Lone Pine: The Story of a Lost Mine

by R. B. Townshend

"I wonder how many centuries it is since those were live coals?" he said. "I've heard say the old, old Aztecs used to live up north here in these deserted mountain pueblos and cliff-dwellings before ever they went south and built the City of Mexico. And they'd been living down there, so I've heard, for ages and ages before Cortes came along and slaughtered Montezuma. Why, it might be a thousand years since this place was inhabited."

He looked at the dead embers with a fascinated gaze. To him, who considered a mining camp of two years' duration quite old, who was himself one of the restless spirits who were busy making history, the history of the New West, the prehistoric hearth came with a strange appeal.

"I'll rekindle it," he said; "I will so; I'd like to warm my hands at a fire that's a thousand years old maybe. Those old rafters out there will do well to burn." He stepped round to the ruined house. "I wonder if there's any snakes hiding among those fallen stones?" He struck a match once more, and looked round in likely corners and crevices, but no sign of any reptile appeared; he dragged out a couple of rafters and carried them in and placed their ends in the fireplace; he broke with a heavy stone another one that had partly rotted, and got some splinters out of the sounder part and soon had a fire going. He watched the dead embers catch and glow red from the blaze.

"Who'd have thought in all those hundreds of years," he said, "as they lay dead, that they'd ever jump to life again in one moment like this." His words pointed to the glowing coals, but he was thinking of the poor shell of a body that an hour before he had committed to the ground. Who could believe that it might ever live again? and yet—some folks said so.

The fate of that lonely man had moved him deeply, more deeply by far than he was conscious of, for it was the type of what his own was like to be, to fall unfriended and alone in some remote ravine of a nameless range. He thought of the pocket-book he had rescued, and drew it out. The fire blazed brightly now, and he could read by it easily. The notes were casual jottings—entries of cash expended—notes of an arrangement with another man to meet and mine together—the brand of a horse purchased, and the price set down, eighty-five dollars—Winchester cartridges, two and a half dollars.

"That's clear enough evidence that he had a Winchester," commented Stephens; "all right, then; practically that settles it. He's the man, sure, those cursed Navajos joked about killing with his own gun. Hullo! what's this? Mahletonkwa's name, as I'm alive!" He rapidly ran his eye over a page of close writing. "Why, he's got it all down that Mahletonkwa brought him up here to show him a silver mine, and then treacherously left him, and that then he was attacked by Indians; he doesn't say what Indians, poor beggar; but you bet I know who they were. Here's his last entry. 'I've stood them off now for six hours, and if they don't get me before night, maybe I'll make the riffle and get away.' It was after he'd written that that they wounded him and he surrendered to them, and they had their little game with him, the sons of guns! But that's their way; cruelty and cunning are bred in their bones. They've been doing things like that for a good deal more than a thousand years, I guess, and they've kind of got into the habit of it. But I'd like to pay them out all the same. It's that Mahletonkwa's band are the guilty ones, and I dare swear to it. Well, we'll see. I've given them no amnesty for this. We'll see."

He sat there, quite still, in a fierce and moody silence. He was so still that a rattlesnake in the stones behind him pushed his flat, venomous head out of a crevice, and looked at him for quite a long time, and then drew it in again and retired. "Leave me alone and I'll leave you alone," was the snake's motto. He had no wrongs to avenge.

Unconscious of this silent observer of his reverie, the American allowed himself to indulge for a while in wild, fanciful dreams of revenge for the murder of his fellow-countryman; then he pulled himself up short.

"I'm not really called upon to punish them," he said, "and I won't think about it. It only makes me angry, and I hate to be angry and do nothing." He raised himself up, moved the ends of the burning rafters farther into the fireplace, and the flames blazed up freshly.

"Kit Carson used to be mighty careful about looking into the camp-fire at night," he said. "He always used to sit well away from the blaze, with his eyes towards the darkness, so that if anything happened he could see with them at once, without having to wait till they had got accustomed to it. But then there was always war going on, and always danger, when he used to be around in this part of the country. I've never felt shy about sitting by a camp-fire up in this sierra, and there aint no reason that I know of why I should."