Blazed trail stories, and Stories of the wild life

by Stewart Edward White

And besides this, from time to time the shaft must be elaborately timbered in order to prevent its caving in and burying work and workman together—a tedious job, requiring the skill alike of a woodsman, a carpenter, a sailor, and a joiner. The man must make his trips to town for supplies. He must cook his meals. He must meet his fellows occasionally, or lose the power of speech. The years slip by rapidly. He numbers his days by what he has accomplished; and it is little. He measures time by his trips to camp; and they are few. It is no small thing to make three discoveries—and lose them. It is a greater thing to find courage for a fourth attempt.

After the Eagle Ridge fiasco, Peter, as cheerful as ever, journeyed over into Wyoming to try his luck once more. He moved up into the hills, spent a month in looking about him, narrowed his localities to one gulch, and built himself a log cabin in which to live. Then he made his general survey. He went on foot up every gulch, even every little transverse wrinkle that lay tributary to his valley, to the shallow top of it filled with loose stones; he followed the sky-line of every ridge which bordered and limited these gulches; he seized frequent opportunities of making long diagonals down the slopes. Nothing escaped him. In time he knew the general appearance of every bit of drift or outcrop in his district. Then he sat down in his cabin and carefully considered the probabilities. If they had not happened to please him, he would have repeated the whole wearisome process in another valley; but as in this case they did, he proceeded to take the next step. In other words, he went over the same ground again with a sampling-pick and a bundle of canvas bags. Where his theories or experience advised, he broke off quantities of rock from the ledges, which he crushed and mixed in the half of an old blanket; dividing, and recrushing again and again, until an "average" was obtained in small compass. The "average" he took home, where he dumped it into a heavy iron mortar, over which he had suspended a pestle from a springy sapling. By alternately pulling down and letting up on the sapling he crushed the quartz fragments with the pestle into fine red and white sand. The sand he "panned out" for indications of free gold.

The ledges whose averages thus showed the colour, he marked on his map with a cross. Some leads which did not so exhibit gold, but whose other indications he considered promising, he exploited still further, penetrating to a layer below the surface by means of a charge or so of powder. Or perhaps he even spent several weeks in making an irregular hole like a well, from which he carried the broken rock in bags, climbing up a notched tree. Then he selected more samples. This is hard work.

Thus Peter came to know his country, and when he knew it thoroughly, when he had made all his numerous speculations as to horses, blowouts, and slips—then, and not until then, did he stake out his claims; then, and not until then, did he consider himself ready to begin work.

He might be quite wrong in his calculations. In that case, it was all to do over again somewhere else. He had had this happen. Every prospector has. The claims which Peter selected were four in number. He started in without delay on the proof. Foot by foot the shafts descended through the red, the white, vein matter. One by one the spider arms of the tunnels felt out into the innermost crevices of the lode. Little by little Peter's table of statistics filled; here a pocket, there a streak, yon a clear ten feet of low-grade ore. The days, the months, even the years slipped by. Summers came and went with a flurry of thunder-showers that gathered about Harney, spread abroad in long bands of blackness, broke in a deluge of rain and hail and passed out to dissipate in the hot air of the prairies. Autumns, clear-eyed and sweet-breathed, faded wanly in the smoke of their forest fires. Winters sidled by with constant threat of arctic weather which somehow never came; powdering the hills with their snow; making bitter cold the shadows, and warm the silver-like sun. Another spring was at hand. Like all the rest, it coquetted with the season as a young girl with her lover; smiling with the brightness of a western sun; frowning with the fierceness of a sudden snow-squall, strangely out of place in contrast to the greenery of the mountain "parks"; creeping slowly up the gullies from the prairie in staccato notes of bursting buds; at last lifting its many voices in the old swelling song of delight over the birth of new loves and new desires among its creatures.

Like all the rest, did I say? No, not quite. To Peter this particular spring was a rare thing of beauty. Its gilding was a little brighter, its colours a little fresher, its skies a little deeper, its songs rang a little truer than ever the gilding or colours or skies or songs of any spring he had ever known. For he was satisfied. Steadily the value of the property had proved itself. One clear, cold day he collected all his drills and picks and sledges and brought them back to camp, where he stacked them behind the door. It was his way of signing Q.E.D. to the proof.

The doubtful spot on the Jim Crow was not a blow-out, but a "horse." He had penetrated below it. The mines were rich beyond his dreams. Yet he sat there at his noon meal as cheerful, as unexcited, as content as ever. When one has waited so long, impatience sleeps soundly, arouses with the sluggishness of unbelief itself. Outside he saw the sun, for the first time in weeks, and heard the pines singing their endless song. Inside, his fire sparkled and crackled; his kettle purred like a fireside cat. Peter was tired; tired, but content. The dream was very near to him.

When he had finished his meal he got up and examined himself in his little square mirror. Then he did so again. Then he walked heavily back to his table and sat down and buried his face in his hands. When he had looked the first time he had seen a gray hair. When he had looked the second time he had discovered that there were many. With a sudden pang Peter realised that he was getting to be an old man. He took a picture from a pocket-case and looked at that. Was she getting to be an old woman?

It was fearful what a difference that little thought suddenly made. A moment ago he had had the eternities before him. Now there was not an instant to be wasted. Every minute, every second even, that he sat there gazing at the faded old picture in his hand was so much lost to him and to its original. Not God himself could bring it and its possibilities back to him. Until now he had looked about him upon Youth; he must henceforth look back to it—back to the things which might have been, but could never be—and each pulse-beat carried him inevitably farther from even the retrospective simulacrum of their joys. He and she could never begin young now. They must take up life cold in the moulds, ready fashioned. The delight of influencing each other's development was denied such as they; instead, they must find each other out, must throw a thousand strands of loving-kindness to span the gap which the patient years had sundered between them, a gap which should never have widened at all. Again that remorseless hurry of the moments! Each one of them made the cast across longer, increased the need for loving-kindness, demanded anew, for the mere pitiful commonplace task of understanding each other—which any mother and her child find so trivially easy—the power of affection which each would have liked to shower on the other undictated except by the desires of their hearts. Peter called up the image of himself as he had been when he had left the East, and set it remorselessly by the side of that present image in the mirror. Then he looked at the portrait. Could the years have changed her as much? If so, he would hardly know her!

Those miserable years of waiting! He had not minded them before, but now they were horrible. In the retrospect the ceaseless drudgery of rock and pick and drill loomed larger than the truth of it; his patience, at the time so spontaneous a result of his disposition, seemed that of a man clinging desperately to a rope, able to hang on only by the concentration of every ounce of his will. Peter felt himself clutching the rope so hard that he could think of nothing, absolutely nothing, else. He proved a great necessity of letting go.