Part 8

Philip felt a cold sweat starting out all over his body. If he could only summon the flaming rage fit that had possessed him on the night when he had flung himself upon the drink-crazed prospector in the bar-room of the Leadville hotel ... he prayed for its return, but it wouldn’t come. By a curious telepathic prickling he knew that the big man crouching beside him sensed his condition, and his shame was complete.

“You skeered?” queried Garth in a hoarse whisper.

“As scared as hell!” was the gritting reply. “Just the same, I’m going after that extra gun. What shall I do after I get it?”

“First off, you tell yer pardner to hold his hand till he hears the big racket beginnin’, and then to blaze away like sin at anything in sight. Next, you keep right on down the gulch and make a round and get on the hill behind that bunch o’ saplin’s. When you’re all set and ready, blaze away, and I’ll whale at ’em from up here, and yer pardner’ll chip in from the cabin. If that don’t stampede them cusses, nothin’ will.”

Philip tightened his belt. “I’ll probably get killed trying, but here’s f-for it,” he stammered; and in a chilling frenzy of the teeth-chattering he began to worm his way down the gulch toward the dump and the cabin.

How he contrived to drag himself over the short three hundred yards, with every nerve and muscle straining to turn the advance into a shameful retreat, he never knew. Every time another gunshot crashed upon the night silence he fancied he was the target and flattened himself with the blood slowly congealing in his veins. None the less he kept on, hugging the shadows and taking advantage of every inequality of the ground that would afford even the scantiest cover.

At last, after what seemed like an endless eternity of the creeping, dodging progress, he found himself behind the cabin and sheltered by it from the desultory gunfire which still kept up from the opposite slope of the gulch. With his pocket knife he dug the clay chinking from between two of the logs and listened. There was no sound from within, and again his blood ran cold. Had one of the random bullets found its mark and killed Bromley? He remembered, with a tingling shock of terror, that all of the later firing had been on the part of the outlaws; there had been no replies from the cabin.

Hastily enlarging the hole in the chinking, he put an eye to the orifice. The interior was not wholly dark, as he had expected to find it. There was a handful of embers on the hearth, and the glow made a murky twilight in the cabin. Presently he made out the slender figure of the play-boy stretched flat upon the earth floor, face downward, and the blood-chilling shock came again. Then he looked more closely and saw that the prone figure was not that of a dead man. Bromley was alive and alert; he was lying behind a low breastwork built of the provision sacks, and he had one of the rifles at his shoulder with the muzzle thrust through a crack between the logs. Philip gulped and shut his eyes. The sudden revulsion from horrified despair to relief made him blind and dizzy.

Another shot from without steadied him and he called softly through the opening he had made. Bromley heard, and recognized his voice.

“You, Philip? How the mischief ... where are you?”

“At the back--where the chinking is out. Don’t you see?”

“Coming,” said the one-man garrison, and as he crawled slowly across the floor Philip could see that one leg was useless; it was bound with a clumsy handkerchief tourniquet above the knee and was dragging.

“Damn them!” he whispered fiercely. “How badly are you hurt, Harry?”

“Can’t say; haven’t had time to look at it. But the honors are easy, so far: I got one of them to pay for the leg, and got him good--I saw ’em carrying him off. Where the devil did you drop from?--out of the blue?”

“Never mind that part of it now. I want one of the rifles and a belt of ammunition. Hook ’em over here while I dig this hole big enough to take them through!”

The transfer was quickly made, and with the gun in his hands, Philip delayed only long enough to get a briefed story of the attack. Bromley had been routed out of his bunk about an hour earlier by somebody hammering on the door. When he opened in answer to the knocking there was a short and brittle parley. Neighbors had made a blunt demand for a surrender of the mining claim, asserting that it was his discovery, made early in the summer.

“Naturally, I told him to go chase himself,” said the play-boy. “Then the five of ’em started to rush little Harry, and one of them got me in the leg with a pistol shot before I could slam the door and drop the bar. I punched a hole in the chinking, and a few rounds from the Winchester drove ’em back into the woods for cover. They’ve been there--or four of ’em have--ever since, taking pot shots at the cabin. Now tell me what happened to make you turn back.”

“Just a piece of good luck--the story will keep till we’re out of this mess. You’re not fighting alone any more; there are two of us on the outside. Keep down and don’t let them get you through the door. Those slabs won’t stop a rifle bullet.”

“Haven’t I found that out?” said Bromley, with a grim chuckle. “But tell me--what’s the plan of campaign?”

“This: I’m going to try to circle around and get behind that bunch of trees where they’ve taken cover. I’ve picked up a helper--an old prospector and mountain man that I met last spring. He has his own rifle, and when the circus begins, you turn loose through your loophole and pump lead just as fast as you can. In that way we’ll get ’em from three directions at once. Will that hurt leg let you do your part?”

The grim little chuckle came again. “I don’t shoot with my legs. Wave your little baton and I’ll come in on the fortissimo passages.”

“That’s all, then. Take care of yourself, and don’t unbar the door until you are sure we are on the other side of it. I’m gone.”

While he had the shelter afforded by the cabin there was some little sense of security. But as soon as he got beyond this bulwark the shaking fit seized him again. For the first few yards there was little or no cover save a few stumps and a pile of firewood, and behind these he crept, hardly daring to breathe. He had buckled the filled cartridge belt around him, but the rifle was an impediment that could not be disposed of so easily. So long as he must crawl, he had to drag the weapon along as best he could; and remembering that he had heard that even a plug of snow will cause a gun barrel to burst when it is fired, he halted behind the woodpile and stopped the muzzle of the rifle with a rag torn from his handkerchief.

From the woodpile to the nearest forest cover on that side was only a matter of a few rods, but the interval was bare, and he had to have another fight with himself before he could drum up the courage to cross it. Once among the trees, however, he felt safer; and after he had emerged from the mouth of the gulch and could take shelter in the groving of aspens that lined the valley stream, he told himself that the worst was over.

In the fringe of quaking aspens he stumbled upon the horses and jacks of the invaders, the burros still standing with their packs on. It was not until he was fairly among the tethered animals that he remembered the man that Bromley had shot, and reflected that if the outlaw was only wounded, he would be somewhere near the horses. The thought had barely flashed upon him before he saw the wounded man. He was sitting with his back to a tree and mumbling curses. Philip slipped aside cautiously and pushed on, again with cold chills racing up and down his spine. The wounded man was evidently only half conscious.... If he had been fully conscious....

Philip broke into a nervous run, following the stream for possibly an eighth of a mile before he ventured to turn aside to climb the slope which should lead to the outlying position above the thicket in the gulch where the outlaws were in hiding.

Toiling upward breathlessly, it seemed to take him a frightfully long time to gain the proper elevation. Unlike the spur on the western side of the gulch, this one was thinly wooded and was besprent with a scattering of boulders; he was in constant fear of dislodging one of these and thus giving a premature alarm. With the occasional crack of a rifle in the depths below to guide him, he finally reached a height from which he could look down upon the clump of young firs; and squeezing himself between two of the surface boulders he pumped the loading lever of the Winchester and prepared to give the firing signal agreed upon.

It was while he was steadying the rifle over the rock in front of him that he felt something giving way and realized that the slight push of his wedged-in body was tipping the bulwark boulder over to set it in motion down the slope. In a frenzy of excitement at this discovery his only thought was that with the boulder gone he would lose his sheltering breastwork and be naked to rifle fire from below. Dropping the gun, he clung to the tilting rock with both hands and tried to hold it--to drag it back upon its balancing pinnacle. When his puny effort failed, and the great rock turned slowly over to go bounding down the declivity straight for the sapling grove and carrying a small avalanche of lesser stones with it, he lost his head completely, snatching up the rifle and firing it wildly again and again, and with no attempt at taking aim, until he had pumped the last cartridge from its magazine. It was this final shot that did for him. In his mad haste he failed to hold the gunstock firmly against his shoulder, and at the trigger-pulling the kick of the weapon slewed him around with a jerk that snapped his head against the rock behind him. For a brief instant the black bowl of the heavens was illuminated by a burst of fiery stars, and after that he knew nothing more until he opened his aching eyes upon a graying dawn to find Garth kneeling beside him, unbuttoning his shirt to search for the presumptive effacing wound.

At the touch of the big man’s cold hands he sat up, with the buzzing of many bees in his brain.

“It isn’t there,” he said; “it’s the back of my head. The gun kicked me against the rock. How long have I been gone?”

“A hour ’r so. I allowed yuh was scoutin’ round to see what’d come o’ the jumpers; was why I didn’t come a-huntin’ for yuh. Besides, that there game li’l’ pardner o’ yourn was needin’ to have his laig fixed up.”

“What _has_ become of the jumpers?” Philip asked, holding his head in his hands in a vain endeavor to quiet the bees.

Garth sat back on his heels and his wide-mouthed smile made him look like a grinning ogre.

“Skedaddled; gone where the woodbine twineth an’ the whangdoodle mourneth for her fust-borned, I reckon. Cattle o’ that sort ain’t makin’ no stand-up fight, less’n they got the odds _all_ their way. And what with this here mount’in tumblin’ down on ’em, and guns a-poppin’ three ways from the ace, they wasn’t stayin’ to wait for daylight--not any.” Then: “That was a mighty fly li’l’ trick o’ yourn--shovin’ a rock slide down at ’em.”

Philip was honest enough not to take credit for a sheer accident.

“I didn’t,” he denied. “I had jammed myself in between two rocks to get cover, and I was scared stiff when I found the front one rolling away from me; I was even silly enough to grab it and try to hold it back.”

“Ne’m mind; hit done the business, all the same.” A pause, and then: “I took a li’l’ squint at yer strike afore I clim up here. You two boys’ve sure had a chunk o’ tenderfoot luck! You’ve got the world by the horns if that streak o’ pay rock don’t play out on yuh too soon. Hit’s richer’n Billy-be-damn, right from grass-roots. Time she’s had a winter’s work put in on ’er, there’ll be money enough on the dump to buy yuh a whole raft o’ farms in God’s country. Reckon that bumped head’ll let yuh drill down to the cabin? Or shall I h’ist yuh onto my back and tote yuh?”

“I can walk,” said Philip, struggling to his feet. And after the descent was begun, with Garth’s arm to steady him: “Harry’s leg--how badly is he hurt?”

“Clean hole, and no bones broke. It’ll lay him out for a spell, but that’s all.” Then, with the approving chuckle that Philip was learning to anticipate: “Lordy-goodness! you couldn’t kill that nervy li’l’ pardner o’ yourn with a axe! And a while back I was foolish enough in my head to ask yuh if he had sand enough to hold them pirates till we got to him! Why, say; he’s all sand--that li’l’ rat is! Just laughed like I was ticklin’ him when I was diggin’ in that hole in his laig to clean it out--he did, for a fact! Yuh needn’t never worry yore head a minute about _that_ boy.”

IX

THE beginning of the week after the clash with the claim jumpers found the routine which the owners of the “Little Jean” hoped to maintain through the winter catching its stride. True, Bromley was out of the activities for the time being; but even as a cripple he contributed his part by refusing to let Philip or Garth make a trip afoot to Leadville on the slender chance of being able to persuade a doctor to cross the ranges in the perilous edge of the closed season. As to this, however, a second snowfall, coming almost upon the heels of the first, shut them off conclusively from the outer world, and their isolation was complete.

“It’s perfectly all right,” Bromley maintained cheerfully. “I’m doing fine--couldn’t be doing any better if I had all the doctors in Leadville. The only thing that nags me is the fact that I’m tied down and can’t pull my weight in the boat.”

“You have good and well earned all the time you have to lose,” was Philip’s retort to this plaint; and with Garth as an able team-mate he completed the preparations for the winter, cutting down trees for firewood, setting up a third bunk in the cabin, and building a small lean-to for the storing of the provisions and explosives.

When it came to a resumption of the mining operations, Philip found that they had acquired much more than a mere day-laborer in the experienced mining man. Quite apart from his great strength and apparently unlimited capacity for hard work, Garth’s practical knowledge of development processes proved invaluable, and it was at his suggestion that the tunnel was straightened and enlarged, its future drainage and ventilation provided for, and a rough-and-ready process of hand-picked ore-sorting made a part of each day’s task.

“You got to look ahead a mile ’r so in this here minin’ game,” was the experienced one’s business-like argument. “You let on like you boys ain’t got the spondulix to buy a stamp-mill and tote it in over the mount’ins, so you either got to make a stock comp’ny o’ this bonanza o’ yourn ’r else lease it. Either way the cat jumps, it’s a-goin’ to pay big if yuh’ve got a sure-enough mine, with rich ore on the dump, to show up next spring.”

For two tenderfoots to whom, as yet, all things mining-wise were unknown quantities, this practical advice was as water to the thirsty, so the development work was planned accordingly. By the time Bromley’s wound had healed and he was able to take his shift as third man in the heading, the work of drilling and blasting had been expertly systematized, and the stock of selected ore was growing day by day.

Speculations as to what had become of the would-be jumpers died out after the first heavy snowfall, which blocked, not only the mountain passes, but the high-lying valley as well. Garth had argued from the first that, with at least one wounded man in the party, Neighbors would not try to hold his footing in the snowbound western wilderness through the winter.

“Now that he knows whereabouts them high-grade assays o’ yourn come from, he’ll know how to beat the rush that’s shore goin’ to come chargin’ in here the minute the passes are open in the spring,” was Garth’s answer to the speculations; and since the snow blockade, daily added to, shut all intrusion out, no less effectually than it shut the occupants of the lonely log cabin in, the stirring incidents of the night of battle became only a memory, and the day’s work filled the cup of the days to overflowing for the three who had elected to brave the winter in the solitudes.

The severity of the winter of 1880-81 in the mountains of Colorado had--and still has--for its reminiscent chroniclers all those who endured the rigors of that Arctic season. The trio in the high-pitched valley of the Saguache were not the only mineral-mad gold-hunters who, deliberately or in tenderfoot hardihood, disregarded the warnings of the old-timers and stayed afield, many of them without adequate supplies, and lacking the skill and experience necessary to successful pioneering in a snowbound wilderness. As a consequence, the hard winter took its toll on many a mountain side and in many an isolated gulch. Snow slides swept precariously situated log cabins from bare slopes, or buried them fathoms deep in débris in the gulches. In the ill-provided camps starvation stalked abroad; and though there was game to be had, it could not be pursued without snow-shoes; and few, indeed, were the neophytes who had had the foresight to include snow-shoes in their winter camp kits.

As for the three burrowing in the gulch of the “Little Jean,” the hardships played no favorites, though Garth’s fund of experience stood them in good stead, tiding them over many of the exigencies. Before they became entirely shut in, the big man stalked and shot a deer: the meat was smoke-cured and added to the store of provisions, and the skin, Indian-tanned, served for an extra bunk cover in the cold nights. But with the coming of the heavier snows deer-stalking became impossible, so that source of food supply was cut off for the future.

Fortunately, by the middle of December, by which time zero-and-below temperatures were clamping the western slope wilderness in an icy vise, they had driven the mine tunnel to a depth to which the outdoor frigidities only partly penetrated; hence they were still able to carry on the mining operations. But the deepening drifts in the gulch were now threatening to bury the small cabin, chimney and all, and no little of their daylight time was spent in keeping the snow shovelled from the roof, and the paths open to the tunnel, to the woodpile and to the creek from which they were still obtaining their drinking water.

Life under such conditions--complete and unbreakable isolation, day-long toil, much of which must be squandered in a bare struggle for existence, and the constant and wearing demand upon fortitude and endurance--exacts penalties in whatever coin the debtor may be able to pay. For Philip Trask, his uneventful youth and early manhood, with its years running in the well-worn grooves of tradition and the conventional, faded and became as the memory of a dream--a memory which was dimming day by day and withdrawing into a more and more remote distance.

It was in the long winter evenings before the hearth fire in the half-buried cabin that he began to understand that Bromley was humanly and socially the better man; that there was in him a fine strain of gentle breeding which not only enabled him to rise superior to environment and association, but also gave him an outlook upon life unattainable by the under-gifted. From the beginning the play-boy had struck up a friendship, or rather an affectionate comradeship, with Garth that he, Philip, could not bring himself to share, try as he might. Little things, even the mountain man’s crudities of speech, jarred upon him. It was quite in vain that he called himself hard names, asking himself why he, of all men, should yield to the nudgings of an intellectual or social snobbishness. But the fact remained. Bromley could bridge the social gap between himself and Garth apparently without effort; could and did. In the pipe-smoking hours before the cabin fire it was the play-boy and the bearded frontiersman who were companions, while Philip found himself sitting apart and brooding.

“How do you do it, Harry?” he asked, one evening when Garth, who thought he had seen deer tracks in the snow, had gone out to the water hole in the creek to try for a moonlight shot at more meat.

“Do what--chum in with Big Jim? Why shouldn’t I? He’s a man, isn’t he?”

“Yes; but you and he have absolutely nothing in common. Garth washes his face occasionally and calls it a bath; keeps his fingernails in mourning; shovels his food with a knife; rolls into his bunk with his boots on if he happens to forget to take them off.”

Bromley smiled and relighted his pipe.

“You have some queer notions in that narrow old Puritan head of yours, Phil. Don’t you know that humanity is all common?”

“Is it?--from your point of view?”

“It’s the surest thing you know. ‘For a’ that an’ a’ that, a man’s a man for a’ that.’ Big Jim is a diamond; an uncut diamond, I grant you, but the pure quill is there, just the same.”

“Think so? By his own tell he is a spendthrift drunkard and gambler when he has the means to buy or bet.”

“Well, what of that? Does the foolish evil cancel all the wise good? When it comes to that, how many of us have a clean slate? I’m sure I haven’t, for one. How about you?”

Philip was silent for a time, and when he spoke again it was to say, rather complacently: “I think you have seen the worst of me, Harry.”

Bromley smiled again and shook his head. “I’ve seen the best of you, Phil. I’m only fearing the worst.”

“Thanks”--curtly; “you have said something like that before. Make it plainer.”

“I don’t know that I can; or that you’d thank me if I could. It is merely the potentialities, I guess.”

“My potentialities for evil?”

“Both ways. You are, or you have been, virgin ground. This gold hunt is the first thing that has ever put the plow into you. It remains to be seen what kind of soil it is going to turn up. Don’t you feel that, yourself?”

“I don’t know why it should turn up anything different.”