The Man on Horseback/Chapter 1
CHAPTER I
THE YANKEE DOODLE GLORY
Like a great, shimmering silver horn the morning mist swung out of the valley and Tom Graves swung along with it, sitting his tough, sinewy, thirteen-hand pony as easily as a lifetime of it can teach a man, and lifting the mare gently with knee and soft word and knowing hand when ruts or slippery timber falls clef the road or when it dipped too suddenly into rock-strewn levels.
Fourteen miles beyond, an hour and a half's ride if the pony was as keen as the man, was Woodfell, a one-horse, one-man homestead of drab, slat-built house, splintering, zig-zag fence, rickety corral, and a brown, hopeless blotch of illy tilled fields. There he would stable his horse with "Swede" Johnson, the squatter, pay more or less gracefully that flaxen-haired individual's habitual overcharge for a meal consisting of bread mixed in the flour bag and baked in the frying-pan, inky, boiled coffee, stringy bacon that tasted of fish, and rice pudding remarkable for its shortcomings as to raisins, and resume his journey on foot into the Hoodoo mining district. Tom Graves was easily moved to laughter. He would laugh, at other people and at himself, with his mouth that was wide and generous, his flashing, even, white teeth, his square fighter's chin, his nose that, starting in a haughty Wellingtonian curve, finished disconcertingly with a humorous tilt to starboard. He would laugh with every inch of his muscular, well-knit body, with his very hair that was uncompromisingly bristly and as uncompromisingly red; and he laughed now as he said to himself that the district was rightly named.
The Hoodoo! The evil, lumpish spirit of man's aspirations, man's hopes and faith!
Once that part of Idaho had been famed for its rich placer claims that had washed every day into the thousands; then a misleading and glittering outcropping of gold-studded quartz, and a mad wave of adventurers, Americans, Canadians, Englishmen, Scots, and Scandinavians, surging in and making the gaunt hillsides ring with the staccato thud of pickaxe and the dull, minatory rumble of powder and dynamite. Finally disappointment, misgivings, an indiscriminate swallowing of both capital and labor in one tremendous avalanche of failure. . . And the merry band of Argonauts, shaking off their dismay as a spaniel shakes off water and cocking their beavers at the face of misfortune, had followed the gold lure into farther fields, the Kootenais this time.
To-day the Hoodoo district was empty of life except for a couple of ancient Chinamen from California, satisfied with washing their daily dole of five dollars of gold in a forgotten claim; a few optimistic Spokane prospectors who dreamt glimmering mirages of mica; and John Truex, called "Old Man" Truex throughout the Inland Empire.
He was a relic of former days, a man who had once hobnobbed with such notorious characters of localNorthwestern history as Soapy Smith and Swiftwater Bill and who, well past three score and ten, white-haired, patriarchal, yet erect and lithe, had built himself a two-story cabin of logs neatly dovetailed, in the
heart of the bleak, frowning Hoodoos. It was surrounded by a flower garden, odorous with old-fashioned blossoms, and flanked by a nostalgic strawberry patch, shooting thin roots in fifteen inches of well-fertilized soil that he had carried in bags from the rolling Palouse and spread with loving hands on the narrow rock ledge that framed his cabin.
He still called himself a prospector, still was sure that some day he would strike it rich, and he was the partner of Tom Graves, half owner in the latter's prospect hole that was called grandiloquently the Yankee Doodle Glory and was the joke of every mining man from Seattle to the Idaho Panhandle.
Not that Tom Graves was a miner by profession.
He had been born thirty years earlier in the Palouse, had never been west of Spokane nor east of Butte, and had followed the range all his life. As a boy he had helped his father in a decade's hopeless fight against the sprouting of grain, the fencing of free land, and the nibbling of sharp-toothed sheep, afterwards riding herd to various cattle men, and finally becoming horse wrangler to Charles Nairn, the owner and manager of the Killicott ranch.
He was a typical Man on Horseback, an atavistic throwback to an earlier age when men rode free and large, and before steam and electricity and machinery came to cumber, some say to lighten, the world's burden. But he was not displeased when his friends referred to him as "the miner," or introduced him to traveling salesmen or visiting ranchers as the "King of the Hoodoos." For he had a healthy American appetite after money and the decent things that money can buy.
He remembered how the Yankee Doodle Glory had come into his possession at the end of a memorable day and night two-handed, stud-poker session with Dixon Harris, the horse wrangler of a neighboring ranch.
Tom had won steadily, hand after hand, pot after pot, until finally Dixon Harris had risen to his feet, had taken a greasy, yellowish, thumb-stained paper from his pocket, and thrown it across the table.
"I am flat, Tom," he had announced. "Thirty seeds to the bow-wows an' next pay day a hell o' a long ways off. Take this here Yankee Doodle Glory an' call it even. Somebody stuck me with it when I wasn't lookin' an' now I'm goin' to stick you, you old son-of-a-gun. Turns about's fair play!"
And Tom Graves had laughed and had taken the title certificate–the mine was patented–in payment of Dixon Harris' gambling debt.
The Yankee Doodle Glory was a standing joke in the community. It had had a variegated, picturesque, and not altogether honest career. It had been sold and re-sold to capitalists from Boston, London, Minneapolis, and New York, abandoned and picked up again, disposed of at auction in Spokane amidst the roaring laughter of those present for thirty-five cents cash ("an' you're paying damned high for what you're getting!" the auctioneer had added facetiously); money had been spent on it lavishly for blasting and timbering, tunneling and assaying, and never a speck of color, neither gold nor silver, neither copper nor galena, had ever been discovered in its frowning, hopeless depths.
Men out there in the Northwest spoke of "passing the Yankee Doodle Glory" as men in other places speak of "passing the buck"; and now laughing Tom Graves was the owner.
But though he had had half-a-dozen chances of palming it off on newcomers fresh from the East he had always stoutly refused to do so.
"It isn't because I don't want to stick 'em," he had said, blushing like a girl, "but I'm going to develop this here property of mine, see?" And so he had formed a partnership with "Old Man" Truex by the terms of which the latter contributed the labor, the tools, and the dynamite, while Tom ceded to him a half interest in the mine and gave an occasional sum of money whenever he could save it out of his munificent wage of sixty dollars a month.
And then, two days ago, he had received a succinct and ungrammatical telegram that read:
"Git here in a helluva hurry struck it apowerful and aplenty.
"(Signed) Truex."