Silver and Gold: A Story of Luck and Love in a Western Mining Camp. Coolidge Dane

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СКАЧАТЬ furnace, and the whole State of Texas for a dump, you couldn’t extract the copper from that property inside of a million years. It’s big, I’m telling you, it’s big!’ And all he wanted for his claim was a thousand dollars, down.”

      “Aw, you make me tired,” confessed Bunker Hill frankly, now that he saw his sale gone glimmering, “I see you’re never going to get very far. You’ll tramp back to Globe and blow in your money and go back to polishing a drill. W’y, a young man like you, if he had any ambition, could buy one of these claims for little or nothing and maybe make a fortune. I’ll tell you what I’ll do–you stay around here a while and look at some of my claims; and if you see something you like─”

      “Nope,” said Big Boy, “you can’t work me now–you lost your horse-shoe this morning. I was a hobo then and you told me to go to hell, but now when you see I’ve got eight hundred dollars you’re trying to bunco me out of it. I know who you are, I’ve heard the boys tell about you–you’re one of these blue-bellied Yankees that try to make a living swapping jack-knives. You got your name from that Bunker Hill monument and they shortened it down to Bunk. Well, you lose–that’s all I’ll say; I wouldn’t buy your claims if they showed twenty dollar gold pieces, with everything on ’em but the eagle-tail. And the formation is no good here, anyhow.”

      “Oh, it ain’t, hey?” came back Bunk thrusting out his jaw belligerently, “well take a look up at that cliff. That Apache Leap is solid porphyry─”

      “Apache Leap!” broke in Big Boy suddenly sitting erect and looking all around, “by grab, is this the place?”

      “This is the place,” replied Old Bunk wagging his head and smiling wisely, “and that cap is solid porphyry.”

      “Gee, boys!” exclaimed Big Boy getting up on his feet, “say, is that where they killed all those Indians?”

      “The very place,” returned Bunker Hill proudly, “you can find their skeletons there to this day.”

      “Well, for cripe’s sake,” murmured Big Boy at last and looked up at the cliff again.

      “Some jump-off,” observed Bunker, but Big Boy did not hear him–he was looking up at the sun.

      “Say,” he said, “when the sun rises in the morning how far out does that shadow come?”

      “What shadow?” demanded Bunker Hill. “Oh, of Apache Leap? It goes way out west of town.”

      “And does it throw its shadow on these hills where your claims are? Well, old-timer, I’ll just take a look at them.”

      He climbed out purposefully and began to put on his shoes and Old Bunk squinted at him curiously. There was something going on that he did not know about–some connection between the Leap and his mines; he waited, and the secret popped out.

      “Say,” said Big Boy after a long minute of silence, “do you believe in fortune-tellers?”

      “Sure thing!” spoke up Bunker, suddenly taking a deep breath and swallowing his Adam’s apple solemnly, “I believe in them phenomena implicitly. And, as I was about to say, you can have any claim I’ve got for eight hundred dollars–cash.”

      CHAPTER V

      MOTHER TRIGEDGO

      “Well, I’ll tell you,” confided Big Boy, moving closer to Old Bunk and lowering his voice mysteriously, “I know you’ll think I’m crazy, but there’s something to that stuff. Maybe we don’t understand it, and of course there’s a lot of fakes, but I got this from Mother Trigedgo. She’s that Cornish seeress, that predicted the big cave in the stope of the Last Chance mine, and now I know she’s good. She tells fortunes by cards and by pouring water in your hand and going into a trance. Then she looks into the water and sees a kind of vision of all that is going to happen. Well, here’s what she said for me–and she wrote it down on a paper.

      “‘You will soon make a journey to the west and there, in the shadow of a place of death, you will find two treasures, one of silver and the other of gold. Choose well between the two and─”

      “By grab, that’s right, boy!” exclaimed Old Bunk enthusiastically, “she described this place down to a hickey. You came west from Globe and when you went by here the shadow was still on those hills; and as for a place of death, Apache Leap got its name from the Indians that jumped over that cliff. Say, you could hunt all over Arizona and not find another place that came within a mile of it!”

      “That’s right,” mused Big Boy, “but I was thinking all the time that that place of death would be a graveyard.”

      “Sure, but how could a graveyard cast a shadow–they’re always on level ground. No, I’m telling you, boy, that there cliff is the place–lemme tell you how it got its name. A long time ago when the Indians were bad they had a soldiers’ post right here where this town stands, and they kept a lookout up on the Picket Post butte, where they could heliograph clear down to Tucson. Well, every time a bunch of Indians would go down out of the hills to raid some wagon-train on the trail this lookout would see them and signal Tucson and the soldiers would do the rest. It got so bymeby the Indians couldn’t do anything and at last Old Cochise got together about eight hundred Apaches and came over to wipe out the post. It looked easy at the time, because there was less than two hundred men, but the major in command was a fighting fool and didn’t know when he was whipped. The Apaches all gathered up on the top of those high cliffs–it’s flat on the upper side–and one night when their signal fires had burned down the soldiers sneaked around behind them. And then, just at dawn, they fired a volley and made a rush for the camp; and before they knowed it about two hundred Indians had jumped clean over the cliff. They killed the rest of them–all but two or three bucks that fought their way through the line–and now, by grab, you couldn’t get an Indian up there if you’d offer him a quart of whiskey. It’s sure bad medicine for Apaches.”

      “Isn’t it wonderful!” exclaimed Big Boy, “there’s no use talking–this sure is the place of death. And say, next time you go over to Globe you go and see Mother Trigedgo–I just want to tell you what she did!”

      “All right,” sighed Old Bunk, who preferred to talk business, and he settled down to listen.

      “This Mother Trigedgo,” began Big Boy, “isn’t an ordinary, cheap fortune-teller. Those people are all fakes because they’re just out for the dollar and tell you what they think you want to know. But Mother Trigedgo keeps a Cousin-Jack boarding house and only prophesies when she feels the power. Sometimes she’ll go along for a week or more and never tell a fortune; and then, when she happens to be feeling right, she’ll tell some feller what’s coming to him. Those Cousin Jacks are crazy about what she can do, but I never went to a seeress in my life until after we had that big cave. I’m a timber man, you see, and sometimes I take contracts to catch up dangerous ground; and the best men in the world when it comes to that work are these old-country Cousin Jacks. They’re nervy and yet they’re careful and so I always hire ’em; but when we were doing this work down in the stope of the Last Chance, they began talking about Mother Trigedgo. It seems she’d told the fortune of a boy or two–they were all of them boarding at her house–and she was so worried she could hardly cook on account of them working in this mine. It was swelling ground and there were a lot of old workings where the timbering had given way; and to tell you the truth I didn’t like it myself, although I wouldn’t admit it.”

      “Well, it was the twenty-second of April, and all that morning we could hear the ground working over head and when it came noon we went up above, as we says, for a breath of fresh air. But while we were СКАЧАТЬ