John Brown had concluded to “quit work and go to mining.” Not that mining is not work; but a man doesn’t get so tired working for himself, choosing his own hours and resting when he pleases, as he does working in another man’s time. It is like picking tame blackberries inside the garden fence for the family table, and picking wild blackberries in the fields and hedgerows and eating as one goes. Every boy knows how that is; and some of these good-natured, wandering, Western men are very like big boys.
John was still the teamster at the engineers’ camp in the cañon. He had been a sailor in his native Northern seas. He had been a fisherman of the Skager Rack; and more than once, by his own story, he had been driven out to sea, when drifting from his trawls, and picked up by one of the numerous vessels of the fishing-fleet that is always lying off or on the entrance to the strait. He had been a teamster on the plains where the Indians were “bad.” Once, when crossing the great Snake River plains, he had picked up a curious stone shaped by the Indians which he recognized as a “sinker,” such as he himself had made and used on the fishing-grounds of the far North. John had a little ranch of his own, and he owned half a house. The other half of the house was on the land of the adjoining settler. The two men had taken up preëmption claims, side by side, and to save expense had built a joint-dwelling on the boundary line between the two claims. Each man lived in his own side of the house—the half that rested on his land. John had lived six months on his claim, as the law requires before a settler can secure a title to his land. He was now working to get the money to improve it into a farm. He was a bit of a carpenter; and in many odd ways he was clever with his hands, as fishermen and sailors almost always are. Jack Gilmour possessed a riding-whip, such as the cowboys call a “quirt,” which John had braided for him, with skill and economy, out of leather thongs cut from scraps of waste leather, old boot-legs, or saddle-straps, discarded by the camps.
Such a companion as this, so experienced and variously gifted, and so uniformly gentle, was sure to be missed. Jack found the cañon a much duller place without his friend. He and Charley Moy, the Chinese cook, used to discourse about John, and recount his virtues, much as we linger over praises of the dead—although John’s camp was but five miles away, and he himself in good health, for all any one knew to the contrary.
After a while, Jack got permission to ride up the river to John’s camp and pay him a visit; and he was to be allowed to make the trip alone. Jack had been promoted, since his fishing expedition of two summers before, from a donkey and one spur to a pony of his own, a proper boy’s saddle, and two spurs, all in consequence of his advancing years and the increasing length of his legs. The pony was called “Lollo,” for just when he came the children had been reading “Jackanapes,” and the new pony, like the pony in the story, was “red-haired.” He had belonged, not to the gypsies, but to the Indians, who had broken and branded him. One of his ears was clipped, and the brand on his flank was a circle with a bar through the centre. He had the usual thick mane and tail of a “cayuse,” a white nose, and four white feet.
Now, there is an ancient rhyme which says:
“One white foot, buy him;
Two white feet, try him;
Three white feet, deny him;
Four white feet and a white nose,
Take off his hide and give him to the crows!”
But Lollo shook the dust of the trail from his four white feet, in defiance of the crows; nor was he ever known to hide the light of his white nose under a bushel, except when there were oats in the bottom of it.
Jack’s mother advised him to make sure of his lunch by taking it with him, in case John might be absent from the camp in the hills. But for some reason (it is very difficult to know a boy’s real reasons) Jack preferred to take the chances of the trip without provisions.
His father told him that when he had ridden as far as John Turner’s, by the river trail, he must take the upper trail which runs along the bluffs.
As it turned out, this was mistaken advice. The upper trail was not a good one, as Jack soon discovered; and in certain places, where it was highest and steepest above the river, it had been nearly rubbed out by the passage of herds of stock, crowding and climbing past one another and sliding over the dry and gritty slope.
In one spot it disappeared as a footing altogether, and here Jack was obliged to dismount and creep along on all fours, Lollo following as he could. A horse can go, it is said, wherever a man can go without using his hands. As Jack used his hands it was hardly fair to expect Lollo to follow; but the pony did so. These Western horses seem as ready as the men to risk themselves on dangerous trails, and quite as sure of what they are about.
What with all these ups and downs, the breeze on the bluffs, and the natural state of a boy’s appetite about midday, Jack was hoping that lunch would be ready at John’s camp by the time he reached it; and it is possible that he wished he had not been so proud, and had taken a “bite” in his pocket, as his mother advised him.
John’s camp was in a gulch where a cool stream came down from the hills. There were shade and grass and flowers in the season of flowers. The prospect-holes were higher up beneath the basalt bluffs which rise like palisades along the river. Earlier prospectors had driven tunnels, such as prisoners dig under the foundations of a wall, some extending a few feet, some farther, under the base of the bluffs. John was pushing these burrows farther still and “panning out” the dirt he obtained in his progress.
Jack soon found the sluice-boxes that John had built, and the “head” he had made by damming the little stream, but he could not find John nor John’s camp.
He argued with himself that John would not be likely to “make camp” below the pool of water; it was clear and cold, much better for drinking than the murky river water. His searching, therefore, was all up the gulch instead of down toward the river; but nowhere could he discover a sign of John nor of his belongings.
Jack’s mother asked him afterwards, when he told his story, why he did not call or make a noise of some kind. He said that he did whistle, but the place was so “still and lonesome” that he “did not like the sound of it.”
His hope now was that John might be at work in one of the tunnels under the bluffs. So he climbed up there; and by this time he was quite empty and weak-hearted with hunger. He had a fine view of the river and its shores, rising or sinking as the bluffs came to the front, or gave place to slopes of dry summer pastures. There was a strong wind blowing up there, and the black lava rocks in the sun were like heated ovens. The wind and the river’s faint ripple, so far below, were the only sounds he could hear. There were no living sounds of labor, or of anything that was human or homelike.
At the entrance to one of the tunnels he saw John’s canvas overalls, his pick and shovel, a gold-pan, and a wheelbarrow of home construction. Jack examined the latter and saw that the only shop-made part of it was the wheel, an old one which John must have found, and that John by his own ingenuity had added the other parts out of such materials as he could find.
The sight of these things, lying unused and unclaimed by their owner, made Jack feel more dismal than ever. The overalls, in particular, were like a picture of John himself. The whole place began to seem strange and awesome.
Jack crept into the short tunnels, where it was light even at the far end; and he saw nothing there, either to explain or to add to his fears. But the long tunnel was as black as night. Into that he dared not go.
He looked once more at the dreary little heap of tools and clothing, and with an ache that was partly in his heart, partly no doubt in the empty region of his stomach, he climbed down again into the gulch, mounted Lollo and rode away.
When he came to the bad place on the trail, he slid down, keeping ahead of Lollo, who shuffled along cautiously behind him. Lollo would not have stepped on Jack, but he might have slipped and fallen on him. However, a cayuse on a bad trail attends strictly to business, and is quite safe if he can keep but two of his feet on firm ground.
If Jack’s father had known about that place on the trail he never would have sent Jack by that way; and it was well that his mother had no notion of it. As it was, they were merely surprised to see the boy returning about the middle of the hottest part of the afternoon, and were not a little sorry for his disappointment when they heard the story of the trip.
Mrs. Gilmour shared the boy’s anxiety about John; and Charley Moy, while he was giving Jack his dinner, told some very painful stories of miners done away with on their solitary claims for the sake of their supposed earnings. Mr. Gilmour said there might be a dozen explanations of John’s absence; and, moreover, that Jack hadn’t found the camp at all, and the camp should be there, or some sign of its having been there must remain to indicate the spot.
Still the boy could not dismiss his fears, until two or three days later John himself stopped at the cañon, on his way to town, not only alive but in excellent health and spirits.
He told Jack that he had been at his camp all the time the boy was searching for him; but the camp was at the mouth of the gulch, close to the river, where he had found a spring of pure cold water. Very near the spring was a miner’s shanty, deserted but still quite habitable. The advantages of house and spring together had decided John to camp there, instead of higher up and nearer to his ditches. He urged Jack to make the trip again, and in a week or so the boy repeated his visit.
This time he did not take the upper trail. John said that that trail was only used at high water in the spring, when the river rose above the lower trail.
The lower trail along the river bank was safe and pleasant, and not so hot as the upper one; and this time there were no adventures. Adventures do very well to tell of afterward, but they do not always make a happy journey.
John was at home, and seemed very glad to see the boy. He took him up on the bluffs to show him his workings, and Jack found it very different, up there by the tunnels,—not at all strange and anxious. He did not mind the dark tunnel a bit, with John’s company and a candle to guide him.
John showed him the under surface of the bluffs, exposed where he had undermined them and scraped away the dirt. These lava bluffs were once a boiling flood of melted rock. The ground it flowed over and rested upon after it cooled had been the bed of a river. In its soft state the lava had taken the impression of the surface of the river-bed, and after it cooled the forms remained the same; so that the under surface of these ancient bluffs was like a plaster cast of the ancient river-bed. The print could be seen of stones smoothed by water, and some of the stones were still embedded in the lava crust.
Now this river came down from the mountains, where every prospector in Idaho knows there is plenty of gold for those who can discover it. John argued that the old river-bed must have had, mixed with its sand, fine gold for which no one had ever prospected. The new bed which the river had worn for itself at the foot of the bluffs probably contained quite as much gold, sunk between stones or lodged in potholes in the rocks (as it lodges against the riffles in a sluice-box), but no one could hope to get that gold, for the water which covered it. The old river-bed was covered only with rock, which “stays put” while you dig beneath it.
So, on the strength of this ingenious theory, John was digging where the other theorists had dug before him. He was not getting rich, but he was “making wages” and enjoying himself in the pleasant camp in the gulch; and as yet he had not found any of the rich holes.
He made a great feast in the boy’s honor. The chief dish was stewed grouse, rolled up in paste and boiled like dumplings. Jack said those grouse dumplings were about the best eating he had ever “struck.” They also had potatoes, baked in the ashes, and canned vegetables and stewed apples and baking-powder biscuits and honey; and to crown the feast, John made a pot of strong black coffee and sweetened it very sweet.
But here the guest was in a quandary. He refused the coffee, because he was not allowed to drink coffee at home; but he could see that his refusal made John uncomfortable, for there was no milk; there was nothing else that he could offer the boy to drink but water, and water seemed very plain at a feast.
Jack wondered which was worse—for a boy to break a rule without permission, or to seem to cast reproach upon a friend’s entertainment by refusing what was set before him. He really did not care for the coffee; it looked very black and bitter; but he cared so much for John that it was hard to keep on refusing. Still, he did refuse, but he did not tell John his reason. Somehow he didn’t think that it would sound manly for a big boy, nearly twelve years old, to say he was forbidden to drink coffee.
Afterward he told his mother about it, and asked her if he had done right. His mother’s opinion was that he had, but that he might have done it in a better way by telling John his reason for refusing the coffee. Then there would have been no danger of John’s supposing that the boy refused because he did not like that kind of coffee.
Jack’s little problem set his mother thinking how often we do what is right, at some cost to ourselves, perhaps, but do it in such an awkward, proud way, that we give pain to others and so undo the value of our honest effort to be good; and how, in the matter of feasts, it is much easier in our time for a guest to decline anything that does not suit him in the way of eating and drinking than it used to be long ago, when a gentleman was thought not to have “dined” unless he had both eaten and drunk more than was good for him; and how, in the matter of rules, it is only little silly boys who are ashamed to confess that they are not their own masters. The bravest and wisest men have been keepers of simple rules in simple matters, and in greater ones respecters of a loving Intelligence above their own, whose laws they were proud to obey.
The courage that displays itself in excesses is happily no longer the fashion; rather the courage that keeps modestly within bounds, and can say “no” without offense to others.