The Mine with the Iron Door

by Harold Bell Wright

“You can’t never tell,” returned Bob with his usual cheery optimism, “gold is where you find it.”

When Bob and Thad were gone, Saint Jimmy and his mother, discussing the matter, were forced to agree with the Pardners. It certainly did look bad. In fact it looked so bad that Saint Jimmy was not at all happy under the burden of the responsibility which the old prospectors had shifted from their own shoulders to his. He foresaw that it would not be easy to tell this young woman whom he had educated, and whose fine, sensitive pride he knew so well, this story that he had just heard from her two foster fathers.

When Marta stopped at the Burtons’ on her way home from Oracle, later in the day, neither Saint Jimmy nor his mother mentioned the Pardners’ visit, and there seemed to be no opportunity for the girl’s teacher to tell her the story he was so sure she should know. Some other time, he told himself, it would be easier, perhaps.

While the Pardners’ daughter was riding home from the Burtons’ that afternoon, and the Pardners were at work in their little mine, Natachee the Indian stood on a point of rock, high on the mountain side—so high that he could look beyond the Cañon of Gold and afar off, over the brown desert that, from the foothills of the Catalinas, stretches away, weary mile after weary mile, until, in the shadowy blue distance, it is lost in the sky.

To those of us who are accustomed to the present-day Indian in his white man’s garb, doing the white man’s work on the white man’s roads and ranches, Natachee would have aroused peculiar, not to say amusing, interest. From the single feather in the headband which bound his long, raven-black hair to his beaded moccasins, he was dressed in the picturesque costume of his savage fathers. Save for a broad hunting knife, he was armed only with the primitive bow and arrows. He was in the best years of his manhood and his face and bearing would have graced the hero of a Fenimore Cooper Indian tale.

But however much he seemed out of step with the times, that lone figure, standing sentinel-like on the rocky point, fitted his wild surroundings. So, indeed, might one of his ancestors have stood to watch the strange new human life when it first began to move along those trails that, until then, had known only the sandaled and moccasined feet of prehistoric peoples.

An hour passed. The Indian held his place as motionless as the rock against which he leaned, while his somber gaze ranged over those mighty reaches of desert and mountain and sky. High over Rice Peak a golden eagle wheeled on guard before the nest of his royal mate. But Natachee seemed not to see. From a dead oak on Samaniego Ridge a red-tailed hawk screamed his shrill challenge. The Indian apparently did not hear. A company of buzzards circled above a dark object in the wash below the Wheeler Ranch corrals. Natachee gave no heed. A ground squirrel leaped to a near-by rock to sit bolt upright with bright eyes fixed upon the red man, the while he sounded a chirping note of inquiry. But the Indian’s gaze remained steadfastly fixed on that distant landscape where he could see a cloud of dust that was raised by a swiftly moving automobile on the Oracle road. On the Bankhead Highway there were two similar clouds. In the purple haze beyond the point of the Tortollita Mountains, a streamer of smoke marked the position of a Southern Pacific Overland train that was approaching Tucson from the western coast. The face of the red watchman on the mountain side was set stern and grim. In his somber eyes there was a gleam of savage meaning.

The sun was just touching the tops of the Tucson hills when the Indian started and leaned forward with suddenly quickened interest.

No ordinary power of human vision would have noticed that black speck in the vast stretch of country, much less could the ordinary observer have said exactly what it was that had attracted the Indian’s attention. But Natachee saw that the tiny dot, moving so slowly on the old road into the Cañada del Oro, was a man. His interest was excited to an unusual degree because the man was walking, unaccompanied even by a pack burro.

And now the evening wind from the desert, fragrant with the smell of greasewood, mesquite and cat-claw, swept along the mountain side. The Tucson hills were massed dark blue with their outlines sharply cut against the colors of the sunset. Natachee, watching, saw that lone figure on the trail below enter the Cañon of Gold and lose itself in the gathering dusk.