ARTHUR F. PIERSON,
Tucsony Arizona.
Stuffing the hat into his pocket Tom scrambled on, thinking out the meaning of the incident; and now he began to notice in this steeper place that some of the boulders had been misplaced, and here and there was a broken branch, as, if someone had descended very hastily or clumsily.
“If that crazy old man came down here, and perhaps caught a second bad fall, I don't wonder he was used up by the time he reached the lake” was Tom's mental ejaculation, as he toiled up the acclivity and at last, panting and leg weary, gained a narrow grassy level at the foot of a crag “spiked with firs,” which had been conspicuous from the valley not only by its height and castellated battlements, but because a colossal X was formed on its face by two broad veins of quartz crossing each other.
With his eyes fixed upon the rocky wall he walked along in the face of a stiff breeze, until he noticed a pinkish streak upon the dark cliff, betokening the outcrop of another vein, and turned aside to climb a pile of fallen fragments at the foot of the crag to reach it. These fragments were overgrown with low, dense shrubbery. He ducked his head and was pushing into them, when suddenly he saw a huge brown body rise almost into his face, heard the tremendous growl of a grizzly, and amid a crash of bushes and dislodged stones felt himself hurled backward.
Clutching instinctively at one of the shrubs as he fell, he whirled under its hiding foliage, and the vicious stroke of the bear's paw came down upon his leg instead of his head, while the released branches snapped upward into the face of the brute, which, as much surprised as its victim, paused in its onslaught to collect its wits. An instant later Shep dashed up, and at the bear's hindquarters. Bruin spasmodically sank his claws deeper into Tom's thigh, but turned his head and shoulders with a terrific ursine oath at this new and most palpable enemy; and ten seconds afterward Tom's revolver, its muzzle pressed close underneath the bear's ear, had emptied half an ounce of lead into its brain. A blood-freezing death squeal tore the air, and the ponderous carcass sank down, stone dead, upon Tom's body and upon the dwarfed spruce which covered it. It pinned him to the ground with an almost insupportable weight. Perhaps if the animal alone had lain upon him he might have wriggled out; but the brute's carcass also held down the tough and firmly-rooted tree, and the rocks on each side formed a sort of trough. Turn and strain as he would Tom could not free himself from the burden which threatened to smother him. Moreover, the convulsive death throe had forcibly tightened the grip of the claws in the side of his knee, which felt as if in some horrible torturing machine of the Inquisition; and had he not been able at last to reach that paw with his left hand and pull it away from the wound he would have died under the agony.
Then, as he felt the blood running hot and copious down his leg, a new fear chilled his heart. Might he not bleed to death? There seemed no end to the hemorrhage, and what hope had he of succor? He thought of firing signals of distress, but could not reach the pistol, which had been knocked out of his hand. He spoke to the dog, which was barking and worrying at the bear's hind leg, and Shep came and licked his face and sniffed at his blood-soaked trousers. Then, as if even he realized how hopeless was the situation, he sat on his haunches and howled until Tom, hearing him less and less distinctly, imagined himself a boulder slowly but musically crunching to powder under the resistless advance of a glacier, and lost consciousness as the cold-blue dream-ice closed over his dust.
By and by he awoke. It was dark, and something cold and soft was blowing against his face. He moved and felt the shaggy fur and the horrible pain in his leg and in his right arm, which was confined in a twisted position. Then he remembered, but forgot again.
A second time he awoke. It was still dark, but a strange pallor permeated the air, and all around him was a mist of white.
It was snowing fast. He closed his left hand and grasped a whole fistful of flakes. The body of the bear was a mound of white—like a new-made grave over him, he dismally thought. The snow had drifted under and about his shoulders. Its chill struck the wound in his thigh, which throbbed as though hit with pointed hammers, keeping time to the pulsations of his heart; but, thank God! he no longer felt that horrible warm trickling down his leg. He had been preserved from bleeding to freeze to death. How long before that would happen; or, if it were not cold enough for that, how long before the snow would drift clear over him and cut off the little breath which that ponderous, inert, dead-cold beast on his chest prevented from entering his lungs? Where was the dog? He called feebly: “Shep! Shep! Hi-i-i, Sh-e-p!” But no moist nose or rough tongue responded. He tried to whistle, but his parched mouth refused. Heavens, how thirsty! He stretched out his hand and gathered the snow within his reach. Then he closed his eyes and dreamed that two giants were pulling him asunder, and that a third was pouring molten lead down his throat.
But it was only Bill Cooper trying to make him drink whiskey.
He understood it after a little and realized that he ought to swallow. Then life came back, and with the knowledge that he was no longer alone on the cold, remote, relentless mountain top, but that Cooper was lifting away the bear, and that Shep was wild with sympathy and gladness because he had been able to bring help, came courage and forbearance of his suffering. In the morning new strength came with the sunshine. The snow rapidly melted. Cooper got breakfast and Tom rebandaged his knee.
“These gashes won't amount to much, unless the claws were poisoned. You'll have to make me a crutch, and give me a couple of days to get rid of the stiffness, but then I'll be all right.”
“How did you and the bear get into this scrimmage, anyhow? You surely didn't go hunting him with that there six shooter?”
“Not I. The wind was blowing hard toward me, so he didn't smell nor hear me, and I ran right on to him. Shep was not there to warn me, but if he hadn't come back just as he did, or if I hadn't been able to get at my revolver, Old Ephraim would ha' used me up in about a minute.”
“I ain't a betting on one pistol shot against a grizzly, anyhow.”
“Of course, the chances were about one in a thousand, but I wasn't going to die without a shot. I suppose the bullet struck the lower part of the brain.”
“Yes,” said Bill, who had been probing its track. “Tore it all to pieces. But what was the bear after in that brush?”
“Give it up—ants, likely. You know—Great Scott! What's that dog got now?” Shep was coming out of the bushes, dragging a package wrapped in buckskin which was almost too heavy for him to handle. Cooper went and took it from him and brought it to the fire. It was a sort of pouch firmly tied with a thong. Running a knife under this the bundle fell apart, and a double handful of flakes and nuggets of gold and quartz rolled out.
“The cache!” Tom shouted, comprehending instantly the meaning of this. “The bear was tearing it to pieces!”
It was true. His strong feet had displaced the loosely-heaped stones, and a half-devoured side of bacon lay close by where the animal had been disturbed.
Evidently the marauder had just begun his work. There remained in the cache two more pouches of gold—perhaps a quart of the metal pieces in all, more or less pure, for all of it had been dug out of a vein with hammer and knife point, none of the fragments showing the water-worn roundness characteristic of placer gold. Then there were a small quantity of provisions, some ammunition and a small rosewood box with an ornamental brass lock having a remarkably small and irregular keyhole.
From an inner pocket of his purse Tom drew the odd little key the dead prospector had given him. It fitted into the hole and easily turned the lock. The cover sprang open, revealing a package of letters. He lifted them out, but did not pause to read them.
Then came an envelope containing a patent to ranch lands in Arizona, certificates of stock in Mexican and other mines that Burke had never heard of, and a commission as lieutenant of artillery in the Confederate army. All these documents were made out to “Arthur F. Pierson,” establishing the fact that the lost hat was really that worn by the old man, as his dog had recognized.
At the bottom of the box, however, Tom found what interested him most—a formal “claim” and description of the lode whence the gold had been taken, and how to reach it from this cache. It was written in pencil, in a very shaky hand, on two or three soiled leaves torn from a memorandum book and eked out with one of the covers.
Then Tom took up the letters. Most of them were recent and of business importance, but several were old and worn with much handling. One of these latter was from a lawyer in San Francisco, acknowledging funds “sent for the support of your infant daughter,” describing her health and growth, and the care taken of her “at the convent”—all in curt business phrase, but precious to the father's heart. Then there were two or three small letters, printed and scratched in a childish hand, to “dear, dear papa,” and signed “Your little Polly.” One of these spoke of Sister Agatha and Sister Theresa, showing that it was written while the child was still in the convent; but the others, a little later, prattled about a new home with “my new papa and mamma,” but gave no clew to name or place.
“This baby girl—she must be a young woman now, if she lives,” Tom mused—“is evidently the person the poor old chap wanted me to divide with. It ought not to be difficult to trace her from San Francisco, I suppose the convent Sisters knew where she went to when they gave her up. But, hello! here's a picture.”
It was an old-fashioned daguerrotype of a handsome woman of perhaps four-and-twenty, in bridal finery, whose face seemed to him to have something familiar in its expression. But no name or date was to be found, and with the natural conclusion that this was probably Pierson's wife he puzzled a moment more over the pretty face, and then put it away.
After a few days, when Burke was able to travel, the prospector's memorandum and their mountain craft together led them almost directly to the coveted gold vein, which ran across a shoulder of the mountain at the head of the gulch, like an obscure trail, finally disappearing under a great talus at the foot of a line of snowcapped crags.
Tracing it along, they presently came upon the old man's claim marks. The stakes were lettered pathetically with the name of the old man's choosing—“Polly's Hope.”
Adjoining the “Hope” Tom staked out one claim for himself and another for his sweetheart, intending to do the proper assessment work on it himself if Corbitt couldn't or wouldn't; and Cooper used up most of what remained of the visible outcrop in a claim for himself.
Returning to town their claims were registered in the Crimson Mineral District, and their report sent a flight of gold hunters in hot haste to the scene.
Tom Burke, after selling everything he could send to market to turn into ready money, departed to Denver, carrying with him documents and specimens of the gold quartz to support his assertions.
Keen men fêted and flattered him, buttonholing him at every corner with whispered advice, and many proffered schemes. But he was indifferent to it all, and anxious as yet only to hear what Marion should say.
Not a word had he heard from her directly during all the weeks of her absence, but indirectly he knew she had been a star in the local society. He had even to hunt out where she lived, finding it in a cottage near where the stately court house now stands.
He went there, after tea, with a fastbeating heart. Had she forgotten, or withdrawn or been turned away by hardhearted parents and friends? He suspected everything and everybody, yet could give no reasons. And how absurd these fears looked to him—how foolish!—when, sitting in the little parlor, hand in hand, they talked over the past, and she confided that the same doubts had worried her now and then—“most of all, Tom, dear, when I hear of this wonderful success of yours.”
“Bless me! I had forgotten it. By your side all else——”
Here the door opened—not too abruptly—and Mr. Corbitt came in, grimly hospitable and glad, no doubt for his own sake, to see this young fellow who was still true to his daughter; while Mrs. Corbitt was more openly cordial, as became her.
“An' what's this we're hearin' aboot your new mines? They're sayin' down town that you've struck a regular bonanza, an'll soon be worth your meellions. But I told 'em 'Hoot! I'd heard the like o' that before!'”
So Tom recounted briefly the story of the prospector's death and his will; still more briefly his adventure with the grizzly, and how it led to the curious disclosure of the cache. Then, with no little dramatic force, seeing how interested was his audience, he described the hunt for the vein and the finding it, produced his specimens and handed to Miss Marion a mass of almost solid gold embedded in its matrix.
“I can't promise you,” he said, as she tried to thank him with her eyes and a timid touch of her fingers, “that the whole ledge will equal that, but it is a genuine sample from near the surface.”
“Wonderful! Wonderful!” the old Scotchman ejaculated, with gleaming eyes, as Tom went on to show how regular and secure was the title to this possession. “But did ye no find out the name of the poor vagabone?”
“Oh, yes. Didn't I mention it? His name was Arthur Pierson.”
Corbitt and his wife both started from their seats.
“Man, did I hear ye aright?—Arthur F. Pierson?”
“That was the name exactly. I can show it to you on the letters.”
“An' he charged ye to give the half of all ye found to his daughter Polly?”
“Yes, and I mean to try to find her.”
“There she sits!” cried Mother Corbitt excitedly, before her cautious husband, could say “Hush!”—pointing at Marion, who gazed from one to the other, too much amazed to feel grieved yet at this stunning announcement. “We took the lassie when she was a wee bairn, and she would never ha' known she wasn't ours really till maybe we were dead and gone. Her feyther was a cankert, fashious body, but her mother was guid and bonnie (I knew her well in the auld country) and she died when Mary—that's you, my dearie—was born.”
“Is this her picture?” Tom asked, showing the daguerrotype.
“Aye, that it is. Puir Jennie!”
The rest is soon told. A company of capitalists was formed to work the four consolidated claims on the new vein, under the name of the Hope Mining Company.
All the next season was spent by Tom Burke in developing the property and erecting machinery. Corbitt was there too, much thawed by the sun of prosperity, but his wife and daughter remained in Denver. In the autumn, however, the ladies went East, and as the holidays approached Tom and Corbitt followed them to New York, where, on Christmas eve, my hero and heroine were married quietly in a little church up town; and his gift to her was the brooch which had attracted my attention and whose significance was now plain.
