“What a hellish pity it is that I didn’t find you and try to hold you up weeks ago, Trask—while I had some few ravellings of the thousand left. Will you take a beggar with you on your quest of the golden fleece? Because, if you will, the beggar is yours. We mustn’t disappoint the angel.”
IV
The August sun had dropped behind a high-pitched horizon of saw-tooth peaks and broken ranges, leaving the upper air still shot through with a golden glow that was like the dome lighting of a vast celestial theater, by the time two young men, whose burro packs of camp equipment, supplies and digging tools marked them as prospectors, had picked their way down the last precipitous rock slide into a valley hemmed in by the broken ranges. At the close of a hard day’s march the straggling procession was heading for running water and a camp site; the water being a clear mountain stream brawling over its rocky bed in the valley bottom. Reaching the stream before the upper-air effulgencies had quite faded into the smoke-gray of twilight, a halt was made and preparations for a night camp briskly begun.
Two full months had elapsed since the partnership bargain had been struck in the lobby of the American House in Denver, and during the greater part of that interval Philip and the play-boy had prospected diligently in the foot-hills and eastern spurs of the Continental Divide, combing the gulches in the vicinity of Fair Play and Alma, and finding nothing more significant than an occasional abandoned tunnel or shaft, mute evidences that others had anticipated their own disappointment in this particular field. Drifting southwestward, past Mount Princeton, they had ascended Chalk Creek, crossed the range over a high pass into Taylor Park, and were now in new ground on the western side of the Divide.
“This side of the world looks better; or at least a little less shopworn,” Bromley remarked, after they had cooked and eaten their supper and were smoking bed-time pipes before the camp fire. “I think we have outrun the crowd, at last, and that is something to be thankful for.”
Philip opened his pocket knife and dug with the blade into the bowl of his pipe to make it draw better. The two months of outdoor life and hard manual labor had done for him what the treasure search was doing for many who had never before known what it was to lack a roof over their heads at night, or to live on a diet of pan-bread and bacon cooked over a camp fire. With the shedding of the white collar and its accompaniments and the donning of flannel shirt, belted trousers and top boots had come a gradual change in habits and outlook, and—surest distinguishing mark of the tenderfoot—a more or less unconscious aping of the “old-timer.” Since his razor had grown dull after the first week or two, he had let his beard grow; and for the single clerkly cigar smoked leisurely after the evening meal, he had substituted a manly pipe filled with shavings from a chewing plug.
Bromley had changed, too, though in a different way. Two months’ abstention from the hectic lights and their debilitating effects had put more flesh and better on his bones, a clearer light in his eyes and a springy alertness in his carriage; and though his clothes were as workmanlike as Philip’s, he contrived to wear them with a certain easy grace and freedom, and to look fit and trim in them. Also, though his razor was much duller than Philip’s, and their one scrap of looking-glass was broken, he continued to shave every second day.
“I’ve been wondering if a later crowd, with more ‘savvy’ than we have, perhaps, won’t go over the same ground that we have gone over and find a lot of stuff that we’ve missed,” said Philip, after the pipe-clearing pause.
“‘Savvy,’” Bromley chuckled. “When we started out I was moved to speculate upon what the wilderness might do to you, Phil; whether it would carve a lot of new hieroglyphs on you, or leave you unscarred in the security of your solid old Puritan shell. ‘Savvy’ is the answer.”
“Oh, go and hire a hall!” Philip grumbled good-naturedly. “Your vaporings make my back ache. Give us a rest!”