The original Eagle Tail tunnel had been driven into the side of a steep hill; so steep, in fact, that the loose shale stretched in long shoots from the base of the frowning porphyry dikes that crowned the tops of the hills to the bottom of the cañon. On each side of the discovery gulch sharp ridges, perforated by the gopher-holes of the Mexicans, and the ancient workings of the Spaniards, ran directly up the hill to meet the contact. But it was against the face of the big ridge itself that Kruger had driven his drift and exploded his giant blast of dynamite, and the whole slope had been altered and covered with a slide of rock.
Against this slide, in the days when they were marking time, Bud and his pardner had directed their energies, throwing the loose stones aside, building up walls against the slip, and clearing the way to the solid schist. There, somewhere beneath the jumble of powder-riven rock, lay the ledge which, if they found it, would make them rich; and now, with single-jack and drill, they attacked the last huge fragments, blasting them into pieces and groveling deeper until they could strike the contact, where the schist and porphyry met and the gold spray had spewed up between.
It was slow work; slower than they had thought, and the gang of Mexicans that they had hired for muckers were marvels of ineptitude. Left to themselves, they accomplished nothing, since each problem they encountered seemed to present to them some element of insuperable difficulty, to solve which they either went into caucus or waited for the boss. Meanwhile they kept themselves awake by smoking cigarettes and telling stories about Bernardo Bravo.
To the Mexicans of Sonora Bernardo Bravo was the personification of all the malevolent qualities—he being a bandit chief who had turned first general and then rebel under Madero—and the fact that he had at last been driven out of Chihuahua and therefore over into Sonora, made his malevolence all the more imminent.
Undoubtedly, somewhere over to the east, where the Sierras towered like a blue wall, Bernardo and his outlaw followers were gathering for a raid, and the raid would bring death to Sonora.
He was a bad man, this Bernardo Bravo, and if half of the current stories were true, he killed men whenever they failed to give him money, and was never too hurried to take a fair daughter of the country up behind him, provided she took his fancy.
Yes, surely he was a bad man—but that did not clear away the rock.
For the first week Phil took charge of the gang, urging, directing, and cajoling them, and the work went merrily on, though rather slowly. The Mexicans liked to work for Don Felipe, he was so polite and spoke such good Spanish; but at the end of the week it developed that Bud could get more results out of them.
Every time Phil started to explain anything to one Mexican all the others stopped to listen to him, and that took time. But Bud's favorite way of directing a man was by grunts and signs and bending his own back to the task. Also, he refused to understand Spanish, and cut off all long-winded explanations and suggestions by an impatient motion to go to work, which the trabajadores obeyed with shrugs and grins.
So Don Felipe turned powder-man and blacksmith, sharpening up the drills at the little forge they had fashioned and loading the holes with dynamite when it became necessary to break a rock, while Bud bossed the unwilling Mexicans.