Part 9

“‘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.”

X

WITH the threat of the snow slides definitely removed, the routine of ore-digging was resumed. Deeper and deeper the tunnel was driven into the mountain, and each day saw the accumulation of ore and broken rock on the dump grow in proportion. Nothing was said by any one of the three about Garth’s night raid on the whiskey bottle; but Philip’s attitude toward the big miner was stiffer for the lapse--as Bromley’s was gentler. Since there was no more liquor in the stores, there were no more lapses; and no fault could be found with the way Garth spent himself in the drilling and shovelling, the ore-carrying and sorting.

After a fortnight of bright sunshine in January, with a thaw that merely compacted the surface of the great snow blanket without perceptibly thinning it, the cold weather came again; there were night temperatures that made the green logs of the cabin walls crack and snap with sounds like pistol shots, and the clay chinkings became broad lines of hoar frost--this though the fire on the hearth was never allowed to die down. With an ample supply of fuel they suffered little from the cold; but by the middle of February the provisions were running very low. Bromley’s turn at the cooking came in the final week of the month, and it was he who found the bottom of their last sack of potatoes.

“We can kiss the dear old Murphys good-by with this supper,” he announced cheerfully, as he shook up and salted the last boiling in the pot; adding: “And everything else in the chuck-hole is going the same way,” Then to Garth: “You know a lot more about these mountain winters than we do, Jim. How long is it going to be before we can break trail for Leadville?”

“Wish I knowed,” was the sober answer. “Two year ago it was the last o’ May afore you could get over the range on most o’ the trails.”

Bromley gave a low whistle. “Two months, and more, of this? In less than half that time we’ll be licking the skillet.”

Philip helped himself sparingly to the potatoes. “That means short rations,” he thrust in morosely. “We ought to have had sense enough to begin limiting ourselves long ago. Half quantities, from this time on, Harry.”

Accordingly, the rationing was begun with the next meal, and thereupon a grim battle with a foe hitherto unconfronted dragged its steadily weakening length through the days and weeks. Day after day they toiled doggedly in the tunnel, and night after night turned in hungry after the long hours of hard work. As the hunger grew upon them they fell silent; hours would pass without the exchange of a word; and a gloom, which was not to be dispelled even by Bromley’s gallant attempts at cheerfulness, settled down upon them.

It was in this famine time that the dour malady known as cabin madness began to show its grisly head; the sickness that seizes upon cabin dwellers shut in with one another and shut off from other human contacts. As his ancestry and rearing would postulate, Philip was the first to fall a victim to the splenetic mania, developing an increasing irritability, with Garth for its principal target. As the hunger pangs grew sharper, Bromley could see that the giant’s rough good nature was slowly breaking down under Philip’s harsh girdings; that a time was approaching in which surly bickerings would flare into open antagonism and violence; and he did his best to stave off the evil day.

Unhappily, his best was not good enough. The volcanic outburst came one evening while they were eating their scanty supper. Garth, who had dug his home-made skis out of the slide, had climbed to the slope above the mine to make sure that the tunnel portal and ore piles were not menaced by another avalanche. While he was about it, Philip, coming out of the mine to sharpen drills at the forge, had seen Garth working his way cautiously along the upper slope of the spur. At supper he flatly accused the mountain man of making an examination of the slide menace an excuse for staking off a claim of his own which would intersect the “Little Jean” at a certain depth in the hill.

“I’ve been keeping an eye on you!” he wound up harshly. “You may think because we’re tenderfoots we can’t see through a millstone when there’s a hole in it, but if you do, you’re missing it a thousand miles!”

“_Philip!_ You don’t know what you’re saying!” Bromley interposed quickly. “Jim’s all right. Why, good Lord!----”

“You keep out of it!” Philip snapped back angrily. “You may be blind but by God, I’m not!”

The big man was frowning sourly at his accuser.

“Say,” he growled in slow belligerence, “I been thinkin’, for quite a li’l’ spell, that the time was a-comin’ when I’d have to take yuh over my knee and larrup yuh a few. I reckon you’ve fetched it, now. You’re the first livin’ live man that ever told Big Jim Garth to his face that he wasn’t on the square; and when you say it, you’re a liar!”

Like a bolt from a crossbow, Philip hurled himself upon Garth, clearing the hewn slab that served as a table at a bound. The attack was so sudden that the big man was toppled off the block of wood upon which he was sitting, and the two went down in a fierce clinch. Bromley sprang up and strove to separate the combatants as they rolled over and over upon the earth floor, striking and clutching madly at each other. But the half-rations upon which they had all been starving for weeks proved the better, or at least the more effectual, peacemaker. Breathless exhaustion came speedily to both men to make the frenzied struggle degenerate into a mere beating of the air; and when a sullen peace had been patched up through Bromley’s urgings, Philip staggered outdoors to hold a handful of snow to an eye that had stopped a blow from Garth’s fist in the brief battle.

The aftermath of this savage flare-up marked an abysmal difference in the characteristics of the two men; rather, perhaps, it served to mark the distance Philip had come on the road to moral disintegration. Having fought it out with his accuser in some sort, the rough frontiersman was willing to let bygones be bygones; and he tried patiently, in a blundering way, to make this plain. But Philip held stubbornly aloof. With the cabin madness still souring in his veins he had less and less to say to either of his fellow sufferers, and his attitude toward Garth continued to be suspiciously hostile.

It was in the latter part of April, when the snow blanket had begun to shrink visibly under the rays of the mounting sun, and the creek in the valley had burst its icy bonds and was running bank full, that they came to the famine end of things. A fortnight earlier even the short working shifts in the mine to which weakness had reduced them had been discontinued, and for days Garth, slipping and sliding on his home-made skis had been going forth with his rifle in search of food, only to return at night empty-handed and with the same growling lament.

“I’m jist so razzle-dazzled an’ no-account I ain’t fittin’ to do nothin’ no more! They’s deer a-plenty in these here mount’ins--I see ’em every day; but I can’t see to shoot straight; never will get one less’n it lets me come close enough to grab it by the neck and choke it to death!”

With the beginning of the last week in April the losing battle with hunger had become a grim waiting game, with their final reserves of endurance pitted against the chance of the weather. If the thawing weather should continue, if there should be no more storms, a few more days might make foot travel over the passes possible. But even so, the forty miles of snowy wilderness to be traversed loomed dismayingly. Could they, in their weakened condition, fight their way out over the slippery trails? It was an open question, and one which Philip, in whom the cabin madness had now reached the stage of hopeless dejection, answered in a gloomy negative.

“What’s the use of talking that way, Harry?” he raged weakly--this on a day when Garth had once more gone out to waste powder and lead. “You know well enough we couldn’t make five miles a day in the condition we’re in now.” Then, with a jeering laugh: “This is the end of it.... With gold enough up there on the dump to sink a ship, we’re starving to death. With a world full of food only thirty or forty miles away, we can’t buy enough to keep us alive until the snows go.”

But Bromley, cheerful to the last, refused to be daunted. “While there’s life, there’s hope,” he insisted. “The snow is melting fast now.”

“It doesn’t make any difference to us how fast it melts; you and I will never leave this gulch alive, Harry. As I’ve said, neither one of us could tramp five miles in a day, even over a level trail. It’s the end.”

“You say ‘you and I’. Big Jim doesn’t complain much, but he is as badly off as either of us.”

Philip, propped in his bunk, rocked his head on the blanket pillow.

“I don’t trust Garth,” he muttered. “One of these days, when he is sure we’re too nearly dead to try to trail him, he’ll go and we’ll never see him again.”

“Oh, give us a rest!” snapped Bromley, losing, for once in a way, the cheerful equanimity which had enabled him to grapple sanely, thus far, with the hardships and deprivations, “I wouldn’t have your narrow angle on humanity for all the gold there is in the ‘Little Jean’! Why, good Lord, man!--Jim has been loyalty itself, from start to finish! You’ve simply got a crooked convolution in your brain, Philip!”

“Call it what you like; he’ll go, just the same. You’ll see. And after he’s given us time to die properly, he’ll come back and take over the mine.”

Bromley gave it up and crept from his bunk to the hearth to get a light for his pipe, tobacco being the only provision supply that was not completely exhausted. As the day wore away, the echo of distant rifle shots penetrated to the cabin interior from time to time, but the sounds meant nothing more to them than that Garth was trying again, as he had heretofore, to kill something for the pot; trying and failing, as a matter of course.

The sun had gone down and a cloudy twilight was filling the gulch with shadows when Garth returned, dragging the hind quarters of a deer after him. Gaunt, bush-bearded and long-haired, the giant was by this time a mere bony framework of a man; and as he sank down upon his bunk he was gasping for breath and whimpering like a hurt child.

“I got a doe, after the longest,” he choked; “an’ then I had to go an’ leave most o’ the meat for the coyotes and buzzards--durn ’em--’cause I couldn’t tote it home! Time was when I could’ve took that li’l’ doe across my shoulders and brought her in whole; but I ain’t no damn’ good no more whatsoever!”

Bromley stumbled hastily out of his bunk.

“What’s that?--no good, did you say? By Jove, you’ve saved our lives, just the same, old-timer! Don’t you worry a minute about what you had to leave for the dogs and birds; half a deer is better than no meat. You just stretch yourself out and rest your face and hands--and you, too, Phil. I’ll call you both when supper’s ready.”

For the first time in many days they had a full meal for supper, and under the stimulus of a couple of juicy venison steaks, hot from the broiling twig, even Philip came out of his shell of hopelessness and joined in the discussion of the ways and means of escape. It was Garth who set the hopeful pace.

“With a couple o’ days feedin’ up, I believe we can try it,” he ventured. “Snow’s deep yit, but it’s thawin’ days and freezin’ nights so ’t there’s a crust early mornin’s that’ll hold a man. Weather’s the only thing I’m afeard of.”

“Oh, good Lord!” Bromley groaned. “Don’t tell us there’s more snow coming!”

The giant wagged his beard. “Looks mighty like it, over on the western ranges. And the sun come up fire-red this mornin’. If it’ll only hold off for a day ’r so, till we get a li’l’ stren’th in our bones....”

But the next morning when they turned out, the storm had come, silently and as a thief in the night; there was half a foot of fresh snow in their tiny dooryard, and the feathery flakes were still sifting down endlessly from gray skies with no signs of a break in them. After breakfast, Philip went back to his bunk and turned his face to the wall, leaving Bromley and Garth to wash the dishes and shovel the snow out of the small areaway.

“Winter’s been sort o’ hard on that pardner o’ yourn,” Garth remarked, stopping to beat the snow from his battered hat. “Looks like he’d sort o’ lost his sand lately.”

“We’re both tenderfoots, you must remember,” said the loyal play-boy. “It’s all new to both of us, Jim. But Phil will come out all right.” Then: “What is this fresh snow storm going to do to us?”

“Depends on how long it’s goin’ to keep up. There’s enough now to block the trails for another week ’r so. I was afeard it was comin’.”

“Well, we have meat enough to last for a while, anyhow,” Bromley put in hopefully. “And that’s thanks to you, Jim. We won’t say die till we’re dead.”

All through the day the gray skies held their own and the snow sifted down as though it would never stop. By nightfall the six inches of new blanketing had grown to a foot, and the prospect of escape had withdrawn into a remote distance. When Bromley raked the coals out and made ready to broil the supper steaks, he was the only one of the three who preserved even a semblance of cheerfulness. Philip was cursing the weather bitterly; and Garth, stretched out in his bunk with a cold pipe clamped between his teeth, was scarcely more companionable.

It was while the venison was sizzling over the coals that Bromley cocked an ear and said: “Listen!” Into the silence thus commanded came the muffled hoofbeats of a horse and then a shout of “Hello, the cabin!” from without. Garth sprang up to unbar the door, and Philip reached for a rifle, gasping out, “It’s Neighbors again!”

But the stocky figure that appeared in the doorway was not that of the leader of the jumpers; it was a far more welcome apparition--the figure of the man who, up to that time, had bought, sold and operated more mines than any other promoter in Colorado--Stephen Drew.

“Well, well!” he said, coming in to shake the snow from his poncho and to stamp it from his feet, “I thought I’d find you somewhere up in this gulch! Found out what old winter can do to you in the Rockies, haven’t you?” and he shook hands with the exiles, and not less heartily with Garth than with the two younger men, saying: “You here, too, Jim? If I had known that, I wouldn’t have been quite so anxious about these two young tenderfoots.”

Philip sat down on his bunk and he was gasping again.

“Are--are the trails open, Mr. Drew?” he stammered.

“They were day before yesterday, when we crossed the main range, but they will be blocked again for a few days, now. However, that doesn’t matter. I knew you must be running short of supplies, so I brought a pack train along. I left the outfit making camp in the valley below and rode on ahead to see if I could locate you.”

Bromley laughed happily.

“You look like an angel out of heaven to us, Mr. Drew,” he bubbled. “We’d eaten the last of our grub-stake and were starving when Jim killed a deer and saved our lives. How did you find the way in?”

The promoter planted himself comfortably upon Garth’s bunk, and he was smiling genially when he said: “We had to use a little diplomacy. One of the Neighbors gang took one drink too many and spilled the beans. We got hold of him and gave him his choice between going to jail and coming along with us as a guide. He’s with the outfit now. But tell me--have you got a mine to show me?”

It was Garth who got in the first word about the “Little Jean.”

“You’re shoutin’,” he said. “These boys’ve got a li’l’ bonanza, right! There’s enough rich, free-millin’ ore on the dump to run you crazy. We’re in a good piece on the vein, and she’s a-holdin’ up like a lady. All these boys is a-needin’ now is somebody to back ’em with a li’l’ capital, and----”

“Easy, Jim,” laughed the promoter; “I know the color of your paints. But never mind,”--this to Philip and Bromley. “If you’ve got something that measures half-way up to those assays you had made last fall, I’m ready to talk turkey with you. But we’ll have to talk fast and work fast--if we want to protect ourselves. The rush for the new diggings isn’t more than a day’s march behind us on the trail we’ve broken over the range, and when it comes, we’ll be swamped. Jim, you old mossback, see if you can’t carve a couple more steaks off that deer bone and broil them for me. I’m as hungry as a hunter.”

XI

THOUGH it was now well into the summer edge of spring for the lower altitudes, a late snow had fallen during the night, and the Continental Divide, framed in the window where Philip was sitting, was clothed in virgin white. In the street below, the snow had already been trampled into a grimy batter by the hoofs and wheels of laboring streams of traffic. Philip looked down upon the busy street scene, trying vainly to realize that this teeming, throbbing, palpitant mining-camp city of thirty-five or forty thousand souls was less than three years old; that, only three backward turnings of the calendar in the past, the marvelous treasure beds in its swelling hills were barely getting themselves discovered.

From such contemplation of the material marvel his thoughts turned inward. For the better part of a year, and with only the brief autumn visit to the great wonder camp to break the wilderness monotonies, he had been an exile with all the familiar human contacts dissevered; it had been a period during which, for him and Bromley, the moving world had ceased to exist. He was just now beginning to apprehend the complete totality of the time eclipse. In the lost interval an exciting national political campaign had run its course, Garfield had been elected president, and his inauguration had taken place; all this without disturbing, by so much as the turning of a leaf, the cosmic procession of the weeks and months in the mountain fastnesses, or recording itself in any way upon the pages of great Nature’s book of the unpeopled immensities.

In the more intimate and personal relations there had been a corresponding break. Never more than a desultory letter-writer, he had sent a card to his mother and sisters in New Hampshire on the occasion of his former trip to Leadville, telling them not to write again until they should hear from him--that he expected to be out of reach of the mails for the duration of the winter. Hence, there had been no home letters awaiting him when he emerged from the western wilderness; nothing to help bridge the separating chasm of the months.

In the few days that had elapsed since his return to Leadville he had been making determined but futile efforts to close the gap; to regard the year of exile as an incident, and to take up the normal thread of life where he had dropped it the preceding spring. The discovery that this could not be done--that the change from flannel shirt, corduroys and miner’s boots to civilized clothes, and from a log cabin in the wilds to a comfortable hotel in the great mining-camp, wrought no miracle of readjustment--was confusing. Was the curious inner consciousness of a changed point of view merely a step forward in character development? Or had the step been taken in the opposite direction--into the region of things primitive and baldly disillusioning? He could not tell; and the inability to make the distinction was strangely disturbing. When the attempt to account for his present mental attitude became a fatiguing strain, he twisted his chair from the window to make it face the scene in the handsomely furnished business office.

At a table in the middle of the room, Bromley, garmented as a gentleman of leisure and wearing his good clothes with an easy and accustomed grace that Philip envied, was talking in low tones with a stockily built man whose dark eyes, heavy brows and aquiline nose gave his features a Jewish cast. Half absently Philip, compared the two faces: Bromley’s high-bred, animated, impishly youthful; Stephen Drew’s strong, kindly--the face of a man whose generous dealings with his friends and business associates had given him a notability as marked as that of the lavish spenders who were making the name of the Colorado “lucky-strike” miner a synonym for all that was fantastic and extravagant.

The moment, as Philip tried, rather ineffectually, to realize, was epochal. Drew and his party of experts had spent a fortnight at the “Little Jean,” exploring, testing, estimating the probable extent of the ore body and preparing samples for additional assays. And now, as the net result, at the farther end of the business office Drew’s attorney was dictating to a young clerk whose pen was flying rapidly over the pages of legal cap paper--using the pen, though one of the new writing machines lately come into use stood on its iron-legged table within easy reach.

After a time the lawyer came to the table in the middle of the room with the finished document in his hands and ran through its provisions with his client and Bromley. Drew nodded and dipped a pen, looking up to say to Philip: “All right, Mr. Trask; if you’ll come and look this over----”

Philip dragged his chair to the table and read the paper Drew passed to him. It was an agreement defining the duties, responsibilities, undertakings and emoluments of the three principals in the “Little Jean”; namely, the two discoverers and the man who was furnishing the working capital; and its provisions were simple and straightforward. On his part the promoter undertook to develop the mine, paying an equitable royalty to the discoverers, the royalty provision including a liberal cash advance.

“I think that is about as we talked,” Drew said. “If you and Mr. Bromley are agreeable, we may as well sign up and call it a deal.”

With a hand that shook a little in spite of his best effort to hold it steady, Philip signed and passed the papers and pen to Bromley.

“Wigglesworth?” the promoter queried, when the papers came back to him with Bromley’s signature. “Is that a family name?”

“Very much so,” admitted the play-boy, with a grin.

“I used to know some Wigglesworths in Philadelphia. Relations of yours?”

“They are, indeed. My mother was a Wigglesworth.”

Stephen Drew signed as lessee of the “Little Jean” with the intricate pen flourish familiar to every bank teller in Leadville and Denver, and the young clerk attested the signatures as notary. The formalities concluded, Drew spoke of the practical details.

“We’ll go in as soon as we can get in with the machinery for a mill. We’ll have to have our own mill, of course. Freighting the machinery over the range will be a costly job, but there is no way to avoid it. Rich as the ore is, it wouldn’t pay to jack freight it out over the mountains. However, you have ore enough on the dump to take care of the overhead.”

“I’m not sure that we don’t owe you an apology for not discovering our mine in some place nearer the broad highways,” Bromley put in whimsically. “It is due to us to say that we did try, pretty faithfully, to do that very thing, before we crossed over to the Western slope, but we couldn’t make it.”