The Man on Horseback/Chapter 3
CHAPTER III
THE UNKNOWN METAL
A long career as chemist and assayer had made a pessimist and misanthrope of Newson Garrett.
Miners had come to his laboratory and had offered him large, certified checks, asking nothing of him in return except that he should rectify his reports by taking off a couple of figures from the rubric entitled Silica and add them to that labeled Gold. Other miners had proposed to kill him on the spot when he told them that what they had taken for virgin gold were only shimmering, deceptive bits of iron crystal. Still others, told by him that they had struck it rich, went straightway on a lengthy spree in the old Cœur d'Alene Theater to wake up a week later with a splitting headache and a brown taste, and to discover on returning to their mines that somebody had jumped their claims in the meantime.
So he was morose and silent.
"It'll take another Treadwell, another Leroy, to make me excited," he used to say at the Club over his glass of Vichy and milk, "and those days are over. Why, to-day a fellow thinks he's all the Guggenheims rolled into one and multiplied by the sum total of all the Vanderbilts when his stuff runs two ounces to the ton!"
But, five days later, when Tom Graves ambled into his office, still dressed as if he had just come fresh from the range, in blue jeans tucked into high-heeled boots, a gray flannel shirt, and sombrero, but all neat and clean, even slightly dandyish in the careful knotting of the blue cotton necktie, the rakish angle of his hat, and the elaborate pattern stitched on his boot legs, Newson Garrett smiled. He smiled all over his large, puttyish, hairless face, and held out a flabby hand.
"Mr. Graves," he said in his exact, well-modulated diction that still smacked of Harvard after a lifetime in the Northwest, "permit me to shake you by the hand."
"Sure, I'll permit it if you ask like a nice little girl. But, what's the festive occasion? Why this exuberance of comehitherness, Garrett?"
"Your mine!" replied the other. "Your Yankee Doodle Glory! The jest of the decade has turned into the marvel, the envy of the decade, my dear sir. It is wonderful. I might say extraordinary. It will make history in the mining annals of the Inland Empire. See for yourself," handing Tom the typewritten assay report of the quartz samples which Truex had given him.
Tom read:
- "Au.
115 oz. - Ag.
1.5 oz. - Cu.
tr. - Fe.
12.2% - Si O2
45% - Al2O2 3 Ca O, Mg O, etc., not determined.
There is also present an element, probably some metal that could not be determined, as it did not respond to ordinary tests."
Tom looked up with a laugh.
"Say, put it in plain American. All this is Siwash to me. What does it mean?"
"It means that you are rich beyond the dreams of avarice. It means that you are a budding Rockefeller. It means that the Yankee Doodle Glory, if the vein runs true …"
"Truex says it does …"
"He ought to know. He is an expert at blocking out ore bodies in his own crude way."
"I guess so." Tom pointed at the paragraph at the bottom of the assay report. "Say, Garrett, what's this?"
"Just what it says there. You see, when I assayed the ore samples, though I used all the known tests, there was one little ingredient, a metal most likely—I am trying not to be too technical—that I was unable to separate."
Tom leaned across the counter. He thought of his partner's curious words, and of his own curious sensation, something like an echo, yet less decided, more far away, he had experienced when he had entered the tunnel of the Yankee Doodle Glory and had come face to face with the ore ledge which his partner's pickaxe had uncovered.
"This unknown metal or whatever you call it," he asked, "did it—well—affect you any? Your ears, I mean …?"
"Yes!" Garrett gave his words the emphasis of a suddenly lowered voice. "It did affect my ears in a very strange," he thumped the table in an access of quite unhabitual excitement, "a perfectly unscientific manner." He was going to say more, but checked himself. "Never mind," he went on, "you are rich. You've got the gold. As to this unknown ingredient, this unknown metal, I have made sure that it will not interfere with any smelting process you may decide on. And I shall send it East to a friend of mine who has a great scientific laboratory to see what he makes of it. Don't you worry about it."
But Tom Graves did worry a day later when Truex suddenly came to town and went straight to his room in the Hotel Spokane.
"Tom," said the old miner, "I'm through with the Yankee Doodle Glory. I'd swap my half of it for a chaw of Macdonald's plug." And being pressed for a reason he repeated his former statement that he was afraid. He said that, in continuing blasting the tunnel and running it smack up against the vein, he had uncovered an even richer ore body, but that the strange sensations, as of a far-off echo, had increased a hundredfold.
"Garrett says something about a new metal,"'rejoined Tom Graves.
"Forget it. Metals don't affect your ears. I don't want nothing to do with that there mine."
"But," said Tom philosophically, "half of it is yours."
"I don't want nothing to do with it, just the same. I'm scared. I don't want to ever enter that tunnel again!"
"You won't have to. We'll develop the mine in style. It won't cost much, will it?"
"No. We got enough ore in sight to pay for all the machinery we need, an I've a little money saved up. But," he repeated, irritably, "I tell you, Tom, I'm goin' to sidestep that there mine. I don't want nothing to do with it—not a damned thing. I'd rather …"
"All right, all right, old-timer. Keep your hair on. I'll take a run over to the Club and have a talk with Martin Wedekind."
The latter was a German-American of the best type. He came of an excellent Berlin family, but his father, dead these many years, had been of such a grimly Calvinistic turn of mind that he had not been able to understand why his own children should have been born with a grain of original sin. To the father, the whole of life had meant nothing but a continuous and emphatic moral action. He had brought up his two sons accordingly, and had strained their souls to such a horrible pitch of self-righteousness and hard ideal ism that they threatened to snap and recoil.
And finally, in the case of Martin, his younger son, it had recoiled. He had been guilty of a small sin and had been shipped off to America thirty years earlier.
He had come straight West, had done well there, and had become an American heart, soul, and politics, including even the saving prejudices. He hated the very sound of the word hyphen.
"There are two classes of hyphenates," he used to say when he warmed to the subject. "There's the sort who get here via the steerage with the clothes they stand in, make their stake, thanks to the splendid hospitality, the fairness of equal chance, and the unlimited possibilities of America, and return to Germany as first-class passengers with money jingling in the jeans. Over yonder they pose as Simon-pure Yankees and read the New York Herald, while here in America they swear by Bill the Kaiser and read the New Yorker Herald. They are the breed who hate America and dislike Germany, who try to straddle the fence, who would kick at the climate of both Hell and Paradise, who are neither fish nor flesh nor good red herring. Then there's the other variety, the intellectual hyphenates—and often they have good American names and not a drop of German blood in their veins—who spout statistics about German efficiency, meaning by that damnable word a comparison between what's best in Germany with what's worst in America. I hate both breeds. I'm an American. No. I am not sorry that I wasn't born over here. If I had been, I wouldn't have been able to appreciate so thoroughly what America is, and means, and does."
To-day Martin Wedekind was retired from active business affairs and spent his time between his home in Lincoln Addition and the Club, where he played his afternoon game of cards or dominoes and took his whiskey straight, like a native born. His wife was a New England woman and he had an only child, a daughter. He was a little on the autumn side of fifty, tall, heavy, slightly stooped, with peering, twinkling, kindly eyes, a mass of close-curled hair, a thick, graying mustache, and great hairy hands that he used freely to gesticulate with.
He did so this afternoon when the Club steward announced Tom Graves, whom he had met the year before on a visit to the owner of the Killicott ranch. At that time an impromptu friendship had sprung up between the two men in spite of their difference in age and fortune and, at least on Tom's side, not altogether hindered by the fact that Bertha, Martin Wedekind's daughter, was blond and violet-eyed and straight of limb.
"Hullo, Tom! Hullo, capitalist!" was his hearty greeting as the young Westerner ambled into the room with that peculiar, straddling, side-wheeling walk which smacked of stock saddle and rolling prairie.
Tom grinned sheepishly as he sat down. "I guess the news of the rich strike in the Yankee Doodle Glory is all over town by this time?" he asked.
"Sure. Garrett spilled the beans."
"Damned good beans," commented Tom, "fine and rich and nutritious and juicy."
"Yes. But look out, young fellow. Every con agent in the Inland Empire is going to lay for you with a flannel-wrapped brick and a cold deck."
Tom waved a careless hand.
"A fat lot of good it'll do them," he laughed. "My mother was Scotch and as careful as a setting hen, and I've followed the range all my life. Bulliest little training-school to kick some horse sense into you. Well, Wedekind," he leaned across the table and his eyes lit up with a frank, boyish appeal, "you're a good friend of mine, aren't you?"
"None better!" came the kindly reply.
"Fine and dandy. You see, I want to talk to you about that mine."
Wedekind smiled.
"Need a stake to start your developing work?" he asked, slapping his check book on the table. "Name your figure, my boy."
Tom shook his head. "Thanks. It isn't that. It's just some advice I want about my partner. The old son-of-a-gun has gone loco …"
"Gold gone to his head?"
"Not a bit. Gold's gone to his feet. They're cold, Wedekind, as cold as clay." And he told the other about the curious sensation, as of a far-off echo, he and his partner had experienced in the tunnel, adding that Truex resolutely refused to have anything more to do with the Yankee Doodle Glory, and showing Garrett's assay report with the paragraph about the unknown substance on the bottom.
"Garrett says it's all right?" asked Wedekind.
"Sure. As right as rain. Says that foreign metal or whatever it may turn out to be won't interfere with the smelting."
"Well, there's nothing to worry over then. I guess platinum was an unknown metal once, and even gold and silver were unknown during the iron age."
"But Truex won't play."
"You don't need him, Tom. You work the mine yourself. I'll give you a line to Fred Gamble, the engineer. He has done some work for me. And you make a contract with Truex … Never mind. I'll take the matter up with him myself." He looked at his watch. "What are you doing to-night?"
"Oh, nothing special."
"Fine. Come on up to the house and take pot luck. Mrs. Wedekind will be glad to see you. And Bertha, too."
"I haven't seen your daughter since last year," said Tom, as he walked down the broad staircase of the Club side by side with Wedekind.
The latter laughed.
"She's changed some," he replied. "You know she has been visiting my brother Heinrich in Berlin for over five months. Just returned. Oh, yes," he repeated rather musingly, "she's changed some."