, its place being taken by a slanting snowbank reaching up to the steep slope of the mountain above. On the height they could plainly see the gash left by the sliding mass that was now filling the space between the cliff and the cabin and heaping itself well up toward the ridge-pole on the roof.

“There she is,” said Garth, pointing. “If that other chunk lets go, it’ll be hell and repeat for the cabin! We got to get a hump on us, mighty sudden!”

“But what can we do?” Philip demanded.

“Ain’t but one thing. That snow mount’in a-hangin’ up there over us’ll have to be eased down slaunchwise, ’r we’ll have it on top of us, shore as shootin’. Come inside and dig out the powder and fuse whilst I’m riggin’ for it!”

A handful of brush thrown into the fireplace blazed up, illuminating the interior of the cabin fitfully. In the firelight they could see that the rafters on the side facing the cliff were buckling dangerously. Opening the door communicating with the lean-to where they stored the provisions and explosives, they found the roof crushed in and the contents of the small room half buried in snow. Garth had flung the deerskin over his shoulders and was belting it about his waist. “One of you get them skis down,” he commanded.

It was Philip who took the skis from their pegs on the wall, but it was the play-boy who cut in quickly tosay: “See here, Jim; it isn’t your job to go up there and shoot that drift! Let me have those skis.”

“Like hell I will!” was the brusque refusal. “Didn’t you tell me, t’other day, that you’d never had ’em on? Gimme that powder and fuse.”

“But there’s nothing like this in your contract,” Bromley insisted.

“Contract be damned! You goin’ to stand there chewin’ the rag till that drift comes down and chokes you off? Gimme that stuff!”

“The dynamite will be frozen—it’s frozen now,” said Philip.

“It’ll be thawed out good-and-plenty, time I get up there,” Garth asserted, cramming the coil of fuse into a pocket and opening his shirt to thrust the dynamite cartridges in his armpit next the bare skin. “Open the door and lemme out!”

Bitter cold as it was, they sallied out with him and watched him as he “crabbed” over the drifts sidewise and began the ascent on the nose of the spur. There was nothing they could do. Until the menace of the overhanging avalanche should be removed, it would be a mere flirting with death to try to relieve the cabin roof of its buckling burden. In a few minutes Garth became a shapeless, climbing blot in the moonlight on the bare slope, the muffling deerskin making him look like a clumsy animal. That he could reach the critical point, impeded as he was by the awkward foot-rigging, seemed incredible to the anxious watchers below. Yet without the skis to support his weight, he could have done nothing.

“Th-there goes a brave man, if you’ll l-listen to me!”stammered Bromley between his teeth chatterings. Then: “D-did you say something a time ago about dirty fingernails and such small matters?”

“Don’t!” exclaimed Philip sharply. And after a breath-holding moment: “I’m a cad and a coward, Harry. I let you try to make him turn that job over to you a few minutes ago, and I never said a word: I was scared crazy for fear you’d insist upon the three of us drawing straws for it and the lot would fall to me! That is God’s truth. Now and then I get a glimpse of the real man inside of me, and then I know I’m not fit to live in the same world with you and Jim Garth.”

“Easy,” Bromley deprecated. “After all, if the thing can be done, Garth is the one who can come the nearest to pulling it off. We both know that—and he knows it, too.”

The big man had climbed out of sight behind a clump of trees, but now he reappeared higher up the slope and not far from the impending mass that was threatening to break down upon the cabin. They saw him prodding in the snow with the staff he carried and knew he was planting the dynamite.

“Good Lord!” groaned Bromley, “why doesn’t he get above it? If he fires it from where he is now, it will catch him, sure!”

“It’s the drift; he can’t get above it—don’t you see how it lips out over his head? Besides, it’s got to be shot from that side. If it isn’t, it will come straight down this way.”

“But,Philip! It’s suicide for him to shoot it from where he is now!”

“It looks that way. But that’s what he is doing. He is lighting the fuses now—don’t you see them sputtering?”

Garth had risen to his feet, but now they saw him stoop again, as if he were adjusting the fastenings of the skis. In the brilliant moonlight they saw, or fancied they could see, the thin, wavering curls of smoke rising from the burning fuses. Still the big man was crouching within arm’s-reach of the blasts he had planted and set alight.

“God in heaven! Why doesn’t he get away from there?” The words stuck in Philip’s throat and became an almost inarticulate cry. Garth was up again and was evidently trying to edge away along the steep snow slope. It was plainly apparent that something had gone wrong with one of the long, unmanageable skis. For two or three of the edging steps he contrived to keep it under him; then it came off and slid away down the slope, and the two watchers saw him fall sidewise, buried to the hip on the side that had lost its support.

With terrifying distinctness they saw him struggle as a man fighting desperately for life. With one ski gone, the other was only a shackle to hold him down. Fiercely he strove to kick the manacling thing off, beating frantically with his bare hands, meanwhile, at the sputtering fuses in an effort to extinguish them before the fire should reach the dynamite. At last he gave over trying to free himself from the one encumbering ski, and struggling out of the snowy pit into which his exertions had sunk him, sought to roll aside out of the path of the impending avalanche.

Given a few more precious seconds of time he mighthave made it. But the reprieve was too short. Before he had floundered a dozen yards the snow dam holding the huge cliff-top drift in leash leaped into the air like a spouting geyser to the muffled cough of a triple explosion, and an enormous white cataract poured into the gulch a short distance valley-wards of the half-buried cabin.

“Shovels!” Bromley yelped; and together the two horrified witnesses raced up to the tunnel for digging tools. When they ran back they had to wallow waist deep in the yielding mass to reach the spot where the tip of an up-ended ski marked the grave of the buried man; and they had little hope of finding him alive as they burrowed desperately to uncover him.

But Big Jim’s time to die had not yet come. When he had found himself going, he had had the presence of mind to draw a fold of the deerskin over his face, holding it with a crooking arm. He was all but asphyxiated when they dragged him out of his snowy grave, but the fresh air soon revived him; apart from a wrenched ankle owed to the too-well fastened ski, he seemed to be unhurt.

None the less, back in the cabin and hovering over a roaring fire in an attempt to thaw himself out, the big man began to shake as if in an ague fit, paying the penalty of his violent exertions in a teeth-rattling chill. In buying the winter’s supplies in Leadville, Bromley had included a bottle of whiskey for emergencies. Philip searched for the bottle in the wrecked storeroom, found it unbroken, and poured a drink for Garth. The effect was magical. The chill subsided and Garth begged for another drink, the single potation makinghim loose-tongued and volubly eloquent. Philip said “no” firmly, and hid the bottle; after which, with Bromley’s help, he got Garth out of his wet clothes and into his bunk.

The giant fell asleep at once, or seemed to; and after deciding that the buckled cabin roof would hold until they could have daylight for its unloading, the two who were still stirring dried themselves out before the fire, covered the embers and went to bed. When they awoke, the sun was shining in at the single small window of the cabin, and Garth was still asleep, or he appeared to be. But the empty whiskey bottle lying on the earthen floor beside his bunk told another story.

“Look at that! There’s your ‘rough diamond’—dead drunk!” Philip commented scornfully, sitting up in his bed and pointing across to the comatose figure in the opposite bunk. “He was only shamming after we put him to bed last night. He waited until we were asleep and then got up and found the liquor. I have no use for a man who has no more self-control or decency than that!”

But the play-boy was shaking his head.

“‘Touching the righteousness which is in the law, blameless’,” he quoted sardonically. “That’s you, Philip. It’s a gruesome thing to have lived such a truly good life oneself that one can’t light a little candle of charity for the poor sinners. I can’t forget that Big Jim risked his life last night—and nearly lost it—to save us from being turned out homeless and starving in this howling desert. Let’s get a bite to eat and unload this roof while he’s sleeping it off.”

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