Part 10

But Bromley, cheerful to the last, refused to be daunted. “While there’s life, there’s hope,” he insisted. “The snow is melting fast now.”

“It doesn’t make any difference to us how fast it melts; you and I will never leave this gulch alive, Harry. As I’ve said, neither one of us could tramp five miles in a day, even over a level trail. It’s the end.”

“You say ‘you and I’. Big Jim doesn’t complain much, but he is as badly off as either of us.”

Philip, propped in his bunk, rocked his head on the blanket pillow.

“I don’t trust Garth,” he muttered. “One of these days, when he is sure we’re too nearly dead to try to trail him, he’ll go and we’ll never see him again.”

“Oh, give us a rest!” snapped Bromley, losing, for once in a way, the cheerful equanimity which had enabled him to grapple sanely, thus far, with the hardships and deprivations, “I wouldn’t have your narrow angle on humanity for all the gold there is in the ‘Little Jean’! Why, good Lord, man!--Jim has been loyalty itself, from start to finish! You’ve simply got a crooked convolution in your brain, Philip!”

“Call it what you like; he’ll go, just the same. You’ll see. And after he’s given us time to die properly, he’ll come back and take over the mine.”

Bromley gave it up and crept from his bunk to the hearth to get a light for his pipe, tobacco being the only provision supply that was not completely exhausted. As the day wore away, the echo of distant rifle shots penetrated to the cabin interior from time to time, but the sounds meant nothing more to them than that Garth was trying again, as he had heretofore, to kill something for the pot; trying and failing, as a matter of course.

The sun had gone down and a cloudy twilight was filling the gulch with shadows when Garth returned, dragging the hind quarters of a deer after him. Gaunt, bush-bearded and long-haired, the giant was by this time a mere bony framework of a man; and as he sank down upon his bunk he was gasping for breath and whimpering like a hurt child.

“I got a doe, after the longest,” he choked; “an’ then I had to go an’ leave most o’ the meat for the coyotes and buzzards--durn ’em--’cause I couldn’t tote it home! Time was when I could’ve took that li’l’ doe across my shoulders and brought her in whole; but I ain’t no damn’ good no more whatsoever!”

Bromley stumbled hastily out of his bunk.

“What’s that?--no good, did you say? By Jove, you’ve saved our lives, just the same, old-timer! Don’t you worry a minute about what you had to leave for the dogs and birds; half a deer is better than no meat. You just stretch yourself out and rest your face and hands--and you, too, Phil. I’ll call you both when supper’s ready.”

For the first time in many days they had a full meal for supper, and under the stimulus of a couple of juicy venison steaks, hot from the broiling twig, even Philip came out of his shell of hopelessness and joined in the discussion of the ways and means of escape. It was Garth who set the hopeful pace.

“With a couple o’ days feedin’ up, I believe we can try it,” he ventured. “Snow’s deep yit, but it’s thawin’ days and freezin’ nights so ’t there’s a crust early mornin’s that’ll hold a man. Weather’s the only thing I’m afeard of.”

“Oh, good Lord!” Bromley groaned. “Don’t tell us there’s more snow coming!”

The giant wagged his beard. “Looks mighty like it, over on the western ranges. And the sun come up fire-red this mornin’. If it’ll only hold off for a day ’r so, till we get a li’l’ stren’th in our bones....”

But the next morning when they turned out, the storm had come, silently and as a thief in the night; there was half a foot of fresh snow in their tiny dooryard, and the feathery flakes were still sifting down endlessly from gray skies with no signs of a break in them. After breakfast, Philip went back to his bunk and turned his face to the wall, leaving Bromley and Garth to wash the dishes and shovel the snow out of the small areaway.

“Winter’s been sort o’ hard on that pardner o’ yourn,” Garth remarked, stopping to beat the snow from his battered hat. “Looks like he’d sort o’ lost his sand lately.”

“We’re both tenderfoots, you must remember,” said the loyal play-boy. “It’s all new to both of us, Jim. But Phil will come out all right.” Then: “What is this fresh snow storm going to do to us?”

“Depends on how long it’s goin’ to keep up. There’s enough now to block the trails for another week ’r so. I was afeard it was comin’.”

“Well, we have meat enough to last for a while, anyhow,” Bromley put in hopefully. “And that’s thanks to you, Jim. We won’t say die till we’re dead.”

All through the day the gray skies held their own and the snow sifted down as though it would never stop. By nightfall the six inches of new blanketing had grown to a foot, and the prospect of escape had withdrawn into a remote distance. When Bromley raked the coals out and made ready to broil the supper steaks, he was the only one of the three who preserved even a semblance of cheerfulness. Philip was cursing the weather bitterly; and Garth, stretched out in his bunk with a cold pipe clamped between his teeth, was scarcely more companionable.

It was while the venison was sizzling over the coals that Bromley cocked an ear and said: “Listen!” Into the silence thus commanded came the muffled hoofbeats of a horse and then a shout of “Hello, the cabin!” from without. Garth sprang up to unbar the door, and Philip reached for a rifle, gasping out, “It’s Neighbors again!”

But the stocky figure that appeared in the doorway was not that of the leader of the jumpers; it was a far more welcome apparition--the figure of the man who, up to that time, had bought, sold and operated more mines than any other promoter in Colorado--Stephen Drew.

“Well, well!” he said, coming in to shake the snow from his poncho and to stamp it from his feet, “I thought I’d find you somewhere up in this gulch! Found out what old winter can do to you in the Rockies, haven’t you?” and he shook hands with the exiles, and not less heartily with Garth than with the two younger men, saying: “You here, too, Jim? If I had known that, I wouldn’t have been quite so anxious about these two young tenderfoots.”

Philip sat down on his bunk and he was gasping again.

“Are--are the trails open, Mr. Drew?” he stammered.

“They were day before yesterday, when we crossed the main range, but they will be blocked again for a few days, now. However, that doesn’t matter. I knew you must be running short of supplies, so I brought a pack train along. I left the outfit making camp in the valley below and rode on ahead to see if I could locate you.”

Bromley laughed happily.

“You look like an angel out of heaven to us, Mr. Drew,” he bubbled. “We’d eaten the last of our grub-stake and were starving when Jim killed a deer and saved our lives. How did you find the way in?”

The promoter planted himself comfortably upon Garth’s bunk, and he was smiling genially when he said: “We had to use a little diplomacy. One of the Neighbors gang took one drink too many and spilled the beans. We got hold of him and gave him his choice between going to jail and coming along with us as a guide. He’s with the outfit now. But tell me--have you got a mine to show me?”

It was Garth who got in the first word about the “Little Jean.”

“You’re shoutin’,” he said. “These boys’ve got a li’l’ bonanza, right! There’s enough rich, free-millin’ ore on the dump to run you crazy. We’re in a good piece on the vein, and she’s a-holdin’ up like a lady. All these boys is a-needin’ now is somebody to back ’em with a li’l’ capital, and----”

“Easy, Jim,” laughed the promoter; “I know the color of your paints. But never mind,”--this to Philip and Bromley. “If you’ve got something that measures half-way up to those assays you had made last fall, I’m ready to talk turkey with you. But we’ll have to talk fast and work fast--if we want to protect ourselves. The rush for the new diggings isn’t more than a day’s march behind us on the trail we’ve broken over the range, and when it comes, we’ll be swamped. Jim, you old mossback, see if you can’t carve a couple more steaks off that deer bone and broil them for me. I’m as hungry as a hunter.”

XI

THOUGH it was now well into the summer edge of spring for the lower altitudes, a late snow had fallen during the night, and the Continental Divide, framed in the window where Philip was sitting, was clothed in virgin white. In the street below, the snow had already been trampled into a grimy batter by the hoofs and wheels of laboring streams of traffic. Philip looked down upon the busy street scene, trying vainly to realize that this teeming, throbbing, palpitant mining-camp city of thirty-five or forty thousand souls was less than three years old; that, only three backward turnings of the calendar in the past, the marvelous treasure beds in its swelling hills were barely getting themselves discovered.

From such contemplation of the material marvel his thoughts turned inward. For the better part of a year, and with only the brief autumn visit to the great wonder camp to break the wilderness monotonies, he had been an exile with all the familiar human contacts dissevered; it had been a period during which, for him and Bromley, the moving world had ceased to exist. He was just now beginning to apprehend the complete totality of the time eclipse. In the lost interval an exciting national political campaign had run its course, Garfield had been elected president, and his inauguration had taken place; all this without disturbing, by so much as the turning of a leaf, the cosmic procession of the weeks and months in the mountain fastnesses, or recording itself in any way upon the pages of great Nature’s book of the unpeopled immensities.

In the more intimate and personal relations there had been a corresponding break. Never more than a desultory letter-writer, he had sent a card to his mother and sisters in New Hampshire on the occasion of his former trip to Leadville, telling them not to write again until they should hear from him--that he expected to be out of reach of the mails for the duration of the winter. Hence, there had been no home letters awaiting him when he emerged from the western wilderness; nothing to help bridge the separating chasm of the months.

In the few days that had elapsed since his return to Leadville he had been making determined but futile efforts to close the gap; to regard the year of exile as an incident, and to take up the normal thread of life where he had dropped it the preceding spring. The discovery that this could not be done--that the change from flannel shirt, corduroys and miner’s boots to civilized clothes, and from a log cabin in the wilds to a comfortable hotel in the great mining-camp, wrought no miracle of readjustment--was confusing. Was the curious inner consciousness of a changed point of view merely a step forward in character development? Or had the step been taken in the opposite direction--into the region of things primitive and baldly disillusioning? He could not tell; and the inability to make the distinction was strangely disturbing. When the attempt to account for his present mental attitude became a fatiguing strain, he twisted his chair from the window to make it face the scene in the handsomely furnished business office.

At a table in the middle of the room, Bromley, garmented as a gentleman of leisure and wearing his good clothes with an easy and accustomed grace that Philip envied, was talking in low tones with a stockily built man whose dark eyes, heavy brows and aquiline nose gave his features a Jewish cast. Half absently Philip, compared the two faces: Bromley’s high-bred, animated, impishly youthful; Stephen Drew’s strong, kindly--the face of a man whose generous dealings with his friends and business associates had given him a notability as marked as that of the lavish spenders who were making the name of the Colorado “lucky-strike” miner a synonym for all that was fantastic and extravagant.

The moment, as Philip tried, rather ineffectually, to realize, was epochal. Drew and his party of experts had spent a fortnight at the “Little Jean,” exploring, testing, estimating the probable extent of the ore body and preparing samples for additional assays. And now, as the net result, at the farther end of the business office Drew’s attorney was dictating to a young clerk whose pen was flying rapidly over the pages of legal cap paper--using the pen, though one of the new writing machines lately come into use stood on its iron-legged table within easy reach.

After a time the lawyer came to the table in the middle of the room with the finished document in his hands and ran through its provisions with his client and Bromley. Drew nodded and dipped a pen, looking up to say to Philip: “All right, Mr. Trask; if you’ll come and look this over----”

Philip dragged his chair to the table and read the paper Drew passed to him. It was an agreement defining the duties, responsibilities, undertakings and emoluments of the three principals in the “Little Jean”; namely, the two discoverers and the man who was furnishing the working capital; and its provisions were simple and straightforward. On his part the promoter undertook to develop the mine, paying an equitable royalty to the discoverers, the royalty provision including a liberal cash advance.

“I think that is about as we talked,” Drew said. “If you and Mr. Bromley are agreeable, we may as well sign up and call it a deal.”

With a hand that shook a little in spite of his best effort to hold it steady, Philip signed and passed the papers and pen to Bromley.

“Wigglesworth?” the promoter queried, when the papers came back to him with Bromley’s signature. “Is that a family name?”

“Very much so,” admitted the play-boy, with a grin.

“I used to know some Wigglesworths in Philadelphia. Relations of yours?”

“They are, indeed. My mother was a Wigglesworth.”

Stephen Drew signed as lessee of the “Little Jean” with the intricate pen flourish familiar to every bank teller in Leadville and Denver, and the young clerk attested the signatures as notary. The formalities concluded, Drew spoke of the practical details.

“We’ll go in as soon as we can get in with the machinery for a mill. We’ll have to have our own mill, of course. Freighting the machinery over the range will be a costly job, but there is no way to avoid it. Rich as the ore is, it wouldn’t pay to jack freight it out over the mountains. However, you have ore enough on the dump to take care of the overhead.”

“I’m not sure that we don’t owe you an apology for not discovering our mine in some place nearer the broad highways,” Bromley put in whimsically. “It is due to us to say that we did try, pretty faithfully, to do that very thing, before we crossed over to the Western slope, but we couldn’t make it.”

Drew smiled. “Any old miner will tell you that the gold is where you find it, and not anywhere else. Fortunately for all of us, the ‘Little Jean’ is rich enough to warrant the building of a small mill, even at the high cost of taking the machinery over the range piecemeal--rich enough and with an ore body large enough. But I take it you two are not very pointedly interested in the operating details, so long as the dividends are forthcoming. Have you made any plans for the summer?--for yourselves, I mean?”

Philip denied for himself.

“I think we have been merely living from day to day for the past few weeks. I haven’t any plans reaching beyond Denver, at present. And you haven’t, either, have you, Harry?”

Bromley shook his head. “Not the ghost of a plan.”

“Good,” said the promoter; “then we can keep in touch, more or less, during the make-ready. I am back and forth between the mountains and Denver every week or so. Now if you will come around to the bank with me, I’ll deposit those cash advances to your credit and you’ll be footloose to do as you please.”

The bank visited, and arrangements made for the transfer of the better part of their fortune-earnest to a bank in Denver, the two who, a few months before, had been merely marching privates in the eager army of prospectors, shook hands with their lessee and fared forth into the streets of Leadville as men of solid substance.

“Well?” said Bromley, after they had walked in silence for something more than half the distance from the bank to their hotel--which, it is needless to say, was not the second-rate tavern at which they had put up on the occasion of their former visit.

“Say it,” Philip invited.

“I was just wondering where you were ‘at’; whether you were here in the flesh, or a thousand miles away in the spirit.”

“I am trying to get my feet on the ground,” was the sober answer.

“Still seems like a pipe-dream, does it?”

“More than ever.”

Bromley laughed. “A little chunk of solitude is what you need--time off in which to get used to it. Here is our bunk house. Capture a quiet corner in the lobby, if you can find one, light your pipe and have it out with yourself. I’m going to do a bit of shopping; buy me a bag and a few more articles of glad raiment.”

Philip halted on the hotel steps to frown down upon his late camp-mate.

“You’ve been your own man for nearly a full year, Harry. Don’t go and lie down now and roll your pack off like a fool jackass.”

This time Bromley’s laugh was a shout.

“So the good old New England conscience comes up smiling, after all, does it?” he chuckled. “Give it a pat on the back and tell it to go to sleep again, so far as I am concerned. I’m merely going to buy a bag and something to put in it, and I’ll promise you to come back sober as a judge. Want me to swear it?” and he held up his hand.

“I’d hate to see you ditch yourself now,” said Philip gravely; and with that he went in and found the quiet corner and sat down to fill and light his pipe.

An hour later he was still sitting in the corner of the writing-room alcove, with the cold pipe between his teeth, as oblivious of his surroundings as if he had been alone on a desert island. Realization was slowly coming. He was no longer a striving unit in the vast army of day-to-day bread-winners. Wealth, to which all things must bow and pay tribute, was his. Twice, and yet once again, he found himself taking the crisp bit of bank paper from his pocket to stare at it, to pass it through his fingers so that he might hear the reassuring crackle of it. To the possessor of that slip of paper, and of the treasure store of which it was assumptively only an infinitesimal fraction, all things humanly possible were as good as facts accomplished.

What to do with all this wealth? For an illuminating instant he was able to appreciate the embarrassment of those other lucky ones who, from having nothing but eager hopes, found themselves suddenly in possession of more money than they knew how to dispense. Desires, legitimate or the other kind, do not come into being in the turning of a leaf. They must have time in which to germinate and burgeon. Philip saw how easy it would be for the spendthrifts of luck to give free rein to the impulses of the moment, however grotesque or extravagant; more, for a passing breath he was conscious of the unfathered birth in himself of just such impulses. But the traditions quickly asserted their supremacy. It was not to breed a prodigal that his Trask and Sanborn forebears had dug a frugal living out of the reluctant New England soil. Whatever else might happen, there should be none of the antics of the mad and extravagant wasters.

It was thus that Bromley found him at the early dinner hour; still isolated in the quiet corner, and still with the long-since-extinguished pipe clamped between his teeth.

“Back again, are you, Harry?” he said, hoisting himself with an effort out of the deep gulf of the reveries.

“Same day; same afternoon. And I’ve made a discovery. The railroads, two of them, have been creeping up since we were here before. There are night trains. What do you say to ordering an early dinner and shaking the slush of this metropolis from our muddy feet?”

“It suits me perfectly. There are sleeping-cars?”

“There are; and I have engaged a couple of berths. I’m beginning to long for the flesh-pots; otherwise the comforts of a not-too-crowded Denver hotel. Shall we go and eat a pasty or so and gird ourselves for the flitting? Or has the piece of money paper you got a while back killed your appetite?”

Philip did not reply until they were entering the dining-room together. Then he said, quite as if there had been no interval between question and answer: “It runs in my mind that money breeds many more appetites than it kills. You ought to paste that saying in your hat, Harry.”

“I?” laughed the play-boy. “What about yourself?”

“I told you once that I hadn’t come to Colorado to make a fool of myself.”

Bromley laughed again.

“If all mankind were only as virtuous and impeccable as you think you are, Philip, what a Paradise we’d be living in! Let’s take that table for two over in the alcove; then we won’t have to mix and mingle with the plebeian crowd and run the risk of having some of the virtues rubbed off of us.”

The dinner which was presently served was too appetizing to encourage any more than desultory conversation, and it was not until after the black coffee had been brought in that Bromley said: “By the way, I wonder what has become of Big Jim?”

Philip looked up with a small frown creasing itself between his eyes.

“Garth? I haven’t seen him since the night after we reached town. He is somewhere in the dives, blowing his winter’s wages, I suppose.”

Bromley’s eyes narrowed.

“And you don’t care a whoop. Is that the part of it you left unsaid?”

Philip’s answer was indirect, but none the less explicit.

“I haven’t much use for a man who begins to wallow as soon as he comes to the first available mud-puddle; and you know that is what Garth did. He was tanked full before we’d been six hours in Leadville.”