Silver and Gold

by Coolidge, Dane

  In the morning he rose early, to muck out the rock and clear the tunnel for a new round of holes; and each time as he came out with a wheel-barrow full of waste he cocked his eye to the west. Bible-Back Murray would be coming over soon, if he was still at his camp around the hill. Yet the second day passed before he arrived, thundering in from the valley in his big, yellow car; and even then he made some purchases at the store before he came up to the mine.

  “Good morning!” he hailed cheerily, “they tell me you’ve struck ore. Well, well; how does the vein show up?”

  “’Bout the same,” mumbled Denver and glanced at him curiously. He had expected a little fireworks.

  “About the same, eh?” repeated Murray, flicking his rebellious glass eye, which had a tendency to stare off to one side, “is this a sample of your ore? Well, I will say, it looks promising–would you mind if I go into the tunnel?”

  “Nope,” returned Denver; and then, after a moment’s pause: “How’s that gun-man of yours getting along?”

  “Oh, Dave? He’s all right. I’ll ask you over sometime and let you get better acquainted.”

  “Never mind,” answered Denver, “I know him all I want to. And if I catch him on my ground I’ll sure make him jump–I don’t like the way he talked to me.”

  “Well, he’s rough, but he’s good hearted,” observed Murray pacifically. “I’m sorry he spoke to you that way–shall we go in now and look at the vein?”

  Denver grunted non-committally and led Murray into the tunnel, which had turned now to follow the ore. Whatever his game was it was too deep for Denver, so he looked on in watchful silence. Murray seemed well acquainted with mining–he looked at the foot-wall and hanging-wall and traced out the course of both veins; and then, without offering to take any samples, he turned and went out to the dump.

  “Yes, very good,” he said, but without any enthusiasm, “it certainly looks very promising. Well, good day, Mr. Russell; much obliged.”

  He started down the trail, leaving Denver staring, and then he turned hurriedly back.

  “Oh, by the way,” he said, “I buy and sell ore. When you get enough sacked you might send it down by McGraw and I’ll give you a credit at the store.”

  “Yes, all right,” assented Denver and stood looking after him till he cranked up and went roaring away. Not a word about the title, nothing said about his warning; and no mention made of his well-known ability to break any man in the county. The facts, apparently, were all that interested him then–but he might make an offer later. When the vein was opened up and he had made his first shipment, when it began to look like a mine! Denver went back to work and as he drove in day by day he was careful to save all the ore.

  He hadn’t had it assayed, because assaying is expensive and his supplies had cost more than he expected, but from the size of the button when he made his rough fire-tests, he knew that it ran high in silver. Probably eight hundred ounces, besides the lead; and he had sorted out nearly a ton. About the time he was down to his bottom dollar he would ship and get another grub-stake. Then, when that was gone, if his vein opened up, he would ship to the smelter direct; but the first small shipment could be easier handled by a man who made it a business. Of course Murray would gouge him, and overcharge him on everything, but the main idea was to get Denver to start an account and take that much trade away from Hill. Denver figured it all out and then let it pass, for there were other things on his mind.

  On the evening of his strike the house below had been silent; but early the next morning she had begun again, only this time she was not singing scales. It was grand opera now, in French and Italian; with brilliant runs and trills and high, sustained crescendos that seemed almost to demand applause; and high-pitched, agitato recitatives. She was running through the scores of the standard operas–“La Traviata,” “Il Trovatore,” “Martha”–but as the week wore along she stopped singing again and Denver saw her down among the sycamores. She paid no attention to him, wandering up and down the creek bed or sitting in gloomy silence by the pools; but at last as he stood at the mouth of his tunnel breaking ore with the great hammer he loved, she came out on the trail and gazed across at him wistfully, though he feigned not to notice her presence. He was young and vigorous, and the sledge hammer was his toy; and as Drusilla, when she was practicing, gloried in the range of her voice and her effortless bravuras and trills, so Denver, swinging his sledge, felt like Thor of old when he broke the rocks with his blows. Drusilla gazed at him and sighed and walked pensively past him, then returned and came back up his trail.

  “Good evening,” she said and Denver greeted her with a smile for he saw that her mood was friendly. She had resented, at first, his brusque refusal and his rough, straight-out way of speaking; but she was lonely now, and he knew in his heart that all was not well with her singing.

  “You like to work, don’t you?” she went on at last as he stood sweating and dumb in her presence, “don’t you ever get tired, or anything?”

  “Not doing this,” he said, “I’m a driller, you know, and I like to keep my hand in. I compete in these rock-drilling contests.”

  “Oh, yes, father was telling me,” she answered quickly. “That’s where you won all that money–the money to buy the mine.”

  “Yes, and I’ve won other money before,” he boasted. “I won first place last year in the single-handed contest–but that’s too hard on your arm. You change about, you know, in the double-handed work–one strikes while the other turns–but in single jacking it’s just hammer, hammer, hammer, until your arm gets dead to the shoulder.”

  “It must be nice,” she suggested with a half-concealed sigh, “to be able to make money so easily. Have you always been a miner?”

  “No, I was raised on a ranch, up in Colorado–but there’s lots more money in mining. I don’t work by the day, I take contracts by the foot where there’s difficult or dangerous work. Sometimes I make forty dollars a day. There’s a knack about mining, like everything else–you’ve got to know just how to drive your holes in order to break the most ground–but give me a jack-hammer and enough men to muck out after me and I can sink from sixteen to twenty feet a day, depending on the rock. But here, of course, I’m working lone-handed and only make about three feet a day.”

  “Oh,” she murmured with a mild show of interest and Denver picked up his hammer. Mother Trigedgo had warned him not to be too friendly, and now he was learning why. He set out a huge fragment that had been blasted from the face and swung his hammer again.

  “Did you ever hear the ‘Anvil Chorus’?” she asked watching him curiously. “It’s in the second act of ‘Il Trovatore.’”

  “Sure!” exclaimed Denver, “I heard Sousa’s band play it! I’ve got it on a record somewhere.”

  “No, but in a real opera–you’d be fine for that part. They have a row of anvils around the back of the stage and as the chorus sing the gypsy blacksmiths beat out the time by striking with their hammers. Back in New York last year there was a perfectly huge man and he had a hammer as big as yours that he swung with both hands while he sang. You reminded me of him when I saw you working–don’t you get kind of lonely, sometimes?”

  “Too busy,” replied Denver turning to pick up another rock, “don’t have time for anything like that.”

  “Well, I wish I was that way,” she sighed after a silence and Denver smote ponderously at the rock.

  “Why don’t you work?” he asked at last and Drusilla’s eyes flashed fire.

  “I do!” she cried, “I work all the time! But that doesn’t do me any good. It’s all right, perhaps, if you’re just breaking rocks, or digging dirt in some mine; but I’m trying to become a singer and you can’t succeed that way–work will get you only so far!”

  “’S that so!” murmured Denver, and at the unspoken challenge the brooding resentment of Drusilla burst forth.

  “Yes, it is!” she exclaimed, “and, just because you’ve struck ore, that doesn’t prove that you’re right in eve
rything. I’ve worked and I’ve worked, and that’s all the good it’s done me–I’m a failure, in spite of everything.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” responded Denver with a superior smile, “you’ve still got your five hundred dollars. A man is never whipped till he thinks he’s whipped–why don’t you go back and take a run at it?”

  “Oh, what’s the use of talking?” she cried jumping up, “when you don’t know a thing about it? I’ve tried and I’ve tried and the best I could ever do was to get a place in the chorus. And there you simply ruin your voice without even getting a chance of recognition. Oh, I get so exasperated to see those Europeans who are nothing but big, spoiled children go right into a try-out and take a part away from me that I know I can render perfectly. But that’s it, you see, they’re perfectly undisciplined, but they can throw themselves into the part; and the director just takes my name and address and says he’ll call me up if he needs me.”

  Denver grunted and said nothing and as he swung his hammer again the leash to her passions gave way.

  “Yes, and I hate you!” she burst out, “you’re so big and self-satisfied. But I guess if you were trying to break into grand opera you wouldn’t be quite so intolerant!”

  “No?” commented Denver stopping to shift his grip and she stamped her foot in fury.

  “No, you wouldn’t!” she cried half weeping with rage as she contemplated the wreck of her hopes, “don’t you know that Mary Garden and Schumann-Heink and Geraldine Farrar and all of them, that are now our greatest stars, had to starve and skimp and wait on the impresarios before they could get their chance? There’s a difference between digging a hole in the ground and moving a great audience to tears; so just because you happen to be succeeding right now, don’t think that you know it all!”

  “All right,” agreed Denver, “I’ll try to remember that. And of course I’m nothing but a miner. But there’s one thing, and I know it, about all those great stars–they didn’t any of them quit. They might have been hungry and out of a job but they never quit, or they wouldn’t be where they are.”

  “Oh, they didn’t, eh?” she mocked looking him over with slow scorn. “And I suppose that you never quit, either?”

  “No, I never did,” answered Denver truthfully. “I’ve never laid down yet.”

  “Well, you’re young yet,” she said mimicking his patronizing tones, “perhaps that will come to you later.”

  She smiled with her teeth and stalked off down the trail, leaving Denver with something to think about.

  * * *

  CHAPTER XIV

  THE STRIKE

  Denver Russell was young, in more ways than one, but that did not prove he was wrong. Perhaps he was presumptuous in trying to tell an artist how to gain a foothold on the stage, but he was still convinced that, in grand opera as in mining, there was no big demand for a quitter. As for that swift, back stab, that veiled intimation that he might live to be a quitter himself, Denver resolved then and there not to quit working his mine until his last dollar was gone. And, while he was doing that, he wondered if Drusilla could boast as much of her music. Would she weaken again, as she had twice already, and declare that she was a miserable failure; or would she toil on, as he did, day by day, refusing to acknowledge she was whipped?

  Denver returned to his cave in a defiant mood and put on a record by Schumann-Heink. There was one woman that he knew had fought her way through everything until she had obtained a great success. He had read in a magazine how she had been turned away by a director who had told her her voice was hopeless; and how later, after years of privation and suffering, she had come back to that same director and he had been forced to acknowledge her genius. And it was all there, in her voice, the sure strength that comes from striving, the sweetness that comes from suffering; and as Denver listened to her “Cradle Song” he remembered what he had read about her children. Every night, in those dark times when, deserted and alone, she sang in the chorus for her bread, she had been compelled for lack of a nursemaid to lock her children in her room; and evening after evening her mother’s heart was tormented by fears for their safety. What if the house should burn down and destroy them all? All the fear and love, all the anguished tenderness which had torn her heart through those years was written on the stippled disc, so deeply had it touched her life.

  Denver put them all on, the best records he had by singers of world renown, and then at the end he put on the “Barcarolle,” the duet from the “Love Tales of Hoffmann.” For him, that was Drusilla’s song, the expression of her gayest, happiest self. Its lilt and flow recalled her to his thoughts like the embroidered motifs that Wagner used to anticipate the coming of his characters. It was a light song, in a way, not the greatest of music; but while she was singing it he had seen her for the first time and it had become the motif of her coming. When he heard it he saw a vision of a beautiful young girl, singing and swaying like a slender flower; and all about her was a golden radiance like the halo of St. Cecelia. And to him it was a prophecy of her ultimate success, for when she sung it she had won his heart. So he played it over and over, but when he had finished there was silence from the old town below.

  Yet if Drusilla was silent it was not from despair for in the morning as Denver was mucking out his tunnel he heard her clear voice mount up like the light of some bird.

  “Ah, Ah-h-h-h, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah.”

  It was the old familiar exercise, rising an octave at the first bound and then fluttering down like some gorgeous butterfly of sound till it rested on the octave below. And at each renewed flight it began a note higher until it climbed at last to high C. Then it ran up in roulades and galloping bravuras, it trilled and sought out new flights; yet always with the pellucid tones of the flute, the sweet, virginal purity of a child. She was right–there was something missing, a something which she groped for and could not find, a something which the other singers had. Denver sensed the lack dimly but he could not define it, all he knew was that she left out herself. In the brief glimpse he had of her she had seemed torn by dark passions, which caused her at times to brood among the sycamores and again to seek a quarrel with him; yet all this youthful turbulence was left out of her singing–she had not learned to express her emotions.

  Denver listened every morning as he came out of his dark hole, pushing the wheel-barrows of ore and waste before him, and then he bade farewell to sun, air and music and went into the close, dark tunnel. By the light of a single candle, thrust into its dagger-like miner’s candlestick and stabbed into some seam in the wall, he smashed and clacked away at his drill until the whole face was honeycombed with holes. At the top they slanted up, at the bottom down, to keep the bore broken clean; but along the sides and in the middle they followed no system, more than to adapt themselves to the formation. When his round of holes was drilled he cut his fuse and loaded each hole with its charge; after which with firm hands he ignited each split end and hurried out of the tunnel. There he sat down on a rock and listened to the shots; first the short holes in the center, to blow out the crown; then the side holes, breaking into the opening; and the top-holes, shooting the rock down from above; and then, last and most powerful, the deep bottom holes that threw the dirt back down the tunnel and left the face clear for more work.

  As the poisonous smoke was drifting slowly out of the tunnel mouth Denver fired up his forge and re-sharpened his drills; and then, along towards evening, when the fumes had become diffused, he went in to see what he had uncovered. Sometimes the vein widened or developed rich lenses, and sometimes it pinched down until the walls enclosed nothing but a narrow streak of talc; but always it dipped down, and that was a good sign, a prophecy of the true fissure vein to come. The ore that he mined now was a mere excrescence of the great ore-body he hoped to find, but each day the blanket-vein turned and dipped on itself until at last it folded over and led down. In a huge mass of rocks, stuck together by crystals of silica and stained by the action of acids, the silver and copper came togeth
er and intermingled at the fissure vent which had produced them both. Denver stared at it through the powder smoke, then he grabbed up some samples and went to see Bunker Hill.

  Not since that great day when Denver had struck the copper had Bunker shown any interest in the mine. He sat around the house listening to Drusilla while she practiced and opening the store for chance customers; but towards Denver he still maintained a grim-mouthed reserve, as if discouraging him from asking any favors. Perhaps the fact that Denver’s money was all gone had a more or less direct bearing on the case; but though he was living on the last of his provisions Denver had refrained from asking for credit. His last shipment of powder and blacksmith’s coal had cost twenty per cent more than he had figured and he had sent for a few more records; and after paying the two bills there was only some small change left in the wallet which had once bulged with greenbacks. But his pride was involved, for he had read Drusilla a lecture on the evils of being faint-hearted, so he had simply stopped buying at the little store and lived on what he had left. But now–well, with that fissure vein opened up and a solid body of ore in sight, he might reasonably demand the customary accommodations which all merchants accord to good customers.

  “Well, I’ve struck it,” he said when he had Bunker in the store, “just take a look at that!”

  He handed over a specimen that was heavy with copper and Bunker squinted down his eyes.

  “Yes, looks good,” he observed and handed it somberly back.

  “I’ve got four feet of it,” announced Denver gloating over the specimens, “and the vein has turned and gone down. What’s the chances for some grub now, on account? I’m going to ship that sacked ore.”

  “Danged poor–with me,” answered Bunker with decision. “You’d better try your luck with Murray.”

  “Oh, boosting for Murray, eh?” remarked Denver sarcastically. “Well, I may take you up on that, but it’s too far to walk now and I’ve been living on beans for a week. I guess I’m good for a few dollars’ worth.”