Part 6

For the first half-mile or so through the windings of the gulch they were able to hide their tracks in the brook bed, but the farther they went, the rougher the way became, until finally they had to drag the horses and pack animals up out of the ravine and take to the mountain slopes, zigzagging their way upward as best they could through the primeval forest. Luckily, though there were craggy steeps to be climbed with shortened breath, perilous slides to be avoided, and canyon-like gulches to be headed at the price of long detours, they encountered no impassable obstacles, and evening found them far up in the forest blanketing of the higher slopes, with still some little picking of grass for the stock and with plenty of dry wood for the camp fire which they heaped high in the comforting assurance that its blaze would not now betray them.

It was after they had cooked and eaten their first hearty meal of the toilsome day, and had stretched themselves luxuriously before the fire for the evening tobacco-burning, that Bromley said: “How about it, Philip?--are you getting a bit used to the millionaire idea by this time?”

Philip shook his head slowly.

“No, Harry; I can’t fully realize it yet. For a little while after I saw the figures of those assays I thought I could. But now it seems more like an opium dream. It doesn’t seem decently credible that after only a short summer’s knocking about in these hills, two raw green-horns like ourselves could stumble upon something that may change the entire scheme of things for both of us for the remainder of our lives. It’s fairly grotesque, when you come to think of it.”

“Well, I guess it isn’t a dream, at any rate. Mr. Drew gave me a good bit of his time day before yesterday; went with me to the land office, and afterward helped me in the horse market where I bought the extra burro. He asked a lot of questions; about the width of the vein, how far we had traced it, and how fair or unfair we’d been to ourselves in picking the samples; and after I had answered him as well as I could, he said, in effect, that we had the world by the neck, or we would have, if the ‘Little Jean’ pans out anywhere near as good as it promises to.”

Again Philip shook his head. “I’m not at all sure that I want to grab the world by the neck, Harry. That doesn’t seem like much of an ambition to me.”

“All right; say it doesn’t. What then?”

“Oh, I don’t know. If the miracle had happened a year or so ago ... but it didn’t; so what’s the use?”

“Go on and turn it loose,” Bromley encouraged. “Set the clock back a year or so and let us see what it strikes.”

“I had a few ideals then; modest ones, I guess you’d call them. I’d had to break my college course in the third year--family matters. At that time I wanted nothing so much as to go back and finish; and perhaps have a try for a Ph.D. degree afterward.”

“And past that?”

“More of what you’d call the modesties, I guess: a teaching job in some college back home, or something of that sort; a job in which I’d have some leisure for reading, thinking my own thoughts, living my own life.”

“No wife and kiddies in the picture?” Bromley asked, with his most disarming smile.

“No; not then.”

The play-boy laughed softly. “No sentimental foolishness for the austere young student and pedagogue, of course. But the ‘not then’ tells a different story. You’ve met the incomparable ‘her’ in your later avatar?”

It was some measure of the distance he had come on the road to freer human expression that Philip did not at once retreat into the speechless reticences.

“Yes,” he said: “I’ve met a girl.”

“The ‘angel’ you spoke of, the night you fed a hungry hold-up?”

“Don’t get it wrong. She is not so angelic that she can’t be perfectly human.”

“But didn’t you say you’d met her only twice?”

“I did; and the saying still holds true.”

“Bowled you over like a shot, did she? I’d never have believed it of you, Philip.”

“You needn’t believe it now. There was no ‘bowling over’ about it. I first met her on the train coming to Denver--with her family; sat with her for part of an afternoon. She isn’t like any other girl I’ve ever known.”

“And that is as far as you’ve gone? You are a cold-blooded fish, Philip, dear. But we were talking about futures. I take it the teaching job in a New England college doesn’t appeal to you now; or won’t if our mine keeps its promise?”

“Honestly, Harry, I can’t see very far ahead. I’m not at all sure that I want to go back and finish my college course. There is nothing truer than the saying we have hurled at us all the time out here--that the West lays hold of a man and refuses to let go; that you may be as homesick as the devil, but you’ll never go home to stay. But this is all dream stuff--this talk. We haven’t got the millions yet. Even if the mine is as rich as it seems to be, we may find jumpers in possession, and so many of them that we can’t get away with them.”

“That’s so. ‘There’s many a slip,’ as we read in the copy-books.”

For a time the high-mountain silence, a silence curiously bereft of even the small insect shrillings of the lower altitudes, enveloped them. The cheerful fire was beginning to fall into embers when Philip began again.

“A while back, you thought the money fever was getting hold of me, Harry, but I hope you were wrong. Of course, there are things I want to do; one in particular that money would help me to do. It was my main reason for heading west from New Hampshire a little less than a year ago.”

“Is it something you can talk about?”

“I guess so--to you,” and, breaking masterfully through whatever barrier of the reticences remained, he told the story of his father’s disappearance, of the cloud which still shadowed the Trask name, of his own unshakable belief in his father’s innocence, and, lastly, of his determination to find the lost man and to clear the family name.

“You see how the money will help; how I couldn’t hope to do much of anything without money and the use of my own time,” he said in conclusion. Then, the ingrained habit of withdrawal slipping back into its well-worn groove: “You won’t talk about this, Harry? You are the only person this side of New Hampshire who knows anything about it.”

“It is safe enough with me, Phil; you ought to know that, by this time. And here is my shy at the thing: if it so happens that the ‘Little Jean’ is only flirting with us--that we get only a loaf of bread where we’re hoping to hog the whole bakery--you may have my share if your own isn’t big enough to finance your job. I owe you a good bit more than the ‘Little Jean’ will ever pan out on my side of the partnership.”

“Oh, hell,” said Philip; and the expression was indicative of many things not written down in the book of the Philip who, a few months earlier, had found it difficult and boyishly embarrassing to meet a strange young woman on the common ground of a chance train acquaintanceship. Then, “If you’ve smoked your pipe out, we’d better roll in. There is more of the hard work ahead of us for to-morrow.”

But the next morning they found, upon breaking camp and emerging from the forest at timber line, that the blessing of good luck was with them still more abundantly. With a thousand and one chances to miss it in their haphazard climb, they had come upon an easily practicable pass over the range; and beyond the pass there was a series of gentle descents leading them by the middle of the afternoon into a valley which they quickly recognized as their own.

Pushing forward at the best speed that could be gotten out of the loaded pack animals, they traversed the windings of the valley with nerves on edge and muscles tensed, more than half expecting to find a struggle for re-possession awaiting them in the treasure gulch. At the last, when the more familiar landmarks began to appear, Philip drew his rifle from its holster under his leg and rode on ahead to reconnoitre, leaving Bromley to follow with the jacks. But in a few minutes he came galloping back, waving his gun in the air and shouting triumphantly.

“All safe, just as we left it!” he announced as he rode up. And then, with a laugh that was the easing of many strains: “What a lot of bridges we cross before we come to them! Here we’ve been sweating blood for fear the claim had been jumped--or at least I have--and I don’t suppose there has been a living soul within miles of it since we left. Kick those canaries into action and let’s get along and make camp on the good old stamping ground.”

VII

THE autumn days were growing perceptibly shorter when the discoverers of the “Little Jean” lode began to make preparations to be snowed in for the winter in the western mountain fastnesses. By this time they had heard enough about the mountain winters to know what they were facing. With the first heavy snowfall blocking the passes they would be shut off from the world as completely as shipwrecked mariners on a desert island. But hardships which are still only anticipatory hold few terrors for the inexperienced; and with the comforting figures of the assays to inspire them, they thought more of the future spring and its promise than of the lonely and toilsome winter which must intervene.

Since there was still sufficient grass in sheltered coves and forest glades to feed the stock, they postponed the journey which one of them would have to take to find winter quarters for the animals. The delay was partly prudential. Though each added day of non-interference was increasing their hope that their ruse at the shale slide had been completely successful in throwing their pursuers off the track, they had no reason to assume that the Neighbors party would turn back without making an exhaustive search for the new “rich diggings”; and Philip was cannily distrustful of the Neighbors purpose.

“It may be just as you say: that they are merely hungry gold-chasers, breaking their necks to be the earliest stake-drivers in a new district; but then, again, they may not be,” was the way he phrased it for the less apprehensive Bromley. “If they happen to be the other sort--the lawless sort--well, with both of us here to stand up for our rights, they’d be five to our two. We can’t afford to make the odds five to one. I’d rather wait and take the horses and jacks over the range in a snow storm than to run the risk of losing our mine.”

“Meaning that we needn’t lose it if we can muster two to their five?” said Bromley, grinning.

“Meaning that if anybody tries to rob us there’ll be blood on the moon. Get that well ground into your system, Harry.”

“Ho! You are coming on nicely for a sober, peaceable citizen of well-behaved New England,” laughed the play-boy. “But see here, didn’t you tell me once upon a time that you had never fired a gun? If you really believe there is a chance for a row, you’d better waste a few rounds of ammunition finding out what a gun does when you aim it and pull the trigger. It’s likely to surprise you. I’ve shot ducks in the Maryland marshes often enough to know that pretty marksmanship is no heaven-born gift.”

“Thanks,” returned Philip grimly. “That is a sensible idea. Evenings, after we knock off work, we’ll set up a target and you can give me a few lessons.”

Making the most of the shortening days, they had become pioneers, felling trees for the building of a cabin, and breaking the two broncos, in such primitive harness as they could contrive out of the pack-saddle lashings, to drag the logs to a site near the tunnel mouth. Like the drilling and blasting, axe work and cabin building were unfamiliar crafts, to be learned only at a round price paid in the coin of aching backs, stiffened muscles and blistered palms. Nevertheless, at the end of a toiling fortnight they had a one-room cabin roofed in, chimneyed and chinked with clay, a rude stone forge built for the drill sharpening and tempering, and a charcoal pit dug, filled and fired to provide the forge fuel. And though the working days were prolonged to the sunset limit, Philip, methodically thorough in all things, did not fail to save enough daylight for the shooting lesson, setting up a target in the gulch and hammering away at it until he became at least an entered apprentice in the craft and was able to conquer the impulse to shut both eyes tightly when he pulled the trigger.

They were bunking comfortably in the new cabin when they awoke one morning to find the ground white with the first light snowfall. It was a warning that the time had come to dispose of the animals if they were not to be shut in and starved. In his talk with Bromley, Drew, the Leadville mine owner, had named a ranch near the mouth of Chalk Creek where the borrowed saddle horses could be left, and where winter feeding for the jacks might be bargained for; and after a hasty breakfast Philip prepared to set out on the three-days’ trip to the lower altitudes.

“I feel like a yellow dog, letting this herding job fall on you, Phil,” protested the play-boy, as he helped pack a haversack of provisions for the journey. “I’d make you draw straws for it if I had the slightest idea that I could find the way out and back by myself.”

“It’s a stand-off,” countered the potential herd-rider. “I feel the same way about leaving you to hold the fort alone. If that Leadville outfit should turn up while I’m away----”

“Don’t you worry about the Neighbors bunch. It’s been three full weeks, now, with no sign of them. They’ve lost out.”

“I’m not so sure of that. Better keep your eye peeled and not get too far away from the cabin. If they should drop in on you----”

“In that case I’ll man the battlements and do my small endeavors to keep them amused until you put in an appearance,” was the lighthearted rejoinder. “But you needn’t run your legs off on that account. They’ve given us up long ago.” Then, as Philip mounted and took the halter of the horse that was to be led: “Are you all set? Where’s that old pistol?”

“I don’t need the pistol. If I’ve got to walk back, lugging my own grub and blankets, I don’t want to carry any more weight than I have to.”

“Just the same, you’re going prepared to back your judgment,” Bromley insisted; and he brought out the holstered revolver and made Philip buckle it on. “There; that looks a little more shipshape,” he approved. “Want me to go along a piece and help you start the herd?”

“Nothing of the kind,” Philip refused; and thereupon he set out, leading the extra horse and driving the jacks ahead of him.

It was his intention to back-track over the trail by which they had first penetrated to their valley in the late summer, and being gifted with a fairly good sense of direction, he found his way to the foot of the first of the two enclosing mountain ranges without much trouble. But on the ascent to the pass the difficulties multiplied themselves irritatingly. The trail was blind and the snow was fetlock deep for the animals. The led horse was stubborn and hung back; and wherever a widening of the trail permitted, the jacks strayed and scattered. Philip’s temper grew short, and by the time he had reached the high, wind-blown, boulder-strewn notch which served as the pass over the spur range, he was cursing the scattering burros fluently and fingering the butt of the big revolver in an itching desire to bullet all three of them.

“Damn your fool hides!” he was yelling, oblivious of everything but the maddening impossibility of towing the reluctant bronco astern and at the same time keeping the long-eared stupidities ahead in any kind of marching order; “Damn your fool----”

He stopped short, swallowing the remainder of the shouting malediction and flushing shamefacedly under his summer coat of tan. Seated beside the trail on a flat-topped boulder from which the snow had been brushed was a thick-chested, bearded giant of a man making his much-belated midday meal on a sandwich of pan-bread and bacon; a grinning witness of the outbreak of ill-temper. As Philip drew rein the giant greeted him jovially.

“Howdy, pardner! Yuh must ’a’ had a heap o’ book-learnin’ to be fitten to cuss thataway. Don’t blame yuh, though. It’s one hell-sweatin’ job to herd canaries when they ain’t got no packs on ’em.”

Philip stared hard at the big man, his excellent memory for faces serving him slowly but surely. When he spoke it was to say: “People are always telling us this is a little world, and I’ll believe it, after this. Don’t you remember me?--and the K.P. train last spring?”

The thick-chested giant got upon his feet

“Well, I’ll be dawg-goned! Sure I ricollect! You’re the young feller I told to hump hisself and go sit with the li’l’ black-eyed gal that had the sick daddy. Put ’er there!” and he gave Philip’s hand a grip that made the knuckles crack.

Philip slid from the saddle, smiling a sheepish apology.

“Sorry I had to come on the scene swearing like an abandoned pirate, but these chicken-brained jacks have just about worn me out. Queer we should stumble upon each other in this God-forsaken place. Where do you come from?”

“Hoofed it up from the Aspen diggin’s. Aimin’ to get out o’ the woods afore I get snowed under and can’t. You ain’t had all the bad luck. Yiste’day I lost my canary, pack, blankets and all, in the Roarin’ Fork. Li’l’ cuss slipped and rolled into the creek and I didn’t get to save nothin’ but the old Winchester I was totin’ and a li’l’ bite o’ bread and meat I had in my pockets. Box o’ matches went with the hide and taller, and I’d ’a’ slep’ cold last night if I hadn’t run onto a bunch o’ Leadville men back yonder a piece and hunkered down afore their fire.”

Philip started at the mention of the Leadville men, but he deferred the question that rose instantly to his lips.

“You are going out by way of the pass over the main range at the head of Chalk Creek?” he asked.

“Aimin’ to get out thataway; yes.”

“All right; I’m headed that way, too, and, as you see, I have one more horse than I can ride. I’ll give you a lift, if you say so.”

The big man’s laugh was like the rumbling of distant thunder.

“If I say so? Say, young feller me lad, I ain’t got but one mouth, but I reckon if I had a dozen of ’em they’d all be sayin’ so at once,” he affirmed gratefully. “Want to pitch out right now?”

“No; I’ll eat first. Didn’t want to stop until I got to the top of the pass.”

Philip unslung his provision haversack and spread the contents on the flat rock. Over the meal, which he invited the wayfarer to share with him, he got the story of the bearded man’s summer; weary months of prospecting in the western slope wilderness with nothing to show for it, not even the specimens from the few putative discoveries he had made, since these had gone to the bottom of the Roaring Fork with the drowned burro.

“Hard luck,” Philip commented, when the brief tale of discouragement had been told. “What will you do now?”

“Same as every busted prospector does: hunt me a winter job in a smelter ’r stamp-mill and sweat at it till I get enough spondulix ahead to buy me another grub-stake.”

“Go to work as a day-laborer?”

“You’ve named it. Minin’s the only trade I know; and the mills ain’t payin’ miner’s wages for shovelin’ ore into the stamps.”

“Why don’t you try for a job in one of the big mines?”

The giant’s laugh rumbled again.

“Not me--I ain’t that kind of a miner--ain’t wearing no brass collar for a corp’ration! Gone too long without it. But lookee here, you ain’t told me nothin’ about yerself. I didn’t allow you was aimin’ to turn into a mount’in man when I rid the cars with yuh last spring.”

“I wasn’t,” said Philip; and thereupon he gave a short account of the summer’s wanderings up to, but not including, the discovery of the “Little Jean,” and entirely omitting all mention of Bromley’s part in the wanderings. That his story did not explain his presence on the outward trail with two saddle horses, three jacks and no tools or camp equipment, he was well aware; but the canny traditions were warning him not to betray the carefully guarded secret of the “Little Jean” to a chance travelling companion.

“Tough luck, all round,” said the big man half absently; and Philip saw plainly enough that he was trying to fit the present moment’s inconsistencies into the story. Then: “Still and all, somebody’s had good luck over here in this hell’s back kitchen. I heard about it in the camp o’ them Leadville pardners last night.”

“What did you hear?” Philip asked, and his nerves were prickling.

“They said two young fellers, tenderfoots, both of ’em, hoofed it into Leadville two-three weeks ago with some stuff that run away up yonder in the assays--rotten quartz and free gold.”

“Well,” said Philip, still with nerves on edge, “that sort of thing is happening every day, isn’t it? What more did you hear?”

“They was talkin’ ’mongst theirselves--not to me. The news had leaked out, like it always does, and they’d trailed the young fellers, a ridin’ two broncs and herdin’ three loaded jacks, acrosst the range and over here. Then they’d lost the trail somehow. From what I picked up, I allowed they was aimin’ to stay till they found it ag’in, if it took all winter.”

Philip’s tongue was dry in his mouth when he said: “Whereabouts were these Leadville people camped?”

“About ten mile north, at the mouth of a li’l’ creek that runs into the Fork.”

There was one more question to be asked, and Philip was afraid to ask it. Yet he forced himself to give it tongue.

“You say you camped with these fellows last night. What kind of a crowd was it?”

The big prospector was staring at the three jacks and two horses as if he were mentally counting them.

“Jist betwixt you and me and the gate-post, it’s a sort o’ tough outfit. Hank Neighbors is headin’ it, and if half o’ what they tell about him is so, he’s plum bad medicine.”

“Not prospectors, then?”

“W-e-l-l, you might call ’em so; but I reckon they’re the kind that lets other folks do most o’ the hard work o’ findin’ and diggin’.”

“You mean they’re ‘jumpers’?”

“Least said’s soonest mended. But if I had a right likely prospect anywheres in these here hills, I’d shore hate like sin to have ’em run acrosst it.”

Philip’s resolve was taken upon the instant. From what had been said he knew precisely where the Neighbors camp was; it was only a few miles below the gulch of the “Little Jean”; so few that the campers may well have heard the crashes of the evening rifle practice. And Bromley was standing guard alone.

“See here,” he began, suddenly reversing all former resolutions of canny secrecy; “I don’t know you--don’t even know your name. But I believe you are an honest man, and I’m going to tell you something: I’m one of the tenderfoots Neighbors is trying to trail.”

The wayfaring prospector greeted the information with a wide-mouthed smile.

“Yuh didn’t hardly need to tell me that--with them five critturs standin’ there a-hangin’ their heads, and you without any camp stuff ’r tools, and with two saddle hosses where yuh didn’t need only one. What’s yer game?”

Being fairly committed now, Philip went the entire length--with nothing hopeful to build upon save the big miner’s rough chivalry as he had seen it manifested in the Kansas Pacific day-coach months before. Frankly filling the blanks he had left in his earlier account of the summer’s experiences, he wound up with an anxious question:

“What am I to do? I can’t go on and leave my partner to stand off this robber gang alone. They’ll find our claim before I could get back. It’s our own creek they’re camping on, right now!” Then: “You say you are going out by way of Chalk Creek. I have a little money left; it isn’t much, but it’s all yours if you’ll take these horses and jades out to Nachtrieb’s ranch in the South Park and leave them there. Then I can go back from here and take my share of what’s coming to us.”

The big man got up and brushed the crumbs from his clothes.