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THE PRICE OF A CLAIM
All through this time of dread and danger, of plot and counterplot andintrigue, of brooding war and half-awakened pillage, the doctor went onpeacefully collecting his funny little statistics, utterly oblivious toeverything but their accumulation and arrangement. Every morning ofthe warmer months he went out into the hills for the day. There hewould grub about among his ledges and leads, pecking away at the rockswith his little hand pick, filling his canvas bags, jotting down notesand statistics in his notebook.
During its progress he was blind to everything but his work. One day,as he walked along the top of a ridge, a huge bear rose up in his path.The doctor politely lifted his hat and passed to one side. The declineof the sun alone he noticed. When the shadow of Harney crept out tohim he turned toward home. As he neared the log cabin his placid eyesfairly beamed through his spectacles. When he came in sight of it heran forward, his specimen bags swinging heavily against his legs,caught up the child stumbling to meet him and carried her, laughing andstruggling, to the woman in the doorway. Then they had supper alltogether--bacon, or perhaps game, with vegetables from the garden, andcorn bread. Occasionally they had white bread and coffee, and alwaysfresh water from the cold mountain creek. After supper the doctor wentoutdoors to arrange his specimens and plot out his notes as long as thedaylight lasted. His wife moved about inside softly. After a time shebrought out the little girl in her nightdress to be kissed. So thetwilight neared, and the long day was done.
As the yellow glow crept down, she came outdoors too, and sat pensivelylooking over the peaks of the lower mountains to the distant Cheyenneand the prairies. Beyond them was the East. There were cities andbooks and other women and the beat of human life in the air. Here wasa still, lonely grandeur that even the wind in the pines did notrelieve.
The doctor finally had to put aside his work for lack of light, and satat her feet leaning against the logs of the cabin. She looked down onhis little figure, his round shoulders, his forehead even now abstractand wrinkled with speculation, his kindly blue eyes, his sensitivemouth, and then she softly reached out and took his hand. The two satthere until the moon rose over the Bad Lands. Then they went inside.In moments such as this the woman lived.
In winter time the doctor sat near the fireplace, writing by thecandlelight on his great book. She was in the shadow, looking at himwith tenderness, smiling wearily at the eager quivering of his chin,and rocking gently back and forth. The little girl played demurely onthe floor within the circle of firelight, her curls falling down on herforehead. She piled up her blocks, and occasionally, as one wouldfall, she would look up in deprecation of her mother's hush. Thegolden heads of the mother and child were like sunshine before the darkwalls of the cabin. Against them the firelight gleamed. Outside, thethin, light snow drifted fitfully by the pane. The doctor wrote. Thewoman watched in patience. The child played.
As spring came on, the doctor got out into the hills again.
One day he came back and found the woman murdered and the child gone.The cabin was ransacked from one end to the other, but no attempt hadbeen made to fire it.
The doctor put his specimen bags methodically in their places, and thensat down by his dead wife.
At evening some passing miners found him there holding her hand. Withsome difficulty, and by the exercise of a gentle force, they persuadedhim to rise, after which they tenderly laid the body on a couch,concealing as best they might the red tonsure where the scalp had been.They set the cabin in order and cooked supper from the provisions intheir wagon. The doctor ate and drank in silence, making no sign whenthe men spoke to him.
After supper he went outside and began to arrange his specimens. Whendarkness fell he came in, stood undecided for a moment, and then laydown on a bear-skin, Jim's gift, and slept.
The men looked at one another in a puzzled way, conversing in lowtones. Soon they too rolled themselves up and went to sleep on thefloor.
Early in the morning Jim Buckley came down the gulch with part of adeer. The men told him the news hurriedly, between mouthfuls ofcoffee. Jim looked at the dead woman with a hardening of the mouth anda softening of the eyes; then he went out and for the first time tookthe doctor's hand.
When they had finished breakfast, the men made a rough bier of willowbranches plaited, on which they gently laid the body. Two went down tothe soft earth by the creek bottom and began to dig. The othersfollowed with their burden, which they laid beside the growingexcavation, and then stood with bared heads, waiting for the diggers.The doctor would not come. After a little persuasion they left himsitting on the ground, leaning against the logs of the cabin, lookingout over the bluffs of the Cheyenne to the east.
The men in the trench worked rapidly and skilfully, one loosening thegravel with his pick, the other shovelling it out on the grass.Suddenly the latter stopped in the act of tossing a shovelful. Hepushed his stubby forefinger in among the gravel for a moment and drewout an irregular bit of metal. It was gold.
They buried the young wife elsewhere, and staked out the claim, andothers, lying along the creek.
So Prue slept quietly at last. Her little life was drab-colored inspite of the lights of adventure and drama that had played over it. Itcontained a great love and a great sacrifice. So little of the goldwould have made her happy, and yet all the wealth of these new placerscould not have saved her at the last!
A rider dashed up to them at the cabin, bringing news of the outbreak.It was directed to the towns of the North, and had only brushed SpanishGulch on its destroying way. The men camped on the site of the newplacer. They built cradles and pumped water down from Spanish Creek,so that in a little time the gulch contained quite a town. The firstdiscovery is known as the Doctor's Claim, and so you can find itrecorded in the records of Pennington County to-day. It turned out tobe very rich.
And as for the doctor--he died.
The Westerners Page 10