Down the Mother Lode Part 5

They ran as one man across the road to Charlie's cabin. It was empty.

"He was callin' 'Help'," said the round-eyed boy.

"Yes, we heard him," added the sheriff.

They had come up the road. They started back down the trail.

Charlie had got nearly home when he began to worry about a deep prospect hole near the trail known as "Rosenhammer's Shaft." He must be careful to avoid it. Suddenly his foot slipped on a pebble. He clutched unavailingly at a manzanita and rolled into a circle of inky blackness.

Rosenhammer's Shaft! Now he was lost, indeed.

But, no. As he slid he came against a st.u.r.dy live-oak bush which he clutched, managing to stop his descent into the next world for the time being. He even, swung one leg over a wiry limb, and there he clung, puttering sailors' argot, considering his sins, and roaring for help in his best fortissimo tone.

The shaft was said to be a hundred feet deep. It was filled part way with oily water, and inhabited by snakes and monsters of the subterranean deeps. People had fallen in and drowned, and had been known never to rise again. The ghost of a Chinaman who had been murdered and flung down, was said to float up from its depths at night to range the earth, seeking the perpetrator of the fiendish deed.

Charlie wished that he had led a more blameless life that he had not so thoroughly beaten the Indian who had sold him a salted mine; that he had not made Lizzie plow; that, above all, he had married the Widow Schmitt when she had so plainly shown her liking for him.

Well, it did not matter much. He would fall in forty feet of water and they would never find him. He wished that he had drunk that which the jug contained. It was growing daylight. What was the day, then, to him?

He would never live to see it. His arms were numb. He must soon let go and fall to his doom.

He heard voices but was too spent to call out. As a crowd of men came running over the hill, his arms were slipping--slipping. It was almost broad day.

He made one last, herculean effort to hold fast, turning his head over his shoulder to glance into the deathtrap below and--just as his repentant rescuers reached him, he gave a disgusted snort and fell--three feet to the bottom of the hole!

In the darkness he had safely pa.s.sed the Rosenhammer shaft and had fallen into the six-feet-deep prospect hole of his own claim.

Two days later, Charlie married the Widow Schmitt

"Rattlesnake d.i.c.k"

IV

"Again swings the lash on the high mountain trail, And the pipe of the packer is scenting the gale; For the trails are all open, the roads are all free, And the highwayman's whistle is heard on the lea."

--Bret Harte.

We were riding one day under the Digger pines, down an abandoned old road toward Mountaineer House. As usual, my spirited half-Arab, as white as she was fleet, had put me far in the lead. She loved a race as well as I did, but she ran it to suit herself. If I tried to interpose any theories of my own, she calmly took the bit in her teeth and after that I devoted most of my energies to hanging on!

Mammy Kate, own daughter of Nancy Gooch of Coloma, would scold when I came home with torn skirt and a b.u.mp on my forehead: "Now, den, look at dat chile! Been hoss-racin' agin su'ah as Moses was in Egypt! I shall suttenly enjine yo' fathah to done gin' yo' plow-hoss to ride so yo's gwi' git beat wiff yo' racin', and quit. Spects yo' had 'nothah tumble, didn't you'? You' wait till Katie gits de camph-fire an' put on dat haid."

So did Katie's scoldings invariably end in renewed pampering of her "chile," and so did I continue to race every horse in the community and usually to win.

With one small ear laid back to listen for the other horses, little white Flossie flew along the gra.s.sy track, darting around the chapparal bushes which had grown up and jumping the fallen tree trunks. Suddenly we came out of the woods and she s.h.i.+ed violently at a man who was digging a fence-post hole, directly in the road. I always rode Indian fas.h.i.+on without stirrups of any kind, so of course I was catapulted neatly over her head.

"h.e.l.lo. Otto," I said, remaining seated in the road and catching at Floss' bridle rein, "what have you found?"

Otto was sifting the loose dirt in the hole through eager fingers.

"h.e.l.lo! I've found some money here in the ground. I wonder--oh, yes, I've heard my mother tell about it! This was the old pioneer road and it was at this very spot that Rattlesnake d.i.c.k and some of his gang held up the Wells-Fargo stage coach and got such a lot of money. They say there's still $40,000 buried on Trinity Mountain, half of what was waiting when Rattlesnake d.i.c.k got killed."

Rattlesnake d.i.c.k, pirate of the placers, prince of highwaymen! Magical name--irridescent bubble from the pipe of romance. Proud, imperious, bitter d.i.c.k! What a splendid old name he had been born to, and what blows Fate had dealt him which led to his tragic end!

The others had come up by this time and we sat in a circle listening again to the story of the bold and brilliant Englishman whom two undeserved jail sentences had turned into such a picturesque dare-devil of a highwayman. However, I disagreed with Otto's version of the robber chief.

"But you have made him out all bad," I told him. "I have heard the story often, and he wasn't all bad by any means."

"He was a wild desperado. Why, even after he was dead and lying on the sidewalk in Auburn, a man came up and kicked his face."

"Yes, and they say that everybody in the county was mad about it, and when the man ran for supervisor more than a year later, no decent person would vote for him and he lost his election." Now, the true story of Rattlesnake d.i.c.k is this, and I never tire of hearing it:

"Would you present me to your sister's friend, then, George?"

"Why not."

"I am an Ishmailite! I, the son of an honorable English gentleman, have done a term in prison."

"But these ideas are extreme, d.i.c.k. There is no such general opinion of you. Were you not exonerated from having stolen the wretched little Jew's goods? It is all forgotten," and George Taylor paused in his restless pacing, before the long, graceful figure on the bunk against the wall. d.i.c.k raised handsome eyes whose flas.h.i.+ng light was made of pain.

"George, I wish--how I wish that it were forgotten. But it is not. They whisper it in doorways, and over the card tables and down in the drift tunnels. Wherever I go it follows me like an evil spirit, rearing its unclean head between me and all fair things." His deep voice reflected the hurt in his dark eyes, and his broad shoulders drooped in despondency.

"d.i.c.k--d.i.c.k, the gay the debonair--this is not like you. Brace up, man, and come with me to this opening of the new opera house, if only to add to my pleasure. All the town will be there to hear the singer who has just landed in San Francisco from Boston."

"She it was who brought you the letter from your sister?"

"Yes, yes. They were school-mates. She is beautiful, and you shall meet her after the concert."

The "Opera House" was crowded, the front rows seating the leading men of the community and their richly clad wives and daughters. In the back rows, seated on benches and around the side walls were, the roughly dressed miners and the usual flotsam of a mining town. The singer was not of the hurdy-gurdy type so common in those days, but a "lady,"

young, lovely and accomplished. Her ballads were greeted with the greatest enthusiasm, and soon the stage began to be showered with gold.

The miners brought her back again and again, calling the names of songs they wished to hear. Hundreds of dollars of gold were tossed up to her, whilst she smilingly complied with all their requests.

"One more," they shouted, "only one more, and her slippers shall be filled with gold dust." She slipped out of her little sandals and stood, blus.h.i.+ng modestly, hiding her silken feet under her long, wide skirts.

"You are very kind to a lonely stranger," she called, to an instantly silenced audience, "and I will sing for you a song which has but lately come from London. 'Tis from a new opera called the Bohemian Girl, composed by Master Balfe," and folding her little hands before her, she sang sweetly, "Then You'll Remember Me."

"When other lips and other hearts their tales of love shall tell Of days that have as happy been, and you'll remember--you'll remember me."

"d.i.c.k, why do you cover your eyes? You are surely not asleep?"

"By all the G.o.ds, man, the accusation is an insult," with a haughty flash of his great eyes.

"You are to be presented; have you forgotten?"

"Forgotten! While life lasts, I shall remember this night."