Part 4

“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 pipe was 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 with samples 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 into the 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 pass over 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 to smoke 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-crazed celebrator. “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--both of 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.”

V

THE level rays of the morning sun were struggling in through a dusty and begrimed bed-room window when Bromley awoke to find Philip in the room; a Philip haggard and hollow-eyed for want of sleep, but nevertheless fiercely, exultantly jubilant.

“Wake up!” he was shouting excitedly. “Wake up and yell your head off! We’ve struck rich pay in that hole in the gulch!--do you hear what I’m saying?--pay rock in the ‘Little Jean’!”

Bromley sat up in bed, hugging his knees.

“Let’s see where we left off,” he murmured, with a sleepy yawn. “I was headed for bed, wasn’t I? And you were chasing back to the assay shop to hang, draw, quarter and gibbet the outfit if it shouldn’t give us a fair shake. I hope you didn’t find it necessary to assassinate anybody?”

“Assassinate nothing!”--the news-bringer had stripped off coat and shirt, and was making a violent assault upon the wash-stand in the corner of the room. “Didn’t you hear what I said? We’ve struck it--struck it big!” Then, punctuated by vigorous sluicings of cold water: “The ‘Little Jean’s’ a thundering bonanza ... six separate assays ... one hundred and sixty-two dollars to the ton is the lowest ... the highest’s over two hundred. And it’s free-milling ore, at that! Harry, we’re rich--heeled for life--or we are going to be if we haven’t lost everything by acting like two of the most footless fools on God’s green earth.”

“‘We have left undone those things which we ought to have done, and we have done those things which we ought not to have done, and there is no health in us,’” quoted the play-boy, thrusting his legs out of bed and groping for his clothes. “For what particular sin do we pray forgiveness?”

“For leaving that claim of ours out of doors with nobody to watch it,”--this out of the mufflings of the towel. “It gives me a cold sweat every time I think of what may have happened since we left; what may be happening right now, for all we know!”

“What could happen?” Bromley queried. “It is our discovery, isn’t it? And we have posted it and are here to record it and file on it according to law.”

“Yes, but good Lord! Haven’t you been in these mountains long enough to know that possession is nine points of the law where a mining prospect is concerned? I knew it, but I took a chance because I thought we had that country over across the range pretty much to ourselves.”

“Well, haven’t we?”

“No; the woods are full of prospectors over there, so they told me at the sampling works; we just didn’t happen to run across any of them. Did you ever hear of a man named Drew?”

“You mean Stephen Drew, the man who bought the ‘Snow Bird’ for five millions?”

“That’s the man. He happened to be down at the sampling works this morning when our assays were handed out. I guess I made a bleating idiot of myself when I saw what we had. Anyway, Mr. Drew remembered meeting me in the railroad offices in Denver and he congratulated me. One word brought on another. He asked me if we wanted to sell the claim, and I told him no--that we were going back to work it through the winter. He said that was the proper thing, if we could stand the hardships; that if we did this and pulled through, he’d talk business with us next spring on a partnership or a lease.”

“Good--immitigably good!” chirruped Bromley. “And meanwhile?”

“Meanwhile, we take out our legal papers and get back to that gulch as quick as the Lord will let us. Mr. Drew shook his head when I told him how we had left things. He said we’d be lucky if we didn’t find a bunch of mine jumpers in possession when we got back; that there were plenty of thugs in the mountains who wouldn’t scruple to take a chance, destroy our posted notice and stick up one of their own, and then fight it out with us when we turned up, on a basis of might making right. I mentioned our rights and the law, and he smiled and said: ‘You are a long way from the nearest sheriff’s office over there, and you know the old saying--that possession is nine points of the law. Of course, you could beat them eventually, but the courts are slow, and you would be kept out of your property for a long time. Take my advice, and get back there as soon as you can.’ I told him we’d go back right away and be there waiting for him next spring.”

“Oh, Lord!” Bromley groaned in mock dismay; “have we got to hit that terrible trail again without taking even a couple of days to play around in?”

“Hit it, and keep on hitting it day and night till we get there!” was the mandatory decision. “If you are ready, let’s go and eat. There is a lot to be done, and we are wasting precious time.”

It was at the finish of a hurried breakfast eaten in the comfortless hotel dining-room that Bromley took it upon himself to revise the programme of headlong haste.

“You may as well listen to reason, Phil,” he argued smoothly. “The land office won’t be open until nine o’clock or after; and past that, there is the shopping for the winter camping spell. You are fairly dead on your feet for sleep; you look it, and you are it. You go back to the room and sleep up for a few hours. I’ll take my turn now--do all that needs to be done, and call you when we’re ready to pull our freight.”

Philip shook his head in impatient protest. “I can keep going all right for a while longer,” he asserted obstinately.

“Of course you can; but there is no need of it. We can’t hope to start before noon, or maybe later; and it won’t take more than one of us to go through the motions of making ready. You mog off to your downy couch and let me take my turn at the grindstone. You’ve jolly well and good had yours.”