The spur to which Joe referred, connecting at its upper end with the cliff at the foot of which we were then standing, reached downward like a great claw to within a short distance of the chain of snow hummocks, and undoubtedly our safest course would be to follow it to its lowest extremity and begin our descent from there. It was near the further edge of the slide, however, and to get over to it we had to take a course close under the cliff, holding on to the rocks with our right hands as we skirted along the upper edge of the shaly slope. It was rather slow work, for we had to be careful, but at length we reached our destination, when, turning once more to our left, we scrambled down the spur to its lowest point.
“Now, Phil,”cried Joe, “you stay where you are while I go down. No use to take unnecessary risks by both going down together. You sit here, if you don’t mind, and wait for me; I won’t be any longer than I can help.”
“All right,”said I; “but take the end of the rope in your hand, Joe. No use for you to take unnecessary risks, either.”
“HE SHOT DOWNWARD LIKE AN ARROW”
“That’s a fact,”replied my companion. “Yes, I’ll take the rope.”
With a shovel in one hand and the end of the rope in the other, Joe started downward, but presently, having advanced as far as the rope extended, he dropped it and went cautiously on, using the shovel-handle as a staff. Down to this point he had had little difficulty, but a few steps further on, reaching presumably the change of formation we had expected to find, where the smooth, icy rock beneath the shale was covered only by an inch or so of the loose material, the moment he stepped upon it Joe’s feet slipped from under him and falling on his back he shot downward like an arrow.
I held my breath as I watched him, horribly scared lest he should go flying down the whole remaining length of the slope and over the precipice; but my suspense lasted only a few seconds, for presently a great jet of snow flew into the air, in the midst of which Joe vanished. The next moment, however, he appeared again, hooking the snow out of his neck with his finger, and called out to me:
“All right, Phil! I fell into a hole where a tree came out. I’m going to shovel out the snow now. Don’t let go of that rope whatever you do.”
So saying he set to work with the shovel, making the snow fly, while I sat on the rocks a hundred feet above, watching him. In about a quarter of an hour he looked up and called out to me:
“I’ve found it, Phil. Right in this hole. It’s the hole our big tree came out of, I believe. Can’t tell how much of a vein, though, the ground is frozen too hard. Bring down the pick, will you? Come down to the end of the rope and throw it to me.”
In response to this request, having first tied a knot in the end of the rope and fixed it firmly in a crack in the rocks, I went carefully down as far as it reached, when, with a back-handed fling, I sent the pick sliding down to my partner.
“Don’t you think I might venture down and help you, Joe?”I called out.
“No!”replied Joe with much emphasis. “You stay where you are, Phil. It would be too risky. I can do the work by myself all right.”
Still keeping my hold on the rope, therefore, I sat myself down on the shale, while Joe, pick in hand, went to work again. Pretty soon he straightened up and said:
“I’ve found the vein all right, Phil; I don’t think there can be a doubt of it. Good strong vein, too, I should say.”
“How wide is it?”I asked.
“Can’t tell how wide it is. I’ve found what I suppose to be the porphyry hanging-wall, right here”—tapping the rock with his pick—“and I’ve been trying to trench across the vein to find the foot-wall, but the shale runs in on me faster than I can dig it out.”
“What do you propose to do, then, Joe?”
“Try one of those other holes further along and see if I can’t find the vein again and get its direction. You sit still there, Phil. I shall want you to give me a hand out of here soon.”
With extreme caution he made his way along the line of stumps, helping himself with the pick in one hand and the shovel in the other, until, about a hundred yards distant, he arrived at another hole where a tree had been rooted out, and here he went to work again. This time he kept at it for a good half hour, but at length he laid down his tools, and for a few minutes occupied himself by building with loose pieces of rock a little pillar about eighteen inches high.
“Can you see that, Phil?”he shouted.
“Yes, I can see it,”I called back.
This seemed to be all Joe wanted, for he at once picked up his tools again, and with the same caution made his way back to the first hole.
“What’s your pile of stones for, Joe?”I asked.
“Why, I found the vein again, hanging-wall and all, and I set up that little monument so as to get the line of the vein from here.”
Taking out of his pocket a little compass we had brought for the purpose, he laid it on the rock, and sighting back over his “monument,” he found that the vein ran northeast and southwest.
“Phil,”said he, “do you see that dead pine, broken off at the top, with a hawk’s nest in it, away back there on the upper side of the gulch where we left the ponies?”
“Yes,”I replied, “I see it. What of it?”
“The line of the vein runs right to that tree, and I propose we get back and hunt for it there. I don’t want to set up the location-stake here: this place is too difficult to get at and too dangerous to work in. So I vote we get back to the dead tree and try again there. What do you say?”
“All right,”I replied. “We’ll do so.”
“Very well, then I’ll come up now.”
But this was more easily said than done. Do what he would, Joe could not get up to where I sat, holding out to him first a hand and then a foot. He tried walking and he tried crawling, but in vain; the rock beneath the shale was too steep and too smooth and too slippery. At length, at my suggestion, Joe threw the shovel up to me, when, on my lying flat and reaching downward as far as I could stretch, he succeeded in hooking the pick over the shoulder of the shovel-blade, after which he had no more difficulty.
“Well, Joe,”said I, when we had safely reached the rocks again, “it’s just as well we didn’t both go down together after all, isn’t it?”
“That’s what it is,”replied my partner, heartily. “If you had tried to come down with me we should both probably have tumbled into that hole together, and there we should have had to stay till somebody came up to look for us; and there’d have been precious little fun in that. Did it scare you when I went scooting down the slide on my back?”
“It certainly did,”I replied. “I expected to have to go down to Peter’s house and lug you home next—if there was any of you left.”
“Well, to tell you the truth, I was a bit scared myself. It was a great piece of luck my falling into that hole. It’s a dangerous place, this, and the sooner we get out of it the better; so, let us start back, at once.”
Making our way up the spur, we again skirted along between the upper edge of the slide and the foot of the cliff, and ascending once more to the ridge, we retraced our steps down it until we presently arrived at the dead tree with the hawk’s nest in it.
Here, after a careful inspection of the ground, we went to work, Joe with the pick, and I, following behind him, throwing out the loose stuff with the shovel and searching through each shovelful for bits of galena. In this way we worked, cutting a narrow trench across the line where we supposed the vein ought to run, until presently Joe himself gave a great shout which brought me to his side in an instant.
With the point of his pick he had hooked out a lump of galena as big as his head!
My! How excited we were! And how we did work! We just flew at it, tooth and nail—or, rather, pick and shovel. If our lives had depended on it we could not have worked any harder, I firmly believe. The consequence was that at the end of an hour we had uncovered a vein fifteen feet wide, disclosing a porphyry wall on one side and a limestone wall
on the other.
The vein was not, of course, a solid body of ore. Very far from it. Though there were bits of galena scattered pretty thickly all across it, the bulk of the vein-matter was composed of scraps of quartz mixed with yellow earth—the latter, as we afterwards learned, being itself decomposed lead-ore—to say nothing of grass-roots, tree-roots and other rubbish which helped to make up the mass.
But that we had found a real, genuine vein, even we, novices as we were at the business, could not doubt, and very heartily we shook hands with each other when our trenching at length brought us up against the limestone foot-wall. With the discovery of this foot-wall, Joe called a halt.
“Enough!”he cried. “Enough, Phil! Let’s stop now. We’ve got the vein, all right, and a staving good vein it is, and all we have to do for the present is to set up our location-stake. To-morrow Tom will come up here, when he can make his camp and get to work at it regularly, sinking his ten-foot prospect-hole. What are we going to name it? The ‘Hermit’? The ‘Raven’? The ‘Socrates’?”
“Call it the ‘Big Reuben,’”I suggested.
“Good!”exclaimed Joe. “That’s it! The ‘Big Reuben’ it shall be.”
This, therefore, was the title we wrote upon our location-notice, by which we claimed for Tom Connor a strip of ground fifteen hundred feet in length along the course of the vein and one hundred and fifty feet wide on either side of it; and thus did our old enemy, Big Reuben, lend his name to a “prospect”which was destined later to take its place among the foremost mines of our district.
* * *
CHAPTER XVI
The Wolf With Wet Feet
We had been so expeditious, thanks largely to Joe’s good judgment in tumbling into the right hole at the start when he slid down the shale, that we reached home well before sunset, when, according to the arrangement we had made as we rode down, Joe started again that same evening for Sulphide. This time he made the trip without interruption, and when at eight o’clock next morning he drove up to our house, Tom Connor was with him.
“How are you, old man?”cried the latter, springing to the ground and shaking hands very heartily with our guest. “That was a pretty narrow squeak you had.”
“It certainly was,”replied Peter. “And if it hadn’t been for these boys, I’d have been up there yet. What’s the news, Connor? Any clue to your ore-thieves?”
“Not much but what you and the boys have furnished. But ask Joe, he’ll tell you.”
“Well,”said Joe, “in the first place, Long John has disappeared. He has not been seen since the evening before the robbery. No one knows what’s become of him.”
“Is that so?”I cried. “Then I suppose the robbery is laid to him.”
“Yes, to him and another man. I’ll tell you all about it. After I had been to the mine and given Tom our news, I went down town to Yetmore’s and had a long talk with him. That was a good idea of your father’s, Phil, that we should go and tell Yetmore: he took it very kindly, and repeated several times how much obliged he felt. He seems most anxious to be friendly.”
“It’s my opinion,”Tom Connor cut in, “that he got such a thorough scare that night of the explosion, and is so desperate thankful he didn’t blow you two sky-high, that he can’t do enough to make amends.”
“That’s it, I think,”said Joe. “And I believe it is a great relief to him also to find that we are not trying to lay the blame on him. Anyhow, he couldn’t have been more friendly than he was; and he told me things which seem to throw some light on the matter of the ore-theft. There was seemingly a second man concerned in it; a man with a club-foot, Peter.”
“Ah, ha!”said Peter. “Is that so?”
“Yes. There used to be a man about town known as ‘Clubfoot,’ a crony of Long John’s,”Joe continued. “He was convicted of ore-stealing about three years ago, and was sent to the penitentiary. A few days ago he escaped, and it is Yetmore’s opinion that he ran straight to Long John for shelter. On the night after the explosion he—Yetmore, I mean, you know—went to John’s house ‘to give the blundering numskull a piece of his mind,’ as he said—we can guess what about—and John wouldn’t let him in; so they held their interview outside in the dark. I gathered that there was a pretty lively quarrel, which ended in Yetmore telling Long John that he had done with him, and that he needn’t expect him to grub-stake him this spring.
“It is Yetmore’s belief that the reason John wouldn’t let him into his house—it’s only a one-roomed shanty, you know—was that Clubfoot was then inside; and he further believes that John, finding himself deprived of his expected summer’s work, and no doubt incensed besides at Yetmore’s going back on him, as he would consider it, then and there planned with Clubfoot the robbery of the ore; both of them being familiar with the workings of the Pelican.”
“That sounds reasonable,”remarked Peter; “though, when all is said and done, it amounts to no more than a guess on Yetmore’s part. But, look here!”he went on, as the thought suddenly occurred to him. “If Long John is not prospecting for Yetmore or himself either, being supposedly in hiding, what was he doing on the ‘bubble’ yesterday?”
“But perhaps he is prospecting for himself,”Tom Connor broke in. “Here we are, theorizing away like a house afire on the idea that he is the thief, when maybe he had nothing to do with it. And if he is prospecting for himself, the sooner I get up to that claim the better if I don’t want to be interfered with. I reckon I’ll dig out right away. If you boys,”turning to us, “can spare the time and the buckboard you can help me a good bit by carrying up my things for me.”
“All right, Tom,”said I. “We can do so.”
Starting at once, therefore, with a load of provisions, tools and bedding, we carried them up the mountain as far as we could on wheels, and then packed them the rest of the way on horseback, when, having seen Tom comfortably established in camp near the Big Reuben—with the look of which he expressed himself as immensely pleased—Joe and I turned homeward again about four in the afternoon.
We were driving along, skirting the rim of our cañon, and were passing between the stream and the little treeless “bubble”upon which Joe had, as he believed, seen Long John standing the day before, when my companion remarked:
“I should very much like to know, Phil, what Long John was doing up there. Do you suppose——Whoa! Whoa, there, Josephus! What’s the matter with you?”
This exclamation was addressed to the horse; for at this moment the ordinarily well-behaved Josephus shied, snorted, and standing up on his hind feet struck out with his fore hoofs at a big timber-wolf, which, springing out from the shelter of some boulders on the margin of the cañon and passing almost under his nose, ran off and disappeared among the rocks.
“He must have been down to the stream to get a drink,”suggested Joe.
“He couldn’t,”said I; “the cañon-wall is too steep; no wolf could scramble up.”
“Well, if he didn’t,”remarked my companion, “how did he get his feet wet? Look here at his tracks.”
As he said this, Joe pointed to the bare stone before us, where the wolf’s wet tracks were plainly visible.
“Well,”said I, “then I suppose there must be a way up after all. Wait a moment, Joe, while I take a look.”
Jumping from the buckboard, I stepped over to the boulders whence the wolf had appeared, where, to my surprise, I found a pool, or, rather, a big puddle of water, which, overflowing, dripped into the cañon.
Where the water came from I could not at first detect, but on a more careful inspection I found that it ran, a tiny thread, along a crack in the lava not more than a couple of inches wide, which, on tracing it back, I found we had driven over without noticing. Apparently the water came down from the “bubble”through a rift in the crater-wall.
As I have stated before, several of the little craters contributed small streams of water to our creek, but this was not one of them, so, turning to my companion, I said:
“Joe, this i
s the first time I have ever seen any water come down from that ‘bubble.’ Let us climb up to the top and take a look inside.”
Away we went, therefore, scrambling up the rocky slope, when, having reached the rim, we looked down into the little crater. The area of its floor was only about an acre in extent, but instead of being grown over with grass and sagebrush, as was the case with most of them, this one was covered with blocks of stone of all sizes, some of them weighing several tons. It was evident that the walls, which were only about thirty feet in height, had at one time been much higher, but that in the course of ages they had broken down and thus littered the little bowl-shaped depression with the fragments.
The thread of water which had drawn us up there came trickling out from among these blocks of stone, and we set out at once to trace it up to its source while we still had daylight. But this, we found, was by no means easy, for, though the stream did not dodge about much, but ran pretty directly down to the crack in the wall, its course was so much impeded by rocks, under and around which it had to make its way—while over and around them we had to make our way—that it was ten or fifteen minutes before we discovered where it came from.
We had expected to find a pool of rain-water, more or less extensive, seeping through the sand and slowly draining away. What we actually did find was something very different: something which filled us with wonder and excitement!
About the middle of the little crater there came boiling out of the ground a strong spring, which, running along a deep, narrow channel it had in the course of many centuries worn in the solid stone floor of the crater, disappeared in turn beneath the litter of rocks. A short distance below the spring the channel was half filled for some distance with fragments of stone of no great size, which, checking the rush of the water, caused it to lap over the edge. It was this slight overflow which supplied the driblet we had followed up from the cañon below.
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