The Essential Max Brand - 29 Westerns in One Edition. Max Brand

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      XIV. THE FIRST ATTEMPT

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      The hole was deepening rapidly. The few hours of work had brought about amazing results, for the ground in this place was a loose mixture of sand and gravel; without using picks to loosen it first, the men simply shoveled as fast as their arms and backs could swing. They had made the first cut amply wide, and now, narrowing the pit at the depth of twelve feet, they left a ledge onto which the diggers cast up the dirt while two men on the shelf tossed it up again in relay to a great heap which was growing on the lip of the cut. They were down sixteen feet, and who could tell when a thrusting shovel might strike the treasure? So they were working like mad, never speaking, never even pausing to wipe the dropping sweat from their faces. Only the occasional grunt of effort rolled up, hollow and dull-sounding, from the deep hole.

      “Go up the hill and bring Dawn and his girl,” said the chief. “Ought to be getting close to twenty feet now, and I want ‘em to see as much as we see.”

      Accordingly, a messenger hurried up the course of the creek to the hut and returned to Dawn and the girl. In the meantime, the men had been arranged in four shifts by the leader. Three men were always on guard, overlooking the hole and at the cabins. Three more dug in the pit, and six were kept in reserve. Every half hour the shifts changed. The workers from the pit went up to stand their guard. The guard came back to wait for a turn in the pit, and three fresh men jumped down to take the shovels whose handles were kept warm from the friction of labor.

      Meanwhile Dawn and Jerry arrived.

      A tape was now run down the side of the pit, and a shout of exultation announced that they had cut a full nineteen feet. They gathered in a rush around the edges of the hole, so close, indeed, that the lip of the pit caved under one man and precipitated him, tumbling and yelling, to the bottom. But he came to his feet, snatched the shovel from the hands of a tired worker, and himself assailed the bottom-ground with fury.

      The dirt came up in a steady shower now, and there was no sound but the ringing scrape of little stones on the thin metal of the shovel blades as the gravel was flung high. The watchers swayed and stooped in harmony with the workers, as though by joining the rhythm they were joining the labor and helping. Now the tape measured twenty feet at the edges of the hole. In the center it reached to twenty-one.

      The laborers paused. Of one accord they raised their gloomy faces to the watchers above. Then, with not a word said by those above or those below, the task began again. Two more feet the hole was sunk. And then, uncalled, the men in the pit clambered to the surface, bringing their tools with them.

      Solid silence continued. The digging of the hole had brought the thought of the golden hoard close to every one. For an hour, every time a worker had thrust in his shovel and turned the edge against a solid rock, he had jerked it out expecting to find the tip bright with glittering yellow. At length:

      “We must of made wrong measurements,” said Moon. “We sure must of got the mountains lined up wrong, boys!”

      No one else ventured to answer until Silas Treat spoke.

      “Jack,” he said, “I looked over those sightings. I got ‘em lined up proper. There’s The Vixen; there’s The Crescent, and the point at the left is the peak of The Crescent. There’s Mount Noah, and there’s The Ravenhead. Don’t I know this country like I was born and raised here? No, sir, we sure got the right peaks lined up, and we sunk the old hole more’n twenty feet. Jack, they simply ain’t no treasure here, and old Cosslett, cuss his white-livered hulk, had a laugh at us while he was dying! Wish I had him here now, so I could plug him once more myself.”

      Afterward, Jerry Dawn wondered why that brutal speech did not shock her. But at the time she was intent on only one interest—gold! She paid no attention to even the surly faces around her. Here was a problem, and the reward for solving it was thousands of pounds of solid gold. She could not doubt that the treasure was buried in this vicinity. The slip of paper and the figures on it had been real; the code could not have lied to her.

      “But suppose,” she said at length, “that Cosslett didn’t know this country as well as you, Mr. Treat. To him it might be impossible to calculate which tip of The Crescent is the highest. It lies there like a new moon, on its back. Suppose he took the other tip as his guide and lined it up with Mount Noah beyond. That would bring the line farther over to our right.”

      She began walking, climbed a little mound, and stood on the top of it, shading her eyes and peering under the flat of her hand.

      “Here’s where the line would fall, Mr. Treat. And surely the chance is worth trying. I know we can’t fail.”

      The black look with which Jack Moon had been regarding Hugh Dawn cleared a little.

      “Boys,” he said, “shall we try it? Not now, because we’ve done a day’s work already, and night’s almost here. But tomorrow?”

      The expectant face of the girl had produced the inevitable reaction. The gold fever, which had exhausted them with the first great disappointment, returned with new force. There was but one gloomy voice of foreboding.

      “Here’s the place, right enough,” said Silas Treat, following the girl and, like her, squinting to line Mount Noah with the south crest of The Crescent, “but look here. How come old Cosslett was so strong he could bury his gold under rocks like this one?”

      He pointed to a great boulder on which he was standing. He leaned and laid hold on a ragged projecting edge. The rock did not move.

      “Cosslett wasn’t never the man I am,” he declared. “If I can’t budge this rock, how come it that old Cosslett could ever have put stones like this in the way?”

      “He might have had other men working for him,” answered Jack Moon. “That ain’t hard to explain.”

      “Hire gents? Gents that would know where the gold was buried as well as he knew? That don’t sound like Cosslett! He always played safe!”

      “Maybe when the hole was dug he just up and plugged ‘em and buried ‘em on top of the money,” suggested Jack Moon. “That sounds reasonable.”

      “Maybe it’s got a reasonable sound to you,” Silas Treat returned gruffly, “but it’s got a devilish bad sound to me. Anyway, if you want to dig, I’ll bear a hand. Only, how come these big rocks here?”

      Jerry Dawn pointed up the nearest side of the hollow.

      “See where the trees have been torn away along the hill by a landslide?” she exclaimed. “That same landslide must have rolled these rocks down. It made the mound, too. And well have to dig through the mound and then twenty feet beneath it. But I know that the gold is here! I feel it!”

      “That’s what all green hands at prospecting talk like,” declared one of the men.

      “The girl’s talking sense, though,” retorted another. “More sense than ever come out of your head, Nick! We’ll make that try, Jack!”

      “Good!” the leader said.