AT THE WILL OF THE WATERS
“BLOCKHEAD! idiot! ass! ‘Tenderfoot’ isn’t adequate for such a fool as I have been!” he exclaimed bitterly.
He tried not to care; even he tried to forget that the good-looking, successful mining engineer had given him a title which had made him wince: “the deckle-edged tenderfoot!” But it stung, nevertheless. Perhaps the reason that it hurt, was because of its fitness. And what hurt more, was the fact Cadwallader had taken pains that Evaleen Blaine should hear it said—Cadwallader, who seemed so well fitted to take his place in the rough Western way of battling with life, where he himself did but blunder and stumble, and earn the name of “the deckle-edged tenderfoot!” That Teamster Bill had christened him “this yer gentlemanly burro frum Bost’n,” cut far less keenly. But then, Bill wasn’t trying to move heaven and earth to get Miss Blaine. Whereas Elwyn Cadwallader was.
However, on all sides opinion was the same, if differently expressed. The fact of his being a gentleman had not prevented him from becoming a fool—chiefest of fools—else he never would have trusted so implicitly in old Zeke Runkle’s misrepresentations of the group of mining claims in those foothills that lay just below the Monarch group. The Monarch was the talk of the camp for its richness. If there was a fortune in the one group (he argued to himself), then why not also in those so nearly adjoining. At any rate, it seemed to him it was his one chance to find a fortune by a short cut; so, paying for them with all he had, save a few hundreds that afterwards went for useless development work, the mines became his. The camp welcomed him into its midst, and winked, and grinned when he wasn’t looking; and (to a man) voted him “an easy thing!”
His eyes not having been focused for fraud, he never doubted but that the rich samples shown him had come from the mines represented; nor ever suspected that, under his very eyes, the tests he himself made had been tampered with.
Old Zeke Runkle’s annual swindles had been a camp joke for a score of years; but Sherwood—being an in-experienced stranger—saw only in him an honest (if usually drunken) prospector. A kindly, if simple, old man, too; for Zeke had generously made him a gift of an entire mining claim which had not been included in the original number—one quite distinct from the original group. True, it seemed to be but an undeveloped claim—its one tunnel only running in ten or fifteen feet. And the gift had been tendered him at the suggestion of Cadwallader, from whom Sherwood was surprised to receive evidence of a kindly feeling which had not been previously displayed. That this unusual interest in him had surprised old Zeke, too, was plain; for he seemed puzzled at first, as though it were not possible for him to comprehend Cadwallader’s meaning. After a few whispered words from the younger man, however, Zeke’s face had brightened with understanding, and he turned to Sherwood insisting he must accept it. The unexpected part Cadwallader had taken, and the old man’s unselfish attitude, showed to Sherwood such a fine glimpse of Western good-fellowship that he warmed to the place and the people as he had done at no time before. It turned the scale and the bargain was closed.
So he became sole owner of the seven mines on the sagebrush-covered hills, that comprised the Golden Eagle group; and of the one isolated claim in the foot of the bluffs that rose abruptly at the edge of an old-time ruined mining camp which had been deserted for more than thirty years.
It lay there in a cañon where once men came in search of precious metals; and in that cleft of the mountains they built their homes. Along the cañon sides, from end to end, there trailed a double line of houses, now all in ruins—fallen walls of adobe or stone. Roofless and floorless, with empty casements and doorways, the houses stood mute witnesses of the false hopes which once led men to squander money, and youth, and strength of purpose there in the long-ago, when the State was new.