From his seat on the hotel piazza David Morning gazed into the little triangular garden beneath, with its splashing fountain guarded by fragrant honey locust trees, its close-knit, dark green lawn of Australian grass, and its collection of weird and ugly cacti, transplanted from their native sand for the edification of passing tourists.
Then, raising his eyes, he beheld the ancient adobe pueblo, with a few belated saloon lights blinking through the murk, which was now slowly changing into ashen dawn. In the east a pencil line of light was beginning to glow, and to the northward the blackish purple of the Santa Catalina Range upreared itself against the night sky.
In yonder mountains, as tenantless, as forbidding, as inaccessible, and almost as unexplored as when they were first upheaved from the tortured breast of chaos, there reposed the golden power which, in the hands of David Morning, was to change the economic and social relations of mankind, and, possibly, the governments, the boundaries, and the history of nations.
Nothing of these ripening purposes of Omniscience were then revealed to the soul of our hero; none of them even rested in his dreams. Yet the nations, weary of centuries of error, centuries of wrong, centuries of toil and tears and martyrdom, were waiting, even as he was waiting before commencing his work, for the light which every moment grew brighter in its scarlet beauty against the eastern horizon—the light which was to guide humanity to its destiny of better days.
CHAPTER III.
“The storm is abroad in the mountains.”
The Santa Catalina Mountains, although commonly designated as a part of the Sierra Madres, are, in truth, a small, isolated range, towering to a height of seven or eight thousand feet above the surrounding plains. They are steep, rugged, and practically inaccessible, except at the eastern end, where they may be entered through a long, narrow, crooked canyon, which runs from the plain or mesa to within a short distance of the summit. This canyon widens at intervals into small valleys, few of which exceed a dozen acres in extent, and through it the Rillito, a mountain stream, carrying, ordinarily, about five hundred miner’s inches of water, tumbles and splashes. Along and above the bed of this stream, at a height of fifty feet or more, in order to avoid the freshets created by the summer rains, runs a very primitive wagon road, which was constructed for the purpose of allowing supplies to be transported to the miners, who, during the era of high prices for copper, were engaged in taking ore from the carbonate lodes which exist in abundance in a range of hills half way to the summit and ten miles from the mouth of the canyon.
The lower hills of the Santa Catalinas are covered with a scant growth of mesquite and palo verde, along the Rillito there is a fringe of willows and cottonwoods, and near the summit is a large body of pine timber, but its practical inaccessibility and distance from any available market have protected it from the woodman’s ax. The absence of any extent of agricultural or grazing land in the Santa Catalinas has proven a bar to their occupation by settlers, and their isolation, rugged nature, and unpromising geological formation, have deterred prospectors from thoroughly exploring them. Such searchers for treasure as visited them always returned with a verdict of “no good,” until a quasi understanding was reached by the miners and prospectors of Arizona that it was useless to waste time looking for gold or silver in their fastnesses.
Above the copper belt no prospector was ever able to find trace or color of any metal, and the low price of copper and the high charges for railroad freight which prevailed in 1883 and succeeding years, caused abandonment of the rude workings for that metal, and at the date of the opening of our narrative it might have been truly said that the entire Santa Catalina Range was without an occupant.
At the western and southern end of the range its summit and rim consist of a huge basaltic formation, towering perpendicularly one thousand feet, upon the apex of which probably no human footstep was ever placed, for its character excluded all probability of quartz being found there, even by the Arizona prospector, who will climb to any place that can be reached by a goat or an eagle, if so be silver and not scenery entice him.
In the spring of 1892 Robert Steel, who, in years gone, had acted as superintendent of a copper company operating in the Santa Catalinas, and was familiar with the ground, had been inspired by a considerable advance in the price of copper to visit the scene of his former labors and relocate the abandoned claims. It was at his solicitation and representations that David Morning, who had known him well in Colorado, was induced to take a trip to Arizona to examine the properties.