The Man from the Bitter Roots

by Lockhart, Caroline

  “At a guess, I’d say $25,000, exclusive of freight, and as you know the rates from the coast are almighty high.”

  “Twenty-five thousand dollars!” And five hundred, Bruce reminded himself, was about the size of his pile.

  “Much obliged.”

  “Don’t mention it,” Mr. Dill yawned. “One good turn deserves another, and, thanks to you, I’m almost warm.”

  Because Mr. Dill yawned it did not follow that he slept. On the contrary, he was as wide awake as Bruce himself and when Bruce gently withdrew from the sociable proximity of a bed that sagged like a hammock, and tiptoed about the room while dressing, going downstairs to the office wash-basin when he discovered that there was skating in the water-pitcher, lest the sound of breaking ice disturb his bed-fellow, Dill was gratefully appreciative.

  He really liked the fellow, he did for a fact—in spite of his first prejudice against him for being alive. Besides, since he was going outside, as he had told him, for an indefinite stay, he might not interfere so much with his plans after all, for Mr. Dill, too, had had an inspiration.

  * * *

  X

  “Capital Takes Holt”

  It is a safe wager that where two or three prospectors meet in a mining camp or cabin, the length of time which will elapse before the subject of conversation reverts to food will not exceed ten minutes and in this respect the inhabitants of Ore City who “bached” were no exception. The topic was introduced in the office of the Hinds House this morning as soon as there was a quorum.

  “I declare, I doubts if I lives to see grass,” said Yankee Sam despondently as he manicured a rim of dough from his finger-nails with the point of a savage-looking jack-knife. “I opened my next-to-the-last sack of flour this mornin’ and ’twas mouldy. I got to eat it though, and like as not t’other’s the same. I tell you,” lugubriously, “the pickin’s is gittin’ slim on this range!”

  “I know one thing,” declared Judge George Petty, who was sober and irritable, “if N. K. Rippetoe sends me in any more of that dod-gasted Injun bakin’ powder, him and me is goin’ to fall out. I warned him once I’d take my trade away and now he’s gone and done it again. It won’t raise nothin’, not nothin’!”

  “An’ you can’t drink it,” Lanningan observed pointedly.

  “You remember them dried apples I bought off the half-breed lady down on the Nez Perce Reserve? Well,” said Porcupine Jim sourly, “they walked off day ’fore yistiddy—worms. I weighed that lady out cash gold, and look what she’s done on me! I wouldn’t wonder if them apples wa’nt three to four year old.”

  “If only we could find out what that Yellow-Leg’s after.” Lannigan’s face was cross-lined with anxiety. “If some of us could only unload somethin’ on him, then the rest of us could borry till Capital took holt in the spring.”

  “S-ss-sh! That’s him,” came a warning whisper.

  “Good morning, gentlemen. I seem to have slept late.”

  It was apparent to all that Mr. Dill’s spirits were decidedly better than when he had retired.

  Yankee Sam suggested humorously:

  “I reckon they was a little slow gittin’ around with the tea-kittle to thaw you out, so you could git up.”

  Mr. Dill declared that he had been agreeably disappointed in his night; that he really felt quite rested and refreshed.

  “If it isn’t too soon after breakfast, friends,” he said tentatively, as he produced a flask.

  It was quickly made clear to him that it was never too soon, or too late, for that matter, and a suggestion of force was necessary to tear the flask from Yankee Sam’s face.

  “What? Teetotaler?” As Uncle Bill shook his head.

  “Not exactly; sometimes I take a little gin for my kidnas.”

  Ore City looked at him in unfeigned surprise. Mr. Dill, however, believed he understood. The old man either knew him or had taken a personal dislike—maybe both—at any rate he ceased to urge.

  “Gentlemen,” impressively, and Ore City felt intuitively that its acute sufferings, due to ungratified curiosity, were at an end, “no doubt you’ve wondered why I’m here?”

  Ore City murmured a hypocritical protest.

  “That would be but natural,” Mr. Dill spoke slowly, drawling his words, animated perhaps by the spirit which prompts the cat to prolong the struggles of the dying mouse, “but I have postponed making my mission known until rejuvenated by a good night’s sleep. Now, gentlemen, if I can have your support, your hearty co-operation, I may tell you that I am in a position—to make Ore City boom! In other words—Capital Is Going to Take Hold!”

  Porcupine Jim, who, through long practice and by bracing the ball of his foot against the knob on the stove door, was able to balance himself on one rear leg of his chair, lost his footing on the nickel knob and crashed to the floor, but he “came up smiling,” offering for inspection a piece of ore in his extended hand.

  “Straight cyanidin’ proposition, averagin’ $60 to the ton with a tunnel cross-cuttin’ the ore-shoot at forty feet that samples $80 where she begins to widen—” Lack of breath prevented Porcupine Jim from saying that the hanging wall was of schist and the foot wall of granite and he would take $65,000 for it, if he could have 10 per cent. in cash.

  The specimen which Yankee Sam waved in the face of Capital’s representative almost grazed his nose.

  “This here rock is from the greatest low-grade proposition in Americy! Porphery dike with a million tons in sight and runnin’ $10 easy to the ton and $40,000 buys it on easy terms. Ten thousand dollars down and reg’lar payments every six months, takin’ a mortgage—”

  “I’m a s-showin’ y-you the best f-free-millin’ proposition outside of C-California,” Judge George Petty stammered in his eagerness. “That there mine’ll m-make ten m-men rich. They’s stringers in that there ledge that’ll run $5,000—$10,000 to the ton. I t-tell you, sir, the ‘B-Bouncin’ B-Bess’ ain’t no m-mine—she’s a b-bonanza! And, when you git down to the secondary enrichment you’ll take it out in c-c-chunks!”

  Inwardly, Lannigan was cursing himself bitterly that he had eaten “The Gold-Dust Twins,” but, searching through his pockets, fortunately, he found a sample from the “Prince o’ Peace.” He handed it to Mr. Dill, together with a magnifying glass.

  “Take a look at this, will you?” He indicated a minute speck with his fingernail.

  Mr. Dill lost the speck and was some time in finding it and, while he searched, the stove pipe separated at the joint, calling attention to the fact that the sufferer upstairs was nervous. Pa Snow’s voice came so distinctly down the stove-pipe hole that there was reason to believe he was on his hands and knees.

  “Befoah you should do anything definite, we-all should like if you would look ovah ‘The Bay Hoss.’ It’s makin’ a fine showin’, and ‘The Under Dawg’ is on the market, too, suh.”

  In the excitement Uncle Bill sat puffing calmly on his pipe.

  Mr. Dill with a gesture brushed aside the waving arms and eager hands:

  “And haven’t you anything to sell?” he asked him curiously. “Don’t you mine?”

  “Very little,” Uncle Bill drawled tranquilly: “I dudes.”

  “You what?”

  “I keeps an ‘ad’ in the sportin’ journals, and guides.”

  “Oh, yes, hunters—eastern sportsmen—” Mr. Dill nodded. “But I thought I recognized an old-time prospector in you.”

  “They’s no better in the hull West,” Yankee Sam declared generously, while Uncle Bill murmured that there was surer money in dudes. “Show Dill that rar’ mineral, Uncle Bill.” To Dill in an aside: “He’s got a mountain of it and it’s somethin’ good.”

  Uncle Bill made no move.

  “I aims to hold it for the boom.”

  “And what’s your honest opinion of the country, Mr. Griswold?” Dill asked conciliatingly. “What do you think well find when we reach the secondary enrichment?”

  A pin dropping would have sounded like a tin wash boil
er rolling downstairs in the silence which fell upon the office of the Hinds House. Uncle Bill, looking serenely at the circle of tense faces, continued to smoke while he took his own time to reply.

  “I’m a thinkin’,”—puff-puff—“that when you sink a hundred feet below the surface,”—puff-puff—“you won’t git a damn thing.”

  Involuntarily Yankee Sam reached for the poker and various eyes sought the wood-box for a sizable stick of wood.

  “Upon what do you base your opinion?” asked Mr. Dill, taken somewhat aback. “What makes you think that?”

  “Because we’re in it now. The weatherin’ away of the surface enrichment made the placers we washed out in ’61-’64.”

  Judge George Petty glowered and demanded contemptuously:

  “Do you know what a mine is?”

  “Well,” replied Uncle Bill tranquilly, “not allus, but ginerally a mine is a hole in the ground owned by a liar.”

  Yankee Sam half rose from his chair and pointed an accusing poker at Uncle Bill.

  “That old pin-head is the worst knocker that ever queered a camp. If we’d a knowed you was comin’,” turning to Mr. Dill, “we’d a put him in a tunnel with ten days’ rations and walled him up.”

  “They come clost to lynchin’ me onct on Sucker Crick in Southern Oregon for tellin’ the truth,” Uncle Bill said reminiscently, unperturbed.

  Southern Oregon! Wilbur Dill looked startled. Ah, that was it! He looked sharply at Griswold, but the old man’s face was blank.

  “We’re all entitled to our opinions,” he said lightly, though his assurance had abated by a shade, “but, judging superficially, from the topography of the country, I’m inclined to disagree.”

  Ore City’s sigh of relief was audible.

  Mr. Dill continued:

  “And I—we are willing to back our confidence in your camp by the expenditure of a reasonable amount, in order to find out; but, gentlemen, you’ve raised your sights too high. Your figures’ll have to come down if we do business. A prospect isn’t a mine, you know, and there’s not been much development work done, as I understand.”

  “How was you aimin’ to work it,” Uncle Bill asked mildly, “in case you did git anything? The Mascot burned its profits buyin’ wood fer steam.”

  “The riddles of yesterday are the commonplaces of to-day, my friend. The world has moved since the arrastre was invented and steam is nearly as obsolete. Hydro-electric is the only power to-day and that’s what I—we—propose to use.”

  Ore City’s eyes widened and then they looked at Uncle Bill. What drawback would he think of next? He never disappointed.

  “There ain’t water enough down there in Lemon Crick in August to run a churn.”

  Mr. Dill laughed heartily: “Right you are—but how about the river down below—there’s water enough in that, if all I’m told is true.”

  For once he surprised the old man into an astonished stare.

  “The river’s all of twenty mile from here.”

  “They’ve transmitted power from Victoria Falls on the Zembesi River, in Rhodesia, six hundred miles to the Rand.”

  Chortling, Ore City looked at the camp hoodoo in triumph.—That should hold him for a while.

  “I wish you luck,” said Uncle Bill, his complacency returning, “but Ore City ain’t the Rand. You’ll never pull your money back.”

  “And in our own country they send ‘juice’ two hundred and forty-five miles from Au Sable to Baltic Creek, Michigan.”

  * * *

  Before his departure Bruce had arranged with Porcupine Jim to load a toboggan with provisions and snowshoe down to Toy. Mr. Dill was delighted when he learned this fortunate circumstance, for it enabled him to make a trip to the river for the purpose, as he elaborately explained, of “looking out a power-site, and the best route to string the wires.”

  While he was gone, properties to the value of half a million in the aggregate changed hands—but no cash. It was like the good old days to come again, to see the embryo magnates whispering in corners, to feel once more a delicious sense of mystery and plotting in the air. Real estate advanced in leaps and bounds and “Lemonade Dan” overhauled the bar fixtures in the Bucket o’ Blood, and stuffed a gunny-sack into a broken window pane with a view to opening up. In every shack there was an undercurrent of excitement and after the dull days of monotony few could calm themselves to a really good night’s sleep. They talked in thousands and the clerk’s stock of Cincos, that had been dead money on his hands for over three years, “moved” in three days—sold out to the last cigar!

  When the time arrived that they had calculated Dill should return, even to the hour, the person who was coming back from the end of the snow tunnel at the front door of the Hinds House, that commanded a good view of the trail, always met someone going out to ask if there was “any sight of ’em?” and he, in turn, took his stand at the mouth of the tunnel, until driven in by the cold. In this way, there was nearly always someone doing lookout duty.

  Ore City’s brow was corrugated with anxiety when Dill and Porcupine Jim had exceeded by three days the time allotted them for their stay. Wouldn’t it be like the camp’s confounded luck if Capital fell off of something and broke its neck?

  Their relief was almost hysterical when one evening at sunset Lannigan shouted joyfully: “Here they come!”

  They dashed through the tunnel to see Mr. Dill dragging one foot painfully after the other to the hotel. He seemed indifferent to the boisterous greeting, groaning merely:

  “Oh-h-h, what a hill!”

  “We been two days a makin’ it,” Jim vouchsafed cheerfully. “Last night we slept out on the snow.”

  “You seem some stove up.” Uncle Bill eyed Dill critically. “And looks like you have fell off twenty pounds.”

  “Stove up!” exclaimed Dill plaintively. “Between Jim’s cooking and that hill I took up four notches in my belt. I wouldn’t make that trip again in winter if the Alaska Treadwell was awaiting me as a gift at the other end.”

  “You’ll git used to it,” consoled Uncle Bill, “you’ll learn to like it when you’re down there makin’ that there ‘juice.’ I mind the time I went to North Dakoty on a visit—I longed for one of these hills to climb to rest myself. The first day they set me out on the level, I ran away—it took four men to head me off.”

  “We found where we kin develop 250,000 jolts,” Porcupine Jim announced.

  “Volts, James,” corrected Mr. Dill, and added, dryly, “Don’t start in to put up the plant until I get back.”

  He was coming back then—he was! Figuratively, all Ore City fell at his feet, though strictly only two scrambled for the privilege of unbuckling his snow-shoes, and only three picked up his bag.

  * * *

  XI

  The Ghost at the Banquet

  T. Victor Sprudell’s dinner guests were soon to arrive, and Mr. Sprudell’s pearl gray spats were twinkling up and down the corridor of Bartlesville’s best hotel, and back and forth between the private dining-room and the Room of Mystery adjoining, where mechanics of various kinds had been busy under his direction, for some days.

  But now, so far as he could see, everything was in perfect working order and he had only to sit back and enjoy his triumph and receive congratulations; for once more Mr. Sprudell had demonstrated his versatile genius!

  The invited guests came, all of them—a few because they wanted to, and the rest because they were afraid to stay away. Old Man “Gid” Rathburn, who cherished for Sprudell the same warm feeling of regard that he had for a rattlesnake, occupied the seat of honor, while John Z. Willetts, a local financier, whose closet contained a skeleton that Sprudell by industrious sleuthing had managed to unearth, was placed at his host’s left to enjoy himself as best he could. Adolph Gotts, who had the contract for the city paving and hoped to renew it, was present for the sole purpose, as he stated privately, of keeping the human catamount off his back. Others in the merry party were Abram Cone and Y. Fred Smart.


  The dinner was the most elaborate the chef had been able to devise, the domestic champagne was as free as the air, and Mr. Sprudell, stimulated by the presence of the moneyed men of Bartlesville and his private knowledge of the importance of the occasion, was keyed up to his best. Genial, beaming, he quoted freely from his French and Latin phrase-book and at every turn of the conversation was ready with appropriate verse—his own, mostly.

  This was Mr. Sprudell’s only essay at promoting, but he knew how it was done. A good dinner, wine, cigars; and he had gone the ingenious guild of money-raisers one better by an actual, uncontrovertible demonstration of the safety and value of his scheme.

  His personal friends already had an outline of the proposition, with the promise that they should hear more, and now, after a dash through “Spurr’s Geology Applied to Mining,” he was prepared to tell them all that their restricted intelligences could comprehend.

  When the right moment arrived, Mr. Sprudell arose impressively. In an attentive silence, he gave an instructive sketch of the history of gold-mining, beginning with the plundering expeditions of Darius and Alexander, touching lightly on the mines of Iberia which the Roman wrestled from the Carthagenians, and not forgetting, of course, the conquest of Mexico and Peru inspired by the desire for gold.

  When his guests were properly impressed by the wide range of his reading, he skillfully brought the subject down to modern mines and methods, and at last to his own incredible good fortune, after hardships of which perhaps they already had heard, in securing one hundred and sixty acres of valuable placer-ground in the heart of a wild and unexplored country—a country so dangerous and inaccessible that he doubted very much if it had ever been trod by any white foot beside his own and old “Bill” Griswold’s.

  The climax came when he dramatically announced his intention of making a stock company of his acquisition and permitting Bartlesville’s leading citizens to subscribe!

  Mr. Sprudell’s guests received the news of the privilege which was to be accorded them in an unenthusiastic silence. In fact his unselfish kindness seemed to inspire uneasiness rather than gratitude in Bartlesville’s leading citizens. They could bring themselves to swallow his dinners, but to be coerced into buying his mining stock was a decidedly bitter dose.