The Little Fig-tree Stories

by Mary Hallock Foote

This time he did not take the upper trail. John said that that trail was only used at high water in the spring, when the river rose above the lower trail.

The lower trail along the river bank was safe and pleasant, and not so hot as the upper one; and this time there were no adventures. Adventures do very well to tell of afterward, but they do not always make a happy journey.

John was at home, and seemed very glad to see the boy. He took him up on the bluffs to show him his workings, and Jack found it very different, up there by the tunnels,—not at all strange and anxious. He did not mind the dark tunnel a bit, with John’s company and a candle to guide him.

John showed him the under surface of the bluffs, exposed where he had undermined them and scraped away the dirt. These lava bluffs were once a boiling flood of melted rock. The ground it flowed over and rested upon after it cooled had been the bed of a river. In its soft state the lava had taken the impression of the surface of the river-bed, and after it cooled the forms remained the same; so that the under surface of these ancient bluffs was like a plaster cast of the ancient river-bed. The print could be seen of stones smoothed by water, and some of the stones were still embedded in the lava crust.

Now this river came down from the mountains, where every prospector in Idaho knows there is plenty of gold for those who can discover it. John argued that the old river-bed must have had, mixed with its sand, fine gold for which no one had ever prospected. The new bed which the river had worn for itself at the foot of the bluffs probably contained quite as much gold, sunk between stones or lodged in potholes in the rocks (as it lodges against the riffles in a sluice-box), but no one could hope to get that gold, for the water which covered it. The old river-bed was covered only with rock, which “stays put” while you dig beneath it.

So, on the strength of this ingenious theory, John was digging where the other theorists had dug before him. He was not getting rich, but he was “making wages” and enjoying himself in the pleasant camp in the gulch; and as yet he had not found any of the rich holes.

He made a great feast in the boy’s honor. The chief dish was stewed grouse, rolled up in paste and boiled like dumplings. Jack said those grouse dumplings were about the best eating he had ever “struck.” They also had potatoes, baked in the ashes, and canned vegetables and stewed apples and baking-powder biscuits and honey; and to crown the feast, John made a pot of strong black coffee and sweetened it very sweet.

But here the guest was in a quandary. He refused the coffee, because he was not allowed to drink coffee at home; but he could see that his refusal made John uncomfortable, for there was no milk; there was nothing else that he could offer the boy to drink but water, and water seemed very plain at a feast.

Jack wondered which was worse—for a boy to break a rule without permission, or to seem to cast reproach upon a friend’s entertainment by refusing what was set before him. He really did not care for the coffee; it looked very black and bitter; but he cared so much for John that it was hard to keep on refusing. Still, he did refuse, but he did not tell John his reason. Somehow he didn’t think that it would sound manly for a big boy, nearly twelve years old, to say he was forbidden to drink coffee.

Afterward he told his mother about it, and asked her if he had done right. His mother’s opinion was that he had, but that he might have done it in a better way by telling John his reason for refusing the coffee. Then there would have been no danger of John’s supposing that the boy refused because he did not like that kind of coffee.