BLACK MIKE MEETS AN OLD ACQUAINTANCE AND STARTS A COLLECTION
In the course of this same morning, Lafond had discovered an old acquaintance.
He arose early, and spent some time after breakfast investigating and criticising the premises. Frosty's administration had, it must be confessed, been rather slack, and there were many loose ends. These Black Mike gathered into a cat o' nine tails with which to lash his subordinate. After he had done more for Frosty's character in sixty minutes than that young man, unaided, could have accomplished in as many months, he left the scene of his reorganizations behind, and strolled about in the one narrow street of the village.
He soon saw all there was to be seen there. With a vague idea of finding his way to the famous Great Snake Mine, he rambled out from the double row of log cabins, around the bend, and into the lower gulch. He had defined to himself two things very clearly—that Billy Knapp was now easily the most important figure in the community, and that a continuance of this importance depended entirely on his effecting a combination of his group of claims with Eastern capital. In the Black Hills nearly all of the promising leads are of quartz, requiring in their development more expensive machinery than any ordinary man is able to afford. Until the good angel arrives, they are so much crumbling red rock or white crystal; but with the erection of a stamp mill, within wagon distance, they become valuable. Mike had set himself to the task of depriving Billy Knapp at once of his property and of his prestige; but since he could not hold him up at the point of a pistol, as might have been done had it been the question of a watch or a scarf-pin, he did not at present see just how it was to be accomplished. Ruminating these matters, he found himself all at once in a cañon much grown with underbrush, full of birds, and possessing a general air of the gentler aspects of nature.
Immediately before him stood a double cabin, its two parts connected by a passage way. The foundations of its timbers were encircled by broad bands of red geraniums. Behind the buildings, chained to posts, he perceived three wild animals. One was a short, comical, and shaggy bear; the second, an equally furry but more eager-looking raccoon; the third, a bobcat with tasselled ears.
Mike paused and surveyed them with amusement. As he stood there the door of the cabin opened and the owner stepped out into the sunshine. The half-breed never forgot a face which a vital incident had impressed on his memory; and though this old, white-haired, mild-eyed man had passed in and out of his life in the space of one evening fifteen years ago, Lafond recognized without difficulty the stranger whose words had given him so powerful an impetus toward his new way of life. It was Durand, the butterfly hunter.
He was little changed. And again the coarser man felt, as fifteen years before, the air of gentle and quaint courtesy, which a keener observer would have associated with an old-fashioned society now quite passed away. It should have gone with ruffles and silken hose, with powdered hair and silver shoe buckles.
The naturalist caught sight of the newcomer and approached.
"They are quite gentle," he assured, explaining the beasts. He rubbed the heavy fur of the raccoon the wrong way. "Ah, Jacques," he said to the little animal, relapsing quaintly into a sort of old-time speech, "thy hair doth resemble in stiffness of texture the bristles of thine own curry brush."
The raccoon uttered his high, purring over-note, and seized the man's fingers with his little black hands, almost human. The bear waved his paws appealingly. The bobcat danced back and forth at the end of its leash. "Peace, my children," chided the old man, bestowing on each a pat. "It is not yet the hour of noon." He stooped to unsnap the raccoon's chain; and then, as though recalling the half-breed's presence, he turned with an air of apology.
"You are a stranger here?" he asked. "Yes? And you walk this morning for your pleasure? Yes? That happens not often in these parts." He went on, conversing shyly but easily, with the obvious desire of pleasing the half-breed rather than himself. Lafond had opportunity to observe the great solidity of the logs composing the cabin walls, and to recognize that the structure must belong to the earlier period of the primitive architecture of the Hills—for there are such periods.
"You have lived here long," he suggested, following out this inference.
"Yes," laughed the old man softly, "very long. The camp there came to me. I was an old timer when the first house was built."
After a little, they entered the cabin together, and Lafond found himself in a sheet-ceiled room, strewn with all sorts of literary and scientific junk. The imagination could discover much food for speculation in the curiosities literally heaped about the apartment, but most wonderful of all, seizing the eye, holding it from all else, were the scores of shallow glass-fronted boxes hanging everywhere on the wall. They were lined with white paper pasted over a layer of cork. In them, row after row, were impaled butterflies of many colors. Thousands of the pretty insects were there outspread, varying in size from the tiny blue Lycaena to the great Troilus or the gorgeous yellow and black Turnus. They were exquisitely prepared, with just the right lift on the wings, just the proper balance of the long antennae, until it seemed that they must be on the point of flight, and one almost expected that in another moment the air would be filled with a fluttering, many-hued splendor.
The men seated themselves in two home-made chairs. The raccoon, evidently from old winter-time habit, waddled in a dignified fashion to the fireless stove, where he curled up like a door-mat with keen, bright eyes. Mike's gaze roamed about the apartment.
"You are a great scientist," he observed, intending the remark for a compliment.
"In a way, in a way," replied the old man humbly. "One must occupy the mind when one is alone, and what task more fitting to our highest faculties than that of investigating, with all due reverence, the workings of God's mechanism?"
He said it with a simple piety which could not provoke a smile. Michaïl Lafond caught himself wondering what he did there. Surely there was nothing to interest him in stuffed insects and a garrulous old man, especially as the conversation insisted on retaining its formal footing.
"You are not a miner?" the entomologist inquired, after a moment's pause.
"No," replied Mike.
"I am glad to hear it. I like not this eager scrambling for what does so little good. I too once—— But now I am content; yes, content. There is always good if one will but find it. I myself might with justice be accused of being a miner. I find my leads, I develop them, I assay my ores; but always in miniature—on a small scale."
Then, in a flash, Michaïl Lafond saw at least the outlines of his plan, and he knew why he had come in here to talk to the garrulous old man.
"You know the assay, then?" he inquired conversationally.
"In a modest way—a few simple tests."
"But that is much. Do you not know that it is at Rapid, in the School of Mines, that the nearest assayer is? You have a profession here at your lands."
A sudden scream broke through the apartment, a rush of wings, a growl. The old man ran nimbly to the stove, and rescued the little raccoon from the savage attacks of a magpie. The magpie sailed back to his perch on one of the butterfly cases, where he ruffled his feathers indignantly. The raccoon curled up in the old man's lap.
"You are French?" inquired the latter, with more interest than he had hitherto shown.
"I have some French blood," replied Lafond cautiously.
"I knew it," said Durand, immensely pleased. "I am rarely mistaken. It was a twist of your words that suggested it, an idiom. Et maintenant nous pouvons causer," he added in the purest Parisian accent.
"Oui, oui, oui," cried the half-breed, suddenly swept up by an uncontrollable excitement he could not himself understand. "La belle langue!"
He felt an unwonted expansion of the heart at thus hearing once more the language of his youth. The formality of the interview was gone. They conversed freely, swiftly, animatedly. Durand had been educated in Paris, and had a thousand reminiscences to impart. He told of many quaint customs, and Lafond, with growing emotion, recalled similar or analogous customs among his own expatriated branch of the race in the pine forests of Canada. His sullen, taciturn manner broke. He became the Gaul. He gesticulated, he overflowed, his eye lighted up, he said a thousand things.
After a time Durand opened a chest at the foot of the bed, from which he abstracted a bottle and two long-stemmed glasses. These he placed on the table with a quaint little air of ceremony.
"Sir," said he, "we must know each other better. We speak each the language we love. We talk of old days. Sir," he concluded, bowing with stately grace as he poured the red wine into the glasses, "I ask you to drink wine with me to our acquaintance. My name is Durand."
He inclined, his hand to his heart, and somehow there seemed to be nothing ridiculous in the act.
"I am Michaïl Lafond," replied the half-breed simply.
A silence fell. The realities came back to Lafond's mind.
"I would ask you a favor," he said abruptly.
"Name it; it is yours."
"I want you to teach me how to make an assay."
"It would be a pleasure. I will do it gladly."
"Is it difficult?"
"Not very."
"When shall we begin?"
"When you say."
Lafond reflected. "Well, I will bring some ore in a day or two." Then, after a pause, as though in deference to the attitude he knew the old man held in regard to such things, he added, "It must be very interesting, this making of gold from the rock."
"And more interesting still," supplemented Durand gently, "is the thrill of a shared thought."
The raccoon stood on his hind legs in his master's lap, and began deliberately to investigate the contents of his pockets, deftly inserting his little black hands, almost human, and watching the man's face with alert eyes. Durand took the animal's small head between both his palms, and smiled at him affectionately.
"Ah, Jacques, polisson! Thou art a rogue, and dost learn early what thy master's race doth teach. See, Lafond, how the little villain would even now rob the very one who doth give to him his daily bread and all that which he hath." He softly rubbed the small, black nose with the flat of his palm, much to its owner's disgust. Jacques backed off deliberately to the floor, where he sneezed violently, while Durand gazed at him with a kindly smile.
After leaving the cabin, Black Mike no longer slouched along unseeing. He burned with the inspiration of an idea. Just where the idea would lead him, or how it would work out in its final processes, he did not know; but he had long since grown accustomed to relying blindly on such exaltations of confidence as the present, sure that details would develop when needed. He believed in letting the pot boil.
Through the town he walked with brisk, business-like steps, out into the higher gulch. There he soon came upon signs of industry. Up a hill he could hear the ring of axes and the occasional rush of a falling tree, sounding like grouse drumming in the spring. He followed the sound. Half way up the knoll, he discovered a cabin and three shafts. A rude sign announced that this represented the surface property of the Great Snake Mining and Milling Company. Lafond halted abruptly when he saw the sign. For perhaps half an hour he looked over, with the eye of a connoisseur, the three piles of ore at the mouths of the three shafts, approving silently of the evidence of slate walls, crumbling between his strong fingers the oxygenated quartz, putting his tongue to the harder specimens to bring out their color by moisture, gazing with some curiosity at the darker hornblende. Finally he selected a number of the smaller specimens, with which he filled the ample pockets of his shooting-coat. After this he returned to town and the Little Nugget saloon, where he emptied his pockets on the bar.
"Get some of that packin' stuff out behind," he commanded Frosty, "and with it construct a shelf there by the mirror."
He stood over Frosty while the latter, frightened into clumsiness, hammered his fingers, the wall, the rude shelf, anything but the nail. Finally, Lafond thrust him aside with a curse, and finished the job himself. On the completed shelf he ranged about half of the specimens which he had picked up from the ore dumps. Beneath these he tacked a label, indicating that they were from the Great Snake Mine.
Then he joined Jack Graham outside, and settled down to watch the group of men engaged in laying the foundation timbers of a new log shack.