Part 5

“Well,” Philip yielded reluctantly. Then: “Late in the season as it is, there will be a frantic rush for our valley as soon as the news of the ‘Little Jean’ discovery leaks out. Mr. Drew warned me of this, and he cautioned me against talking too much here in Leadville; especially against giving any hint of the locality. You’ll look out for that?”

Bromley laughed. “I’m deaf and dumb--an oyster--a clam. Where can I find this Mr. Stephen Drew who is going to help us transmute our hard rock into shiny twenty-dollar pieces next spring?”

Philip gave him Drew’s Leadville address, and then went to climb the ladder-like stair to the room with the dirty window, where he flung himself upon the unmade bed without stopping to undress, and fell asleep almost in the act. When next he opened his eyes the room was pitchy dark and Bromley was shaking him awake.

“What’s happened?” he gasped, as Bromley struck a match to light the lamp; and then: “Good God, Harry!--have you let me waste a whole day sleeping?”

“Even so,” was the cheerful reply. “I’ll tell you about it while you’re sticking your face into a basin of cold water. To make it short--the way you did this morning--the cat’s out of the bag. This whole town knows that there has been a big gold strike made on the other side of the range. What it hasn’t found out yet is who made the strike, or where it is located. Mr. Drew put me on.”

“Good Lord!” Philip groaned. “And we’ve lost hours and hours!”

“They’re not lost; they’ve only gone before. Friend Drew is responsible. He said, since the news had got out, we would better wait until after dark to make our start, and then take the road as quietly as we could; so I let you sleep. So far, as nearly as Mr. Drew could find out, we haven’t been identified as the lucky discoverers.”

“That will follow, as sure as fate!” Philip predicted gloomily.

“Maybe not. While there’s life there’s hope. I’ve paid our bill here at the hotel, and we’ll go to a restaurant for supper. Everything is done that needed to be done; claim recorded, grub-stake bought, jacks packed and ready to move, and a couple of tough little riding broncos, the horses a loan from Mr. Drew, who pointed out, very sensibly, that we’d save time and shoe-leather by riding in, to say nothing of leg weariness. Drew has one of his hired men looking out for us at the livery stable where the horses and jacks are put up, and this man will give us a pointer if there is anything suspicious in the wind. If you are ready, let’s go.”

As unobtrusively as possible they made their way down the steep stair to pass out through the office-bar-room. As they entered the smoky, malodorous public room Philip thought it a little odd that there were no card players at the tables. A few of the evening habitués were lined up at the bar, but most of them were gathered in knots and groups about the rusty cast-iron stove in which a fire had been lighted. With senses on the alert, Philip followed Bromley’s lead. There was an air of palpitant excitement in the place, and, on the short passage to the outer door, snatches of eager talk drifted to Philip’s ears; enough to make it plain that the new gold strike was responsible for the group gathering and the excitement.

“I’ll bet a hen worth fifty dollars that Hank Neighbors--that big cuss leanin’ up ag’inst the bar--knows who struck it, and whereabouts it’s located,” was one of the remarks that he overheard; and, glancing back from the door, he saw the man to whom the reference was made--a tall, loose-jointed man, with deep-set, gloomy eyes and a curling brown beard that masked something more than half of his face.

Upon leaving the hotel, Bromley led the way down Harrison Avenue toward a restaurant not far from the stable where their outfit waited for them. With the mining excitement now at its most populous height, and the sidewalks filled with restless throngs of men, there was curiously little street disorder; this though the saloons, dance-halls and gaming rooms of a wide-open mining-camp city were running full blast, their garishly lighted entrances lacking even the customary slatted swing doors of concealment. For the greater part, the crowds were good-natured and boisterously hilarious; and where the not too infrequent drunken celebrator came weaving along, the sidewalk jostlers gave him room, shouting such encouragements as “Walk a chalk, old boy!” or “Go it while you’re young--when you’re old you can’t!” One of the staggerers who bumped against Philip and his partner was repeating monotonously: “’Rah for Jimmie Garfield--canal boy, b’gosh--nexsht presh’dent!” an exotic injection of the politics of a campaign year into an atmosphere as remote as that of another planet from matters political or governmental.

In the side-street restaurant Philip chose a table in a corner and sat with his back to the wall so that he could see the length and breadth of the room. The hour was late, and the tables were no more than half filled; but where there were groups of two or more, there was eager talk.

“It’s here, too,” Philip commented in low tones, indicating the eager and evidently excited groups at the other tables.

“It is everywhere, just as I told you. The town is sizzling with it. When I was a little tad I used to sit goggle-eyed listening to the tales of a cousin of ours who was one of the returned California Forty-niners. I remember he said it was that way out there. A camp would be booming along fine, with everybody happy and contented, until word of a new strike blew in. Then the whole outfit would go wild and make a frantic dash for the new diggings. It’s lucky nobody has spotted us for the discoverers. We’d be mobbed.”

“I wish I could be sure we haven’t been spotted,” said Philip, a wave of misgiving suddenly submerging him.

“I think we are safe enough, thus far,” Bromley put in, adding: “But it was a mighty lucky thing that we came in after dark last night with those sacks of samples. If it had been daytime----”

The Chinese waiter was bringing their order, and Bromley left the subjunctive hanging in air. Philip sat back while the smiling Celestial was arranging the table. As he did so, the street door opened and closed and he had a prickling shock. The latest incomer was a tall man with sunken eyes and a curly brown beard masking his face; the man who had been leaning against the bar in the Harrison Avenue hotel, and who had been named as Hank Neighbors.

“What is it--a ghost?” queried Bromley, after the Chinaman had removed himself.

“It is either a raw coincidence--or trouble,” Philip returned. “A fellow who was in the bar-room of the hotel as we passed through has just come in. He is sitting at a table out there by the door and looking the room over ... and trying to give the impression that he isn’t.”

“Do you think he has followed us?”

“It is either that or a coincidence; and I guess we needn’t look very hard for coincidences at this stage of the game.”

“Don’t know who he is, do you?”

“No, but I know his name. It’s Neighbors. Just as we were leaving the hotel, one of the bar-room crowd named him; pointed him out to his fellow gossips as a man who probably knew who had made the new gold strike, and where it is located.”

“Well,” Bromley began, “if there is only one of him----”

“If there is one, there will be more,” Philip predicted. Then, at a sudden prompting of the primitive underman: “I wish to goodness we had something more deadly than that old navy revolver we’ve been lugging around all summer.”

Bromley’s smile was cherubic.

“As it happens, we are perfectly well prepared to back our judgment--at Mr. Drew’s suggestion. Our arsenal now sports a couple of late model Winchesters, with the ammunition and saddle holsters therefor. I bought ’em and sneaked ’em down to the stable this afternoon.”

Philip looked up with narrowed eyes. “Would you fight for this chance of ours if we’re pushed to it, Harry?”

Bromley laughed.

“I’ll shoot any man’s sheep that’ll try to bite me. Have you ever doubted it?”

“I didn’t know.”

“How about you?”

“I have never fired a rifle in my life; not at anything--much less at a man. But if I had to----”

“I know,” said Bromley with a grin. “You’re a chip off the old Puritan block. If the occasion should arise, you’d tell your New England conscience to look the other way, take cold-blooded aim, pull trigger and let the natural law of expanding gases take its course. But we mustn’t be too blood-thirsty. If we are followed to-night it needn’t be a foregone conclusion that the trailers are going to try to take our mine away from us. It is much more likely they’ll be tagging along to do a little hurry stake-driving of their own, after we’ve shown them the place.”

Philip had drained his second cup of coffee. “If you are through?” he said; and as they left the restaurant he shot a quick glance aside at the man who either was, or was not, a coincidence. To all appearances, suspicion had no peg to hang upon. The Neighbors person was eating his supper quietly, and he did not look up as they passed him on their way to the street.

At the stable they found Drew’s man; a young fellow who looked like a horse-wrangler, and who dressed the part, even to a pair of jingling Mexican spurs with preposterous rowels, and soft leather boots with high heels.

“Everything lovely and the goose hangs high,” he told them; and as they were leading the loaded jacks and the saddle animals out: “The big boss said I was to ride herd on yuh till yuh got out o’ town. He allowed it’d be safer if yuh didn’t go pee-radin’ down the Avenoo.”

In silence they followed their mounted guide through the lower part of the town and so came, by a rather long and dodging detour, into the rutted stage road at some distance beyond the last of the houses. Here their pace-setter turned back and they went on alone. It was a moonless night, but they had no trouble in following the well-used road over the hills and down to the valley of the Arkansas.

At the river crossing, however, the difficulties began. Though hardly more than a mountain creek at this short distance from its source, the river still held hazards in places for a night crossing with loaded pack animals, and it was some little time before they found the shallows through which they had led the burros the previous evening. Just as they reached and recognized the crossing place they heard the sound of galloping hoofs, and Philip jerked his rifle out of its saddle scabbard and began to fumble the breech mechanism.

“Don’t shoot!” Bromley warned; and when the single horseman closed up they saw that he was the guide who had piloted them out of Leadville.

“Sashayed out to tell yuh there’s a bunch a-trailin’ yuh,” he announced laconically. “Five of ’em, with Hank Neighbors headin’ the procession. Must’ve got onto yuh, some way.”

“Did you see them?” Philip asked.

“Passed ’em as I was goin’ back, and circled round to get ahead of ’em.”

“What sort of a man is this Neighbors?”

“Minin’ man, is what he lets on to be.”

“Straight or crooked?”

“You can’t prove nothin’ by me. But if I was you-all, I’d try to make out to lose him and his pardners in the shuffle somewheres betwixt here and wherever it is you’re a-headin’ for. I shore would.”

“Have they horses?” Bromley inquired.

“Yep; and three jacks, packed same as yourn.”

“Then they can’t make any better time than we can,” Philip put in.

“That depends on how much time yuh make and how much yuh lose. But that don’t make no difference. They can trail yuh, if yuh don’t figger out some trick to throw ’em off.”

“Are they armed?” Philip asked.

The horse-wrangler chuckled at the tenderfoot naïveté of the question.

“Folks don’t trail round much in this neck o’ woods without totin’ their artillery. Leastways, a _hombre_ like Hank Neighbors don’t. Far as that goes, you-all seem to be pretty well heeled yourselves.”

“We’ll try to hold up our end of the log,” Philip boasted. Then: “If they’re chasing us, I guess we’d better be moving along. Much obliged for your trouble--till you’re better paid. Get hold of that canary’s halter, Harry, and we’ll pitch out.”

The river crossing was made in safety, and, to their great relief, they had little difficulty in finding their way to the high basin. Since the trail threaded a dry gulch for the greater part of the ascent, there were only a few stretches where they had to dismount and lead the horses, so not much time was lost. Nevertheless, it was past midnight when they reached the easier travelling through the basin toward the pass of the crusted snowdrifts. Riding abreast where the trail permitted, they herded the jacks before them, pushing on at speed where they could, and slowing up only in places where haste threatened disaster.

“What’s your notion, Phil?” Bromley asked, when, in the dark hour preceding the dawn, they found themselves at the foot of the precipitous climb to the pass. “Don’t you think we’d better camp down and wait for daylight before we tackle this hill?”

Philip’s reply was an emphatic negative. “We can make it; we’ve got to make it,” he declared. “If those people are chasing us, they can’t be very far behind, and if we stop here they’ll catch up with us. And if we let them do that, we’d never be able to shake them off.”

“As you like,” Bromley yielded, and the precipitous ascent was begun.

With anything less than tenderfoot inexperience for the driving power, and the luck of the novice for a guardian angel, the perilous climb over a trail that was all but invisible in the darkness would never have been made without disaster. Convinced by the first half-mile of zigzagging that two men could not hope to lead five animals in a bunch over an ascending trail which was practically no trail at all, they compromised with the necessities and covered the distance to the summit of the pass twice; once to drag the reluctant broncos to the top, and again to go through the same toilsome process with the still more reluctant pack animals. It was a gruelling business in the thin, lung-cutting air of the high altitude, with its freezing chill; and when it was finished they were fain to cast themselves down upon the rocky summit, gasping for breath and too nearly done in to care whether the animals stood or strayed, and with Bromley panting out, “Never again in this world for little Henry Wigglesworth! There’ll be a railroad built over this assassinating mountain range some fine day, and I’ll just wait for it.”

“Tough; but we made it,” was Philip’s comment. “We’re here for sunrise.”

The assertion chimed accurately with the fact. The stars had already disappeared from the eastern half of the sky, and the sharply outlined summits of the distant Park Range were visible against the rose-tinted background of the coming dawn. In the middle distance the reaches of the great basin came slowly into view, and in the first rays of the rising sun the ground over which they had stumbled in the small hours of the night spread itself map-like below them. Far down on the basin trail a straggling procession of creeping figures revealed itself, the distance minimizing its progress so greatly that the movement appeared to be no more than a snail’s pace.

“You see,” Philip scowled. “If we had camped at the foot of this hill it would have been all over but the swearing.”

Bromley acquiesced with a nod. “You are right. What next?”

“We have our lead now and we must hold it at all costs--get well down into the timber on the western slope before they can climb up here. Are you good for more of the same?”

“A bit disfigured, but still in the ring,” said the play-boy, with his cheerful smile twisting itself, for very weariness, into a teeth-baring grin. Then, as the sunlight grew stronger, he made a binocular of his curved hands and looked back over the basin distances. As he did so, the twisted smile became a chuckling laugh. “Take another look at that outfit on the trail, Phil,” he said. “It’s my guess that they have a pair of field-glasses and have got a glimpse of us up here.”

Philip looked, and what he saw made him scramble to his feet and shout at the patient jacks, lop-eared and dejected after their long night march. The group on the distant trail was no longer a unit. Three of the dots had detached themselves from the others and were coming on ahead--at a pace which, even at the great distance, defined itself as a fast gallop.

VI

WITH the vanguard of the army of eager gold-hunters fairly in sight, the two who were pursued cut the summit breathing halt short and resumed their flight. Avoiding the sand-covered snowdrifts in which they had come to grief on the journey out, they pushed on down the western declivities at the best speed the boulder-strewn slopes and craggy descents would permit, postponing the breakfast stop until they reached a grassy glade well down in the foresting where the animals could graze.

After a hasty meal made on what prepared food they could come at easily in the packs, and without leaving the telltale ashes of a fire, they pressed on again westward and by early afternoon were in the mountain-girt valley of the stream which had been their guide out of the western wilderness two days earlier. Again they made a cold meal, watered and picketed the animals, and snatched a couple of hours for rest and sleep. Scanting the rest halt to the bare necessity, mid-afternoon found them once more advancing down the valley, with Philip, to whom horseback riding was a new and rather painful experience, leading his mount.

One by one, for as long as daylight lasted, the urgent miles were pushed to the rear, and after the sun had gone behind the western mountains they made elaborately cautious preparations for the night. A small box canyon, well grassed, opened into the main valley on their left, and in this they unsaddled the horses and relieved the jacks of their packs and picketed the animals. Then, taking the needed provisions from one of the packs, they crossed the river by jumping from boulder to boulder in its bed, and made their camp fire well out of sight in a hollow on the opposite bank; this so that there might be no camp signs on the trail side of the stream. But in the short pipe-smoking interval which they allowed themselves after supper, Bromley laughed and said: “I guess there is a good bit of the ostrich in human nature, after all, Philip. Here we’ve gone to all sorts of pains to keep from leaving the remains of a camp fire in sight, when we know perfectly well that we are leaving a plain trail behind us for anybody who is even half a woodsman to follow. That’s a joke!”

“Of course it is,” Philip agreed; and for a time before they extinguished the fire and recrossed the river to roll up in their blankets in the box canyon where the animals were grazing, they discussed the pressing matter of trail effacement without reaching any practical solution of the problem.

The next morning they were up and on their way in the earliest dawn twilight. As yet, there were no signs of the pursuit. The mountain silences were undisturbed save by the drumming thunder of the swift little river and the soft sighing of the dawn precursor breeze in the firs. Convinced that all the haste they were making was clearly so much effort thrown away unless they could devise some means of throwing their followers off the track, they resumed the camp-fire discussion, falling back in the end, not upon experience, which neither of them had, but upon the trapper-and-Indian tales read in their boyhood. In these, running water was always the hard-pressed white man’s salvation in his flight, and, like the fleeing trapper, they had their stream fairly at hand. But the mountain river, coursing along at torrent speed, and with its bed thickly strewn with slippery boulders, was scarcely practicable as a roadway; it was too hazardous even for the sure-footed broncos, and entirely impossible for the loaded jacks.

Next, they thought of cutting up one of the pack tarpaulins and muffling the hoofs of the animals with the pieces, but aside from the time that would be wasted, this expedient seemed too childish to merit serious consideration. In the end, however, chance, that sturdy friend of the hard-pressed and the inexperienced, came to their rescue. Some seven or eight miles beyond their night camp they came upon a place where, for a half-mile or more, the left-hand bank of the stream was a slope of slippery, broken shale; the tail of a slide from the mountain side above. Bromley was the first to see the hopeful possibilities.

“Wait a minute, Phil,” he called to his file leader; “don’t you remember this slide, and how we cursed it when we had to tramp through it coming out? I’ve captured an idea. I believe we can delay this mob that’s chasing us, and maybe get rid of it for good and all. Is the river fordable here, do you think?”

Philip’s answer was to ride his horse into the stream and half-way across it. “We can make it,” he called back, “if we can keep the jacks from being washed away.”

“We’ll take that for granted,” said Bromley. “But we don’t need to go all the way across. Stay where you are, and I’ll herd the rest of the caravan in and let it drink.”

This done, and a plain trail thus left leading into the water, Bromley explained his captured idea. While they couldn’t hope to make a roadway of the stream bed for any considerable distance, it was quite possible to wade the animals far enough down-stream to enable them to come out upon the shale slide. After they had been allowed to drink their fill, the expedient was tried and it proved unexpectedly successful. On the shale slide the hoof prints vanished as soon as they were made, each step of horse or burro setting in motion a tiny pebble slide that immediately filled the depression. Looking back after they had gone a little distance they could see no trace of their passing.

“This ought to keep the mob guessing for a little while,” Bromley offered as they pushed on. “They’ll see our tracks going down into the creek, and think we crossed over. They’ll probably take a tumble to themselves after a while--after they fail to find any tracks on the other side; but it will hold ’em for a bit, anyway. Now if we could only scare up some way of hiding our tracks after we get beyond this slide----”

Though the continuing expedient did not immediately suggest itself, the good-natured god of chance was still with them. Before they came upon ground where the tracks of the animals would again become visible, they approached the mouth of one of the many side gulches scarring the left-hand mountain, and in the gulch there was a brawling mountain brook with a gravelly bottom.

“This looks as if it were made to order, don’t you think?” said Philip, drawing rein at the gulch mouth. “If we turn up this gulch we can walk the beasts in the water.”

“But that isn’t the way we want to go,” Bromley objected.

“I’m not so sure about that. The map shows our valley lying on the other side of this southern mountain range. The route we took, coming out, was along two sides of a triangle, following the streams--which is the long way around. I’m wondering if we couldn’t cut straight across and save a lot of time. We’ve climbed worse mountains than this one looks to be. And there’s another thing: we can take the water trail up this gulch for a starter, and the chances are that we’d lose the hue and cry that’s following us--lose it permanently. What do you say?”

“I’m good for a try at it, if you are,” was the prompt reply; and so, without more ado, the route was changed.