The Man on Horseback/Chapter 2
CHAPTER II
GOLD
"Look a-here, Tom," said "Old Man" Truex late that evening as he was busying himself amongst his pots and pans that shone and twinkled and glittered like so many kindly, ruby-eyed hobgoblins, "what are you goin' t'do with your half of all them opprobrious riches down yonder in the Yankee Doodle Glory?" He waved a hand through the window towards the Hoodoos that coiled back to the star-lit firmament in a great wave of carved, black stone.
Tom was toasting his legs in front of the glowing hearth. He was tired and sleepy and happy. All morning he had ridden; then the long up-hill pull on foot from "Swede" Johnson's homestead to the cabin; and finally three hours' climbing and slipping in and about the prospect hole of the Yankee Doodle Glory under his partner's guidance. It had not meant much to him: just a flat facet of shimmering quartz where the old miner's pickaxe had uncovered it, something like a trail of haggard, indifferent light that disappeared in the frowning maw of a rudely blasted, rudely timbered tunnel, and a small heap of what to him had appeared to be rubbish, but which his partner had handled as a fond mother handles her firstborn and had designated as: "Gold, my lad! Virgin gold, or I'm a Dutchman!"
"Sure it isn't fool's gold?" Tom asked now with a laugh.
"Fool yourself!" In his excitement Truex missed the flapjack that he was tossing browned side up into the skillet, so that it dropped on the ground with a flopping, sizzling smack. "I tell you it's the real thing. Look a-here, Tom. I guess them years on the range have stunted yer perceptions. Of course you don't know the hills as I do. You can't know–oh–the struggle, the fight, the treachery, the damned cheating deceit that's in them rocks. But," wagging his patriarchal beard, "nor can you know the promise of them hills. Wealth that comes to you suddenly after you've given up hope and are mighty near to blowing off yer head with a stick o' powder! Why, by the Immortal and Solemnly Attested Heck!"–this was his pet swear word–"I tell you I have ranged these here hills since I was knee-high to a wood louse and I've never seen such a vein of–"
"Say! What is a vein?"
"Gosh A'mighty! Go to bed, Tom, before I brain you with my skillet. Only take this bit o' information along and hug it in yer dreams: You've got enough gold down there in the Yankee Doodle Glory to buy enough what you want!"
"Oh!" Tom Graves yawned and kicked off his high-heeled boots. "I always did have a hankering after the coin. There's that new saddle Dixon Harris got up from Gallup's. Cost him seventy seeds an he's willing to part with it for fifty, spot cash. Guess there's enough gold in my half for that?"
"Tom," he said very solemnly, "I tell you there's enough gold in there so's you can do what you darned please. You can go to Spokane and join the Club and be a man o' leisure. You can walk up Seventh Avenue and have the pick of the all them swell dumps there. You can surround yer bow-legged self with Chink cooks and autermobiles and baskets of champagne and. . . Say, what d'you call them things full o' small bones that tastes like punk chicken and sticks in yer throat?"
"Fishes?" suggested Tom sleepily.
"No! Not fishes! I had it once when I sold that there Sally Miller prospect hole to that Eastern guy. Wait! I have it! Terrapin—that's the name! Why, man," he continued seriously, sitting down on the edge of his narrow bunk and scratching his shins, "there's so much gold down there in that hole it makes me afraid at times, Afraid!" he repeated in a strangely sibilant whisper.
"Say, you're locoed!" Tom laughed. "'What's the matter with you, old-timer? Afraid of gold?"
"I ain't afraid of the gold. Gold is all right." Truex shook his head. "But, Tom. . ." he crossed the room and put his hand on the younger man's shoulder, "when you were down there, in that tunnel of the Yankee Doodle Glory, didn't you—oh—hear something?"
Tom looked up sharply.
"I did. But it wasn't exactly hearing. It was more like. . ." he hunted for the right word. "Well, something like. . . I don't know what!"
"All right. You did notice it then!" Truex broke in triumphantly. "And so did I!"
"Isn't it always so ina mine? Ina tunnel? Like an echo?"
"No, It isn't. And it wasn't like an echo. Nor did I notice it until my pickaxe knocked off that bit o' sure-enough quartz, the morning I sent you that wire! Say, Tom," he went on, very earnestly, "it's maybe because I am an old fellow and sorta superstitious. I've followed the gold trail these fifty years or more, an' I know! I have seen mighty strange things in the hills. I could tell—things. And, Tom, down there in the Yankee Doodle Glory, when I found that bit o' quartz with the true color sticking in it like raisins in a pudding, I had a funny feeling. I. . . I was scared, scared stiff. Well, never mind," he wound up, returning to his bunk and taking off his clothes. "To-morrow you got to get up right early and take a sample of that there ore to Newson Garrett in Spokane. He'll make us an assay. Good night."
"Good night," mumbled Tom, who was already half asleep.