CHAPTER XXI. THE RUBY SILVER MINE.--A TRUE STORY.

Mining atmospheres are rife with stories, marvelous, startling, that would be incredible, did we not know it is always the incredible which happens. Of the many tales floating about Santa Fé, I give one to you, beloved, which shows how strangely things come round in this round world of ours.

The patient reader who has graciously followed my rambling, scrambling steps through New Mexico may possibly remember that a large portion of the MSS. comprising the archives of the territory, was sold as waste paper and found way into the various shops of the city. Santa Fé being the largest town and commercial center of New Mexico, from it they were widely dispersed in every direction, and on this accidental scattering of leaves hangs my story and a fortune.

One night in the Autumn of 1879 I sat boring myself into inanity over the _Pharos of the Occident_ (which is a misnomer, the newspaper being anything but light reading), when a visitor was announced.

“_Me parece un minero_,” said Dolores Lucia Marina Feliciana Flores.

I was pleased at the thought of a visitor, even on business, and, in dread of being left alone with _The Pharos_, insisted _el minero_ should not be interviewed in the Assay Office, but here. The “Palace” halls are neither long nor lofty, being the length of two moderate rooms on the ground floor, and in a few minutes there stood in the deep doorway a figure, as revealed by the shaded student’s lamp, unmistakably that of a miner. His face was sunburnt to a vermeil red and made prematurely old by exposure. Wrinkled by drying wind and pitiless sunbeat, his appearance was weather-worn, showing days of wanderings without shelter and lodgings on the cold, cold ground.

The contagion of good manners is a happy thing. In Spanish-speaking countries, though all else be lacking, there is ever the most exquisite politeness, and the man removed his slouch of a hat with a profound and sweeping bow. His uncovered head was thatched with a thick shock of carrot-colored locks, which are the inheritance of “the sandy complected,” to speak after the manner of the poke-berry districts of our own Indiana. The strip of forehead shaded by his hat was dotted with large, assertive freckles, which in the exposed portion of his face were “in one red burial blent.” He closed the door carefully and, with an air of secrecy, dropped his voice to a certain loud whisper, peculiar to sick-rooms and miners in confidence, and his whisper gradually sank to the ledger lines below, as he made his report; for, though rather untimely, his call was not unexpected.

I spread _The Pharos_ on my table, and he slowly proceeded to unload his pockets and his red handkerchief, and empty on the paper various ores, kept separate, tied in rags and marked. To him they represented all precious things, besides gold and silver; to me they appeared formless, jagged lumps of dull-looking stone.

The story of the Argonaut was long--too long for any but a frontiersman, with plenty of leisure to speak and to hear--and was given in the style of oratory perfected by the Cousin of Sally Dillard.

He could not sit still, but started every few minutes, as at a calling voice, and strode hurriedly up and down the room, restless, eager, nervous, like one who, after long and exhaustive strain, suddenly slackens the tension. With the utmost minuteness he gave the history and described the locality of each particular sample, and tied them again, one by one, each in its own grimy cloth and label. This done, he hesitated, cleared his throat, rose from his chair, apologized for trespassing upon our valuable time (as though we had anything _but_ time), opened the door, looked up and down the hall, as if he feared some ear was airing at the key-hole. Satisfied with the reconnaissance, he closed it again and with stealthy step returned to the table. Evidently two hours of rigmarole had failed to free his soul. There was something still unsaid. We silently awaited the revelation. “There is one specimen left,” he began, doubtfully, and looked at me much as to say: Can a woman keep or be trusted with a secret? Perhaps he read assurance in my face, for he fumbled in his vest (from the Semitic shop hard by, painfully new and pathetically cheap), and out of its deepest corner produced a little bag of buckskin, tied with a leather string. He untied it with nervous haste, and his wistful light blue eyes, burned in deep hollows with miner’s fever, brightened as he spoke, scarcely above his breath, in an awe-inspiring whisper: “Here we air. Here’s the richest thing yet.” Shaking the bag, there dropped into the palm of his left hand a reddish purple stone, without streakings or glitter. “Ruby silver,” he said, softly. “Ruby silver, and plenty of it. There’s no end to the lead.”

He reached it to me tenderly, as though it could break at a touch. I did as was expected of me--scraped the fragment of mineral with a pen-knife, peered at it through the magnifying glass, hefted it on my forefinger, and made the sagacious observation: “It looks well. I should say a very rich specimen.”

“It’s from the Cañon de los Angelos,” said the miner.

I remembered it as a dismal gorge, torn up and riddled by volcanic action, a blasted wilderness of gashed and riven stone peaks, bearing aloft gnarled and twisted firs, their utmost summits a region of ice, lifted above the limit of life. The silence unbroken but by the howl of wild beasts and the war-whoop of the savage; where only fresh mountain-heaps of piled-up lavas, marking the throes of the earthquake, vary the forbidding gloom which baffles the traveler, entering it with a sense of approaching the Valley of the Shadow of Death. As soon expect water in desert-sand as gold in that lava-flood, silver in those melted rocks!

“How did you come to prospect in that dreadful cañon?” I asked.

“The strangest thing in the world,” said the miner, “how I first lighted on it. I bought a plug of tobacco (it was six years ago), and carried it home in a piece of an old letter, dated sixteen hundred and something. I disremember the year. It was writ on thick yellow paper, to one of the Spanish governors, when Arizona and New Mexico was one. My wife was a-studyin’ Spanish (you can’t git along here without some), and she brought the dictionary to bear and spelt the thing out. It told about a rich lead in the Cañon de los Angelos; but the paper was tore off in the very place I most wanted, so I couldn’t exactly spot it. For nigh onto five years I’ve prospected. I’ve hunted off and on, in hot and cold, wet and dry. I’ve been hungry and thirsty. I’ve scorched and I’ve froze. Oncet I was nearly drowned by a sudden rise at night, when I camped in an _arroya_. One winter I was snow-blind. Many and many’s the week I’ve heard no voice, nothing but the yelp of the coyote and the wind among the pines. Many and many a time I’ve smelt the grizzlies; but, as luck would have it, I never run onto one. A lion or a panther will run when he’s hurt and roar; but a grizzly doesn’t, and, after bein’ hit, shot through the heart, instead of dyin’, he lives long enough to chaw up the hunter.”

Dear reader, beware of starting the Rocky Mountaineer on bear stories. You will feel the daisies growing over you before he slackens the strain of his eloquence.

“Did you spend all these six years in the Cañon?” I inquired, by way of bringing the prospector back to the subject in hand.

“Oh! no. By spells I went at other bizness; but the idee of a fortune a-waitin’ for me in Los Angelos, and that old Spanish letter made me sour on everything. You know it is in Valencia County.”

I did not, but made an amiable effort to look as though I did.

“There’s curious old things down there in them old lava-beds.”

“What things?” I asked, for the first time rousing to any interest, for my antiquarian blood began to stir.

“Heaps of ruins, cities, ragged walls, sixty feet high and ten feet thick, scattered over miles and miles. The rafters air charred with the banked-up fire of the volcano; but I see one beam as sound as the day it was laid up.”

“And how did the timber appear?”

“’Twas piñon, squared with a stone hatchet or hammer and covered with markings--Indian signs, maybe--furrowed with a stone gouge. Then there was a drawin’ of the sun, and a sort of a _neye_; the lava had buried deep, and people who like old potteries can get a wagon-load there. About four feet down I struck a room, about ten feet square, where there was a big fireplace; and in it was a crane, with a clay hook, and on the end of the hook was a bone. By the side of the fire was a skeleton--the old man a-watchin’ his bone a-roastin’ on the hook, when here comes the lava and seals him up tight. Over yonder, at the Fonda, I’ve got his skull; and here” (he opened the revolver-pocket this time)--“here’s the old fellow’s finger-bone. I’ve lots of the same old arrowheads and a flint tomahawk.”

I was greatly interested in the still relics of remote generations; but we had not reached the mine, and the evening was far spent. “These were near your ruby silver mine?” I said, suggestively.

“Oh! no. As I was sayin’, I found the bones of a dog close to a spring of sweet water, and I knowed then I was a-gettin’ warm. My time was pretty nigh out. The snow was so deep I hid my tools, and give up for the winter and hired out to the freighters. As soon as winter broke I lit out one moonshiny night. Somehow the prospectors in Santa Fé got wind of my moves. I don’t know how, unless I told in my sleep, for I kept dumb as the dead, and I was afeered they’d track me. I hunted round that Spring in a ring of five miles. First, I found the _acequia_ which kept the buried city in water. I followed it in a blind lead for three-quarters of a mile, to a broken dam. The trail to the dam came next. When I tell you cedars thick as my body air growin’ on that trail, you have an idee how long it’s been since tracks has been made in it.”

Just there I think the prospector drew on his imagination for his facts; but his audience held their peace, and he continued:

“It was a mighty poor zigzag; but it led to smelters.”

“To smelters!” we both exclaimed, in a breath; then followed a thrilling pause. The prospector had reached his climax, and he walked up and down the floor excitedly, tossing the ruby silver back and forth in his hands, like the hands of Esau.

“To old smelters!” he repeated, with emphasis. He struck the Colossus-of-Rhodes pose on the wolf-skin rug and continued:

“They was made of adobes, and was raised some twenty foot above the ground, and had saw hard service. I prowled around there a full month, hackin’ and diggin’ alone; for I dassent tell anybody but a Pueblo Indian, and threatened to kill him if he ever made sign to white man. It was my last throw. I was hard up. My old pard was dead, give out with rheumatism. My wife had went back to the States. My credit (never anything to brag on) went after my wife” (he smiled, for the first time), “and I see plain luck must come soon or never; but I never lost my grip. I knowed I was a-gittin’ warm. There’s no sign like the buried towns. It’s certain indication of diggin’s not far off. It’s the rule all over the territories. I lived on venison, venison, till it was worse than old mutton. About three mile away was a lake, where I scooped up salt with my hands; but venison and salt gets monotonous week in and week out. There was plenty of charcoal (had been used by the miners, whoever they was), and I made out that the dam led the water of the Abo to the works. From the old furnaces I found another overgrown trail, that run to this mine.”

“What sort of mine is it?”

“One of the covered-up ones. It’s certain hundreds of years old, buried under felled timber. Some of it had rooted. I was a month gettin’ through, and it took a sharp eye to sight it.” The speaker modestly blinked the milky orbs under their pink lashes, and continued: “The shaft is eighty feet deep or more, walled up with pine, and drifts runnin’ to the right and left a hundred feet or so. I’ve set my stakes and the papers is all made out. It’s mine, and no divide, and not a soul on earth knows about it except you two and me.”

I have seen so many ruined prospectors hunting mines that are nothing but myths, it was cheering to learn there could be no mistake about this discovery.

“You have fairly earned all you have found,” I said, in sympathy.

“_Gracias, Señora_,” said the rich man, dramatically waving the Esau hand, evidently enjoying his Spanish.

“You see this specimen will run twelve hundred to the ton, and there’s no end to the lead.” He teetered the stone on his trembling forefinger. “I’ve had a hard time! My wife never got done mournin’ she ever spelt out the old letter. She’ll feel better now. I’ve struck it, and I guess I’ve struck it rich.”

And he had. With a farewell toss up of the ruby silver specimen, till it struck the muslin ceiling overhead, the fortunate man, haggard and shaken, yet hilarious, took his leave.