by Zane Grey
“What will be, Blair?” queried Kalispel, thrilling despite his agony.
“Sydney! To win back her confidence and respect. To show her that you are a man. That you can take a blow like this, yet still come up to make your fortune. That no defeat can keep you from winning her and the ranch your heart was set on.”
“You’re draggin’ my guts out of a vise,” returned Kalispel. “Blair, it’s not hard to see why Sydney is such a wonderful girl. You’re her father....I’ll play the cards as you have dealt them to me. An’ win or lose, I shall owe to you an’ Sydney the great lesson of my life.... You go back now. I’ve work to do an’ some mighty desperate thinkin’.”
Kalispel’s acts, in great contrast to his inertia for three days, attested to the spell which beset him. At least the interest taken in him by the miners along that end of the stream proclaimed he was an individual of marked interest in Thunder Mountain Camp. He bathed and scrubbed himself in the ice-cold creek; he packed water up to his camp; he shaved his bristling face; he burned his ragged clothes and donned the new outfit he had purchased; he put his camp in shipshape, and then cooked supper, all with feverish haste and in plain sight of his neighbors.
He thought that they would be vastly more astounded if they could have read his mind. It seemed to him to be a whirling chaos of consciousness, a continual stream of ideas, plans, hopes, fears, of deduction and calculation, of intuitive reasoning and rejected imaginings. And a fight against the deadly menace he felt for Leavitt. He divined presently that any effort of will directed against that mood was wasted. Leavitt was responsible for Sam’s disappearance, probably his death. He would get back Sam’s quartz mine from that suave and resourceful robber and kill him afterward, or he would kill him, anyhow. Proof was the imperative necessity.
Finally he grasped the wisdom of Blair’s reasoning. What he had to do was to live down an undeserved reputation for reckless shooting and evil motive, for all the hard idiom the frontier had cast upon him. How to set about that seemingly impossible task was the imperious question. Kalispel cudgeled his brain. Long after dark he paced to and fro under the black sinister mountain and the stars, and long after he lay in his bed he pondered the problem. In the end he remembered his earlier years of cowboy life on the Wyoming ranges, where he had been popular with everybody with whom he came in contact. Drinking, gambling, his appeal to dance-hall girls, and the inevitable gun-play—these had been his bane. The man who made the same mistake twice could never cope with the terrific problems that confronted Kalispel. At midnight he heard the faint thunder of the mountain, and it seemed to record the passing of time, the brevity of life, the fact that nature audited her secret books—that now was the day to seize.
Morning came. Kalispel awakened to it, mindful that a resolve made in the white heat of misfired passion could be kept through the gloom and tedium of recurrent moods. He was equal to his task. He laid stone walls; he chopped wood; he washed and dried his blankets; he built a fireplace; and to his watchful neighbors he made plain that he had adopted his camp as a permanent abode.
He had supplies for a month, but not a dollar to his name. His resentment powerfully combated the idea of working a poor claim, when by rights he should have owned the best. Yet he yielded to the exigency of his plan. Once decided, he had the thought that there must be hundreds of fine claims left. But where? Anywhere in that valley of treasure, he argued. Seldom did the mile stretch of winding trail up the valley fail to show pack-trains. The prospectors, the miners, the adventurers were coming. He had as fair a chance as they.
A few minutes later he was deepening the gravelly pit of his fireplace when a gleam of yellow caught his eye. “What the hell!” he muttered, falling on his knees. The bright gleam had resulted when his spade cut into a dusty gold nugget. Incredulously he stared. The blood fled back to his heart and appeared to dam up there; a muffled drumming pounded in his ears. Then with eager, grasping hands he clawed into a pocket of nuggets, a few large and many small, coarse-grained and dull, but gold, gold, gold.
CHAPTER
* * *
6
THE town of Thunder Mountain grew as if by magic.
Only a little while back the valley had been a wilderness of solitude and silence, undisturbed save for the scream of the eagle on the heights, the bugle of elk on the slopes, and the strange rumble, like distant thunder, deep under the earth.
The old beaver, answering to the instincts of nature, had taken her cub and had left the valley. The Indians, creatures of the wild, in touch with the elements, had listened to the mysterious voice of the Great Spirit, and they too had fled.
But the white man came. The magnet was gold. And no voice, no warning, no spirit, no God could drive him away.
From Challis and Salmon, Boise and Bellair, from Washington and Montana, from the south across the black lava deserts, from the Wyoming ranges, from everywhere that men heard that siren call, enchanting and irresistible, they came deepening the trails; prospectors, engineers, promoters, miners, followed by the adventurers, the gamblers, the women with hawk eyes, the dive-keepers and rum-peddlers, until Thunder River hummed with a raw, bold, happy, excited greedy throng.
Tents sprouted like white weeds and shacks and cabins followed suit. Two enterprising carpenters packed in a portable saw-mill and made more money than the gold diggers. Like grass before the scythe the willows, the cottonwoods, the pines and firs, the lodge-pole pines and the spruces went down, in peeled logs and sawed clapboards they went up again, almost as swiftly as they had come down, and from dawn to dark the incessant pound of hammers resounded through the valley. The solitude that had beguiled the Indians vanished in the roar of a thriving gold-camp, and the beauty perished in the stark, ghastly, hideous defacement of nature by white men.
In less than six weeks after its discovery, Leavitt Mine was in operation, grinding out the precious yellow metal. A ten-ton stamp mill in sections had been hauled by wagons to within a hundred miles of Thunder River. From there the greatest freighter in Idaho, one Juan Uri-quides, had packed the mill over perilous trails and down into the valley on the backs of mules. He received ten cents a pound for this packing, and thereby set a price for all supplies and merchandise to be freighted in.
The once crystal stream of mountain water ran low and muddy; the big-horn sheep that had watched from the lofty ledges deserted their haunts to escape the noise and smoke; the elk and deer went across the divide.
Every available claim for two miles along the creek had been staked. Up the slopes and in the gullies miners dug in the loose earth blasted in the rock. By day and by night the long wide street of Thunder City roared. On each side of this long wide street stores and restaurants, saloons and gambling-dens, lodging-houses and dance-halls, made bid for the custom of the populace, and each and every one of them was full. Thunder City, in its early bloom, was rich. The atmosphere was one of swift, gay, ruthless, happy-go-lucky life, under which burned the fever of gold. There were no drones in that beehive. A restless tension strung each and all as if they unconsciously knew Thunder City would not last and they must make hay while the sun shone.
The time came when Thunder City achieved the dignity of a miners’ meeting, during which, as was the custom of progressive mining-camps, a judge, sheriff, and recorder were elected. The former’s duty was to preside at each meeting of the gold-diggers; the second was supposed to maintain law and order; and the third had the task of keeping records of claims. All claims went by numbers. Leavitt’s mine was No. 1, and ail the others, up and down the valley, were numbered accordingly.
Rand Leavitt was the judge; Hank Lowrie, the sheriff; and Cliff Borden, the recorder.
* * *
One sunset hour in early summer Kalispel Emerson sat in the door of the little cabin he had erected between the boulders that had served as his shelter.
He had a double motive for occupying this favorite seat during his leisure hours—first he could watch the trails in the hope of seeing his brother
Jake some day; and secondly, from this vantage-point he could look down the gradually descending bench to the cabin of the Blairs, located on the bank of the stream, and on the site of Blair’s gold claim. Tents and shacks were scattered all along the stream and over the bench, but the cabin of the Blairs stood out conspicuously by reason of its yellow peeled logs and pretentiousness, it had a wide porch on the eastern side, where Sydney spent a good deal of her time working and resting.
Kalispel watched her at this distance, perhaps an eighth of a mile, and knew that she knew he watched her. The young miners going by her cabin always stopped to chat a moment, and Rand Leavitt often visited her there, especially on Sunday afternoons, but Kalispel never went near enough to catch the expression of her eyes. They appeared to be black gulfs in a pale face the sun did not tan.
Two months had gone by for Kalispel on the wings of his strenuous gold-digging and his passionate devotion to the Herculean task he had set himself. The former had been successful beyond even the dreams he had entertained before his loss. Every place he struck his pick yielded gold in some quantity, and he had so many little buckskin bags of dust and nuggets hidden away that he was afraid to count them. But in his serious reflection he knew beyond doubt that his dream of a ranch could be realized, and that if his star continued to shine all through summer and fall he would be rich. It did not affect him much, except when he indulged in a melancholy dream of what might have been.
His passionate devotion to the ideal set up by Blair had not been entirely futile, but he had found that to live down a bad name kept alive by enemies in high places was something well-nigh impossible. The sole hope that now inspired Kalispel hung upon the fact that Sydney Blair watched him from afar.
Always at the back of his mind was the consciousness that he still was Kalispel Emerson and would one day stalk out to face Rand Leavitt. That seemed inevitable. Jealousy had been added to what he considered a stern passion for justice. Leavitt’s attention to Sydney Blair was unmistakable and if she had not responded she had at least accepted it. Gossip of the gold camp had it that Leavitt would marry the girl.
Each and every honest miner in the diggings was too busy with his own labors to know what the other fellow was doing. The saloons and gambling-dens were objective proof of whether a miner was rich today and poor tomorrow. As they earned prodigiously, they wasted prodigally. But this fact did not apply to Kalispel. He did not drink or gamble or spend; and therefore was considered poor, one of the many unsuccessful diggers. Moreover, his story was known, and his absurd claim and loss were an outstanding joke with those miners who did not know him.
Thunder City, however, was overrun with adventurers, and miners who labored for gold only as a blind, while by stealth they stole and robbed. Kalispel had come under the cold, watchful eyes of those parasites, and many had been the time his gun hand had itched. But if they were suspicious of him, they had no ground to substantiate it, for he was just as shrewd and infinitely more watchful.
On a late afternoon Kalispel pondered a plan to further his interests; and this was to begin to hunt game with the idea of supplying meat to the miners. Deer had been run out of the valley. Good hunters were few, and most miners would not take the time to hunt. Yet they were greatly dependent upon meat, for food prices in the stores were abnormally high. Kalispel thought his plan would serve several purposes—to give the impression that he needed money, to enable him to become acquainted with many miners and win their confidence, and to hide his secret motive to work out the truth of Leavitt’s guilt. As the weeks passed Kalispel grew more sure of this. Leavitt might be another Henry Plummer of Alden Gulch fame. Murder of miners had so far not occurred, but the finding and stealing of stored gold dust, and robbery by masked men at night had grown increasingly until it was something to contend with.
As he revolved these thoughts the valley became steeped in a luminous golden sheen, the last reflection from the sunset flush upon the heights. And at that moment Sydney Blair appeared upon the porch, to lean against the rail and gaze out. This had become such a habit of hers that Kalispel waited for it. She wore something which shone faintly blue. He got up to pace to and fro, and at last to stand where she could not help but see him. Always he was alone. And she must know that his heart was yearning for her—that degradation was impossible for him now. But did she know, and if she did, what were her thoughts?
Kalispel had talked often with Blair, and somehow their positions had become reversed. The advice and solicitation now came from Kalispel. After all, Blair had not made as good a deal in his gold claim as he had fondly believed. His gravel bar had suddenly panned out. And digging among the rocks of his claim for nuggets or quartz had not been successful. He had begun to drink and gamble, moderately, as was common among the better class of miners, yet even that little had lately made a subtle difference in him. Wherefore Kalispel, summing up, decided that it was about time for him to step out of his quiet, watchful isolation.
He walked down to the stream, to the big camp where Hadley and Jones, two progressive miners, maintained a mess for eight of their comrades. Kalispel dropped in on them at supper-time. He was not exactly friendly with these men, but knew that through the weeks they had unlearned some of the lessons gossip and ill-will had taught them.
“Jones, I’ve an idee,” said Kalispel. “How are you off for meat?”
“Meat?—Jehoshephat! Costs us more than ham an’ bacon.”
“How’ll it be when the snow flies?”
“If it grows any harder to get we’ll blow this grub-shack, an’ thet’s no lie.”
“I’m thinkin’ of huntin’ meat to sell. What’ll you pay a pound for fresh venison an’ elk?”
“Thet’s a good idee, Emerson. Are you serious?”
“Shore. I’ve got to live. I’m a poor miner, but a good hunter. Will you pay ten cents a pound till fall, an’ more when the snow flies?”
“You bet I will. An’ jump at a hundred pounds a week, an’ double thet when winter comes.”
“Done. It’ll be no trick for me. I’ve a horse an’ burros.”
“Kalispel,” spoke up Hadley, the young partner of Jones, “you’d be doin’ us a service. Lack of meat is the drawback of this mess. An’ thet holds all over town.”
“Wal, I’ll see if I can drum up some more customers. An’ if I can, I won’t trade for any of your claims.”
“Small chance of you gettin’ a whack of mine,” called out a miner, cheerfully. “Look at this.”
Kalispel stepped over to have placed in his hands a bright smooth nugget weighing in excess of three ounces.
“Gosh! That’s the biggest I ever saw,” exclaimed Kalispel, as he returned it.
“This ain’t a marker to the one sold to Leavitt by a miner. Three hundred dollars he got for it. An’ you can gamble thet if Leavitt paid so much it was worth a good deal more.”
“Yes, an’ our hard-fisted judge grabbed the Woodbury claim today,” interposed another miner.
“I hadn’t heard,” replied Kalispel, quietly. “You fellows know I’m particular interested in how Judge Leavitt acquires land, gold, claims, an’ quartz veins.”
“Haw! Haw!—Wal, this was easy. Leavitt has the decidin’ of all claims, you know. An’ he took over most of Woodbury’s because thet hombre stepped high, wide, an’ handsome when he stepped off his claim. Course the miners in on the meetin’ were thick with Leavitt an’ voted Woodbury out. There’s some gossip floatin’ about. Leavitt, Borden, Lowrie, an’ a few more are playin’ a high-handed game these days.”
Kalispel went on down the trail, pondering what he had heard. He stopped at camps of miners he knew and got not only orders for fresh meat, but also sincere thanks for the offer.
There were several trails leading into town and the one on which he found himself happened to pass the Blair cabin. This time Kalispel did not avoid it.
The hour was almost dusk, but the magnificent afterglow of sunset reflected down into the valley, bathing it in rosy
light. The day had been hot, and now the drowsy heat had begun to yield to the cool air from the heights.
Blair sat on his porch steps, smoking. Kalispel heard voices, and as he recognized Sydney’s, he felt his breath catch in his throat.
“Howdy, Blair,” drawled Kalispel, as he leisurely halted. “Any dust these days?”
“Hello yourself,” replied Blair. “Where you been keepin’ yourself?”
“Me? Aw, I been meditatin’ on a misspent life,” said Kalispel, coolly.
Sydney stepped from the back of the porch to the rail. She wore white. Kalispel bowed and greeted her.
“Good evening,” she rejoined, in perfect composure.
Kalispel’s quick glance noted the sweet, troubled face, and the dark eyes that swept over him. Then he looked back at Blair, striving to hide the tumult sight of her had roused in him.
“Kalispel, the only dust around this claim is what blows in from the trails,” said Blair, disgustedly.
“All panned out?”
“Ha!—My neighbor, Dick Swan, an old miner, says the bar in front of my claim was planted.”
“Dad, you should not say things you can’t prove,” interposed Sydney, quickly. “Especially to an enemy of Rand Leavitt.”
“Oh, well, what’s the use?” returned Blair, wearily. “I’ll have to buy another claim....How you making out, Kalispel? Never saw you look so fine. Still digging up in the rocks?”
“Not much. I hate it ’most as bad as I did diggin’ fence-post holes back in Wyomin’. Blair, what I dropped over to see you about is this. I’m goin’ to hunt game an’ sell fresh meat to the miners. Would you like some?”
