“Zinc,” returned the other, as he passed his huge, soiled palm over his forehead.
“We have stuff down in our county that looks like that,” said the judge as he turned the dull-looking lump over and considered for a while. “I’m sure of it—any amount.” Then he became suddenly silent, for a thought struck him.
“Well, if it’s really ‘Jack,’” said the workman, using the trade or mining name for it, “there’s money in it, all right. This here comes from St. Francis.”
The old judge thought of this for a little while and quietly turned away. He knew where St. Francis was. If this was so valuable that they could ship it all the way from southeast B——, why not from Taney? Had he not many holdings in Taney?
The result was that before long a marked if secret change began to manifest itself in Taney and regions adjacent thereto. Following the private manipulations and goings to and fro of the judge one or two shrewd prospectors appeared, and then after a time the whole land was rife with them. But before that came to pass many a farmer who had remained in ignorance of the value of his holdings was rifled of them.
Old Bursay Queeder, farmer and local ne’er-do-well in the agricultural line, had lived on his particular estate or farm for forty years, and at the time that Judge Blow was thus mysteriously proceeding to and fro and here and there upon the earth, did not know that the rocks against which his pair of extra large feet were being regularly and bitterly stubbed contained the very wealth of which he had been idly and rather wistfully dreaming all his life. Indeed, the earth was a very mysterious thing to Bursay, containing, as it did, everything he really did not know. This collection of seventy acres, for instance—which individually and collectively had wrung more sweat from his brow and more curses from his lips than anything else ever had—contained, unknown to him, the possibility of the fulfilment of all his dreams. But he was old now and a little queer in the head at times, having notions in regard to the Bible, when the world would come to an end, and the like, although still able to contend with nature, if not with man. Each day in the spring and summer and even fall seasons he could be seen on some portion or other of his barren acres, his stubby beard and sparse hair standing out roughly, his fingers like a bird’s claws clutching his plough handles, turning the thin and meagre furrows of his fields and rattling the stony soil, which had long ceased to yield him even a modicum of profit. It was a bare living now which he expected, and a bare living which he received. The house, or cabin, which he occupied with his wife and son and daughter, was dilapidated beyond the use or even need of care. The fences were all decayed save for those which had been built of these same impediments of the soil which he had always considered a queer kind of stone, useless to man or beast—a “hendrance,” as he would have said. His barn was a mere accumulation of patchboards, shielding an old wagon and some few scraps of machinery. And the alleged corn crib was so aged and lopsided that it was ready to fall. Weeds and desolation, bony horses and as bony children, stony fields and thin trees, and withal solitude and occasional want—such was the world of his care and his ruling.
Mrs. Queeder was a fitting mate for the life to which he was doomed. It had come to that pass with her that the monotony of deprivation was accepted with indifference. The absence or remoteness of even a single modest school, meeting house or town hall, to say nothing of convenient neighbors, had left her and hers all but isolated. She was irascible, cantankerous, peculiar; her voice was shrill and her appearance desolate. Queeder, whom she understood or misunderstood thoroughly, was a source of comfort in one way—she could “nag at him,” as he said, and if they quarreled frequently it was in a fitting and harmonious way. Amid such a rattletrap of fields and fences bickering was to be expected.
“Why don’t yuh take them thar slug lumps an’ make a fence over thar?” she asked of Queeder for something like the thousandth time in ten years, referring to as many as thirty-five piles of the best and almost pure zinc lying along the edges of the nearest field, and piled there by Bursay,—this time because two bony cows had invaded one of their corn patches. The “slug lumps” to which she referred could not have been worth less than $2,000.
For as many as the thousandth time he had replied:
“Well, fer the land sakes, hain’t I never got nuthin’ else tuh do? Yuh’d think them thar blame-ding rocks wuz wuth more nor anythin’ else. I do well enough ez ’tis to git ’em outen the sile, I say, ‘thout tryin’ tuh make fences outen ’em.”