Silver and Gold

by Coolidge, Dane

  “Mr. Russell,” he began, ignoring the grinning Bunker, “I vant to expound to you the cheology of dis country–I haf made it a lifelong study.”

  “Yes, you want to get this,” put in Bunker sotto voce, “he knows every big word in them books.”

  “I claim,” went on the Professor, slapping the books together vehemently, “I claim dat in dis district we haf every indication of a gigantic deposit of copper. The morphological conditions, such as we see about us everywhere, are distinctly favorable to metalliferous deposition; and the genetic influences which haf taken place later─”

  “Well, he’s off,” sighed Bunker rising wearily up and ambling over towards the door, “so long, Big Boy, I’ll see you to-morrow. Never could understand broken English.”

  “Dat’s all righd!” spat back the Professor with spiteful emphasis, “I’m addressing my remarks to dis chentleman!”

  “Ah–so!” mimicked Bunker. “Vell, shoodt id indo him! And say, tell him about that tunnel! Tell him how you went in until the air got bad and came out up the hill like a gopher. Took a double circumbendibus and, after describing a parabola─”

  “Dat’s all righd!” repeated the Professor, “now–you think you’re so smart–I’m going to prove you a liar! I heard you the other day tell dis young man here dat dere vas no golt in dis district. Vell! All righd! We vill see now–joost look! Vat you call dat now, my goot young friend?” He dumped out the contents of his canvas ore-sack and nodded to Denver triumphantly. “I suppose dat aindt golt, eh! Maybe I try to take advantage of you and show you what dey call fools gold–what mineralogists call pyrites of iron? No? It aindt dat? Vell, let me ask you vun question den–am I righd or am I wrong?”

  “You’re right, old man,” returned Denver eagerly as he held a specimen to the light; and when he looked up Bunker Hill was gone.

  “You see?” leered the Professor jerking his thumb towards the door, “dot man vas trying to do you. He don’t like to haf me show you dis golt. He vants you to believe dat here is only silver; but I am a cheologist–I know!”

  “Yes, this is gold,” admitted Denver, wetting the thin strip of quartz, “but it don’t look like much of a vein. Whereabouts did you get these specimens?”

  “From a claim dat I haf, not a mile south of here,” burst out the Professor in great excitement; and while Denver listened in stunned amazement he went into an involved and sadly garbled exposition of the geological history of the district.

  “Yes, sure,” broke in Denver when he came to a pause, “I’ll take your word for all that. What I want to know is where this claim is located. If its inside the shadow of Apache Leap, I’ll go down and take a look at it; but─”

  “But vat has the shadow of the mountain to do with it?” inquired the Professor with ponderous dignity. “The formation, as I vas telling you, is highly favorable to an extensive auriferous deposit─”

  “Aw, can the big words,” broke in Denver impatiently, “I don’t give a dang for geology. What I’m looking for is a mine, in the shadow of that big cliff, and─”

  “Ah, ah! Yes, I see!” exclaimed the Professor delightedly, “it must conform to the vords of the prophecy! Yes, my mine is in the shadow of Apache Leap, where the Indians yumped over and were killed.”

  “Well, I’ll look at it,” responded Denver coldly, “but who told you about that prophecy? It kinder looks to me as if─”

  “Oh, vell,” apologized the Professor, “I vas joost going by and I couldn’t help but listen. Because dis Bunker Hill, he is alvays spreading talk dat I am not a cheologist. But him, now; him! Do you know who he is? He is nothing but an ignorant cowman. Ven dis mine vas closed down I vas for some years the care-taker, vat you call the custodian of the plant; and dis Bunker Hill, ven I happened to go avay, he come and take the job. I am a consulting cheologist and my services are very valuable, but he took the job for fifty dollars a month and came here to run his cattle. For eight or ten years he lived right in dat house and took all dat money for nothing; and den, when the Company can’t pay him no more, he takes over the property on a lien. Dat fine, valuable mine, one of the richest in the vorld, and vot you think he done with it? He and Mike McGraw, dat hauls up his freight, dey tore it all down for junk! All dat fine machinery, all dem copper plates, all the vater-pipe, the vindows and doors–they tore down everything and hauled it down to Moroni, vere they sold it for nothing to Murray!

  “Do you know vot I would do if I owned dat mine?” demanded the Professor with rising wrath. “I vould organize a company and pump oudt the vater and make myself a millionaire. But dis Bunker Hill, he’s a big bag of vind–all he does is to sit around and talk! A t’ousand times I haf told him repeatedly dat dere are millions of dollars in dat mine, and a t’ousand times he tells me I am crazy. For fifteen years I haf begged him for the privilege to go into pardners on dat mine. I haf written reports, describing the cheology of dis district, for the highest mining journals in the country; I haf tried to interest outside capital; and den, for my pay, when some chentleman comes to camp, he tells him dat I am a barber!”

  The Professor paused and swallowed fiercely, and as Denver broke into a grin the old man choked with fury.

  “Do you know what dat man has been?” he demanded, shaking a trembling finger towards Bunker’s house, “he has been everything but an honest man–a faro-dealer, a crook, a gambler! He vas nothing–a bum–when his vife heard about him and come here from Boston to marry him! Dey vas boy-und-girl sveetheart, you know. And righdt avay he took her money and put it into cows, and the drought come along and killed them; and now he has nothing, not so much as I haf, and an expensive daughter besides!”

  He paused and wagged his head and indulged in a senile grin.

  “Und pretty, too–vat? The boys are all crazy, but she von’t have a thing to do with them. She von’t come outdoors when the cowboys ride by and stop to buy grub at the store. No, she’s too good to talk to old mens like me, and with cowboys what get forty a month; but she spends all her time playing tunes on the piano and singing scales avay up in G. You vait, pretty soon you hear her begin–dat scale-singing drives me madt!”

  “Oh, sings scales, eh?” said Denver suddenly beginning to take an interest, “must be studying to become a singer.”

  “Dat’s it,” nodded the old man shaking his finger solemnly, “her mother vas a singer before her. But after they have spent all their money to educate her the teacher says she lacks the temperament. She can never sing, he says, because she is too dumf; too–what you call it–un-feeling. She lacks the fire of the vonderful Gadski–she has not the g-great heart of Schumann-Heink. She is an American, you see, and dat is the end of it, so all their money is spent.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” defended Denver warmly, “what’s the matter with Nordica, and Mary Garden and Farrar? They’re Americans, all right, and I’ve got some of their records that simply can’t be beat! You wait till I get out my instrument.”

  He broke open a box in which was packed with many wrappings a polished and expensive phonograph, but as he was clearing a space on a rickety old table the Professor broke into a cackle.

  “Dere! Dere!” he cried, “don’t you hear her now? ‘Ah, ah, ah, oo, oo, oo, oo!’ Vell, dat’s what we get from morning till night–by golly, it makes me sick!”

  “Aw, that’s all right,” said Denver after listening critically, “she’s just getting ready to sing.”

  “Getting ready!” sneered the Professor, “don’t you fool yourself dere–she’ll keep dat going for hours. And in the morning she puts on just one thin white dress and dances barefoot in the garden. I come by dere one time and looked over the vall–and, psst, listen, she don’t vare no corsets! She ought to be ashamed.”

  “Well, what about you, you danged old stiff?” inquired Denver with ill-concealed scorn. “If Old Bunk had seen you he’d have killed you.”

  “Ah–him?” scoffed the Professor, “no, he von’t hurt nobody. Lemme tell you something–now di
s is a fact. When he married his vife–and she’s an awful fine lady–all she asked vas dat he’d stop his tammed fighting. You see? I know everyt’ing–every little t’ing–I been around dis place too long. She came right out here from the East and offered to marry him, but he had to give up his fighting. He was a bad man–you see? He was quick with a gun, and she was afraid he’d go out and get killed. So I laugh at him now and he goes avay and leaves me–but he von’t let me talk with his vife. She’s an awful nice woman but─”

  “Danged right she is!” put in Denver with sudden warmth and after a rapid questioning glance the Professor closed his mouth.

  “Vell, I guess I’ll be going,” he said at last and Denver did not urge him to stay.

  * * *

  CHAPTER VIII

  THE SILVER TREASURE

  As evening came on and the red eye of the sun winked and closed behind a purple range of mountains Denver Russell came out of his cliff-dwelling cave and looked at the old town below. Mysterious shadows were gathering among the ruins, the white walls stood out ghostly and still, and as a breeze stirred the clacking leaves of the sycamores a voice mounted up like a bird’s. It rose slowly and descended, it ran rippling arpeggios and lingered in flute-like trills; but it was colorless, impersonal, void of feeling.

  It was more like a flute than like the voice of a bird that pours out its soul for joy; it was perfect, but it was not moving. Only as the spirit of the desolate town–as of some lost soul, pure and passionless–did it find its note of appeal and Denver sighed and sat silent in the darkness. His thoughts strayed far away, to his boyhood in the mountains, to his wanderings from camp to camp; they leapt ahead to the problem that lay before him, the choice between the silver and gold treasures; and then, drowsy and oblivious, he left the voice still singing and groped to his bed in the cave.

  All night the prying pack-rats, dispossessed of their dwelling, raced and gnawed and despoiled his provisions; but when the day dawned Denver left them to do their worst, for his mind was on greater things. At another time, when he was not so busy, he would swing some rude cupboards on wires and store his food out of reach; but now he only stopped to make a hasty breakfast and started off up the trail. When the sun rose, over behind Apache Leap, and cast its black shadow among the hills, Denver was up on the rim-rock, looking out on the promised land that should yield him two precious treasures.

  The rim where he stood was uptilted and broken, a huge stratified wall like the edge of a layer cake or the leaves of some mighty book. They lay one upon the other, these ledges of lime and sandstone, some red, some yellow, some white; and, heaped upon the top like a rich coating of chocolate, was the brownish-black cap of the lava. In ages long past each layer had been a mud bank at the bottom of a tropic sea, until the weight of waters had pressed them down and time had changed them to stone. Then Mother Earth had breathed and in a slow, century-long heave, they had emerged from the bottom of the sea, there to be broken and shattered by the pent-up forces of the fire which was raging in her breast.

  Great rents had been formed, igneous rocks had boiled up through them; and then in a grand, titanic effort the fire had forced its way up. For centuries this extinct volcano had belched forth its lava, building up the frowning heights of Apache Leap; and then once more the earth had subsided and the waters of the ocean had rushed in. The edge of the rim-rock had been sheered by torrential floods, erosion had fashioned the far heights; until once more, with infinite groanings, the earth had risen from the depths. There it stayed, cracking and trembling, as the inner fires cooled down and the fury of the conflict died away; and boiling waters bearing ores in solution burst like geysers from every crack. And there atom by atom, combined with quartz and acids, the metals of the earth were brought to the surface and deposited on the sides of the cracks. Copper and gold and silver and lead, and many a rarer metal, all spewed up from the molten heart of the world to be sought out and used by man.

  All this Denver sensed as he gazed at the high cliff where the volcano had overflowed the earth, and at the layers and layers of sedimentary rock that protruded from beneath its base; but his eyes, though they sensed it, cared nothing for the great Cause–what they looked for was the fruit of all that labor. Where along this shattered rim-rock, twisted and hacked and uptilted, were the hidden cracks, the precious fissure veins, that had brought up the ore from the depths? There at his feet lay one, the gash through the rim where Queen Creek took its course; and further to the north, where the rim-rock was wrenched to the west, was another likely place. To the south there was another, a deep, sharp canyon that broke through the formation to the heights; and over them all, like a sheltering hand, lay the dark, moving shadow of Apache Leap. He traced out its line as it crept back towards the town and then, big eyed and silent, he started down the trail, still looking for some sign that might guide him.

  But other eyes than his had been sweeping the rim and as he came up the trail Bunker Hill appeared and walked along beside him.

  “I’ll just show you those claims,” he said smiling genially, “it’ll save you a little time, and maybe a pair of shoes. And just to prove that I’m on the square I’ll take you to the best one first.”

  He led on up the street and as they passed a stone cabin the door was yanked violently open and then as suddenly slammed shut.

  “That’s the Dutchman,” grinned Bunker, “he wakes up grouchy every morning. What did you think of that rock he showed you?”

  “Good enough,” replied Denver, “it was rotten with gold. But from the looks of the pieces it’s only a stringer–I doubt if it shows any walls.”

  “No, nor anything else much,” answered Bunker slightingly, “you can’t even call it a stringer. It’s a kind of broken seam, going flat into the hill–the Mexicans have been after it for years. Every time there’s a rain the Professor will go up there and wash out a little gold in the gulch; but a Chinaman couldn’t work it, and make it show a profit, if he had to dig out his ore. Of course it’s all right, if you think gold is the ticket, but you wait till I show you this claim of mine–next to the famous Lost Burro Mine.

  “You know the Lost Burro–there she lays, right there–and they took out four million dollars in silver before the bonanza pinched out. At first they hauled their ore to the Gulf of California and shipped it to Swansea, Wales, and afterwards they built a kind of furnace and roasted their ore right here. It was refractory ore, mixed up with zinc and antimony; but with everything against them, and all kinds of bum management, she paid from the very first day. All full of water now, or I’d show you around; but some mine in its time, believe me. I wouldn’t sell it for a million dollars.”

  “Five hundred is my limit,” observed Denver with a grin and Bunker slapped his leg.

  “Say,” he said, “did I tell you that story about the deacon that got stung in a horse-trade? Well, this was back east, where I used to live, before I emigrated for the good of the country, and there was an old Methodist deacon that was as smart as they make ’em when it came to driving a bargain. He and the livery-stable keeper had made a few swaps and one was about as sharp as the other; until finally it got to be a matter of pride between ’em to cut each other’s throats in some horse-trade They would talk and haggle, and drive away and come back, and jockey each other for months; but they always paid cash and if one of ’em got stuck he’d trade the horse off to some woman. Well, one day the livery-stable man drove past the deacon’s house with a fine, free, high-stepping bay; and every afternoon for about a week he’d go by at a pretty good clip. The deacon he’d rush out and try to flag him, but the livery-stable keeper wouldn’t stop; until finally the deacon’s curiosity got the best of his judgment and he went out and laid in wait for him.

  “‘How much do you want for that hoss?’ he says when the livery-stable man came to a stop.

  “‘Two hundred dollars,’ says the livery-stable keeper.

  “‘I’ll give you fifty!’ barks the deacon coming out to look him ove
r and the livery-stable man tossed him the reins.

  “‘The hoss is yours,’ he says, and the deacon knowed he was stung.

  “Quick work,” said Denver, “but I’m not like the deacon. I’m going to look around.”

  “Oh, sure, sure!” protested Bunker, “take all the time you want, but this offer is only good for one week. I’ve got a special reason for wanting to make a sale or I’d never let you look at this claim. Why, the Professor himself has told me a thousand times that it’s a better proposition than the Burro, so you can see that I am making it attractive. And I ain’t pretending that I’m making you the offer for any bull-con reason. I might say that I wanted you to do some work, or to open up the district; but the fact of the matter is I need the five hundred dollars. I’ve seen times before this war when a hundred thousand cash wouldn’t pry me loose from that claim, but now it’s yours for five hundred dollars if you honestly think it’s worth it. And if you don’t, that’s all right, there’s no hard feeling between us and you can go and buy from the Professor. You wasn’t born yesterday and you’re a good, hard-rock miner; so enough said, there’s the claim, right there.”

  He waved his hand at the steep shoulder of the hill, where the canyon had cut through the rim-rock; and as Denver looked at the formation of the ground a gleam came into his eyes. The claim took in the silted edge of the rim, where the strata had been laid bare, and along through the middle of the varicolored layers there ran a broad streak of iron-red. Into this a streak of copper-stained green had been pinched by the lateral fault of the canyon and where the two joined–just across the creek–was the discovery hole of the claim.

  “Let’s go over and look at it,” he said and, crossing the creek on the stones, he clambered up to the hole. It was an open cut with a short tunnel at the end and, piled up about the location monument, were some samples of the rock. Denver picked one up and at sight of the ore he glanced suspiciously at Bunker.