Lone Pine: The Story of a Lost Mine

by R. B. Townshend

Recovering himself, with a look of fury he threw back his right hand to his hip for a pistol; it was in vain; he had come without one; he cast a meaning look at the revolver belted round the prospector's waist. "You're a d—d brave man, aren't you?" he sneered, "when you know you're heeled and I aint."

For answer Stephens instantly unbuckled his belt and hung the pistol over the horn of his saddle. "There, then," he said, and he advanced with his hands up towards the Texan, "if you want a fist fight you can get it right here."

"Yes," said the other, "and then have your infernal dog lay hold of me," and he backed away from Stephens. In height and weight Backus knew himself to be a match for the prospector, but there was a grim determination about the latter which cowed him. "I'll pay you out for this," he said with oaths, still retreating before Stephens, "but I'll choose my own time for it."

Right behind him ran the acequia, brimming full, as it had been ever since the blasting, but Backus, stepping backwards with his eyes fixed on his enemy, forgot that it was there; he put one foot over the edge of the bank, lost his balance, and fell with his whole length in the water. He emerged, streaming, on the opposite bank, and rescued his hat which had fallen off and was floating away. Then rising, he shook his fist and poured out more curses upon Stephens, who, thinking him sufficiently punished, did not choose to follow him farther. He waited a minute in silence till he saw Backus walk off towards the pueblo, then turning his back on his late adversary he remounted and quickly loped on to overtake his companions.

The prospector's brain was in a whirl as he rode through the fresh morning air and thought over the exciting events that had crowded one upon another since sunrise: the beating of Josefa, the arrest of the cacique, the news of the abduction of Manuelita, and lastly his collision with Backus. The first was already past history, and he had satisfied himself that though the Indian girl must have suffered a good deal she would undoubtedly recover and be all right again; what began to bother him a little now was the somewhat equivocal position in which he had placed himself with regard to her by taking her under his protection and establishing her next door to him in the pueblo under the care of Reyna.

"Well," he thought, "folks may say what they like about it. I didn't see any other way on the spur of the moment to make her safe; and now, looking back, I don't see that I could have done anything different. If folks want to talk they must just talk, and that's all there is in it. I guess I can stand the racket. If Tito brings Felipe back alive they shall get married right away, but if the cacique's bullet has laid the poor chap out, then I shall see what I can do to fix her up good somehow when I get back."

It was perhaps characteristic of him that now, when he was embarked on an expedition full of unknown perils, he said to himself easily "when I get back," without considering for a moment that ere that time came his bones might be bleaching white in some remote gulch, like those of the lone prospector whose tragic end had afforded so much amusement to Mahletonkwa and his band.

As for the arrest of the cacique, that, too, was past history, seeing that it was made for an offence that he had now settled to condone. He did not repent of his own action in the matter, either of the arrest or the condonation, but he could not help feeling a certain surprise as he thought of the ease with which the arrest had been effected. The angry chieftain had certainly proved astonishingly meek. As a fact, Stephens mixed so little with men that he was unconscious himself of the power there was in him to dominate others when possessed by strong indignation, and roused to defend the weak from wrong, as he had been that morning. Ordinarily quiet and self-contained in manner, speaking in a gentle voice, and showing an expression of mildness in the blue eyes that had gained him the name of Sooshiuamo, he was capable at times of being transformed by an energy that seemed something outside his common self, and by the contrast made him appear to be the very embodiment of superior and irresistible force.

It was perhaps as well for Backus that Stephens did not know that the storekeeper's greed of gain was at the bottom of the trouble; since he had deliberately whetted the Navajos' craving for whiskey and then doubled the price of it to them. It was their desire to compel Sanchez to pay them off instanter, and enable them to procure more liquor at any price, that had moved them to the extreme step of seizing his daughter.

But Stephens could not know this. All he knew was that she was gone, and that his one burning desire now was to rescue her from this most miserable fate that had overtaken her. Of what that fate was likely to be, there was in his own mind at this moment no manner of doubt whatever. Sioux and Shoshones, Cheyennes and Arapahoes, Kiowas and Comanches, the wild Indians, one and all, dealt out the same horrible fate to those who were unhappy enough to fall alive into their hands. The men were tied to the stake, or spread-eagled on the ground, and roasted by a slow fire, the fiends, who danced round with hideous yells, cutting slices from the living flesh of their victim and eating them before his eyes. No refinement of torture was spared until death mercifully released him from his agonies. The fate of a woman was worse. If she escaped being scalped and mangled on the spot, because her captors preferred to carry her away with them, she became the common property of the band, and the helpless victim of brutal outrage. Stephens had seen one sad-eyed, heart-broken captive who had been rescued from the clutches of the Sioux, and the memory of her woful tale seemed to ring in his ears now as he rode. And he had been in Denver when the dead body of a white woman, on which the Cheyenne Dog-Soldiers had worked their will, was brought in from the burnt ranch where they found her. The mangled body was placed in a room before burial, and the men of the city were taken in, a few at a time, to view the ghastly mutilation, and learn what an Indian war meant for their wives and daughters. Denver was young then, and three-fourths of its people were men of fighting age. Stephens could never forget the faces of those men as they returned from that room where the poor remains lay. Some came out sick and faint; some with faces deadly pale and burning eyes and tight-shut lips; and some blaspheming aloud and hurling curses on the monsters whose pleasure and delight it was to work such abhorred wrong on poor human flesh.