Bad Man's Gulch (20 page)

“Or . . . the earth failing them . . . in the first handy pocketbook,” suggested Louise.

“Ah, child,”—her father sighed—“a rough face does not make a rough heart. You must learn to look beneath surfaces . . . of men and of mountains! Age brings a gentler insight.”

She knew that it was foolish to argue. If she mentioned the fact that one sheriff and two deputy sheriffs had already disappeared from the ken of men in Slosson's Gulch, and that the same fate had been promised for the next upholders of the established law that dared to show their heads near the camp, she knew that William Berenger would have some handy explanation. To dispute the goodness of mankind with him was like condemning the faith of an ardent priest. He felt that his hands were soiled even by opposing such mundane theories.

They rested at noon on the upper waters of the little creek that ran through that nameless ravine. As the western shadows began to come kindly out across the slope, Mr. Berenger advanced to make his exploration. He had not worked for an hour before he paused to consult the pages of his book again.

Louise, weary of idleness, seized the pick and struck it into an eroded ledge of rock. It struck so fast that she could hardly work it out. A bit of rock stuck on the end of the steel when at last it was free. She broke that fragment off in her hand—and found
that sparkling threads of gold were shining back at her through the mountain shadows.

Even her silence seemed to send an electric warning to her father. He came hastily and saw what she held. Together they attacked the ledge. In half an hour they had no doubt. It was a strike and a wonderfully rich one, if only this were not a surface color that would soon disappear. They hastily staked out the claim and put up monuments.

Then they sat down in the shadow and made their plans. To Louise, it seemed that the whole world had instantly become an enemy, wolfishly eager to snatch their prize out of their hands. But her father had no such fears. When they finally turned down the valley, he, with a rich lump of the ore in his pocket, was already building hospitals and universities, and bringing Rembrandts across the Atlantic.

At their little lean-to on the lower edge of the town, Louise stopped to prepare supper. Her father went on into Slosson's Gulch to file his claim.

She waited until the dark with no sign of him, and then she knew that it would be worse than foolish for her to go unescorted through the streets of the gulch.

In the morning she made her hunt—a frantic search. She made wild inquiries here and there; searched at the claim, everywhere, knowing in her heart that his body lay at the bottom of some abandoned prospector's hole, or perhaps, weighted down with rocks, it was being rolled slowly down the bed of the creek.

She went back to her little lean-to and sat down to think. The obvious thing was to find out first whether the claim had been filed in Slosson's Gulch, then to discover a man in whom she could place implicit confidence, and entrust him with working the claim on a partnership basis. But in whom could she place implicit confidence?

She counted her friends, one by one, upon the slender tips of her fingers—a dozen boys and men, all fine fellows, as far as she knew them. But who could tell what they would do when a temptation the size of this was placed in their hands?

With her eyes closed, she tried to weigh them, one by one. In every one, she felt that she had discovered a strain of weakness. Gold supplied an acid test. The men in the gulch were law-abiding like others, when they were at home, but here they became wild beasts!

She heard a clamor of voices and looked out on a group of half a dozen stalwarts, not thirty paces from the door of her own lean-to. They were breaking
ground with a wild, jovial enthusiasm, as though they knew beforehand that gold
must
be there. She scanned those men one by one—a giant Negro, a tall, pale-eyed Scandinavian with a bared forearm as huge as another man's thigh, a gaunt Yankee, a red-faced German grinning with effort as he swung the double jack—all young. But, in addition, there was a middle-aged pair who looked enough alike to be brothers, men uselessly well dressed, with pale, savage faces, cursing their own flabby muscles loudly as they toiled. She felt that a cross-section of the gulch had been presented to her.

But she must find an honest man. That was the first requisite. If there were the slightest flaw in his integrity, he would not fail to rob her of her share. Might was right in Slosson's Gulch. In the second place, he must be brave and strong enough to withstand the dangers from others—from six, say, such as yonder group across the way.

Where was she to find such a man? She turned that problem slowly. Never for an instant did she think of flinching from the work. Not that the gold lured her on, but she felt that to abandon the claim would be to abandon her father himself and the one great thing that he had ever accomplished with those theories at which she had smiled so often. So she set her teeth and determined to struggle ahead with her search, feeling that the instant she weakened, tears would be stinging her eyes and dimming them. Loving her father too much to sit and weep for him, she decided to work out her sorrow, not sit and weep it away.

So thought Louise, saddling her horse straightway, and riding down through the gulch. At the claim office she found that her father had left no record of the holding. In despair she turned her horse toward the ravine.

Certainly she was neither a fool nor a sentimentalist, and, if every man she looked at on this day appeared more than half a villain to her, it was simply because each face that she saw was involuntarily contrasted with the image of William Berenger, half wise man, half saint, and perhaps a little of the fool, as well. But, as he was, he had spoiled her for other men.

She passed through the gulch without having made a choice, and rode out of it, filled with a disgust for the whole race of men. Down the valley she rode, with the alkali dust whipping up into her face and stinging her eyes, her jaws clenched, and fury in her heart.

If she had been a queen, she would have ordered her army into the field on this day—bound anywhere, so long as it were for destruction of other men. But she was not a queen; she was simply a twenty-year-old girl with nothing at her disposal but 135 pounds of wiry strength. And this was a man's country in which she was riding.

Passing out of the gulch, at last, she spurred her mustang unmercifully up the last long slope. Here she found herself in a hinterland of ragged lands, neither mountains nor plains, but chopped, wretched badlands, where the spring watercourses ripped and tore for a month or two; where the sun burned or the ice gathered through all the rest of the year. It was just such a place as suited the humor of Louise Berenger, at that moment.

The trail led upwards again, crossed a ridge, and dipped into a great, silent valley beyond. She paused here, for it was peace to the spirit and rest to the vision to let her eye plunge across to the white-topped mountains of the other side, and down the river that twisted and shone through the center. Nothing
stirred; nothing lived here except trees, scant, hardy grasses, and a few cacti. There were no men, at least, and she thanked God for the absence of them.

But at the very moment of her thanksgiving, she had sight of a rider coming slowly down from the farther side. Louise bent a gloomy eye upon him. He was no more than a black silhouette, at that distance—even with this limpid mountain air to help the vision. Only, on the white forehead of his horse, the sun glinted now and again. The man was like the rest in the gulch, no doubt. Or, if he were decent enough before he went there, he would be defiled and brutalized like the rest in a day or two, for so she thought of all the men in the gulch.

The whole valley was poisoned for her by the presence of that one rider, and therefore she looked up toward the sky, and so, where the white ridges joined the blue, she made out a little column of smoke rising. It seemed very strange that a fire should be built on the snows themselves. Then she saw that it was no fire, but a rapidly traveling column. It dipped out of view and came into sight again much lower down the slope, traveling twice as fast.

She recognized it, now—the white flag of snow dust that flies at the stern of a slide. Too, she heard a faint rumbling. She guessed that it would be a mighty avalanche before it spent itself against some intervening rock ridge.

It came down with a constantly increasing front, a constantly heightening flag of smoke in its rear. As it gathered weight and speed, it crossed the white snows, leaving a wedge-shaped mark upon the opposite mountain. It was like a thinking thing, a great, blunt-headed snake, winding here and there to follow contours of the ground that she could not
make out, at that distance. Then, twisting sharply to the left, she saw that it would spend itself in a thick belt of trees that stretched like a great shadow across the slope.

When it reached the trees she could not mark any abatement of its speed. No, it rushed on through them, and they went down like grass. A huge, raw gash was cut through that forest, and the slide that had entered the trees, as a child, came out as a giant, with a tossing, bristling front. The stripped trunks of pines were flung like javelins high into the air.

It was no longer a white forehead of snow but something like a wave of muddy water, except that she knew the darkness was not mud, but snow, boulders, pebbles, sand, the whole surface soil, and the trees themselves, roots and all, that had been gathered in the arms of the monster. A distant roaring reached her, like the clatter of 1,000 carts across a hollow bridge.

Still the creature gathered power and speed. It was fleeter than a locomotive, staggering down the track, with no train of cars to check its flight. So this heap of ruin lunged down the valley wall. A strong ridge of rocks lay in its way. She waited, breathless for the shock. Then she was aware, again, of the solitary horseman who journeyed down the valley straight in the path of the flying danger. It seemed as though the thundering avalanche behind him had robbed him of power to stir, as a snake fascinated a bird. Yet, he
did
move, although compared to the lightning flashes of fear that fled up and down her nerves, he seemed to be standing still. He moved at the same steady dog-trot of his horse, quietly down the broad ravine.

She looked up again. He had known, evidently, that the ridge of rocks above would check the
course of the slide. Probably he was some wise old head among the mountaineers, skillful in these wild matters.

The cataract of rolling snow and rock and soil struck the rock ridge. It flung its head high into the air like water, one hundred feet aloft. Then it crashed down upon the mountainside beneath and rushed on, with all of its train leaping and flowing across the rocks behind—not over them, now, but through them! She saw ten-ton boulders wrenched off and brought leaping like devils with the rest of the wreckage.

The noise sounded nearer. It seemed as if thunder were roaring in the heavens just above her, or that the ground was being torn to pieces beneath her feet. It seemed to her that she felt a trembling of the great rock mountain shoulder on which she sat her horse, and the mustang itself cringed as though a whip was shaken in its eyes.

And the single rider? He still jogged his horse quietly down the slope, heading for the river.

The heart of the girl stood still. Of all dreadful things in the world, there is nothing that so paralyzes all the mind of man as the sight of some inexplicable horror. But it was not inexplicable to her long; she decided that the man was deaf. That was undoubtedly the explanation. The thundering tumult behind him was as nothing to him, and he would not be disturbed until the very shadow of that towering river of destruction was above him. Then, one frightened upward glance, and he would be swallowed.

She turned to her mustang, and he whirled gladly about to escape the sight of this thing. But before she had ridden off the shoulder of the mountain, pity and hysteria made her check the horse and turn again.

Straight down the slope the avalanche was careening wildly. It struck and demolished a stout grove of trees.

Still the deaf man jogged his horse patiently downhill.

She snatched out her field glasses and trained them on the spot. What she saw was no old mountaineer, but a young one, riding a little atilt in his saddle, with most of his weight upon one leg, and his attention now occupied entirely by the serious business of—rolling a cigarette! His horse seemed to be nervous and twitching—yet held in check by his master's one hand.

It was perhaps better that the thing should be like this; far better that he should have no serious thought in his mind, and certainly no fear when the blow struck him. For it was now too late to flee, even if he were to be warned.

And warned he was, at that very instant, for she saw his head twist around over his shoulder. Her hands shook so that her vision was blurred a little. Finally she could see that he had turned toward the front again. The horse was not brought to a gallop. It still dog-trotted leisurely down the slope, and its rider was lighting his newly made smoke.

She lowered the glasses to look with her naked eye, as though what she had seen magnified, could not have been the truth. To her naked eye it seemed now as though the great front of the slide was already upon the doomed rider. She caught up the glasses again with a murmured word. One meager hope appeared for the fugitive. Just behind him, there was a deep swerve of the floor of the slope and it might be that this would turn the current of the slide. Stop it, it could not, but ward it into another direction perhaps it might.

The rider had barely ridden across this gully when the storm struck upon the other side. She saw the whole front of the landslide dip, the great head of the monster stagger, turn, and rush wildly off down this new channel.