Better days; or, A Millionaire of To-morrow

by Thomas Fitch; Anna M. Fitch

Not more than fifteen minutes had elapsed since the bursting of the waterspout when the storm was over, the sun was shining, the water had departed down the cañon, and our awe-stricken witness to this mighty sport of elemental forces started to retrace his steps. He had witnessed the deflection of the water wall, and knew that his animals were safe, and he also knew that no harm would come to his companions down the cañon, for their camp was hundreds of feet above the bed of the ravine.

A few minutes’ walk brought Morning to the mouth of the gorge which he had visited an hour or more before. From it a small stream of water—the remains of the waterspout—was yet running, and, being curious to observe the effects produced upon the spot which first received the fury of the waters, he descended into the channel which had been torn by the torrent, and again entered the rift.

The tremendous force of the vast body of water precipitated into the gorge had excavated and swept through its opening the fallen and decomposed rock and sand and bowlders which had been accumulating for centuries. The channel rent by the waters as they emerged was quite twenty feet in depth and sixty feet in width, and Morning found that the floor of the box cañon had been torn away to a similar depth.

The waterspout had accomplished in one minute a work that would have required the industrious labor of one thousand men for a month. The gorge was swept clean to the bed rock, which showed blue limestone, and in the center of this limestone bed there now stood erect, to a height of twelve feet, a ledge of white and rose-colored quartz of regular and unbroken formation, forty feet in width, running from near the entrance of the rift to the end of it, where it disappeared under the basalt wall.

The experienced eye of Morning taught him at a glance that this was a true fissure vein of quartz, and a brief examination of some pieces which he knocked off with his pole-pick convinced him that it was rich in gold. But for the waterspout which had swept away the sand, gravel, and loose rocks which ages of disintegration of the face of the wall had deposited over this lode, its existence must ever have remained undiscovered for there were no exterior evidences of the existence of quartz, to tempt a prospector to sink a shaft.

The primal instinct of the miner is to locate his “find,” and Morning proceeded forthwith to acquire title to “the unoccupied mineral lands of the United States” so marvelously brought to light. His notebook furnished paper for location notices, and an hour’s work enabled him to build location monuments of loose stone, in which his notices were deposited.

It was now more than two hours since the waterspout had expended its force. Morning conjectured that Steel and his miners, after the flood had passed them, would probably set out in search of him, and he did not wish his location to be discovered until he should have perfected it by recording at Tucson, and possibly not then. But he knew that it would require at least three hours for the men at the copper-camp to reach him, and, though the light in the cañon was beginning to grow dim, he determined not to leave there without further examination of the ledge.

Accordingly, he walked around it and climbed over it. From its summit and its sides at twenty different places he broke off specimens, which he deposited in his pockets until they were full to bursting. It was beginning to grow dark when he emerged from the rift and started along the base of the basalt. He had not proceeded a hundred yards from the mouth of the rift, when he beheld three figures a quarter of a mile distant, rapidly picking their way along the channel which had been worn by the torrent in its descent of the mountain.

Five minutes more in the gorge and his secret would have been discovered.

He shouted to his friends, who responded to his hail, and in a few minutes they met and descended the mountain together to the plateau under the trees, where the tethered animals, surfeited with alfilirea, were whinnying loudly for human companionship.