Branded Part 15

I shall always remember Barrett's good-natured grin when the meeting was adjourned.

"You two will have the hot end of it," he remarked. "You're going to do the hard work, and all you've left me is a chance to do the starving act. Right here is where I see myself giving up this palatial apartment and going into a boarding-house. For heaven's sake, eat light, you two. We may have to sink a hundred feet in solid rock before we find anything."

We went in light marching order, Gifford and I; and the early dawn of the following morning found us driving our location stakes and pacing off the boundaries of the new claim. I like to remember that we were neither too new to the business, nor too much excited, to be careful and methodical. The triangular patch of unclaimed ground lay along the slope, with the apex of the triangle pointing toward the hill-hidden Lawrenceburg. Ignoring any vein directions which might develop later on, we laid off our location to fit the ground, taking in all the s.p.a.ce we could legally hold; which would be, of course, only the triangle, though our staking necessarily overlapped this area on all sides. If we should be lucky enough to make a strike, ground s.p.a.ce for our operations was going to be at a premium, and at the very best there wasn't an inch of room to spare.

I don't know just why we should have been afraid that anybody would have been foolish enough to try to "jump" an unworked claim; but we were, and we decided at once that we would not leave the ground unwatched now that our stakes were driven and our notice duly posted.

Accordingly, Gifford went back to town to make the needful land-office entry and to bring out the supplies, tools, and a wagon-load of lumber for a shack, leaving me to stand guard with an old horse-pistol of Gifford's for a weapon. It was after dark when I heard the wagon trailing up the gulch, and I had had nothing to eat since morning. But I was free and hopeful--and happy; with the nightmare past becoming more and more a thing to be pushed aside and comfortably ignored.

Looking back at it now, I can see that our venture was haphazard to the tenderfoot degree. Having built a sleeping shack out of the lumber, we picked a place for the prospect shaft solely with reference to its convenience on the hillside. But for this we had plenty of precedents.

What the miners of any other district would have called sheer miracles of luck were the usual thing in the Cripple Creek region. From the earliest of the discoveries the region had been upsetting all the well-established mining traditions, and the tenderfoot was quite as likely to find mineral as was the most experienced prospector; more likely, in fact, since the man with everything to learn would not be hampered by the traditions.

The top layer of fine gravel which answers for soil in the district carries gold "float"--"color," a Californian would say,--in numberless localities over an area of many square miles; a fact which was well known long before any one knew of the underlying treasures which have since been taken out of the deep workings. But there are no vein outcroppings on the surface, and the prospector's first task is to uncover the bed-rock by sinking one or more test pits through the gravel. In some one of these shallow shafts he may--or may not--make his discovery. If successful, he will find, on some well-cleaned surface of the bed-rock, a fine broken line; a minute vein in many instances so narrow as to be discoverable only by the use of a magnifying-gla.s.s; and that discolored line will be his invitation to dig deeper.

By the morning of the second day Gifford had built our rude windla.s.s, and the work of shaft sinking was begun. The gravel layer varies in thickness in different parts of the district, ranging from a few inches in some places to many feet in others. In our case we were less than waist-deep in the hole, and had not yet set up the windla.s.s, when we reached the upper surface of the bed-rock.

Generally speaking, the Cripple Creek district is a dry region as to its surface, but we were lucky enough to have a trickling rivulet in our gulch. It was dark before we had carried water in sufficient quant.i.ty to wash off the uncovered bed-rock bottom in our hole, so we turned in without knowing what we had found, or whether or not we had found anything.

I was cooking the bacon and pan-bread the next morning when Gifford, who had gone early into the hole with a bucket of water and a scrubbing-brush, came running up to the shack with his eyes bulging.

"We--we've got it!" he gasped. "Where's that magnifying-gla.s.s?"

I left the bacon to burn if it wanted to and ran with him to the shallow shaft. He had scrubbed the solid rock of the pit bottom until it was as bare as the back of a hand, and across the cleaned stone, running from southwest to northeast, there was a thin line of discoloration showing plainly enough as a fissure vein. Gifford dug a little of the crack-filling out with the blade of his pocket-knife and we examined it under the magnifier. We were both ready to swear that we could see flecks and dust grains of free gold in the bluish-brown gangue-matter; but that was purely imagination.

I think neither of us knew or cared that the bacon was burned to a blackened crisp when we got back to it. The breakfast was bolted like a tramp's hand-out, and before the sun was fairly over the shoulder of the eastern mountain we were back in the hole with hammer and drills.

The frantic haste was entirely excusable. While it was true that a greater number of the Cripple Creek discoveries had widened satisfactorily from the surface down, becoming more and more profitable at increasing depths, it was also true that some of them had begun as "knife-blades" and had so continued. What Gifford and I did not know about drilling and shooting rock would have filled a library of volumes; none the less, by noon we had succeeded in worrying a couple of holes in the solid shaft bottom, had loaded them, and were ready for the blast.

If any real miner should chance to read this true and unvarnished tale of our beginnings he will smile when I confess that we cut the fuses four feet long and retreated a good quarter of a mile up the gulch after they were lighted. In our breathless eagerness it seemed as if we waited a full half-hour before the shallow hole vomited a mouthful of broken rock and dust, and a dull double rumble told us that both shots had gone off. Gifford was a fairly good sprinter, but I beat him on the home run. The hole was half full of shattered rock and loosened gravel and we went at it with our bare hands. After a few minutes of this senseless dog-scratching, Gifford sat down on the edge of the pit and burst out laughing.

"I guess there ain't any manner o' need for us to go plumb locoed," he said. "We've got all the time there is, and a shovel will last a heap longer than our fingers."

I may say, in pa.s.sing, that this att.i.tude was characteristic of our carpenter partner. He was a country boy from Southern Indiana; a natural-born mechanic, with only a common school education. But he had initiative and a good gift of horse sense and balance, and in the troublous times that followed he was always our level-headed stand-by.

Acting upon his most sensible suggestion, we took our time, spelling each other in shoveling out the debris. The two shots driven in opposite corners had deepened the shaft over two feet. When the new bottom of the hole was uncovered we nearly had a return of the frenzies. The discolored line of the vein had widened to four inches or more, and the last of the broken rock shoveled out was freely mixed with fragments of the bluish-brown gangue-matter.

A hasty estimate a.s.sured us that we had a sufficient quant.i.ty of the lode matter for a trial a.s.say, and we spent the better part of the afternoon picking out pieces of the ore on the small dump and in chipping more of them from the exposed face of the seam. It was arranged that one of us should take the samples to town after dark, for the sake of secrecy, and we put in what daylight there was left after our sample was prepared drilling another set of holes--though we did not fire them.

Leaving Gifford to stand guard over what now might be something well worth guarding, I made my way down the mountain after supper with the two small sacks of selected samples. True to his promise, I found Barrett already established in a rather cheap boarding-house. He was surprised to see me so soon, and more than surprised when I showed him the specimens of bluish rock.

"Say--by George!" he exclaimed; "that sure does look like the real stuff, Jimmie; though of course you can't tell. Have you roasted any of it?"

I was so green a miner at that time that I did not know what "roasting"

meant. Barrett had a tiny coal-stove in his room with a bit of fire in it. Even the June nights are sometimes chilly at the Cripple Creek alt.i.tude. Selecting a bit of the stone he put it upon the fire-shovel among the coals and while it was heating listened to my recounting of the short and exciting story of the "find."

When the piece of bluish stone had been roasted and cooled we did not need the magnifying-gla.s.s. It was covered with a dew of fine pin-point yellow globules. Barrett went up in the air as if his chair had exploded under him. "My G.o.d, Jimmie!" he choked, "it's--it's a _bonanza_!"

The next step was to have authoritative a.s.says made, and together we took the two small sacks of ore to the sampling works, which, at that time, were running day and night. We waited in the office while the tests were being made. The result, which came to us well past midnight, was enough to upset the equanimity of a wooden Indian. Some of the selected samples carried values as high as twenty-five dollars in gold--not to the ton; oh, no; nothing like that: _to the pound_!

Barrett had the situation firmly by the neck when we left the sampling works.

"I have a sort of provisional arrangement with Mr. Conaughy, our president, and I can quit the bank without notice and explain afterward," he said. "I'm going right back with you to-night. Three of us will be none too many to handle this thing when the news gets out."

We went to his room first and loaded up with blankets, working clothes, a shot-gun and a generous supply of fixed ammunition. On the long tramp up the mountain, Barrett, who was older in the district than either Gifford or myself, told me what we might expect.

"You needn't think we are going to be allowed to dig that hole without the toughest kind of a fight, Jimmie," he predicted. "The minute the news gets loose, we shall be swamped with 'interferences,' relocations, law-suits, process servers and constables, to say nothing of the strong-hands and claim-jumpers. The Lawrenceburg people will doubtless claim that mistakes were made in their surveys, as perhaps there were.

They've got a first-cla.s.s fighting man for a superintendent; as I happen to know: a man who won't stick at anything to carry his end."

"But it's our strike," I urged.

"It's ours if we can hold it," was the sober reply. "Our best play is to keep the thing absolutely dark until we can dig out enough money to give us a fighting fund. That's where we're lame. Our bit of capital won't go anywhere when they drag us into the courts."

Our shortest way to the new claim led us in sight of the Lawrenceburg workings. They were running night s.h.i.+fts, and though it was now well along in the small hours, the plant was in full swing. Like most of the mines within trolley distance of the towns, it had no miners'

village, the men going back and forth at the s.h.i.+ft-changing hours. But the superintendent lived at the plant, and there were a few bunk houses and one other detached cottage.

There was a light in one room of this cottage as we pa.s.sed, and Barrett called my attention to it.

"There's a man in that shack that I hope we may be able to get, if we ever grow big enough to hire him," he said. Then he added, quite irrelevantly: "He has a daughter, and I'm telling you right now, Jimmie, she's a peach."

I let the reference to the daughter go by default.

"Who is this gentleman that we ought to be able to hire?" I asked.

"He is the best, or at least one of the best, metallurgical chemists in the district, and it goes without saying that an honest a.s.sayer counts for everything in this mining game. Without one, the smelters will skin you alive."

I laughed. "I didn't ask what he was; I asked who he was--or is."

"He is a school-teacher, or college professor, and I'm told he has taught in High Schools and freshwater colleges all over the Middle West," said Barrett, as we topped the hill to our side of the mountain shoulder. And then I got my bucketing of cold water. "His name is Phineas Everton, and his daughter's name is Mary--though everybody calls her Polly."

XIII

For the Sinews of War

Gifford, sitting in the darkness with his back to the windla.s.s and the big old-fas.h.i.+oned holster revolver across his knees, held us up promptly and peremptorily when we came over the spur. Seeing Barrett with me, he knew pretty well what the results of the a.s.say were before we told him.

At the edge of the shallow pit we held a council of war--the first of many. Gifford fully agreed with Barrett that the most profound secrecy was the first requisite. Though he was new to the business of gold-mining--as new as either the bank teller or myself--he could prefigure pretty accurately what was before us.

"Here's where we'll have to ride and tie on the snoozing act," was his drawling comment. "We mustn't leave her alone for a single minute, after this; and it's got to be one of us, at that. We couldn't afford to hire a watchman if we had a million dollars."

Under the ride-and-tie proposal I volunteered to stand watch for the remainder of the night; and after the other two had turned in I took Gifford's place, with the windla.s.s for a back rest and Barrett's shot-gun for a weapon.

I was not sorry to have a little time to think; to try in some fas.h.i.+on to readjust the point of view so suddenly s.n.a.t.c.hed from its anchorings in the commonplace and shot high into the empyrean. It was the night of the ninth of June. Three months earlier, to a day, I had been an outcast; a miserable tramp roaming the streets of a great city; broken in mind, body and heart; bitter, discouraged, and so nearly ready to fall in with Kellow's criminal suggestion as actually to let him give me the money which, if I had kept it or spent it as he directed, would have committed me irretrievably to a life of crime.

Looking back upon it from the vantage point gained by a few hours' toil on a bare Colorado mountain-side, that ninth of March seemed to have withdrawn into a fathomless past. I was no longer a hunted vagabond; I was breathing the free clean air of a new environment, and in the narrow pit beside me a fortune was waiting to be dug out; a fortune for the ex-convict no less than for the two who had never by hint or innuendo sought to inquire into their partner's past. It was too good to be true; and yet it was true, contingent, as I saw it, only upon our fort.i.tude, discretion and manful courage.

Nevertheless, there was still one small disturbing note in the music of the spheres. Barrett's mention of Phineas Everton as one of our nearest neighbors disquieted me vaguely. It was quite in vain that I reasoned that in all human probability Everton would fail to identify the bearded man of twenty-eight with the schoolboy he had known ten or twelve years earlier. He had taught only one year in the Glendale High School, and I was not in any of his cla.s.ses. Polly had known me much better. She had been in one of the grammar grades, and was just at an age to make a big-brother confidant of her teacher's brother--my sister being at that time a teacher in the grammar school.

Upon this I fell to wondering curiously how Polly, a plain-faced, eager-eyed little girl in short dresses, could have grown into anything meriting Barrett's enthusiastic description of her as a "peach." Also, I wondered how her bookish, studious father had ever contrived to break with the scholastic traditions sufficiently to become an a.s.sayer for a Western mine. But I might have saved myself this latter speculation.