Bendigo Shafter

by Louis L'Amour

  When I pulled my hand out of the water I looked at it, and what I held was gold.

  It was a nugget, of rough gold, showing no sign of stream action at all, and it must have weighed an ounce or more.

  Now it could be one of its kind, but it hadn’t been under water long, and it hadn’t traveled far, or some of that roughness would have been worn down by batting around among the rocks.

  I stood up, dried my hands on my chaps a mite, then slipped that nugget into my pocket.

  For a moment I stood there, listening to the talk on the bank about thirty yards off, then carefully I studied the layout.

  That stream ran cold and fast where I stood, running over rocks polished smooth by the water, but upstream not more than fifty yards it cut through a ragged old ledge of crumbling rock.

  There was a good chance that gold had come right from there, but I’d no idea of climbing back up there. In the first place my back was badly bruised, and every twist it got hurt something fierce, and second I didn’t want anybody noticing or talking about what I’d done. I climbed back up the bank, then stopped and took in the layout.

  The west is littered with lost mines, some good, some not, but those lost were usually lost because the finder was so excited he didn’t find the right landmarks to guide him back. Everybody expects to come right back, but that’s rarely possible due to one reason or another, so I took far-out landmarks, then distances, trying to find objects and estimate distances that would not be the same from any other direction.

  We made it back to our town just after sundown, and sure enough, it turned into snow that night and by daylight the snow was eight inches deep on the level and drifted deep in every draw and canyon.

  To make matters worse, one of those claw marks developed some infection with fever, and it was several days before I could get out and around.

  One thing I did do. While lying in bed or sitting up I wrote a few pages on mountain lions. First, I noted down everything I knew about them, taking several days to recall it. I knew some people claimed a lion never killed except for meat, but that wasn’t true. I’d seen a lion kill a doe and two fawns in just a minute or two, eat part of the meat, bury the rest under branches and such, and leave it. Occasionally a lion would come back to a kill, but only rarely would he eat from it again though he might move it to a fresh place so the meat would not spoil as fast.

  When I had it all down I got out those newspapers I had and reread some of the stuff they’d published to see how others had done it, and then, trying not to be fancy for I didn’t know a lot of words, I wrote everything I knew about mountain lions. I described a couple of hunts, including the lion who’d jumped me, only I wrote it like it was somebody else.

  Stacy Follett dropped by Cain’s one night, and I started him talking. He’d known of two men, one an Indian, one a white man who had been attacked and killed by mountain lions, and when he had gone I noted down what he had said.

  Meanwhile I made notes on the location of the gold just as though it were material for an article on where we had killed the elk.

  So far no gold had been found in quantity in the area, although Neely had taken out a good bit over the past two years, and Webb had also made a fair living from his claims.

  Mail came through just before Christmas, and with the rest of it a bundle of newspapers, some of them dating from months back, but new to most of us. News came through by the occasional travelers, and it was rumored that by spring the telegraph wire was to come to our town.

  Finally I put together my account of the mountain lion and mailed it away. Without waiting for results I wrote an account of the cattle drive from Oregon to our town, including the stories of the gun battles, but writing it as though I wrote of somebody else. Then, suddenly filled with ambition, and having little else to do but rustle firewood and meat, I wrote an account of the rescue of Mae Stuart and the children from the Indians.

  Most of what I had read would lead one to think that Indians were all of a kind, and even before I heard about the first story I received a letter from an editor doubting that the older Indians would sit quietly by while a white man knocked one of them out. Well, Indians had their personal animosities as much as any white men, and that young buck needed taking down a notch.

  The long, cold days gave me time to think, and much of the work that needed to be done was the kind that was conducive to thinking. When a man is sawing wood his mind is free to wander, and mine did. So much was happening in the outside world of which I knew too little. The newspapers were telling me of it, and from a distance it seemed exciting, important, and filled with color. Yet even as I thought that, I knew that here on the frontier, what we were doing was even more important.

  At night I would spend hours reading the papers that had been forwarded to me, papers from New York, Chicago, and Omaha, mostly. They had started an elevated railroad in New York, on Ninth Avenue, and the American-made pianos, Steinway and Chickering, had startled the world by winning first prizes at the Paris Exposition.

  Nebraska had become a state. Jefferson Davis, who had been president of the Confederacy, had been released on bail put up by Horace Greeley, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and Gerrit Smith. President Johnson had fired his Secretary of War, Stanton. A man named Sholes had patented a typewriter and sold the rights to Eliphalet Remington ... whoever he was.

  They had even passed a law giving only an eight-hour day to government workers ... it was getting so nobody wanted to work any more.

  There was no letter from Ninon.

  More and more I was thinking about that trip with old Uruwishi to the Medicine Wheel.

  More travelers were coming along, despite the cold and the snow. Business had more than tripled over the past year, and although other settlements around had trouble, the bad ones avoided our town.

  Colly Benson had built himself a dugout not far from Ethan and was snugged down for the winter. When I was out of town, he walked the streets and wore the star.

  When he pinned it on, he gave me a hard-eyed smile. “What you tryin’, Ben? You want to make an honest citizen of me?”

  Tipping back in my chair, I grinned at him. “Not you, Colly. I’m just trying to keep the others honest.”

  “What’s this talk about you going north come spring?”

  “Ever hear of the Medicine Wheel, Colly?” He nodded. “Yeah, I heard some talk. Never knew anybody who’d seen it. Just a ring of rocks, isn’t it?”

  “It is more than that, I believe. It’s some sort of a religious symbol or shrine for some long ago Indians. I’d like to see it.”

  “Yeah.” Colly knocked the ashes from his pipe and began scraping it with a knife point. “You know, when I was a youngster I lived down along the Carolina-Georgia border, and Ma she went out one day and was washing clothes down by the river. When she came back she had a flat kind of dish, engraving around the edge. She’d found it stuck into the earth in the riverbank.

  “We went down an’ dug around some and we found ten, twelve pots, all the same kind. We washed them up and used them for years. It was better stuff than I ever saw among the fifteen or twenty Injun tribes I’ve had dealin’s with. Which reminds me. There was a man back yonder in our village who’d been a ship’s captain. He had him all kinds of stuff, spears, shields, pottery, baskets, everything like that. He’d picked it up in the South Seas or the like.

  “Well, he had him one basket there that had a thin strip of oak for the rim. It was tied fast with some other strips, but it was a beautiful job. One day when I was talking to him a friend of ours, a Cherokee man, he came to see the Cap’n. He seen that basket and claimed it was Cherokee, but the Cap’n, he told him he’d gotten that basket in South America.”

  After he went away I sat for a long time thinking about the Indians. There were so many questions I wanted to ask, so many answers I needed, and I did not know where to find the answers. Worst of all, it was the old Indians like Uruwishi who had the answers, and so many times nobody asked them, and the
y’d never figure a white man to be interested. And of course, some of it was not to be told to any stranger.

  Ethan came in that afternoon. “Seen some pony tracks, over east of here,” he said. “They’ve been looking us over.”

  “Sioux?”

  “Uh-huh. Ben, I don’t want to worry the women-folks, but come spring we’re in for trouble. It’s in the wind.” He hesitated. “You know, the Sioux were pushing west when the white man interfered ... they got themselves horses back there on the Wisconsin-Minnesota border country and they fanned out, their war parties raided south and west as well as north. They were headed toward conquering the whole country.”

  There was something in that. The horse had changed the Sioux from an earthbound people, hunting on foot and using only the dog for a beast of burden, to a mounted warrior, as fierce as any the old world ever knew. He was a knight without armor, fierce, indomitable ... a conqueror.

  West there were the Crow and the Blackfeet, both tribes of fighting men, the Blackfeet in particular. What would have happened when they collided no man would now know, but in America as in Africa a conquering tribe met the white man face to face. In Africa the Bantu, migrating slowly southward down the centuries, had met no enemy they could not subdue, and then they met the white man coming up from the south. What was left of the Hottentot and the Bushmen was caught in the meat-grinder between them.

  1865 had been the bloody year on the plains, with the Sioux driving hard in attack after attack against soldiers, wagon trains, settlers. In 1866, just before Christmas, the Sioux destroyed the Fetterman command, wiped them out to a man. In 1867 there had been the Wagon-Box fight, led by a more skillful soldier who understood the Indian way of fighting, and they had defeated ... or at least held off... the Sioux.

  Some of this I said aloud. Ethan shrugged. “The Sioux and the Blackfeet have come together a time or two, and the Sioux and the Crow never did get along, far’s I know.

  “The Shoshone now, they’re friendly. Most of that country we’re going to pass through come spring will be their territory. Chief Washakie’s no fool, and he’s ready for peace. His tribe’s not big enough, even with the Bannock’s to help to keep off the Sioux, so he wants allies. He’s doing just what they’ve been doing in Europe for years, he’s getting allies where he can, and if he can’t get us to help he can be sure we won’t attack him whilst he’s busy with the Sioux.”

  “I’m going east, Ethan.”

  The decision was suddenly made, right then. I suppose it had been in my mind for a while, but now it was out in the open where I could rope and tie the idea and inspect the brand. He chuckled. “I figured you’d be doing that. You comin’ back?”

  “Of course.”

  “Drake’s been hoping you would go. He’s worried about Ninon, and he figures you’re the man for her. She’ll be sixteen or so now, and girls are gettin’ married at that age all over the country.”

  “I do want to see her, but I’ve got nothing, Ethan. Her folks have money.”

  “I ain’t worried about you. Neither is Henry Stratton.”

  “Stratton?”

  “He told Drake Morrell he thought you were a coming man. He thinks you should go into politics.”

  It was a flattering thought, but I was not so sure. Who knew of me outside our little area? And what did I know of politics? Only enough to know there was an art to it for beyond what most men realized. Getting elected was one thing, but putting over a program after you were elected was another ... much more difficult.

  Once I’d put my decision into words I knew it was what I must do. Colly Benson was handling the town as well as I could, and it would give me a chance to see Ninon as well as to visit the publishers in the east. The more I thought of it, the more I knew it was what I must do.

  “When I go,” I decided suddenly, “I’ll take Lorna with me.”

  Chapter 33

  It was a week after the lion jumped me before I was up to riding again, and I saddled up and headed out for the hills, leaving Colly Benson in charge at our town. Ethan was off somewhere, hunting.

  The air was crisp and clear. I could hear the ringing of axes where several of the townsmen were cutting firewood. It was cold, but I was dressed for it.

  Another Christmas was right close and the folks were decorating trees, rehearsing for the school play, and straightening up for the holidays. Looking back I could see much activity along the streets. Several little settlements had grown up nearby, and there were stories of men washing out twenty-five to thirty dollars a day; nuggets had been found worth over a hundred dollars each.

  Spring Gulch, Meadow Gulch, and Yankee Gulch were all being worked. There must have been several hundred people in the area now, but they were scattered, and our town was several miles from the nearest group.

  The slope along which I turned was covered with timber, many small trees and a few scattered big ones. Here and there I could see the bare places where porcupines had climbed the trees to eat away the bark. Enough of that would kill the tree.

  There was a wariness in me as I rode, for I well remembered Ethan’s warning about the Sioux. They were a warrior people, and anyone not of their tribe would be considered a potential enemy. Yet the forest and the mountains were always exciting to me, and I wove a precarious trail through the timber and the great boulders, passing a deserted beaver pond, noting a lion track. I walked my horse across a scarred flank of the mountain where a recent avalanche had torn a gash, fifty yards across.

  What trail there may have been was gone, but my horse walked out, choosing his way with care, and we went on across and into the trees once more. Here there was an area of more rain or snow ... all through the mountains there are scattered islands of climate where due to some formation of mountains or canyon, the rainfall is heavier, the growth thicker.

  Soon I would reach the area of my gold discovery, so I pulled up under some trees to watch the trail behind. I did not believe I was followed, but it was good to be sure.

  It was slow going, for there were many deadfalls from an old blow-down. The tree trunks lay gray and bare; most of them had tost their bark, and they lay about like the scattered bones of some gigantic monster. There was a place among the deadfalls where a small stream trickled down, fell over the end of a log, and into a small basin.

  My horse drank, while I let my eyes drift across the steep slopes ... no movement, nothing but a lone eagle, far above. Yet I had learned caution. Nearby I could see where a white-tailed deer had been nibbling pine needles and browsing on some of the brush that appeared above the snow. After a few minutes I let my mustang pick its way down the steep game trail toward the bottom of the canyon.

  Deliberately I had taken a wandering route as if merely hunting for game. I did not wish to ride right to the creek where I had found gold. I dismounted among some pines and boulders well up the slope, picketing my horse on a small patch of snow-covered bush.

  Rifle in hand I went down the slope, following a route where the wind had blown away the snow. My boots slid in the loose rock, but at the bottom I went into the cedars growing from a red rock cliff. Crouching among them, I waited and watched both up and downstream.

  Right below me was the crumbling ledge through which the stream had cut its way and where I believed the gold originated. After a few minutes I went down through the trees to the top of the ledge. Below me the stream was rimmed with ice, and there was a steep slide from the top of the ledge to the stream, some fifteen feet below. Carefully, I descended, using my hands on the rocks, as though going down to the stream for a drink. On the way down I gave all my attention to the rocks, but saw no gold, nor sign of it. At the stream, to complete the illusion for any who might follow my tracks, I crawled out on a rock and drank from the stream.

  At the bottom were some fragments that might be gold. Reaching in, I managed to get two of the larger pieces. One, only slightly larger than a pinhead, was undoubtedly gold. The other was larger ... perhaps twice as large.


  I was close. I drank again, then turned slowly around and looked carefully along the slope of the mountain. Without a doubt I was on some small stream that flowed into the Popo Agie, an Indian name meaning “beginning of the waters.”

  I was alone.

  I went along the ice at the stream’s edge until I stood in the gateway of stone through which the stream passed. I crouched to study the rocks; it was ancient quartz, decomposing. I picked up a chunk in my fingers and could rub grains from it. I struck the chunk against the rock wall, and it fell apart.

  No gold ... at least none that I could see.

  Where I now stood I could be seen only from upstream or down, and due to the twisting canyon the stream had cut, I was visible for no great distance from either direction. I studied the wall with care. Low, down right where the ice formed, was another streamer of quartz that disappeared under the ice.

  Not wanting to leave any knife marks, I picked up a large chunk of rock and slammed it on the ice. In a few minutes I had broken down to the water. Running my hand into the water and through the gravel, I scooped it up.

  There were three good-sized flakes in my hand along with some fragments of quartz and some sand.

  I broke off several fragments from the quartz-vein where it lay under the water and examined them. They were seamed with gold.

  I straightened up and dried my freezing hands on my shirt front, then held them under my coat and in my armpits to warm my gold ... possibly just an outcropping, possibly much more.

  It was winter, and there was no possibility of working a mine in such a place, nor of watching over it if it became known; yet I wanted the gold, or some of it. Worst of all, I should be returning soon if I intended to, and I had said nothing of the possibility of staying out. Nor had I any kind of tool beyond the hunting knife I habitually carried and the hatchet or tomahawk on my saddle.