CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
THE PAT CONNOLLY MINE
Gary decided offhand that he had been neatly sold. He sat down on the loose rubble near Faith and made himself a smoke. The grove and the cabin were hidden from him by the narrow little ridge that looked perfectly smooth from the cañon bottom. But the rest of the cañon—the corral, the potato patch, the alfalfa—lay blocked out in miniature far below him. He stared down upon the peaceful picture it made and wondered why he had climbed all the way up here just following the pinto cat. For the matter of that, his following the cat was not half so purposeless as the cat’s coming had been.
He looked down at her curled asleep in her little hollow. It struck him that this must have been her destination each time she crossed the creek and started up the bluff. But why should the cat come away up here every day? Gary did not attempt to explain the vagaries of a cat so eccentric as Faith had proved herself to be. He wondered idly if he were becoming eccentric also, just from constant association with Faith.
He laughed a little to himself and picked up a piece of malapi rock; balanced it in his hand while he thought of other things, and tossed it down the slide. It landed ten feet below him and began rolling farther, carrying with it a small avalanche of loose rocks. Gary watched the slide with languid interest. Even so small a thing could make a tiny ripple in the dead calm of the cañon that day.
The slide started by that one rock spread farther. Other rocks loosened and went rolling down the bluff, and Gary’s eyes followed them and went higher, watching to see where next a rock would slip away from the mass and go rolling down. It seemed to him that the whole slide might be easily set in motion with no more than a kick or two at the top. He got up and began to experiment, kicking a rock loose here and there. There was no danger to himself, since he stood at the top of the slide. As for Faith, she had sprung up in a furry arch at the first slithering clatter and was now viewing the scene with extreme disfavor from the secure vantage point of a shelf on the ledge above Gary.
In a very few minutes Gary had set the whole surface of the slide in motion. The noise it made pleased him immensely. It served to break that waiting silence in the cañon. When the rocks ceased rolling, he started others. Finally he found himself standing upon firm ground again, with an outcropping of gray quartz just below him. His eyes fixed themselves upon the quartz in a steady stare before he dug heels into the slope and edged down to it.
With a malapi rock bigger than his two fists he hammered off a piece of quartz and held it in the shade of his body while he examined it closely. He turned it this way and that, fearful of deceiving himself by the very strength of his desire. But all the while he knew what were those little yellow specks that gleamed in the shade.
He knelt and pounded off other pieces of the quartz and compared them anxiously with the first. They were all identical in character: steel gray, with here and there the specks of gold in the gray, and the chocolate brown streaks and splotches of hematite—the “red oxide” iron which runs as high as seventy per cent. iron. Hematite and free gold in gray quartz——
“A prettier combination for free gold I couldn’t have made to order!” he whispered, almost as if he were praying. “It’s good enough for my girl’s ‘million-dollar mine’—though they do get rich off a piece of gold float in the movies!” He began to laugh nervously. A weaker-souled man would probably have wept instead.
With the side of his foot he tore away the rubble from the quartz outcropping. There, just where he had been kneeling, he discovered a narrow vein of the bird’s-eye porphyry such as he had found at the cabin. Here, then, lay the object of all his tiresome prospecting. So far as he could judge, with only his hands and feet for digging, the vein averaged about eight inches in width. Whether the porphyry formed a wall for the quartz he could not tell at the surface; but he hoped fervently that it did. With hematite, gray quartz and bird’s-eye porphyry he would have the ideal combination for a rich, permanent gold mine. And Pat, he reflected breathlessly, might really have her millions after all.
He picked up what he believed to be average samples of the vein and started back down the bluff, his imagination building air castles, mostly for Patricia. If he dramatized the event and cast himself for the leading man playing opposite Patricia, who was the star, surely he had earned the right to paint rose tints across the veil that hid his future and hers.
He had forgotten all about the cat; but when he reached the cabin, there she was at his heels looking extremely self-satisfied and waving her tail with a gentle air of importance. Gary laid his ore samples on the table and stood with his hands on his hips, looking down at Faith with a peculiar expression in his eyes. Suddenly he smiled endearingly at the cat, stooped and picked her up, holding her by his two hands so that he could look into her eyes.
“Doggone you, Faith, I wish to heck you could talk! I wouldn’t put it past you to think like humans. I’ll bet you’ve been trying all along to show me that outcropping. And I thought you were hunting mice and birds and gophers just like a plain, ordinary cat! You can’t tell me—you knew all about that gold! I’ll bet you’ve got a name all picked out for the mine, too. But it won’t go, I’ll tell a meddlesome world. That is, unless you’ve decided it ought to be called ‘The Pat Connolly.’ Because that’s the way it’s going on record, if Handsome Gary has anything to say about it—and I rather think he has!”
Faith blinked at him and mewed understandingly. Gary wooled her a bit and put her down, considerately smoothing down the fur he had roughed. Faith was a forgiving cat, and she immediately began purring under his fingers. After that she tagged him indefatigably while he got mortar, pestle and pan, and carried them down to a shady spot beside the creek.
Gary’s glance strayed often to the bluff while he broke bits off each sample of quartz and dropped them into the iron mortar. Then, with the mortar held firmly between his knees, Gary picked up the eight-inch length of iron with the round knob on the end and began to pulverize the ore. For a full quarter of an hour the quiet air of the grove throbbed to the steady pung, pung, pung, of the iron pestle striking upon rock particles in the deep iron bowl.
About twice in every minute, Gary would stop, dip thumb and finger into the mortar, and bring up a pinch of pulverized rock at which he would squint with the wholly unconscious eagerness of a small boy. Naturally, since he was not flattening a nugget of solid gold in the mortar, he failed to see anything except once when he caught an unmistakable yellow gleam from a speck of gold almost half the size of a small pinhead.
He gloated over that speck for a full minute before he shook it carefully back into the mortar. And then you should have heard him pound!
He was all aquiver with hope and eager expectancy when at last he poured the pulverized quartz into the gold pan and went digging his heels down the bank to the water. Faith came forward and stood upon a dry rock, mewing and purring by turns, and waving her tail encouragingly while she watched him.
Those who plod along the beaten trail toward commercial success can scarcely apprehend the thrill of winning from nature herself the symbol that promises fulfillment of hope and dreams coming true. The ardency of Gary’s desire was measurable only by the depth of his love for Patricia. For himself he had a man’s normal hunger for achievement. To discover a gold mine here in Johnnywater Cañon, to develop it in secret to the point where he could command what capital he needed for the making of a real mine, that in itself seemed to Gary a goal worth striving for. To fill Patricia’s hands with virgin gold which he had found for her, there spoke the primitive desire of man since the world was young; to bring the spoils of war or the chase and lay them, proud offering of love, at the feet of his Woman.
Gary turned and tilted the pan, tenderly as a young mother cradles her first-born. He dipped and rocked and spilled the water carefully over the rim; dipped and rocked and tilted again. The three deep creases stood between his straight, dark eyebrows, but now they betokened eager concentration upon his work. At last, he poured clear water from the pan carefully, almost drop by drop. He tilted the pan slowly in the sunlight and bent his head, peering sharply into the pan. His heart seemed to be beating in his throat when he saw the trail of tiny yellow particles following sluggishly the spoonful of black sand when he tilted the pan.
“I’ve got it, Steve,” he exclaimed, looking up over his shoulder. He caught his breath in the sudden realization that he was looking into the empty sunlight. Absorbed as he had been in the gold, the felt presence of Steve Carson looking over his shoulder had seemed perfectly natural and altogether real.
The momentary shock sobered him. But the old dread of that felt presence no longer assailed him as something he must combat by feigning unconsciousness. The unreasoning impression that Steve Carson—the mind of him—was there just behind his shoulder, watching and sharing in his delight, persisted nevertheless. Gary caught himself wondering if the thing was really only a prank of his imagination. Feeling a bit foolish, but choosing to indulge the whimsy, he stood up and turned deliberately, the pan held out before him.
“Steve Carson, if dead people go on living and thinking, and if you really are hanging around just out of sight but watching the game, I’m here to say that I hope you’re glad I found this vein. And I want to tell you right now that if there’s any money to be made out of it, it’s going to the finest, squarest little girl in the world. So if there is such a thing as a spirit, just take it from me everything’s going to be on the square.”
He carried the pan up to the cabin and carefully rinsed the gold down into a jelly glass. He made no apology to himself for the little speech to a man dead and gone these five years. Having made himself as clear on the subject as was diplomatic—supposing Steve Carson’s spirit had been present and could hear—he felt a certain relief and could lay the subject aside and devote himself to the fascination of hunting the gold out of the hills where it had lain buried for ages.
It occurred to him that he might find some particularly rich specimens, mortar them by hand and pan them for Patricia. A wedding ring made from the first gold taken and panned by hand—the hand of Gary Marshall—from “The Pat Connolly” mine, appealed to him irresistibly. Before he had mortared a lump of porphyry the size of a pigeon’s egg, Gary had resolved to pan enough gold for that very purpose. He pictured himself pulling the ring from his vest pocket while the minister waited. He experienced a prophetic thrill of ecstasy when he slipped the ring upon Patricia’s finger. The dreamed sentence, “I now pronounce you man and wife,” intoned by an imaginary minister, thrilled him to the soul.
Pung, pung, pung! It wouldn’t take so very long, if he mortared rock evenings, say, instead of killing time minute by minute playing solitaire with the deck of cards Waddell had thumbed before him. Pung, pung, pung! He could mortar the quartz in the evenings and pan it in the morning before he went to work. Pung, pung, pung, pung! He would hunt up a cow’s horn and fix it as he had seen old prospectors do, so that he could blow the sand from the panned gold and carry it unmixed to the jeweler. Pung, pung! The porphyry sample was fine as corn meal under the miniature stamp-mill of Gary’s pounding.
He was mighty careful of that handful of pulp. He even dipped the mortar half full of water and sloshed it round and round, pouring it afterward into the pan to rinse out what gold may have stuck to the iron. His finger tips stirred the wet mass caressingly in the pan, muddying the water with the waste matter and pouring that out before he squatted on his heels at the edge of the stream.
The result was gratifying in the extreme. Granting that the values were inclined to “jump” from quartz to porphyry and back again to the quartz, he would still lose none of the gold. He tried to be very conservative in estimating the probable value of the vein. He knew that, granting quartz and porphyry were in place from the surface downward, the values should increase with depth. It would take some digging, however, to determine that point. He was glad that Patricia knew nothing at all about it. If there were to be disappointment later on, he wanted to bear it alone. The joys of success he was perfectly willing to share; but not the sickening certitude of failure. He judged that the outcropping would run several hundred dollars to the ton, provided his panned samples had run a fair average of the vein.
Material for air castles aplenty, that! Gary was afraid to believe it. He kept warning himself headily that the world would be peopled entirely with multimillionaires if every man’s dream of wealth came true and every man’s hopes were realized.
“Ninety-nine per cent. of all mineral prospects are failures, Faith,” he told the spotted cat admonishingly. “We may get the raspberry yet on this proposition. I’m just waiting to see whether you’re a mascot or a jinx. I wish to heck you were a dog—I’d make you get busy and help dig!”