Silvertip's Roundup (8 page)

“I?” said the girl. “Then tell me how!”

“By telling me about yourself and Joe Feeley,” said Silver.

“There's nothing to tell you,” said the girl.

He shook his head.

“You'll have to talk out if you want to help,” he observed.

“I'll tell you anything,” she said.

“Were you fond of Feeley?”

“No. I liked him. He was jolly. I wasn't fond of him.”

“Was Feeley fond of you?”

“Yes.”

“You're sure of that, and what makes you so sure?”

She hesitated, then crossed the kitchen, opened a cupboard, and from the far corner of a shelf she took out a handkerchief which she unknotted.

“He gave me this,” she said, and poured into the palm of Silver's hand a small, gleaming heap of gold dust.

S
ILVER
took some of that shimmering dust and sifted it through his fingers. The girl lifted her eyes to his face. He stood back.

“Well?” he demanded sternly. “Where did he get it?”

“He didn't tell me. Somewhere in the hills. Somewhere near his cabin, I suppose.”

“Cabin? Did he have a cabin?”

“There's an old shanty up yonder in the hills. I can show you where. He used to go up there every second day and look around for deer. He never shot a deer. He was no good with a rifle. He told me that he was born with an automatic in his fingers but that he never had worked much with a rifle. He couldn't hit a deer. But one day he came back here looking scared. He showed me some gold dust in the palm of his hand. ‘I've found it in the ground!' he said. He was wild with excitement. I asked him if it were real gold. He said he didn't know but that he'd see if it were good enough to buy a drink with. So he went downtown.”

Silver nodded. “That's what killed him, then,” he declared. “When Feeley paid with gold dust, like a fool, the whisper about it came to Christian. He put his men on Feeley's trail. They found the place where the gold was washed. When Feeley came back to town, they followed him down and killed him so that he couldn't go back to his diggings. I don't suppose there's any doubt about that. It was after the first time that Feeley brought you this gold?”

“It was the next evening. He went down to the saloon, the Round-up Bar, and Pudge took the dust in payment for drinks, all right. Joe Feeley was half-crazy, when he came back and told me that. He said that he was going to wash a cool million out of the ground and marry me, and all that sort of thing. He was crazy.”

“What about you?” asked Silver.

She shook her head. “Gold is catching,” she said. “I was excited, too. I went to the dance with him in a fever. But I knew all the time that I didn't want to marry him. After the dance, that night, he wouldn't wait for the morning. He rolled his blanket and went off in the dark to get back to his cabin. I asked him where the place was where he'd found gold.

“He liked me, all right, but he didn't like me well enough to tell me that. He only laughed. ‘You don't care about the place,' he said. ‘All you'll need to care about is the gold that comes out of it. I'm going to buy you. I'm going to put you in one side of a scales and weigh you down with gold that I stack in the other side. Understand that?' That's the way he was talking. He was on fire. He told me that money wasn't money, unless it came out of the ground. He said that it was dirty stuff and there was murder on every penny of it, except what came out of the ground.”

“Poor Feeley,” said Silver. “I'm sorry about him. If I only knew where that claim is — well, I'd be able to find some of Christian's men there, I suppose. And if I could find the men, I could trail them home, and if I trailed them home, I'd be fairly close to Taxi — if he's still above ground. Sally, come out and point the way for me. I'm going up to that shanty.”

“It'll be hard to find the place where he washed the gold, though,” said the girl. “I've been up there three times, since poor Joe was killed. I know the lie of the land, up there, and I've searched everywhere. I couldn't find a trace.”

She put the gold into the handkerchief, knotted it, and offered it to Silver.

“Take it,” she said. “I don't want it around me. Whenever I see it on the shelf, I think of poor Joe Feeley's face laughing and wrinkling up to the eyes. He was hard as steel, but he was a good fellow.”

Silver made a gesture as though to refuse that gift, but presently he changed his mind and without a word dropped it into his pocket.

Parade took him swiftly over the flat of the Horseshoe plain and up the slope of the mountain. There were seventeen hands of Parade, but the wild years when he had run free, leading a herd, had made him as wisefooted as a mountain goat. He knew by a glance the rocks that would slide under foot and those which would remain firm. He knew how to zigzag up the steepest slopes and just that throw of the foot, coming downhill, which puts the frog of the hoof against slippery ground. He needed all of these arts before he brought Jim Silver to the cabin.

It was hardly worthy of the name. It was a mere lean-to that was propped against a rocky bank and it was made of a queer mixture of sapling poles and logs and thatch. Time had broken and warped and thinned it until the eye could glance out of it in almost any direction.

Silver, standing on the floor of beaten earth, took heed of the bunk that was built against the wall, the fireplace of blackened stones that stood in front of the door, the homemade stool, the table made by stretching across a pair of large stones two logs which had been flattened by ax work. That was about all there was to see.

There was a slight natural clearing in front of the shanty, and the pine trees shouldered up in close ranks all around this open place. The ground was rather rocky and thickly covered, in most places, by pine needles. There could hardly have been more unfavorable land for trailing, but that was what Silver had to do. Somewhere, from this starting point, one of the trails which Joe Feeley had made led to his gold strike. That trail Silver was determined to find.

He disregarded the immediate vicinity of the cabin but entering the trees, he laid out several large circles which cut across semiclearings in the woods, where the soft soil would take and hold the print of feet. After a time he began to locate trails that went out and in.

As for those which went out from the cabin, they made a hopeless proposition, because it seemed that Feeley, like the usual hunter, never went out in a fixed direction but left his cabin and rambled wherever fancy led him. It was plain that Silver could work for months on those signs without reaching a definite conclusion to his labor. The incoming trails, however, were more promising.

Two or three of them, to be sure, clambered up the mountains from lower ground, but the majority came in from above. And the strongest and freshest of the trails, as Silver made out after careful study, raking away pine needles, comparing sign for sign, had been covered a number of times. It might be that this was the trail from the gold strike.

In that case, it was rather strange that there were not tracks both incoming and outgoing. Since only incoming marks were visible, it might be that Feeley, fearing he might be observed, on each occasion had left his house and gone to his mine by a circuitous route. However, having arrived at the diggings and worked them, he probably had come back in a more or less straight line.

One thing was fairly certain. From the rounded nature of the little nuggets in that bit of gold which Silver was carrying, it was reasonably sure that the metal was water-washed and shaped. Therefore he could look for some water-course, not necessarily a new one, but perhaps some dry old bed from which the stream had been turned in the process of time.

Almost every step was a difficult one and meant dropping on his knees, often, to make sure of the impressions which he sought after. Sometimes, where there was a soft undermold and only a thin layer of pine needles on top, he scraped away the needles and found beneath them the sign he was looking for. He made ten failures for one success, but the successes eventually enabled him to chart a line, and the line of course gave him a direction.

It was laborious work but it was exciting, too. The sun was very strong, but there were blowing clouds, high up, and when they crossed the sun, a wave of cool shadow washed across the mountain and left Silver in a dull twilight. But the next moment there would be sun again shining through the treetops and gleaming on the upper surfaces of the thick branches, and spilling through like sheets of gold leaf on the carpet of pine needles.

Of course the trail had variations. If it were in fact laid down by the feet of Joe Feeley, he had not taken one single route even on his return trips, but had swung to the side here and there to avoid various trees or outcroppings of rock. Silver had to put together some dozen of these different routes before, in the end, he was able to mark the signs with a multitude of little twigs. From the twigs he finally charted the eventual line which, as it seemed to him, Feeley had been walking along.

By the time he came out of the heavy press of the pines to the comparative open, he found that his line of march pointed straight at a confusion of big mountain slopes. It was close to dusk. The sun was going down and he knew that he would have to wait until the next day before he resumed his work.

He did not return to the cabin. It seemed too dangerous a business. Therefore he took Parade a hundred yards away into a clearing where some good grass was growing. He had for his supper hard-tack and water out of a runlet. Then, while it was still faintly light, he rolled himself in a blanket on a bed of heaped pine needles and went to sleep.

A pale moon looked down and wakened him once during the night. Then he slept again until the first morning light commenced. The air was almost as cold as frost, but when he got up, he stripped and washed himself at that runlet of snow water. By the time the morning gray had turned to rose and the mountains were no longer black against the sky but beginning to take on some of the dawn color, he had breakfasted on a piece of hard-tack and was back at his work.

He was disheartened when he discovered how little ground he had covered the day before. But now, calculating his line with the greatest care, he saw that it pointed straight toward a mountain with a big, round-bellied slope that poured down to the south, opposite him. He gave up that step-by-step trailing and marched straight off to make a two-mile cast ahead.

The end of his march found him on the breast of the mountain stepping over shimmering rocks without a sign of footmarks anywhere about him. Nevertheless, as the heat increased, he went over the ground inch by inch. Anything, a single impression was all that he asked for. It was nearly noon before he gave up the task.

If the rocks showed nothing, perhaps it was simply because no foot had happened to strike on one of the few bits of soil that filled the hollows among the stones. Therefore he cast straight ahead over the mountain.

Again there was nothing before him.

Parade began to grow impatient. He had followed at the heels of his master during all of this time without finding more than a few salty shrubs to graze at. Now he started walking around and around Silver in a narrowing circle. It took a matter of life or death to close the mind of Silver to the wants of his horse, but life or death was exactly what might be in the balance now. So he went on through the fierce heat of the afternoon, rather hopelessly, because there was no sign of a watercourse before him or to either side. It seemed as if water could never have been there, but as though this terrible sun must always have dried the rocks to the core.

He stood up from the vain survey of a stretch of gravel when he heard a light rushing sound like wind in the distance. No wind came to him, however, though the sound continued. He hurried forward and found himself on the bank of a little stream that ran fast as though down a flume. There was no ravine. There were no trees to mark the course. There was simply this trench slanted across the face of the rock. And Silver felt that he had found what he wanted, at last.

H
E
climbed down the bank and looked at the water. Everything about this creek was extraordinary, but nothing more so than the fact that the little river had been able to pick up so much mud in the course of its journey across solid rock! It should have been as limpid as crystal!

It pointed, however, straight as a rifle barrel across the slope and into the mouth of a small valley filled with stunted pines, for the elevation was great and timber line was not so very high above them. In that valley the stream might pick up soil, though it was strange that there was such variation in the degree of muddiness. As Silver watched, he saw the current run almost clear, while the next moment it was clouded brown again.

He put his hands into the wash. Something struck his fingers. He pulled up his hand with a blade of green grass laid flat across the palm.

Then he understood, and smiled. A normal stream does not eat its banks away so fast, except in floods, that the green grass is taken down the current. Up yonder in that little valley of the pines men were digging away at the soil. Men were there washing the ground for the sake of the gold that was in it. He was as sure as though he had stood on the spot and observed them bending, working the pans, spinning the water around and around in them until the sediment cleared away and the scattering of brilliant yellow remained at the bottom.

He got on Parade now, and made a detour that took him up to the head of the valley. Already the day was slipping away from him. The sun was out of sight beyond the great western mountains, and the sunset would begin to pour its dim tides among the valleys very soon. He left Parade screened from view behind a grove of young pines that were barely taller than the head of the stallion; then he went down the creek, exploring.

Its headwaters were not far above. The waters had worked out a faint depression on the shoulder of the mountain, here. Then a little runlet came in from the left with a rush that turned both currents into a shining dance of many small waves. The steady growth of the pines began here, the trees bending away from the prevailing northwestern stream of the wind. A little farther down, two more sparkling rivulets of spring water joined the main stream which now began to meander through a shallow hollow.

Voices came up to Silver from that hollow. He got down on hands and knees to worm his way through some brush, and so he came within arm's length of a man seated cross-legged on the ground with a rifle across his knees. If the fellow had not moved, Silver might not have seen him until too late.

Perhaps it was too late already!

Little by little, an inch at a time, Silver drew back. The sunset color was streaming with the clouds toward the south before he had maneuvered himself to another place where he lay out, propped on his elbows, and looked down on a busy scene. There were four laborers in the bottom of the hollow. They had stripped away the upper layer of thin turf and left bare a surface of black sand, or loam. This they were cradling, standing in the run of the water and spinning the mud out of the detritus until the small residue — Silver could guess what it was — was dumped into a common milk pail.

They finished working while Silver looked at them grimly. This was the mine that poor Feeley had discovered and for which he had died. Now, no doubt, Mr. Barry Christian was giving to his devoted followers one half of the loot while he kept the other half for himself. Perhaps he had taken a fortune out of the placer already; perhaps there were more fortunes left, though it seemed to Silver that the greatest part of the gold-bearing sand in the little valley had been already washed. It was a mere pocket of a richness at which Silver could not guess. At least Barry Christian had been willing to take a life for the sake of it; but there were varying reasons for which Christian would take life, and one of them was no more than that it satisfied his naked whim.

The old anger which had gathered in the heart of Silver so often when he so much as thought of the man returned upon him now, a dark and settled hatred.

They were ending work. The picks, shovels, and cradles were laid under a tree. The milk pail was emptied into a small-mouthed buckskin sack that had a good weight to it. It must contain, however, only what they had washed on this day.

In the meantime the riflemen from the head of the valley stood up and sauntered down to the miners. They all streamed out of the hollow and took their way on foot right across the brow of the hill.

Silver, watching them through the gathering veils of the dusk, saw them enter a deep pine wood, which extended over the head of a neighboring summit. He followed when the darkness had increased a little. From the very peak of the next hill he looked over the tips of the trees and saw what he had hoped to find, a thin drift of smoke that topped the trees and melted away toward the south in the wind. That was probably where they were camped, and that was where he must hope to find Taxi, if in fact there remained any hope of locating him.

Silver returned to the stallion. With the dusk the wind had risen, well-iced off the higher summits. He felt weak, a little feverish. He kept telling himself that he had done enough for this one day, and that a good night's rest was what he needed, after bending all those hours under the hot burden of that sun. But even while he argued against conscience, he knew that conscience would win, driving him sullenly on. For if Taxi were in fact alive in the hands of Christian's wolfish men, he had probably been through something that was almost worse than death.

He rode Parade down to the verge of the woods. There were horses not far away, when they entered the trees. He could tell that because twice Parade threw up his fine head to whinny, and he had to lean over quickly and catch the horse by the nose in order to stifle the sound.

He dismounted. Already it was the darkness of night under the pines, with the wind blowing the fragrance and with it the icy cold into his lungs. At such a time the temptation is either to surrender or else to stride blindly forward. Silver did neither. The more impatient he grew, the more he took hold of himself with a mighty grip and steadied his nerves.

There in the dark, he made himself halt, and standing perfectly still, he listened to every sound that breathed through the trees. He lay down and with his face against the ground hearkened again. He could hear nothing except the natural noises of the forest, the sound of the wind like the rushing of a great water, and the occasional deep groan of a branch against another.

He went on, often bending over. For an eye close to the ground sees all silhouettes in a clearer proportion. But he did not see the house until he was right at the edge of the clearing. Even then he could not make out the line of it clearly, for a time, as the pine trees beyond it make a background into which it faded so perfectly, and the only lights were thin slits of yellow around the well-shuttered windows. The size of the place surprised Silver, when at last he had completed a survey of it.

After that, he took Parade back into the woods and by pressing a foot behind the knee of the stallion gave him the signal to lie down. There he would remain prostrate even if a forest fire blew raging toward him. Silver turned back to prospect his find.