Dead Man's Gold/Chapter 13
CHAPTER XIII
madre d'oro
LUST of gold ran in their veins. Harvey seemed to have thrown off his years and was as eager as any of them. Close at hand was the first prize he had ever drawn in the long lottery of his prospecting. A little food was snatched, the burros were given a little grain and some grass brought in from the valley, and then they prepared for the conquest of the butte.
It seemed to have felt the influence of the quake that had filled up the gorge of the placer-creek, for it tilted slightly to the east and there was a superficial fracture on that side, where the rock showed less decomposed than the rest of it. The winds seemed to have piled up about its base for, try as they did in the waning daylight, they could not see any signs of the walled-up cavern through which the spring had once issued. Stone fancied it had been so blocked by the priests who inhabited or frequented it, to prevent the precious mineral from being washed away from the matrix within; for he recollected Lyman's wandering sentences about mummies and skulls and fancied that this place must have been both temple and fortress to a dead race.
Besides this crack, the mass was fluted from base to summit by a natural chimney that widened suddenly halfway up and then narrowed again. It was broken here and there by ledges, but Larkin surveyed it ruefully when Stone announced it as their stairway.
"Nice flight of steps, I don't fink," he exclaimed. "Chap could come down heasy enough but—hup? I hain't a bloomin' buzzard. Hain't there hany lift?"
"They used to have ladders, I fancy, that they drew up after them," said Stone. "Reaching from one ledge to another. But Lyman got up this way and so can we."
"It looks as if you could climb to the top from the other side fairly easily," announced Healy.
"Wot good 'ud that do us?" demanded Larkin. "Want to roost on top of the bloody crag? Wot do you fink we are? Heagles?"
"This is where the rope comes in handy," said Stone. "The first part of that chimney isn't so difficult if you use your elbows and knees. We've got some spikes and our prospectors' hammers. It can be done. Lyman did it."
"W'ot made 'im tackle it in the first place?" persisted Larkin. "Is there a door hup there somewheres?"
"There's a way in," said Stone. "As for Lyman, he was sure there was gold inside and he knew such buttes were sometimes honeycombed with caves. There were three of them, you remember. They weren't likely to quit without exploring the whole butte as far as they could climb. Anyway, there is an entrance up there. The moon's coming up. Give me some of those spikes and a hammer. I'll tackle it with the rope. The rock isn't so hard. I can drive them in as I go. Then we'll have a ladder with a rope for hand-rail."
"I'll have a job to manage it," said Healy, dubiously.
We'll git you up there, 'Ealey," said Larkin. "Where we go you go, hold pal, till this job's through with, located, develluped, an' the girl is found and 'as got 'er share. Your arm hain't so bad. I saw you lifting with it this afternoon." Healy made no answer and Larkin went on.
"Let me tackle it, Stone," he begged. "I'm a two-'anded climber and a bit of a hacrobat, though you mightn't think it ter look at me. I hused to be a steeple-jack once. If I can't myke it, you 'ave a try."
He took off his boots and socks while the round moon rose and flooded the mesa, silvering the eastern side of the butte, flinging its rays fairly into the chimney. It was getting cold, but they did not notice it. Harvey cut down some prickly-pear cactus and made a hedge across a hollow at the foot of the cliff in which to place the burros. They had watered themselves and the beasts with what they carried in their canteens.
"Only enough fodder for another meal for the burros," Harvey said. "We'll have to take a trip with them back to the grass to-morrow."
"It won't take long to blast out all the gold they can carry," said Stone. "Then we'll register our location notices and arrange for developing the mine properly. It'll take a stamp mill to clean up, I suppose."
"First find your gold," said Larkin. "'Ere goes."
With the rope slung across his shoulders, he tackled the narrow chute. The strength packed into his squatty body was prodigious. With his fingers hooked in a crevice, he drew himself up, his naked feet clinging like limpets, his legs wide straddled, hanging with one hand while he drove in a spike.
"Hey!" he shouted down. "I know 'ow Lyman made it. Syme w'y I am. They's old spikes 'ere but they're rusted hout, most of 'em." In an incredibly short space of time he mounted to the first ledge, stood on it, and called down again.
"It's four or five foot wide," he said. He rolled a cigarette and lit it, smoking while he got his breath, then flung the spark far out. "Goin' hup!" he cried, and started on again. From now on he progressed rapidly. He had found sockets chiselled in the rock, he told them, where masonry had once been set. Nearly a hundred feet above he reached the widened place and disappeared. They heard the sound of hammering. Presently he came swiftly down, grasping the double line with his hands, clutching the rock with his bare toes, ignoring the spikes he had driven.
"Didn't want to cut my tootsies," he announced. It'll be O. K. wiv boots on. Heasy! S'y, there's a wide ledge running round that scoop like a 'orse-shoe. Regular terrace at the back. But I'm blowed hif I can see any 'ole to go in."
"It's there," said Stone. "Now, then, we want to send up our rifles, the dynamite and caps, pick and drills, some grub, and the electric torches."
"Why the rifles? asked Healy. "Think you're going to find game in there?"
"There's no sense in leaving them," said Stone, quietly. "We might need them. It's too bad we have to leave the burros outside. We don't know how cold it's going to be in there. We'll need some wood for fire and light. These torches ought to be saved for an emergency. How about blankets?"
"We'll be warm henough," said Larkin. "And we won't sleep none, I fancy. Git a move on."
They collected what they were to take up with them. Harvey was to be the last to mount and send up the stuff by the line. Larkin ascended first, stopping on the ledge to call directions down to Healy who made a slow job of it, though he managed to use his injured arm sufficiently to help himself considerably. The rope was strong and able to bear double weight and Stone backed Healy, who could only clutch the line with one hand. At the first ledge he was exhausted but determined to go on, with a dogged persistence that they could not but admire.
"Let Stone come hup wiv me," said Larkin, exasperated at the snail's pace. "We'll make a loop at the end of the line for you to stand in and the two of us can 'aul you. You needn't be hafraid we'll drop yer,' he jeered. "Jest so long as you pl'y straight, my bucko, we'll do the syme."
Healy said nothing and they rigged the rope as Larkin had suggested, after Stone and he had reached the final ledge. Healy came up slowly and carefully but they managed it successfully and then let down the line for the bundles and for Harvey, who ascended handily. Stone hauled in the rope at the last and coiled it to take with them.
Then he led the way to the back of the horseshoe.
"Now whereas your door?" asked Larkin. "Or do I push a bell?"
"You're not so far wrong," answered Stone. He scanned closely the face of the rock on which the rays of the full moon beat powerfully.
"Ah!" he ejaculated at last with an emotion that showed the stress he was under. "Here it is." He traced with his fingers a crude but effectively designed symbol chiselled deeply in the cliff. The edges were weatherworn, some of it was badly flaked, but they made out clearly enough the shape of a bird that might have been meant for either crow or eagle, big-taloned, with a great beak. Between beak and claws it held an object that looked not unlike a bone, a shaft ending in a ring at the lower end with the top flattened out into the shape of a spade. It was probably intended for a rattlesnake, with the ring to represent the rattles.
Stone pushed heavily on the boss within the circle without result.
"Nobody 'ome!" nervously jested Larkin.
The stone resisted, seemingly solid as the butte itself. Larkin tried with strong thumb and fingers and then Harvey. Nothing happened.
"Wot does it do?" asked Larkin, petulantly. Nice lot of Jugginses we are, tryin' to poke a w'y through a bloomin' paving stone!"
"I don't know exactly what it does do," admitted Stone. "Lyman was pretty far gone. He told me to push the knob at the bottom of the thing the bird was holding. That was almost the last thing he said."
"Bet you tuppence farden 'e's larfing at hus now," said Larkin, gloomily.
"Where's that hammer you used, Lefty?" asked Stone at last. "We can't shift it without force, and we'll have to take a chance on breaking it."
"'Ow in 'ell did Lyman know w'ot it was for?" asked Larkin as he handed him the tool.
"I don't know. He didn't have time to tell me much. He may have heard about it from someone. An Indian perhaps. May have tried it because he thought it was here for a purpose. Those old ladders led somewhere."
"Oh, for Gawd's sake 'it the bloody knob!" Larkin burst out. "Bust hit if you 'ave to."
Stone still hesitated. There was evidently some mechanical principle that opened up the rock. A contrivance made by some tribe that flourished long before the cliff-dwellers of Mancos, before even the Mayans. And he feared by one blow to destroy the mechanism, to shut them off entirely from whatever lay within. The nervous sweat dripped into his eyes and he wiped it off with the back of his hand. Then he poised the hammer and struck fairly at the knob. It seemed to give as it shattered.
There was a grating sound, the rushing noise of water, and an opening gaped before them, a slab of the rock that had fitted so snugly as to defy inspection sliding down. A massive panel of granite eighteen inches thick settled with a muffled sound and a gush of damp but warm air came out. The moon shone through the gap and revealed a slanting passage the untouched roof of which showed that it was natural though the sides had been roughly squared and perhaps widened.
"'Ow do yer shut it?" asked Larkin. "There hain't some sort of a trap to it, you suppose?"
"Lyman shut it. It may work only from the outside but I'm afraid we've smashed the connection. It is hydraulic, of course."
"Hof course," echoed Larkin. "Wot do we care? Give us a torch."
Harvey handed him one and he turned on the switch. The tunnel bent abruptly to the right. Larkin turned the corner and led the way, chanting in a voice that echoed loudly:
Ail, 'ail, the gang's all 'ere,
Wot the 'ell do we care?
Wot the 'ell do we care?
Wot the 'ell do we care now?
A swarm of bats came blundering out as they followed the Cockney, descending the narrow passage into the heart of the place with the sound of falling water ever present. The way twisted to the left and then zigzagged. On the roof they marked the smut of ancient torches. It opened out at last into a chamber and there, standing about the walls, or piled up, as Lyman had said, "like cordwood," were hundreds of mummied bodies, shrunken, distorted, with wisps of black hair still clinging to their heads and teeth showing between shrivelled gums.
"Greetings, gents," said the irrepressible Larkin. "Which w'y to the treasure-chamber?"
There were three arched openings to this rudely vaulted morgue and Larkin, still in the lead, tried the centre one. But he backed out.
"Don't like the pattern of the linoleum they got in there," he said. "Skulls hall hover the bloomin' shop. I crunched 'em. Try hagain."
The opening to the right pitched sharply down and they followed it. It was getting distinctly hotter and the sweat began to pour off them.
"Oo was it said blankets?" queried Larkin who was the only one disposed to chatter. "We'll be needin' hice-bags soon." By now the noise of pouring water was so loud that they could barely hear him but there was no sign of it, no moisture on the rock.
"Look hout!" cried Larkin, suddenly. "We've come to the jumping-horf plyce."
The passage emerged on a ledge forming a gallery that seemed to run around a great space, the path vanishing in the darkness to left and right as they lined up by the side of Larkin and stood on the edge of a void. The sound of the water had deadened somewhat and Larkin's syllables came back in a distant echo. They appeared to have entered the hollow core of the butte.
Stone switched on his torch and the two rays swept the place. First, down to a floor fifty feet below them, then up, farther than the stored electricity could penetrate, and then across to where something shone ghostly and glittering.
"Gawd! Look at it!"
The spectacle seemed to emerge slowly from the gloom as if it gathered light from the two torches, a great ghostly wall of quartz or marble, milky-white, with numberless studs and points and snaky lines that gleamed and twinkled as the beams shifted. It was the Madre d'Ore! The Mother of Gold! A portion of the great mother-lode whose discovery was the dream of every miner!
They gasped as they gazed their fill and then sought for a way to get closer to the gorgeous thing. They found the path to their right was hewn out into steps, much worn, but possible, and so got down to the floor and walked across toward the shining matrix. The rock sounded hollow under their feet. From one place steam rose like a wraith; the torch ray showed a circular hole and, through the rising mist, black water running swiftly. It was hot, undoubtedly volcanic, but after it cooled it would serve for drink. The ancient stream of the placer might have flowed scalding water once upon a time, Stone fancied.
Thirst did not bother them as they set down the stuff they had brought and stood close to the foot of this savage reredos. It seemed to hang like a magnificent curtain, fifty feet wide, at least, and reaching far up into the darkness. How thick, they hardly dared conjecture. The floor from which it sprang, and which might have been scraped and stoped out by the Indian miners who worshipped this marvellous thing, was no longer hollow, as it had been above where the steaming water ran, and Harvey stumbled into the charred remnants of a fire. Lyman and his partners must have lighted this when they saw "the great wall of it, reachin' way up into the darkness." Now the fire was charcoal and ashes, Lyman was dust, two men lay in the blue pool at the head of Stone Men Cañon, and the bones of all the rest of them who had tried to reach the treasure^ were scattered graveless.
Then a very wonderful thing happened: From high above them, through a rift that opened to the sky, with ragged edges that proclaimed it a natural window, the moon shot a shaft of light. It struck the matrix high up and invested it with a mystical, shimmering lustre that seemed to give it transparency, to make the gold hang in translucent space.
"The Milky Way," said Stone, softly.
It was not strange that a wild race should have preserved this thing in all its beauty, have worshipped before it as a shrine. It was easy to conjure up mystic rituals held before its splendour while the moon illumined it or torches, borne in the hands of the dead priests now stacked like cordwood in the upper chambers, gave light for weird sacrifices.
The four white men watched the magic of the moonlight slowly shifting downward over the face of the Madre d'Oro and a sense of awe and desecration stole over then. Then the moon sailed on and the rift darkened. They switched on again one of the electric torches.
"It's a'most a pity to tech it," said Harvey with a sigh. "Sure is bewtiful."
"It's a pity to waste it," Larkin came back. "It'll be more beyewtiful w'en that gold is stacked up in twenty-dollar gold pieces. Beats the mint, don't it? 'Ow do we git at it, Stone?"
They built a fire out of the wood they had brought, piling it carefully, to get the most service from the sticks in the way of flame and, conserving one torch, started work with drill and hammer. The quartz was easy to handle, the drill sank into it evenly and readily, and they laughed and jested as they went at it, Harvey and Stone taking turns at the sledge while Healy held the torch for their better guidance.
The size of the open space that made up this central cavern they could not determine, neither could they tell whether it was natural or partly artificial. The sound of their voices went echoing up and around and the strokes of the hammer on the steel returned sharply. They put in six charges along the foot and six more in the face of the hanging wall, capped and fused their dynamite and then, before they lit the fuses, decided to have a drink of water.
It was a muggy place and their work, plus their excitement, with the heat thrown out from the fire, had left them saturated with sweat, even to Healy, who had done little but look on and show the light. Harvey lowered his canteen through the hole into the subterranean stream and brought it up with the cloth covering slightly steaming.
"It's goin' ter be a long time between drinks, waiting for that stuff to cool," said Larkin. "But the sides of my froat are stickin' together. Give it to me."
He tested it with his tongue, making a wry face. But he finally swallowed it.
"Tastes like brimstone and treacle—without the treacle," he said. "Flat beer's champagne to it. But it's wet." The liquid was strongly impregnated with minerals and Stone decided it would not do for a steady drinking diet.
"Hall it needs," opined Larkin, watching the others take their portion, "is sugar, lemon, nutmeg, and Scotch whisky. Partickler the Scotch whisky. Then it wouldn't 'urt if you forgot the water."
Stone and Harvey touched off the fuses and they all backed up across the vault, the torches out, and watched the fizzing, spitting sparks while the seconds seemed interminable.
The charges went off in a volley with a great flare that gave them glimpses of ceiling rocks high above them and also of the gold-seamed marble lifting into space. The air swept upon them as if they had been struck with a heavy web of cloth, and all about the place the reverberations crashed and rolled while the reek of exploded gases forced itself down to their lungs and started them coughing.
Then out of the heights grisly shapes came toppling from shelves and ledges in a ghastly rain of ancient mummies disturbed by the crash and shock of the explosion, their desiccated bodies breaking into shreds and powder that lined mouth and nostrils with this nauseating dust of the dead. They did not know the nature of this descent until Stone switched on his torch and they saw all about them, strewing the floor of the place, the crumbled remnants, dried-up heads that leered at them, broken off from the brittle trunks, bits of brown bone sticking out from what had once been flesh. Stone saw Healy swiftly cross himself while Larkin shuddered and Harvey leaned over and was frankly sick. Stone felt inclined to emulate him. The horrid pluvium was in his ears and hair and eyes, it had sifted down his collar, and it was hard to shake off the suggestion that these shapes had launched themselves upon the invaders in one last attempt to guard their holy of holies, to protect the savage, sacred shrine from profanation.
But as they went forward to where the milky quartz was piled up on the floor with the gold shining from it thick as herring scales on a seine after a big haul, they forgot all superstition, and all the ghosts of a thousand generations could not have stopped their final rush. The fire was out and scattered by the explosion but they squatted down in front of the shattered matrix and gloated while Stone and Larkin played the beams of the two torches on the treasure-dump. To hold the mining phrase, the quartz was fairly rotten with the gold. The dynamite had rent away tons of the wall, the crisp edges of the fractures white as sugar, and tossed great splinters and cubes in heaps while two cracks went snaking up and out into the blackness. But the explosive had failed to pierce, or even indicate, the thickness of the wall. And everywhere it was larded with gold, sown with it, stuffed with it. Chunks of the precious mineral lay loose, torn from the matrix. There were hollows in the marble that had been packed with gold, there was not a square foot of it that did not contain some measure of yellow ore.
They hunkered down before the heap with the two torches stuck in crevices and, like so many stone-breakers on a country road, pecked away at the fragments with hammers and drills. Healy with his one arm was as avid as the rest. They cracked the quartz and picked out the virgin gold as if they had been cracking the walnuts of Midas, working on at frantic speed until sheer fatigue slowed them up. Each had his own heap of gold mingled with slivers of quartz and each looked instinctively to see how his compared with the rest, their faces weary, pinched, avaricious. Healy's pile was much the smallest. Stone got up.
"Hell!" he said, "this is a partnership proposition." And kicked all the gold together. "Let's put in another shot."
They all stretched stiffly as they rose and pounded away again with drill and hammer. Once more the explosion came and a few more mummies fell from their roosts, but they were prepared for them this time and did not mind them. What troubled them most was the acrid stench of the gas. Coupled with the heat of the place and their labours, it gave them all dull headaches as they once more went to getting out their golden kernels. The second attack had slightly deepened the first fissures and excavations but there was no sign that the wall did not extend clear to the outer surface of the butte, veneered there by the granite.
"Begins to look as if it 'ud pay to tunnel in from outside with a pneumatic drill," said Harvey. "By gum, thar's a heap of it! We ain't done more 'n nibble at a corner of it, like a mouse would a whole cheese."
They went again at the gathering of their golden trove. It varied. Some of it seemed soft as the cheese that Harvey mentioned. It sliced off. Some chipped, some flaked, some they gouged out, and the piles, now turned in every little while to the common heap that Stone had parted, grew continually. They sat in puddles of their own perspiration, pegging away automatically, their fingers bruised and bleeding as they handled the sharp fragments, unmindful of time or tiring muscles, of thirst, of anything but the delight in seeing the gold pile up, in yellow kernels and bits of white quartz that were over-stubborn in releasing grip on their wealth, like a sublimated succotash.
Then the light from the torch began to wane, slowly diminishing, so that in the beginning they mistrusted their eyes more than the failing battery until the wire within the vacuum turned red, then blue, and vanished. Before Stone, by renewing a battery, could give them light again, they became swiftly conscious of their aching muscles, their splitting heads, and when the second torch revealed once more the piles of gold they had temporarily lost their magnetism.
"Those were eight-hour batteries," said Stone. "Probably burned a bit short." He looked at his watch. "It's half-past three," he announced. "Better leave this for a while and get up to fresher air. What with the fire and the dynamite, we've used this up too quickly and we've been working where the bad air has sunk to the floor. It'll be daylight by the time we get to the opening. Those burros have got to be fed and our grub is down at the bottom. I'm starving."
"I'm hungry as a spring b'ar, myself," admitted Harvey. "And we got to water them burros. Better fill our canteens with this stuff, though it's no balm for a weak stummick."
They ascended the way they had come and saw the gray light of the dawn through the entrance. Before they reached it the light turned to salmon and then to glowing orange. Stone set down the coil of rope with a sigh of relief. They had left the tools and dynamite in the great cavern. Larkin and Harvey carried the filled canteens. The morning wind blew out of the eye of the rising sun and they gratefully filled their lungs with its sweetness. Behind them, in the bowels of the butte, they had left sufficient gold to pack the burros to full capacity besides the actual necessities they must carry for the trip back to Miami. Verde was nearer but Globe was the county seat and it was vital that they should get the mine registered as soon as possible.