Part 6

“A bit disfigured, but still in the ring,” said the play-boy, with his cheerful smile twisting itself, for very weariness, into a teeth-baring grin. Then, as the sunlight grew stronger, he made a binocular of his curved hands and looked back over the basin distances. As he did so, the twisted smile became a chuckling laugh. “Take another look at that outfit on the trail, Phil,” he said. “It’s my guess that they have a pair of field-glasses and have got a glimpse of us up here.”

Philip looked, and what he saw made him scramble to his feet and shout at the patient jacks, lop-eared and dejected after their long night march. The group on the distant trail was no longer a unit. Three of the dots had detached themselves from the others and were coming on ahead--at a pace which, even at the great distance, defined itself as a fast gallop.

VI

WITH the vanguard of the army of eager gold-hunters fairly in sight, the two who were pursued cut the summit breathing halt short and resumed their flight. Avoiding the sand-covered snowdrifts in which they had come to grief on the journey out, they pushed on down the western declivities at the best speed the boulder-strewn slopes and craggy descents would permit, postponing the breakfast stop until they reached a grassy glade well down in the foresting where the animals could graze.

After a hasty meal made on what prepared food they could come at easily in the packs, and without leaving the telltale ashes of a fire, they pressed on again westward and by early afternoon were in the mountain-girt valley of the stream which had been their guide out of the western wilderness two days earlier. Again they made a cold meal, watered and picketed the animals, and snatched a couple of hours for rest and sleep. Scanting the rest halt to the bare necessity, mid-afternoon found them once more advancing down the valley, with Philip, to whom horseback riding was a new and rather painful experience, leading his mount.

One by one, for as long as daylight lasted, the urgent miles were pushed to the rear, and after the sun had gone behind the western mountains they made elaborately cautious preparations for the night. A small box canyon, well grassed, opened into the main valley on their left, and in this they unsaddled the horses and relieved the jacks of their packs and picketed the animals. Then, taking the needed provisions from one of the packs, they crossed the river by jumping from boulder to boulder in its bed, and made their camp fire well out of sight in a hollow on the opposite bank; this so that there might be no camp signs on the trail side of the stream. But in the short pipe-smoking interval which they allowed themselves after supper, Bromley laughed and said: “I guess there is a good bit of the ostrich in human nature, after all, Philip. Here we’ve gone to all sorts of pains to keep from leaving the remains of a camp fire in sight, when we know perfectly well that we are leaving a plain trail behind us for anybody who is even half a woodsman to follow. That’s a joke!”

“Of course it is,” Philip agreed; and for a time before they extinguished the fire and recrossed the river to roll up in their blankets in the box canyon where the animals were grazing, they discussed the pressing matter of trail effacement without reaching any practical solution of the problem.

The next morning they were up and on their way in the earliest dawn twilight. As yet, there were no signs of the pursuit. The mountain silences were undisturbed save by the drumming thunder of the swift little river and the soft sighing of the dawn precursor breeze in the firs. Convinced that all the haste they were making was clearly so much effort thrown away unless they could devise some means of throwing their followers off the track, they resumed the camp-fire discussion, falling back in the end, not upon experience, which neither of them had, but upon the trapper-and-Indian tales read in their boyhood. In these, running water was always the hard-pressed white man’s salvation in his flight, and, like the fleeing trapper, they had their stream fairly at hand. But the mountain river, coursing along at torrent speed, and with its bed thickly strewn with slippery boulders, was scarcely practicable as a roadway; it was too hazardous even for the sure-footed broncos, and entirely impossible for the loaded jacks.

Next, they thought of cutting up one of the pack tarpaulins and muffling the hoofs of the animals with the pieces, but aside from the time that would be wasted, this expedient seemed too childish to merit serious consideration. In the end, however, chance, that sturdy friend of the hard-pressed and the inexperienced, came to their rescue. Some seven or eight miles beyond their night camp they came upon a place where, for a half-mile or more, the left-hand bank of the stream was a slope of slippery, broken shale; the tail of a slide from the mountain side above. Bromley was the first to see the hopeful possibilities.

“Wait a minute, Phil,” he called to his file leader; “don’t you remember this slide, and how we cursed it when we had to tramp through it coming out? I’ve captured an idea. I believe we can delay this mob that’s chasing us, and maybe get rid of it for good and all. Is the river fordable here, do you think?”

Philip’s answer was to ride his horse into the stream and half-way across it. “We can make it,” he called back, “if we can keep the jacks from being washed away.”

“We’ll take that for granted,” said Bromley. “But we don’t need to go all the way across. Stay where you are, and I’ll herd the rest of the caravan in and let it drink.”

This done, and a plain trail thus left leading into the water, Bromley explained his captured idea. While they couldn’t hope to make a roadway of the stream bed for any considerable distance, it was quite possible to wade the animals far enough down-stream to enable them to come out upon the shale slide. After they had been allowed to drink their fill, the expedient was tried and it proved unexpectedly successful. On the shale slide the hoof prints vanished as soon as they were made, each step of horse or burro setting in motion a tiny pebble slide that immediately filled the depression. Looking back after they had gone a little distance they could see no trace of their passing.

“This ought to keep the mob guessing for a little while,” Bromley offered as they pushed on. “They’ll see our tracks going down into the creek, and think we crossed over. They’ll probably take a tumble to themselves after a while--after they fail to find any tracks on the other side; but it will hold ’em for a bit, anyway. Now if we could only scare up some way of hiding our tracks after we get beyond this slide----”

Though the continuing expedient did not immediately suggest itself, the good-natured god of chance was still with them. Before they came upon ground where the tracks of the animals would again become visible, they approached the mouth of one of the many side gulches scarring the left-hand mountain, and in the gulch there was a brawling mountain brook with a gravelly bottom.

“This looks as if it were made to order, don’t you think?” said Philip, drawing rein at the gulch mouth. “If we turn up this gulch we can walk the beasts in the water.”

“But that isn’t the way we want to go,” Bromley objected.

“I’m not so sure about that. The map shows our valley lying on the other side of this southern mountain range. The route we took, coming out, was along two sides of a triangle, following the streams--which is the long way around. I’m wondering if we couldn’t cut straight across and save a lot of time. We’ve climbed worse mountains than this one looks to be. And there’s another thing: we can take the water trail up this gulch for a starter, and the chances are that we’d lose the hue and cry that’s following us--lose it permanently. What do you say?”

“I’m good for a try at it, if you are,” was the prompt reply; and so, without more ado, the route was changed.

For the first half-mile or so through the windings of the gulch they were able to hide their tracks in the brook bed, but the farther they went, the rougher the way became, until finally they had to drag the horses and pack animals up out of the ravine and take to the mountain slopes, zigzagging their way upward as best they could through the primeval forest. Luckily, though there were craggy steeps to be climbed with shortened breath, perilous slides to be avoided, and canyon-like gulches to be headed at the price of long detours, they encountered no impassable obstacles, and evening found them far up in the forest blanketing of the higher slopes, with still some little picking of grass for the stock and with plenty of dry wood for the camp fire which they heaped high in the comforting assurance that its blaze would not now betray them.

It was after they had cooked and eaten their first hearty meal of the toilsome day, and had stretched themselves luxuriously before the fire for the evening tobacco-burning, that Bromley said: “How about it, Philip?--are you getting a bit used to the millionaire idea by this time?”

Philip shook his head slowly.

“No, Harry; I can’t fully realize it yet. For a little while after I saw the figures of those assays I thought I could. But now it seems more like an opium dream. It doesn’t seem decently credible that after only a short summer’s knocking about in these hills, two raw green-horns like ourselves could stumble upon something that may change the entire scheme of things for both of us for the remainder of our lives. It’s fairly grotesque, when you come to think of it.”

“Well, I guess it isn’t a dream, at any rate. Mr. Drew gave me a good bit of his time day before yesterday; went with me to the land office, and afterward helped me in the horse market where I bought the extra burro. He asked a lot of questions; about the width of the vein, how far we had traced it, and how fair or unfair we’d been to ourselves in picking the samples; and after I had answered him as well as I could, he said, in effect, that we had the world by the neck, or we would have, if the ‘Little Jean’ pans out anywhere near as good as it promises to.”

Again Philip shook his head. “I’m not at all sure that I want to grab the world by the neck, Harry. That doesn’t seem like much of an ambition to me.”

“All right; say it doesn’t. What then?”

“Oh, I don’t know. If the miracle had happened a year or so ago ... but it didn’t; so what’s the use?”

“Go on and turn it loose,” Bromley encouraged. “Set the clock back a year or so and let us see what it strikes.”

“I had a few ideals then; modest ones, I guess you’d call them. I’d had to break my college course in the third year--family matters. At that time I wanted nothing so much as to go back and finish; and perhaps have a try for a Ph.D. degree afterward.”

“And past that?”

“More of what you’d call the modesties, I guess: a teaching job in some college back home, or something of that sort; a job in which I’d have some leisure for reading, thinking my own thoughts, living my own life.”

“No wife and kiddies in the picture?” Bromley asked, with his most disarming smile.

“No; not then.”

The play-boy laughed softly. “No sentimental foolishness for the austere young student and pedagogue, of course. But the ‘not then’ tells a different story. You’ve met the incomparable ‘her’ in your later avatar?”

It was some measure of the distance he had come on the road to freer human expression that Philip did not at once retreat into the speechless reticences.

“Yes,” he said: “I’ve met a girl.”

“The ‘angel’ you spoke of, the night you fed a hungry hold-up?”

“Don’t get it wrong. She is not so angelic that she can’t be perfectly human.”

“But didn’t you say you’d met her only twice?”

“I did; and the saying still holds true.”

“Bowled you over like a shot, did she? I’d never have believed it of you, Philip.”

“You needn’t believe it now. There was no ‘bowling over’ about it. I first met her on the train coming to Denver--with her family; sat with her for part of an afternoon. She isn’t like any other girl I’ve ever known.”

“And that is as far as you’ve gone? You are a cold-blooded fish, Philip, dear. But we were talking about futures. I take it the teaching job in a New England college doesn’t appeal to you now; or won’t if our mine keeps its promise?”

“Honestly, Harry, I can’t see very far ahead. I’m not at all sure that I want to go back and finish my college course. There is nothing truer than the saying we have hurled at us all the time out here--that the West lays hold of a man and refuses to let go; that you may be as homesick as the devil, but you’ll never go home to stay. But this is all dream stuff--this talk. We haven’t got the millions yet. Even if the mine is as rich as it seems to be, we may find jumpers in possession, and so many of them that we can’t get away with them.”

“That’s so. ‘There’s many a slip,’ as we read in the copy-books.”

For a time the high-mountain silence, a silence curiously bereft of even the small insect shrillings of the lower altitudes, enveloped them. The cheerful fire was beginning to fall into embers when Philip began again.

“A while back, you thought the money fever was getting hold of me, Harry, but I hope you were wrong. Of course, there are things I want to do; one in particular that money would help me to do. It was my main reason for heading west from New Hampshire a little less than a year ago.”

“Is it something you can talk about?”

“I guess so--to you,” and, breaking masterfully through whatever barrier of the reticences remained, he told the story of his father’s disappearance, of the cloud which still shadowed the Trask name, of his own unshakable belief in his father’s innocence, and, lastly, of his determination to find the lost man and to clear the family name.

“You see how the money will help; how I couldn’t hope to do much of anything without money and the use of my own time,” he said in conclusion. Then, the ingrained habit of withdrawal slipping back into its well-worn groove: “You won’t talk about this, Harry? You are the only person this side of New Hampshire who knows anything about it.”

“It is safe enough with me, Phil; you ought to know that, by this time. And here is my shy at the thing: if it so happens that the ‘Little Jean’ is only flirting with us--that we get only a loaf of bread where we’re hoping to hog the whole bakery--you may have my share if your own isn’t big enough to finance your job. I owe you a good bit more than the ‘Little Jean’ will ever pan out on my side of the partnership.”

“Oh, hell,” said Philip; and the expression was indicative of many things not written down in the book of the Philip who, a few months earlier, had found it difficult and boyishly embarrassing to meet a strange young woman on the common ground of a chance train acquaintanceship. Then, “If you’ve smoked your pipe out, we’d better roll in. There is more of the hard work ahead of us for to-morrow.”

But the next morning they found, upon breaking camp and emerging from the forest at timber line, that the blessing of good luck was with them still more abundantly. With a thousand and one chances to miss it in their haphazard climb, they had come upon an easily practicable pass over the range; and beyond the pass there was a series of gentle descents leading them by the middle of the afternoon into a valley which they quickly recognized as their own.

Pushing forward at the best speed that could be gotten out of the loaded pack animals, they traversed the windings of the valley with nerves on edge and muscles tensed, more than half expecting to find a struggle for re-possession awaiting them in the treasure gulch. At the last, when the more familiar landmarks began to appear, Philip drew his rifle from its holster under his leg and rode on ahead to reconnoitre, leaving Bromley to follow with the jacks. But in a few minutes he came galloping back, waving his gun in the air and shouting triumphantly.

“All safe, just as we left it!” he announced as he rode up. And then, with a laugh that was the easing of many strains: “What a lot of bridges we cross before we come to them! Here we’ve been sweating blood for fear the claim had been jumped--or at least I have--and I don’t suppose there has been a living soul within miles of it since we left. Kick those canaries into action and let’s get along and make camp on the good old stamping ground.”

VII

THE autumn days were growing perceptibly shorter when the discoverers of the “Little Jean” lode began to make preparations to be snowed in for the winter in the western mountain fastnesses. By this time they had heard enough about the mountain winters to know what they were facing. With the first heavy snowfall blocking the passes they would be shut off from the world as completely as shipwrecked mariners on a desert island. But hardships which are still only anticipatory hold few terrors for the inexperienced; and with the comforting figures of the assays to inspire them, they thought more of the future spring and its promise than of the lonely and toilsome winter which must intervene.

Since there was still sufficient grass in sheltered coves and forest glades to feed the stock, they postponed the journey which one of them would have to take to find winter quarters for the animals. The delay was partly prudential. Though each added day of non-interference was increasing their hope that their ruse at the shale slide had been completely successful in throwing their pursuers off the track, they had no reason to assume that the Neighbors party would turn back without making an exhaustive search for the new “rich diggings”; and Philip was cannily distrustful of the Neighbors purpose.

“It may be just as you say: that they are merely hungry gold-chasers, breaking their necks to be the earliest stake-drivers in a new district; but then, again, they may not be,” was the way he phrased it for the less apprehensive Bromley. “If they happen to be the other sort--the lawless sort--well, with both of us here to stand up for our rights, they’d be five to our two. We can’t afford to make the odds five to one. I’d rather wait and take the horses and jacks over the range in a snow storm than to run the risk of losing our mine.”

“Meaning that we needn’t lose it if we can muster two to their five?” said Bromley, grinning.

“Meaning that if anybody tries to rob us there’ll be blood on the moon. Get that well ground into your system, Harry.”

“Ho! You are coming on nicely for a sober, peaceable citizen of well-behaved New England,” laughed the play-boy. “But see here, didn’t you tell me once upon a time that you had never fired a gun? If you really believe there is a chance for a row, you’d better waste a few rounds of ammunition finding out what a gun does when you aim it and pull the trigger. It’s likely to surprise you. I’ve shot ducks in the Maryland marshes often enough to know that pretty marksmanship is no heaven-born gift.”

“Thanks,” returned Philip grimly. “That is a sensible idea. Evenings, after we knock off work, we’ll set up a target and you can give me a few lessons.”

Making the most of the shortening days, they had become pioneers, felling trees for the building of a cabin, and breaking the two broncos, in such primitive harness as they could contrive out of the pack-saddle lashings, to drag the logs to a site near the tunnel mouth. Like the drilling and blasting, axe work and cabin building were unfamiliar crafts, to be learned only at a round price paid in the coin of aching backs, stiffened muscles and blistered palms. Nevertheless, at the end of a toiling fortnight they had a one-room cabin roofed in, chimneyed and chinked with clay, a rude stone forge built for the drill sharpening and tempering, and a charcoal pit dug, filled and fired to provide the forge fuel. And though the working days were prolonged to the sunset limit, Philip, methodically thorough in all things, did not fail to save enough daylight for the shooting lesson, setting up a target in the gulch and hammering away at it until he became at least an entered apprentice in the craft and was able to conquer the impulse to shut both eyes tightly when he pulled the trigger.

They were bunking comfortably in the new cabin when they awoke one morning to find the ground white with the first light snowfall. It was a warning that the time had come to dispose of the animals if they were not to be shut in and starved. In his talk with Bromley, Drew, the Leadville mine owner, had named a ranch near the mouth of Chalk Creek where the borrowed saddle horses could be left, and where winter feeding for the jacks might be bargained for; and after a hasty breakfast Philip prepared to set out on the three-days’ trip to the lower altitudes.

“I feel like a yellow dog, letting this herding job fall on you, Phil,” protested the play-boy, as he helped pack a haversack of provisions for the journey. “I’d make you draw straws for it if I had the slightest idea that I could find the way out and back by myself.”

“It’s a stand-off,” countered the potential herd-rider. “I feel the same way about leaving you to hold the fort alone. If that Leadville outfit should turn up while I’m away----”

“Don’t you worry about the Neighbors bunch. It’s been three full weeks, now, with no sign of them. They’ve lost out.”

“I’m not so sure of that. Better keep your eye peeled and not get too far away from the cabin. If they should drop in on you----”

“In that case I’ll man the battlements and do my small endeavors to keep them amused until you put in an appearance,” was the lighthearted rejoinder. “But you needn’t run your legs off on that account. They’ve given us up long ago.” Then, as Philip mounted and took the halter of the horse that was to be led: “Are you all set? Where’s that old pistol?”