by B. TRAVEN
“Now it’s my turn again to get a hundred to make our investments as even as can be.” Curtin was trying to think of a way to get some money. At this moment boys were running along the street with bundles of papers under their arms.
“San Antonio Express! The Express! The Express, acaba de llegar, just arrived by train!” they were yelling. One stopped in front of Dobbs and Curtin and offered the paper. Curtin bought it. Hardly had he glanced at the front page when he said: “Here is the solution. That guy here, see his name? He owes me a hundred dollars and I see he is now in the big money. He’s bought a corner at Commerce Street. I’ll wire him. He’s a square shooter. He’ll ship the dough.”
So they went to the Western Union cable office and with a few words Curtin told the old pal of his plight. The same night the pal from San Antonio cabled him two hundred dollars instead of the borrowed hundred.
“Didn’t I tell you he’s on the level, that old pal of mine over in good old S.A.? That’s what you may call a friend in need.” Curtin felt not less superior now than Dobbs had felt on cashing his lottery ticket in the morning.
“We’d better not wait long,” Howard suggested. “Let’s take off tomorrow.”
They agreed. Next day they took the night train to San Luis Potosí, where they boarded the train for Aguascalientes to reach the main line going north. Four days later they were in Durango.
Here they occupied themselves for two days studying maps and trying to get information from all sorts of people who knew this part of the republic.
“Now look here, you puppies,” Howard explained. “Where you see a railroad, there’s no use going there. There aren’t any motor-roads. So let’s forget about these roads. Don’t even look near dirt roads. Wherever there is a railroad or any other road, there’s no use going close. Because railroad-constructors and road-builders usually examine every bit of soil near the roads while they are building them. That’s only natural, and it’s part of their business. So it would be waste of time to look for anything around places where engineers have been at work.”
“I think I see what you’re driving at.” Dobbs began to understand Howard’s plans.
“Not so difficult to see, boys, after I’ve made it clear what is virgin soil and what isn’t.” Howard went with a pencil over the map he had spread out before him. “We have to go where there is no trail. We have to go where we can be positive that no surveyor or anybody who knows something about mining has ever been before. The best spots are those where you feel sure that anybody who is paid for his job would be afraid to go and would not think it worth while to risk his hide for the salary he gets. Only at such spots is there a chance that we might find something. These are the regions we have to make out on this map.”
He drew a few lines over small sections of the map, made a few dots here and a few dots there. For a while he looked at these vague sketches, seemingly weighing one against the other. Then, with a definite gesture, he made a little circle on the map at a certain point. “Here’s where we are bound. Hereabouts.” He thickened the little ring with his pencil. “The exact site doesn’t matter very much—not in detail, so to say. Let’s see the spot at close range and then decide what to do. Here on this map I can’t make out properly whether it’s mountain, swamp, desert, or what. But that shows that the makers of the map themselves don’t know for sure what there is. Once on the spot, all you have to do is to wipe your eyes and look carefully around you. I once knew a feller who, believe it or not, could smell gold if it was close, just as an ass will smell water if he is thirsty and wants to drink. And this reminds me, boys, we’ll have to go out to a few villages near by to buy burros, which we need for carrying our packs and for other services at the camp.”
So they spent the next three days buying burros from the Indian peasants.
5
Curtin and Dobbs learned soon that without Howard they would have been utterly helpless. Had they been alone, they would not have been able to follow even a trail. They had no idea how to keep the burros at the camp during the night, how to pack them the right way, or how to make them go over the rocky paths across the high mountains, where often the boys themselves could not get hold with their feet.
On this trip the boys had to do without such little conveniences as were always found even in the most primitive oil-camps. It took them almost a week to learn how to pitch camp under such difficult conditions as they found here every day. This was no boy scouts’ hike and camp-fires were not built according to instructions in printed guides for hunting parties. Here it meant work, and nothing but hard work. Often at night when they were so tired that they could sleep like blocks they had to get up and search for the burros that had gone astray. There were many other things to attend to even more disagreeable and more wearisome and annoying.
There were many days and more nights when both of them said that if they had known beforehand what it meant to go prospecting, they would have preferred to stay in town and wait for a job to turn up.
Every day their respect for old Howard grew greater and greater. That old fellow never complained, never whined, never felt too tired to lend here a pull and there a push. He appeared to become younger and more active with every mile that the little train made toward its goal. He climbed steep rocks like a cat and trotted for long, dreary hours across arid stretches without even mentioning a drink of water.
“Never fail to understand the reason why gold is so precious,” he said occasionally when the boys were all in. “Perhaps you know now why one ounce of gold costs more than a ton of cast iron. Everything in this world has its true price. Nothing is ever given away.”
The trip alone was of minor importance. The main thing was how to find the metal and how to get it after having found it. In this respect Dobbs and Curtin were still at a greater loss than in knowing how to drive a little bunch of donkeys to a certain place. When still in town, they had thought that prospecting for gold was just like picking up stones in a dry river-bed. Their idea was that you cannot make a mistake, that when you see something that glitters, it must be gold. To their amazement, they found almost every day patches of ground that were covered with glittering yellowish powder, and they found the same glittering sand in brooks and creeks. Whenever they saw this sort of sand, they were sure that it must be the right stuff or at least something that was heavily charged with gold. Howard did not laugh at them. He just said: “I’ll tell you when to pick up. This here stuff wouldn’t pay you a dinner for a truck-load unless you can sell it in town right in front of a house under construction.”
Gold doesn’t call out loud to be picked up. You have to know how to recognize it. “You have to tickle it,” Howard would often say, “you have to tickle it so that it comes out laughing. You may walk over it twenty times a day and you won’t see it if you don’t know its call.”
Old man Howard knew gold and what it looked like in the raw. He saw it even if there were only a trace of it in the vicinity. He could tell from the landscape if there might be gold around or not. He knew whether it would pay to spend a day or two at a certain place to dig and to wash and to make tests so as to be sure that to work the ground would pay enough wages for a living. Whenever he stopped to get his frying-pan from the pack and wash a few shovelfuls of dirt in a brook, the boys would know that he had made a discovery.
Five times they found gold. But the amount which could be taken by the primitive means they could afford was not sufficient to pay them a good day’s wages. Once they came upon a site that was very promising, but the water necessary for washing the sand was six miles away. So they had to give up the find.
“Now, don’t you kids think it’s child’s play to prospect for gold,” Howard said to his partners, who were about to lose the last flicker of hope. “Gold means work, and very hard work at that. Just discard everything you have ever read in stories in the magazines. Forget it. It’s all lies. Bunk, that’s what it is. Don’t believe that millions are lying around. There are very few men i
n the world, or in all history, who have actually made millions by digging for gold. You can’t make it single-handed if you want to have the millions, believe me.”
2
One morning they found themselves entirely surrounded by wild, desolate mountainous country. It looked as though they could not go on nor go back. Panting and gasping, cursing and swearing, the two boys were trying, by cutting the thick underbrush and by climbing the rocks, which seemed inaccessible, to open a trail by which they could go on and at the same time get out of the wilderness. The difficulty became so great that they lost all hope and were ready to give up the whole outfit, leave everything behind, and return to a civilized world, where there were no jobs, but also no such hardships to endure. They were at the edge of what any sane person can bear.
The old man seemed to be in his most hilarious mood. To him, with so many experiences to draw from, such complications were the regular thing when you are after gold.
“Well, tell my old gra’mother I have burdened myself with a couple of fine lodgers, two very elegant bedfellers who kick at the first drop of rain and crawl under mother’s petticoat when thunder rumbles. My, my, what great prospectors a driller and a tool-dresser can make! Drilling a hole with half a hundred Mexican peons around to lend you hands and feet! I still can do that after a two days’ spree, you bet. Two guys and what shit! Two guys reading in the magazines about crossing a lazy river up in Alaska and now going prospecting on their own.”
“Shut your stinking trap!” Dobbs howled. He took up a rock and threatened to use it.
“Throw it, baby, throw it. Welcome. Just do it. You will never leave this wilderness without my help, if you know what is good for you. You two would die here more miserably than a sick rat.”
Curtin tried to quiet Dobbs. “Leave the old man alone. Can’t you see he’s nuts?”
“Nuts, hey? Is that what you mean?” Howard, instead of being angry, just laughed in a satanical way. “Nuts? Now, I’ll tell you somethin’, you puppies. What did I say? Yes, two fine lodgers I’ve burdened myself with. You two are so dumb, so immensely stupid and dumb, that even a secret-service flat would stand amazed at such dumbness. And that’s something.”
Dobbs and Curtin began to listen to the old man. They looked at each other and they looked again at Howard. They seemed to become convinced that the old man had really gone mad, perhaps from the hardships or from senility.
“And what I was saying,” Howard went on, “you two are so dumb that you don’t even see the millions when treading upon them with your own feet.”
The two boys opened their mouths wide. It was clear they had not understood the full sense of what Howard had said. Not yet. But after a minute they came to. Seeing Howard still grinning at them while he held, in both his hands, sand picked up from the ground, letting it run through his fingers, it dawned upon them that the old man was as sane as ever and that what he said was true.
They did not start a dance out of this joyful relief nor did they holler to clear their breasts of the anguish that had filled them during these last few days. A long breath they took and then sat down and fingered the soil, looking at it carefully.
“Don’t you expect to find nuggets of molten gold.” Howard was still standing upright. “It’s not that rich. It’s only heavy dirt. And it’s not here either. Here are only traces of the stuff. It comes from somewhere farther up there.” Howard pointed up to certain rocks which they had been about to cross. “There is where we have to go. And if I am not mistaken, it will be there that we will settle for a few months. Let’s go.”
While this stretch which they had now to cover was short, it meant harder work than any other trail they had encountered so far on the expedition. The distance was less than two miles, but it took them a whole day to reach the site indicated by Howard.
When the outfit arrived at the spot, Howard said: “We’d better not pitch camp right here where the works are. We should build the camp a mile or even a mile and a half away. Some day you may learn why this is for the best.”
It had got dark, and so for this night they camped right there.
Next morning, however, Howard and Curtin went exploring for a good camp-site while Dobbs remained with the animals.
Having found a suitable place sufficiently far off the field, camp was built at the spot where it was to stay.
“Suppose somebody should accidentally come upon this camp, you two fellers understand we are just hunters, professional game-hunters for hides of commercial value. And don’t you make any mistake. It may cost you dearly.” Howard surely knew what he was talking about.
6
If Dobbs and Curtin had ever worked hard in their lives, they would have thought that what they were doing now was the hardest work anywhere in the world. For no employer would they have labored so grindingly as they did now for themselves. Each working-day was as long as daylight would make it. Convicts in a chain-gang in Florida or Georgia would have gone on hunger-strike, and not have minded the whippings either, had they had to work as these three men were doing to fill their own pockets.
The field which they were exploring was embedded in a craterlike little valley on the top of high rocks. The altitude of the mountains and the low pressure of the atmosphere made work still harder than it would have been under better conditions.
In daytime the heat was scorching, and the nights were bitterly cold. There were none of the conveniences which even a working-man in a civilized country—yes, even a soldier in the trenches—is used to and thinks he cannot live without.
One should not forget that though the Sierra Madre is in fact a sister to the Rocky Mountains, it is in the tropics. There is no winter, no snow and ice, and consequently all plants, shrubs, insects, and animals keep alive all the time, and very much alive at that.
There were mosquitoes biting day and night. The more you sweat, the more they like sucking your blood. There were tarantulas the size of a man’s hand, and spiders the same size, not very pleasant to have for permanent neighbors. And then there was the real genuine pest, a little yellowish-reddish scorpion the sting of which kills you within fifteen hours.
Gold has its price. Make no mistake as to that, and forget the stories and the blah of promoters who want to sell worthless ground at the price of cultivated orange-groves in the Royal Valley.
“Never have I dreamed that I would have to work like this,” Curtin growled one morning when Howard was shaking him by the collar to get him up from his cot.
“Never mind,” the old man calmed him, “I’ve worked this way more than once in my life and often for years. I’m still alive, and, what is more, still without a bank account to help me along for the rest of my life. Well, get up and make the burros carry the water up.”
As the working-field had no water, it had to be carried on burros’ backs from a brook about three hundred and fifty feet lower than the field. When, in the beginning, they had found that there was no water for washing the dirt, and that the water was so far down, it was proposed that the diggings should be carried by the burros down to the brook to be washed there. After long deliberation it was decided that it would be better to carry the water up to the field than to carry the dirt down. By digging out tanks and by using channels easily built from wood, the water once carried up to the field could be used over and over again before it evaporated. A wheel was constructed with empty tin cans and small wooden cases, and with the help of a burro this could be made to draw the water from the tank, lift it with those cans and cases up to the upper tank, from where, on opening the shutter, it would run down the channels to wash the sand.
Howard was an all-around expert. Whenever he came out with a useful idea, Dobbs and Curtin would ask themselves earnestly what they would have done in this wilderness without him. They could have met with a field rich with fifty ounces to the ton of raw dirt and not have known what to do with it, how to get it out, or how to keep alive until time to carry it home.
Howard even burned lim
e out of the rocks, mixed it with sand and clay, and built a tank that would lose not a drop of water except what evaporated. With the same stuff in other combinations he tightened the wooden channels and the basins so that here, too, no water was wasted.
The men had breakfast long before sunrise to start work as early as possible. Often they could not work during the noon hours, as the terrific heat made their heads hum and their limbs ache.
“Another reason why I preferred carrying the water up to carrying the dirt down is this,” Howard explained; “we can hide the whole field so well that it is almost impossible for any sniper to find us. If we washed the dirt down at the brook, a native hunter might see us and get suspicious. On the other hand, if he meets one of us with the burros carrying the water up, it will be clear that the water is meant for the camp, for cooking, washing, and cleaning the hides. We’ll start tomorrow to fence in the field and make it invisible. What you say, kiddies?”
“Right, daddy,” Curtin answered.
Dobbs growled: “Okay by me, you know best, old rooster.”
2
One day during the hot noon hours, when Dobbs and Curtin were resting on their cots and complaining of the heat and of the work, Howard, sitting on a box cutting spikes for some new invention of his, watched his two partners rolling about on their cots. “Hell and devil!” he said. “I often ask myself what you two thought it means—digging for the metal. You must have figured you just walk along and if you come near those old hills yonder, you just pick up the gold that lies around like lost grain on a wheat-field after the harvest. You put it into sacks taken along for that purpose, carry it to town, sell it, and there is another millionaire ready for the movies. You ought to know that if you could find the stuff so easily and get it home like a truckload of timber on a paved highway, it wouldn’t be worth any more than plain sand.”
