Speculations as to what had become of the would-be jumpers died out after the first heavy snowfall, which blocked, not only the mountain passes, but the high-lying valley as well. Garth had argued from the first that, with at least one wounded man in the party, Neighbors would not try to hold his footing in the snowbound western wilderness through the winter.
“Now that he knows whereabouts them high-grade assays o’ yourn come from, he’ll know how to beat the rush that’s shore goin’ to come chargin’ in here the minute the passes are open in the spring,” was Garth’s answer to the speculations; and since the snow blockade, daily added to, shut all intrusion out, no less effectually than it shut the occupants of the lonely log cabin in, the stirring incidents of the night of battle became only a memory, and the day’s work filled the cup of the days to overflowing for the three who had elected to brave the winter in the solitudes.
The severity of the winter of 1880-81 in the mountains of Colorado had—and still has—for its reminiscent chroniclers all those who endured the rigors of that Arctic season. The trio in the high-pitched valley of the Saguache were not the only mineral-mad gold-hunters who, deliberately or in tenderfoot hardihood, disregarded the warnings of the old-timers and stayed afield, many of them without adequate supplies, and lacking the skill and experience necessary to successful pioneering in a snowbound wilderness. As a consequence, the hard winter took its toll on many a mountain side and in many an isolated gulch. Snow slides swept precariously situated log cabins from bare slopes, or buried them fathoms deep in débris in the gulches. In the ill-provided camps starvation stalked abroad; and though there was game to be had, it could not be pursued without snow-shoes; and few, indeed, were the neophytes who had had the foresight to include snow-shoes in their winter camp kits.
As for the three burrowing in the gulch of the “Little Jean,” the hardships played no favorites, though Garth’s fund of experience stood them in good stead, tiding them over many of the exigencies. Before they became entirely shut in, the big man stalked and shot a deer: the meat was smoke-cured and added to the store of provisions, and the skin, Indian-tanned, served for an extra bunk cover in the cold nights. But with the coming of the heavier snows deer-stalking became impossible, so that source of food supply was cut off for the future.
Fortunately, by the middle of December, by which time zero-and-below temperatures were clamping the western slope wilderness in an icy vise, they had driven the mine tunnel to a depth to which the outdoor frigidities only partly penetrated; hence they were still able to carry on the mining operations. But the deepening drifts in the gulch were now threatening to bury the small cabin, chimney and all, and no little of their daylight time was spent in keeping the snow shovelled from the roof, and the paths open to the tunnel, to the woodpile and to the creek from which they were still obtaining their drinking water.
Life under such conditions—complete and unbreakable isolation, day-long toil, much of which must be squandered in a bare struggle for existence, and the constant and wearing demand upon fortitude and endurance—exacts penalties in whatever coin the debtor may be able to pay. For Philip Trask, his uneventful youth and early manhood, with its years running in the well-worn grooves of tradition and the conventional, faded and became as the memory of a dream—a memory which was dimming day by day and withdrawing into a more and more remote distance.
It was in the long winter evenings before the hearth fire in the half-buried cabin that he began to understand that Bromley was humanly and socially the better man; that there was in him a fine strain of gentle breeding which not only enabled him to rise superior to environment and association, but also gave him an outlook upon life unattainable by the under-gifted. From the beginning the play-boy had struck up a friendship, or rather an affectionate comradeship, with Garth that he, Philip, could not bring himself to share, try as he might. Little things, even the mountain man’s crudities of speech, jarred upon him. It was quite in vain that he called himself hard names, asking himself why he, of all men, should yield to the nudgings of an intellectual or social snobbishness. But the fact remained. Bromley could bridge the social gap between himself and Garth apparently without effort; could and did. In the pipe-smoking hours before the cabin fire it was the play-boy and the bearded frontiersman who were companions, while Philip found himself sitting apart and brooding.
“How do you do it, Harry?” he asked, one evening when Garth, who thought he had seen deer tracks in the snow, had gone out to the water hole in the creek to try for a moonlight shot at more meat.
“Do what—chum in with Big Jim? Why shouldn’t I? He’s a man, isn’t he?”
“Yes; but you and he have absolutely nothing in common. Garth washes his face occasionally and calls it a bath; keeps his fingernails in mourning; shovels his food with a knife; rolls into his bunk with his boots on if he happens to forget to take them off.”