by Jon E. Lewis
He rode over to where the lightning showed him Chip and Weary, meeting and halting a minute to compare notes and breathe their winded mounts.
“Good work, boys. Where’s that—?” With as many unprintable epithets as he could string together he named the name of Penny.
“Search me, Shorty.” Chip replied with a note of excitement still in his voice. “We dropped him right after we got out on the bench. He’d of had us clear down to the Missouri if he hadn’t quit trying to shoot the tails off the drag. He’s drunk as forty dollars.”
“He’ll be sober when I git through with him,” Shorty promised darkly. “Bed the cattle right here if they’ll settle down. Storm’s goin’ round us, I guess.You boys stand another hour and come on in. Have to double the guard from now till mornin’.”
“Hell, listen to that wind!” Cal Emmett called out as he rode up. Men drew rein and turned in their saddles to look and listen. The clouds were thinning, drifting off to the north where the lightning jagged through the dark, but a great roaring came out of the nearer distance.
“That ain’t wind,” Shorty contradicted, and swung his horse around to stare at the inky blackness, until now utterly disregarded, in the east. “It’s comin’ from off that way.” And suddenly he jumped his horse into a run toward the valley. “My God, it’s water!” he yelled as he rode, and all save the night guard, doubled now to six, followed him at top speed.
At the brink of the steep hillside they pulled up short and looked below. With the tremendous roaring in their ears they scarcely needed the flickering light of the distant storm or the feeble moon struggling through the clouds overhead. They could not see much, but they saw quite enough and they could guess the rest.
Down below, where the creek had meandered languidly through the willows, there was a solid, swirling wall of water. Down the coulee it pushed its resistless way, and they heard it go ravening out across the valley. The horses snorted and tried to bolt, though up there on the bench’s rim they were safe. But where the herd had bedded for the night, down there beside the creek, there pushed a raging flood. Where the night hawk had taken the remuda none of them knew. Out into the valley, probably. If he heard and heeded he could run his horses to safety on high ground.
But the camp— “Patsy’s caught!” yelled Shorty, and reined his horse up along the hillside. They raced up the coulee side to where they could look down upon the camp – or where the camp had stood. A smooth brown plane of water flowed swiftly there, the willow tops trailing on the surface like the hair of drowned women.
No one mentioned Patsy again. Without a word they turned and rode back to the cattle. There was nothing else that they could do until daylight.
By sunrise the flood waters had passed on, and they rode down to search for the body of their cook and to retrieve what they could of the camp outfit. They passed the wagons, over-turned and carried down to the mouth of the coulee where both had lodged in the bedraggled willows.
“We’ll get them later on,” said Shorty, and rode on. Without putting into words the thought in the minds of them all, they knew that Patsy came first.
He did. Waddling down the muddy flat with a lantern long burned dry, he met them with his bad news.
“Poys! Der vagon iss over!” he shouted excitedly as they rode up.
“Over where, Patsy?” Shorty asked gravely with a relieved twinkle in his eye.
“On his pack, you tamn fool!” snorted Patsy. “Der vater iss take him to hell and der stove mit. I cooks no preakfast, py tamn!”
They crowded around him, plying him with questions. Patsy, it appeared, had lighted the lantern and listened with both ears, ready to run if the cattle came up the coulee. The rush of water he had mistaken for the stampede coming, and he had run clumsily to the nearest coulee wall and climbed as high as he could. He had seen the wagons lifted and rolled over and carried off down the coulee. The demolition of the tents had not impressed him half so much, nor the loss of all their beds and gear.
There was nothing to do there, then. They rode back down the coulee hunting their belongings. One man was sent to town for grub and a borrowed outfit to cook it on, together with dishes and such. Hungry as when they had left the bench, the relief rode back to the herd.
Free for the moment, Chip started up the hill alone. “Where yuh goin’?” Shorty yelled after him irritably, his nerves worn ragged with the night’s mishaps.
“Going to find Penny.” Chip yelled back. “You’ve cussed him and called him everything you could lay your tongue to – but it never seemed to occur to you that Penny saved the cattle – and a lot of your necks, too. What if you’d been asleep when that cloudburst—”
“Aw, don’t be so damn mouthy!” Shorty cut him off. “I’ll tend to Penny’s case.”
“Well, time you were doing it then,” snapped Chip, just as if Shorty were still one of the boys with no authority whatever. “Me, I don’t like the way he choked off his yelling so sudden, last night. I was on guard or I’d have looked for him then. The rest of you don’t seem to give a damn.”
“Now that’ll be enough outa you.” growled Shorty. “I guess I’m still boss around here.” He spurred his horse up the hill and disappeared over the top.
And Chip, with Weary Willie at his heels as usual, followed him, grinning a little to himself.
“Mamma!You want to get yourself canned?”Weary protested as their horses climbed. “Shorty’s went through a lot, remember.”
“Well, he ain’t through yet,” replied Chip, grinning. “He’ll go through a change of heart, if I ain’t mistaken.” And he added cryptically, “He’s going to find Penny.” And when Weary looked at him questioningly, he only shook his head. “I got there first, as it happens. On my way down. You wait.”
So Shorty found Penny. He was lying almost as he fell when his horse stepped in a hole last night. Where the horse was now a systematic search might reveal; certainly he was nowhere in sight. A faint aroma of whiskey still lingered around the prone figure, but there were no bottles. Chip had seen to that.
Penny had a broken collarbone and an ear half torn off and one twisted ankle, but he was conscious and he managed to suppress a groan when Shorty piled off and knelt beside him.
“Yuh hurt, Penny?” A foolish question, but one invariably asked at such moments.
Penny bit back another groan. “The herd – did I git here – in time? Did I save – the cattle?” he murmured weakly, just as Chip had told him he must do.
“The cattle? Yeah, they’re all right. Safe as hell, Penny. How—”
“Then – I got here – in time,” muttered Penny, and went limp in his foreman’s arms.
“And I was goin’ to fire the son-of-a-gun!” said Shorty brokenly, looking up blur-eyes into Chip’s face as he and Weary rode up.
JACK LONDON
All Gold Canyon
JACK LONDON (1876–1916) was born in San Francisco. His personal experience of hardship made him a convinced radical, and he was a member of the Socialist Labour Party for many years. In 1897 London participated in the gold rush to the Klondike (then the last North American frontier), returning a year later with the raw material for a vast amount of fiction, including the famous dog novels, Call of the Wild (1903) and White Fang (1906). London’s gripping, naturalistic Alaska stories were so successful that they virtually created a sub-division of the Western, the “Northern”. As well as frontier fiction, London wrote such modern classics as The Iron Heel, Martin Eden and The Sea Wolf. Like Ernest Hemingway, an author with whom he is sometimes compared, London committed suicide.
The story “All Gold Canyon” is from London’s 1901 collection, Moon Face.
IT WAS THE green heart of the canyon, where the walls swerved back from the rigid plan and relieved their harshness of line by making a little sheltered nook and filling it to the brim with sweetness and roundness and softness. Here all things rested. Even the narrow stream ceased its turbulent down-rush long enough to form a quiet pool. Knee-d
eep in the water, with drooping head and half-shut eyes, drowsed a red-coated, many-antlered buck.
On one side, beginning at the very lip of the pool, was a tiny meadow, a cool, resilient surface of green that extended to the base of the frowning wall. Beyond the pool a gentle slope of earth ran up and up to meet the opposing wall. Fine grass covered the slope – grass that was spangled with flowers, with here and there patches of color, orange and purple and golden. Below, the canyon was shut in. There was no view. The walls leaned together abruptly and the canyon ended in a chaos of rocks, moss-covered and hidden by a green screen of vines and creepers and boughs of trees. Up the canyon rose far hills and peaks, the big foothills, pine-covered and remote. And far beyond, like clouds upon the border of the sky, towered minarets of white, where the Sierra’s eternal snows flashed austerely the blazes of the sun.
There was no dust in the canyon. The leaves and flowers were clean and virginal. The grass was young velvet. Over the pool three cottonwoods sent their snowy fluffs fluttering down the quiet air. On the slope the blossoms of the wine-wooded manzanita filled the air with springtime odors, while the leaves, wise with experience, were already beginning their vertical twist against the coming aridity of summer. In the open spaces on the slope, beyond the farthest shadow-reach of the manzanita, poised the mariposa lilies, like so many flights of jewelled moths suddenly arrested and on the verge of trembling into flight again. Here and there that woods harlequin, the madrone, permitting itself to be caught in the act of changing its pea-green trunk to madder-red, breathed its fragrance into the air from great clusters of waxen bells. Creamy white were these bells, shaped like lilies-of-the-valley, with the sweetness of perfume that is of the springtime.
There was not a sigh of wind. The air was drowsy with its weight of perfume. It was a sweetness that would have been cloying had the air been heavy and humid. But the air was sharp and thin. It was as starlight transmuted into atmosphere, shot through and warmed by sunshine, and flower-drenched with sweetness.
An occasional butterfly drifted in and out through the patches of light and shade. And from all about rose the low and sleepy hum of mountain bees – feasting Sybarites that jostled one another good-naturedly at the board, nor found time for rough discourtesy. So quietly did the little stream drip and ripple its way through the canyon that it spoke only in faint and occasional gurgles. The voice of the stream was as a drowsy whisper, ever interrupted by dozings and silences, ever lifted again in the awakenings.
The motion of all things was a drifting in the heart of the canyon. Sunshine and butterflies drifted in and out among the trees. The hum of the bees and the whisper of the stream were a drifting of sound. And the drifting sound and drifting color seemed to weave together in the making of a delicate and intangible fabric which was the spirit of the place. It was a spirit of peace that was not of death, but of smooth-pulsing life, of quietude that was not silence, of movement that was not action, of repose that was quick with existence without being violent with struggle and travail. The spirit of the place was the spirit of the peace of the living, somnolent with the easement and content of prosperity, and undisturbed by rumors of far wars.
The red-coated, many-antlered buck acknowledged the lordship of the spirit of the place and dozed knee-deep in the cool, shaded pool. There seemed no flies to vex him and he was languid with rest. Sometimes his ears moved when the stream awoke and whispered; but they moved lazily, with fore-knowledge that it was merely the stream grown garrulous at discovery that it had slept.
But there came a time when the buck’s ears lifted and tensed with swift eagerness for sound. His head was turned down the canyon. His sensitive, quivering nostrils scented the air. His eyes could not pierce the green screen through which the stream rippled away, but to his ears came the voice of a man. It was a steady, monotonous, singsong voice. Once the buck heard the harsh clash of metal upon rock. At the sound he snorted with a sudden start that jerked him through the air from water to meadow, and his feet sank into the young velvet, while he pricked his ears and again scented the air. Then he stole across the tiny meadow, pausing once and again to listen, and faded away out of the canyon like a wraith, soft-footed and without sound.
The clash of steel-shod soles against the rocks began to be heard, and the man’s voice grew louder. It was raised in a sort of chant and became distinct with nearness, so that the words could be heard:
“Tu’n around an’ tu’n yo’ face
Untoe them sweet hills of grace
(D’ pow’rs of sin yo’ am scornin’!).
Look about an’ look aroun’
Fling yo’ sin-pack on d’ groun’
(Yo’ will meet wid d’ Lord in d’ mornin’!).”
A sound of scrambling accompanied the song, and the spirit of the place fled away on the heels of the red-coated buck. The green screen was burst asunder, and a man peered out at the meadow and the pool and the sloping side-hill. He was a deliberate sort of man. He took in the scene with one embracing glance, then ran his eyes over the details to verify the general impression. Then, and not until then, did he open his mouth in vivid and solemn approval:
“Smoke of life an’ snakes of purgatory! Will you just look at that! Wood an’ water an’ grass an’ a side-hill! A pocket-hunter’s delight an’ a cayuse’s paradise! Cool green for tired eyes! Pink pills for pale people’s ain’t in it. A secret pasture for prospectors and a resting-place for tired burros. It’s just booful!”
He was a sandy-complexioned man in whose face geniality and humor seemed the salient characteristics. It was a mobile face, quick-changing to inward mood and thought. Thinking was in him a visible process. Ideas chased across his face like wind-flaws across the surface of a lake. His hair, sparse and unkempt of growth, was as indeterminate and colorless as his complexion. It would seem that all the color of his frame had gone into his eyes, for they were startlingly blue. Also, they were laughing and merry eyes, within them much of the naiveté and wonder of the child; and yet, in an unassertive way, they contained much of calm self-reliance and strength of purpose founded upon self-experience and experience of the world.
From out the screen of vines and creepers he flung ahead of him a miner’s pick and shovel and gold-pan. Then he crawled out himself into the open. He was clad in faded overalls and black cotton shirt, with hobnailed brogans on his feet, and on his head a hat whose shapelessness and stains advertised the rough usage of wind and rain and sun and camp-smoke. He stood erect, seeing wide-eyed the secrecy of the scene and sensuously inhaling the warm, sweet breath of the canyongarden through nostrils that dilated and quivered with delight. His eyes narrowed to laughing slits of blue, his face wreathed itself in joy, and his mouth curled in a smile as he cried aloud:
“Jumping dandelions and happy hollyhocks, but that smells good to me! Talk about your attar o’roses an’ cologne factories! They ain’t in it!”
He had the habit of soliloquy. His quick-changing facial expressions might tell every thought and mood, but the tongue, perforce, ran hard after, repeating, like a second Boswell.
The man lay down on the lip of the pool and drank long and deep of its water. “Tastes good to me,” he murmured, lifting his head and gazing across the pool at the side-hill, while he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. The side-hill attracted his attention. Still lying on his stomach, he studied the hill formation long and carefully. It was a practised eye that traveled up the slope to the crumbling canyon-wall and back down again to the edge of the pool. He scrambled to his feet and favored the side-hill with a second survey.
“Looks good to me,” he concluded, picking up his pick and shovel and gold-pan.
He crossed the stream below the pool, stepping agilely from stone to stone. Where the side-hill touched the water he dug up a shovelful of dirt and put it into the gold-pan. He squatted down, holding the pan in his two hands, and partly immersing it in the stream. Then he imparted to the pan a deft circular motion that sent the water sluicing in and o
ut through the dirt and gravel. The larger and the lighter particles worked to the surface, and these, by a skilful dipping movement of the pan, he spilled out and over the edge. Occasionally, to expedite matters, he rested the pan and with his fingers raked out the large pebbles and pieces of rock.
The contents of the pan diminished rapidly until only fine dirt and the smallest bits of gravel remained. At this stage he began to work very deliberately and carefully. It was fine washing, and he washed fine and finer, with a keen scrutiny and delicate and fastidious touch. At last the pan seemed empty of everything but water; but with a quick semi-circular flirt that sent the water flying over the shallow rim into the stream, he disclosed a layer of black sand on the bottom of the pan. So thin was this layer that it was like a streak of paint. He examined it closely. In the midst of it was a tiny golden speck. He dribbled a little water in over the depressed edge of the pan. With a quick flirt he sent the water sluicing across the bottom, turning the grains of black sand over and over. A second tiny golden speck rewarded his effort.
The washing had now become very fine – fine beyond all need of ordinary placer mining. He worked the black sand, a small portion at a time, up the shallow rim of the pan. Each small portion he examined sharply, so that his eyes saw every grain of it before he allowed it to slide over the edge and away. Jealously, bit by bit, he let the black sand slip away. A golden speck, no larger than a pin-point, appeared on the rim, and by his manipulation of the water it returned to the bottom of the pan. And in such fashion another speck was disclosed, and another. Great was his care of them. Like a shepherd he herded his flock of golden specks so that not one should be lost. At last, of the pan of dirt nothing remained but his golden herd. He counted it, and then, after all his labor, sent it flying out of the pan with one final swirl of water.
