Part 22 (1/2)
But a heaped up bon-fire and a singing kettle soon drove the shadows from the circling mountain meadow that was to be their home for the night.
”Thet there cabin,” drawled Lester, ”sure made me feel as if I were back on my old stamping grounds. 'Minds me of the place where I once found a chunk o' gla.s.sy white quartz half the size of my head with flakes of color in it that netted me $200. I spent quite consid'able time hunting for the vein that came from, but I never did, nohow.”
Norris explained to Ted and Pedro that a quartz bowlder will often be washed along a river.
They were awakened by the usual concert of hee-haws, as the burros, who followed at their heels all day like dogs, (except when they got contrary), woke the echoes with their loneliness.
That day led them over another of the parallel ridges that comb the West flank of the Sierra, and into a precipitous canyon, over red sandstones and green shales, and slates of Tertiary formation, till they came to another hot spring and decided to pitch camp and all hands make use of the hot water. A natural bath tub and a smaller wash tub were found hollowed out of the stony banks, doubtless carved by whirling bowlders from the spring floods, and with the joy known only to the weary camper they performed their ablutions, filling the tubs, each in turn, by means of the nested pails. What grinding and whirling it must have taken, they reflected, as they felt the smoothness of their symmetrical bowls, to have hollowed these from the solid rock! With accompaniment of drift logs tumbling end for end, as the river rose and foamed beneath the thousand trickles of melting snow!
”Ever been up here in winter?” Ace asked the old prospector.
”Not exactly here, but I been places almighty like it.”
The old prospector told them how, in the days of the 49ers, (vivid recollections of which his father had collated to his youthful ears), the Mexicans had been treated in a way they had practically never forgiven.
The land was free. Discovery and appropriation of a mining claim gave t.i.tle, provided it was staked out and a notice scratched on a tin plate affixed to the claim stake, and likewise provided that the size of the claim accorded with the crude ruling for that region. Fifty feet was generally allowed along a river, or even a hundred where the claim was uncommonly poor and inaccessible, though where it was uncommonly rich, miners were sometimes restricted to ten square feet apiece.
But Mexicans were generally refused the benefits of the gold claims, the ”greasers” often being ejected by force of arms from the more valuable claims. Sometimes they were given three hours' grace for their get-away.
More within the letter of the law, a tax was imposed on alien claim holders, but at first such a heavy one that it was practically prohibitive. This resulted in border warfare, and to many of the Mexicans originally on the land, abject poverty. At the Mexican dry diggings, which, with their bull rings and fandangoes, had sprung up here and there in the foothills, there was b.l.o.o.d.y defiance of the tax collector. Other groups became highwaymen, who robbed and murdered the blond race whom they felt had cheated and maltreated them, stabbing from ambush, or organizing into bands of road agents, who systematically robbed miners of their dust and stage drivers of their express boxes, and as often murdering their victims.
There was Rattlesnake d.i.c.k, among other desperadoes, who with two gangsters, Alverez and Garcia, had terrorized the gold diggings till, five years after the gold rush, he had been killed by a rival bad man.
Ace was so tired, he rested again that day, merely bringing his bi-plane in to the new camp site.
As Long Lester drawled over the camp fire, the drowsy boys lived again in the days when a pinch of gold dust in a buckskin bag was currency, and red s.h.i.+rted miners gambled away their gains or drank it up, in a land of hot suns.h.i.+ne and hard toil, where a tin cup and a frying pan largely comprised their bachelor housekeeping apparatus, their provender such as could be brought in on jingle belled mule teams, their chief diversions the occasional open air meeting or the lynchings of their necessarily rough and ready justice.
The more adventurous always abandoned a moderate prospect for a gold rush. Some of them made rich strikes; others ended their days in poverty, after all.
The fire drowsed to a bed of red coals and the old man's chin was sunk in his whiskers, but still he talked on, almost as if in his sleep, and still the boys propped their eyes open while they stowed away in their memories pictures of the pony express riders, of the horse thieves branded--in this land of horseback distances--by having their ears cut off, and of the unshaven miners, sashes bound Mexican fas.h.i.+on around the tops of their pantaloons, the bottoms thrust into their boots, slouch hats shading their unshaven faces, as they panned the glittering sediments or built their sluices, with rocks for retaining the heavy particles of gold washed over them.
Gold had been found in a belt 500 miles long by 50 wide,--and it was a cherished myth that somewhere along the crest of the range lay a mother lode.
But that, Norris told them, was not the way of the precious metal. The ”mother lode” was a myth.
The next day the two boys started once again to look for the incendiaries, for when Ace set out to do a thing, it was do or die.
Pedro had now overcome his fear for bears, Mexicans, and getting lost, but the too-gently reared youth had never conquered his nervousness at thunder storms. He meant to, though, for he had come to consider useless fears as so much surplus luggage. Just as when he was a small boy he had overcome his fear of the dark by going right out into it and wandering around in it till he felt at home in it, so now he meant to go right out into the next thunder storm that came, becoming its familiar, till he knew the worst, and no longer felt this unreasoning fear.
It was therefore with a certain satisfaction, (though coupled with an equally certain inward shrinking), that as he scanned the skies for some sign of the returning bi-plane, he noticed, rising above a green fringe of silver firs across the canyon, the snowy c.u.mulus of a cloud. This was about an hour before meridian, the time the usual five minute daily noon thunder storm began to gather.
But to-day he noted with surprise, not unmixed with alarm, that beyond this one small mountain of the upper air,--so like the glacier-polished granite slopes beneath that it might have been a fairy mountain, swelling visibly as it rose higher and higher above the canyon wall,--beyond this for as far as he could see were other domes and up-boiling vapor mountains. What did it betoken? A cloud-burst?--For Sierra weather is not like that in the Eastern mountain ranges, and such an a.s.semblage sweeping along the slopes and flying just above the green firs of the lower forests must mean something beyond ordinary in the line of weather.
Had he known more of Sierra weather, he would that instant have given up his plan of being out in this specimen, but his new-born resolution was still strong within him, and--he did not know. One above another for as far as he could see the pearl-tinted billows rose from among the neighboring peaks, swelling visibly as it rose higher and higher. Then they began floating together, the cloud canyons taking on grayer tints, then deep purplish shadows, and their bases darkened with the weight of their vapory waters.
With the sudden reverberation of a cannon shot, the first thunderbolt crashed just ahead of a blinding zig-zag of lightning, and echoing and reechoing from peak to granite peak, with ear-splitting, metallic clearness, it rang its way down the canyon walls, till the echoes died away. Soon the big drops began spattering loudly on the granite slopes, till the drenched boy, bending his hat-brim to the onslaught, lost his footing in the new slipperiness of the smooth, sloping rocks, down which a solid sheet of water now raced, dimpling silver to the pelt of each additional drop.
Before he could collect his scattered wits, another thunder peal came cannonading at the mountain ma.s.s, and almost behind him a solitary old fir tree shook the ground with its fall. Another fir was slivered into huge splinters that flew--fortunately for Pedro--just too far away to hit him. Then loosened rocks and bowlders began bounding and re-bounding down the cliffs till their thunder seemed as loud as that from the heavens.