Blazed Trail Stories, and Stories of the Wild Life Part 24

Those miserable years of waiting! He had not minded them before, but now they were horrible. In the retrospect the ceaseless drudgery of rock and pick and drill loomed larger than the truth of it; his patience, at the time so spontaneous a result of his disposition, seemed that of a man clinging desperately to a rope, able to hang on only by the concentration of every ounce of his will. Peter felt himself clutching the rope so hard that he could think of nothing, absolutely nothing, else. He proved a great necessity of letting go.

And for her, these years? What had they meant? By the internal combustion which had so suddenly lighted up the dark corners of his being, he saw with almost clairvoyant distinctness how it must have been. He saw her growing older, as he had grown older, but in the dull apathy of monotony. She had none of this great filling Labour wherewith to drug herself into day-dreams of a future. The seasons as they pa.s.sed showed her the same faces, growing ever a little more jaded, as dancers in the light of dawn. Perhaps she had ceased counting them? No, he knew better than that. But the pity of it! washing, scrubbing, mending; mending, scrubbing, washing to the time of an invalid's complaints.

To-day she was doing as she had done yesterday; to-morrow she would do the same. To-morrow?

"No, by G.o.d!" cried Peter, starting to his feet. "There shall be no more to-morrow!"

He took from the shelf over the window a number of pieces of quartz, which he stuffed into the pockets of a pair of saddle-bags lying near the door. In the corral was Jenny, a sleek, fat mare. He saddled Jenny and departed with the saddle-bags, leaving the door of his cabin open to the first comer, as is the hospitable Western way.

At Beaver Dam he spread the chunks of rock out on the bar of the princ.i.p.al saloon and invited inspection. He did not think to find a purchaser among the inhabitants of Beaver Dam, but he knew that the tidings of his discoveries would arouse interest and attract other prospectors to the locality of his claims. In this manner his property would come prominently on the market.

The discoveries certainly were accorded attention enough. Peter was well known. Men were perfectly sure of his veracity and his mining instinct.

If Peter said there existed a good lode of the stuff he exhibited to them, that settled it.

"Hum," said a man named Squint-eye Dobs, after examining a bit of the transparent crystal through which small kernels of yellow metal shone.

Then he laid down the specimen, and walked quietly out the door without further comment. He had gone to get his outfit ready.

To others, not so prompt of action, Peter explained at length, always in that hesitating, diffident voice of his.

"I have my claims all staked," said he; "you boys can come up and hook onto what's left. There's plenty left. I ain't saying it's as good as mine; still, it's pretty good. I think it'll make a camp."

"Make a camp!" shouted Cheyenne Harry. "I should think it would! If there's any more like that up country you can sell a 'tater-patch if it lays anywheres near the district!"

"Well, I must be goin', boys," said Peter, sidling toward the door; "and I 'spect I'll see some of you boys up there?"

The boys did not care to commit themselves as to that before each other, but they were all mentally locating the ingredients of their prospecting outfits.

"Have a drink, Happy, on me," hospitably suggested the proprietor.

Peter slowly returned to the bar.

"Here's luck to the new claim, Happy," said the proprietor; "and here's hoping the sharps doesn't make all there is on her."

The men laughed, but not ill-naturedly. They all knew Peter, as has been said.

Peter turned again to the door.

"You'll have a reg'lar cyclone up thar by to-morrow!" called a joker after him; "look out fer us! There'll be an unholy mob on hand, and they'll try to do you, sure!"

Peter stopped short, looked at the speaker, and went out hurriedly.

The next morning the men came into his gulch. He heard them even before he had left his bunk--the _clink_, creak, creak! of their wagons. By the time he had finished breakfast the side-hills were covered with them.

From his window he could catch glimpses of them through the straight pines as patches of red, or flashes of light reflected from polished metal. In the canon was the gleam of fires; in the air the smell of wood-smoke and of bacon broiling; among the still bare bushes and saplings the shine of white lean-tops; horses fed eagerly on the young gra.s.ses and the browse of trees, raising their heads as the creak of wheels farther down the draw told of yet new-comers. The boom was under way.

Peter knew that the tidings of the discovery would spread. To-morrow a new town would deserve a place on the map. Men would come to the town, men with money, men anxious to invest. With them Peter would treat.

There was to be no chance of a careless bargain this time. He would take no chances. And yet he had thought that before.

Peter began to forestall difficulties in his mind. The former experience suggested many, but he drew from the same source their remedies. It was the great unknown that terrified him. In spite of his years, in spite of his gray hairs, in spite of his memories of those former failures, he had to confess to himself that he knew nothing, absolutely nothing of sharpers and their methods. They could not fleece him again in precisely the way they had done so before; but how could he guess at the tricks they had in reserve? Eight years out of a man's life ought surely to teach him caution as thoroughly as twelve. Yet he walked into the Eagle Ridge trap as confidently as he had into the Antelope Gap. He had made it twelve years. What was to prevent his making it sixteen? There is no fear like that of the absolutely unknown. You cannot forestall that; you must depend upon your own self-confidence. Self-confidence was just what Peter did not possess.

Then in a flash he saw what he should have done. It was all so ridiculously simple--a mere question of division of labour. He, Peter, knew prospecting, but did not understand business. Back in his old Vermont home were a dozen honest men who knew business, but understood nothing of prospecting. Nothing would have been easier than to have combined these qualities and lacks. If Peter had returned quietly to his people, concealing his discoveries from the men of Beaver Dam, he could have returned in three weeks' time equipped for his negotiations. Now it was too late. The minute his back was turned they would jump his claims.

Peter's mind worked slowly. If he had felt himself less driven by the sight of those gray hairs, he might have come in time to another idea--that of wiring or writing East for a partner, pending whose arrival he could merely hold possession of the claims. As it was, the terror and misgiving, having obtained entry, rapidly usurped the dominion of his thoughts. He could see nothing before him but the inevitable and dread bargaining with unknown powers of dishonesty, nothing behind him but the mistake of starting the "boom."

As the morning wore away he went out into the hills to look about him.

The men were all busily enough engaged in chipping out the shallow troughs of their "discoveries," piling supporting rocks about their corner and side stakes, or tacking up laboriously composed mining "notices." They paid scant attention to the man who pa.s.sed them a hundred yards away. Peter visited his own four claims. On one he found a small group anxiously examining the indications of the lead. He did not join it. The parting words flung after him at the saloon came to his mind. "Look out for us! There'll be an unholy mob on hand, and they'll try to do you, sure."

Peter cooked himself a noon meal, but he did not eat much of it.

Instead, he sat quite still and stared with wide, blind eyes at the wavering mists of steam that arose from the various hot dishes. From time to time he got up with apparent purpose, which, however, left him before he had taken two steps, so that his movement speedily became aimless, and he sat down again. Late in the afternoon he went the rounds of his claims again, but saw nothing unusual. He did not take the trouble to cook supper. During the evening some men looked in for a moment or so, but went away, because the cabin was empty. Peter was at the moment of their visit walking back and forth, back and forth, away up high there on the top of the ridge, in a little cleared flat s.p.a.ce next the stars. When he came to the end, he whirled sharp on his heels.

It was six paces one way and five the other. He counted the steps consciously, until the mental process became mechanical. Then the count went on steadily behind his other thoughts--five, six; five, six; five, six; over and over again, like that. About ten o'clock he ceased opening and shutting his hands and began to scream, at first under his breath, then louder in the over tone, then with the full strength of his lungs.

A mountain lion on another slope answered him. He stretched his arms up over his head, every muscle tense, and screamed. And then, without appreciable transition, he sank to the rock and hid his face. For the moment the nerve tension had relaxed.

The clear western stars, like fine silver powder, seemed to glimmer in some light stronger than their own, as dust-motes in the sun. A breeze from the prairie rested its light, invisible hands on the man's bent head. Certain homely night-sounds, such as the tree-toads and crickets and the cries of the poor wills, stole here and there through the pine-aisles like living creatures on the wing. A faint, sweet odour of the woods came with them. Peter arose, and drew a deep breath, and went to his cabin. The peace of nature had for the moment become his own.

But then, in the darkness of his low bunk, the old doubts, the old terrors returned. They perched there above him and compelled him to look at them until his eyes were hot and red. "_Do, do, do!_" said they, until Peter arose, and there, in the chill of dawn, he walked the three miles necessary for the inspection of his claims. Everything was as it should be. The men in the gulch were not yet awake. From the _Jim Crow_ a drowsy porcupine trundled away bristling.

This could not go on. It would be weeks before he could hope even to open his negotiations. Peter cooked himself an elaborate breakfast--and drank half a cup of coffee. Then he sat, as he had the day before, staring straight in front of him, seeing nothing. After a time he placed the girl's picture and the square mirror side by side on the table and looked at them intently.

He rose, kicking his chair over backward, and went out to his claims once more.

The men in the gulch had awakened. Most of them had finished the more imperative demands of location the day before, so now they were more at leisure to satisfy their curiosity and their love of comment by inspecting the original discovery to which all this stampede was due. As a consequence Peter found a great gathering on the _Jim Crow_. Some of the men were examining chunks of ore, others were preparing to descend the shafts, still others were engaged idly in reading the location-notice tacked against a stub pine. One of the latter, the same individual who had joked Peter in the saloon, caught sight of the prospector as he approached.

"Hullo, Happy!" he called, pointing at the weather-beaten notice. "What do you call this?" He winked at the rest. The history of Peter's losses was well known.

"What?" asked Peter, strangely.

"You ain't got this readin' right. She says 'fifteen hundred feet'; the law says she ought t' read 'fifteen hundred _linear_ feet.' Your claim is n.g. I'm goin' t' jump her on you."

The statement was ridiculous; everybody knew it, and prepared to laugh, loud-mouthed.

Peter, without a word, shot the speaker through the heart. Men said at his trial that it was the most brutal and unprovoked murder they had ever known.

VII

THE GIRL IN RED

"It isn't _that_ I object to," protested the Easterner, leaning forward from the rough log wall to give emphasis to his words, "for I believe in everyone having his fun his own way. If you're going in for orgies, why, have 'em _good_ orgies, and be done with it. But my kick's on letting these innocent young girls who are just out for the fun--it's awful!"

"It's h.e.l.l!" a.s.sented the Westerner, cheerfully.

"Now, look at that pretty creature over there----"

The young miner followed his companion's gaze through the garishly lit crowd. Then, as though in doubt as to whether he had seen correctly, he tried it again.

"Which do you mean?" he asked, puzzled.

"The one in red. Now, she----"