The Helpers

"Not much! I never got any furder along that-a-way than to stake it off and make a map of it." Garvin found a pack of thumbed and grimy papers in his pocket and worked his way through it till he came upon the map. "You're an engineer," he said: "how's that for a jack-leg entry map?"

Jeffard examined the rude sketch and pronounced it good enough; after which he folded the paper absently and put it in his pocket. Garvin did not notice his failure to return it, – if, indeed, he thought or cared anything further about it, – and went on talking of his own unwisdom in driving a tunnel on a lode which did not "look right."

"We'll know better, this trip," he asserted, as somewhat of a salve to the former hurt. "We'll go higher up the gulch and sink a shaft; that's about what we'll do."

And this, in the fullness of time, was what they did. After a few days, Jeffard was able to inch his way by easy stages to the new location; and by the time Garvin had dug and blasted himself into a square pit windlass-deep, the convalescent was strong enough to take his place at the hoist.

From the very first, Jeffard was totally unable to share Garvin's enthusiastic faith in the possibilities of the new cast for fortune. Ignorant of the first principles of practical metal-digging, he was, none the less, a fairly good laboratory metallurgist; while Garvin, on the other hand, knew naught of man's, but much of nature's, book. Hence there arose many discussions over the possibilities; Jeffard contending that the silver-bearing lodes of the valley were not rich enough to bear pack-train transportation to the nearest railway point; and Garvin clinging tenaciously to the prospectors' theory that a "true-fissure" vein must of necessity prove a very Golconda once you had gone deep enough into its storehouse.

When all was said, the man of the laboratory won a barren victory. At thirty feet the lode in the shaft had dwindled to a few knife-blade seams, and the last shot fired in the bottom of the excavation put an end to the work of exploitation by letting in a flood of water. Since they had no means of draining the shaft so suddenly transformed into a well, Garvin gave over, perforce, but proposed trying their luck elsewhere in the valley before seeking a new field. Jeffard acquiesced, with the suggestion that they save time by prospecting in different directions; and this they did, Garvin taking the upper half of the valley and Jeffard the lower. At the end of a week, Jeffard gave up in disgust; and when his companion begged for yet one other day, was minded to stay in camp and invite his soul in idleness until the persevering one should be convinced.

As a matter of course, Garvin's day multiplied itself by three, and Jeffard wore out the interval as best he might, tramping the hillsides in the vicinity of the cabin to kill time, and smoking uncounted pipes on the doorstep in the cool of the day while waiting for Garvin's return.

It was in the pipe-smoking interregnum of the third day that the abandoned tunnel in the opposite hillside beckoned to him. Oddly enough, he thought, Garvin had never referred to it since the retelling of its history in the reminiscent pauses of their first outdoor evening together. Jeffard's eye measured the dump appraisively. It was a monument to the heroic perseverance of the solitary prospector.

"That hole must be thirty or forty feet into the hill," he mused. "And to think of his worrying it out alone!" Here idle curiosity nudged him with its blunt elbow, and he rose and knocked the ashes from his pipe. "I believe I'll go up and have a look at it. It'll kill another half-hour or so, and they're beginning to die rather hard."

He crossed the stream on Garvin's ancient foot-log, and clambered leisurely to the toe of the dump. The snows of two winters had washed the detritus free of soil, and Jeffard bent, hand on knee, to look for specimens of the ore-bearing rock.

"Gangue-rock, most of it, with a sprinkling of decomposed quartz along at the last," he said reflectively. "The quartz was the dike he struck, I suppose. He was wise to give it up. There's no silver in that stuff."

He picked up a bit of the snuff-colored rock and crumbled it in his hand. It was quite friable, like weathered sandstone, but when the fragment was crushed the particles still clung together as if matted with invisible threads. Jeffard was too new to the business of metal-hunting to suspect the tremendous significance of the small phenomenon, but he was sufficiently curious to gather a double handful of the fragments of quartz, meaning to ask Garvin if he had noticed the peculiarity. And when he had climbed to the tunnel and explored it to its rock-littered heading by the light of a sliver splintered from one of the pitchy logs of the timbering, he sauntered back to the cabin beneath the western cliff and made a fire over which to prepare supper against Garvin's return.

CHAPTER XIV

Garvin came into camp late, and Jeffard needed not to ask the result of the day's quest. He had cooked the simple supper, and they ate it together in silence – the big man too weary and dejected to talk, and Jeffard holding his peace in deference to Garvin's mood. Over the pipes on the doorstep Jeffard permitted himself a single query.

"No go?"

"Nary," was the laconic rejoinder.

Jeffard was the least demonstrative of men, but the occasion seemed to ask for something more than sympathetic silence. So he said: "It's hard luck; harder for you than for me, I imagine. Somehow, I haven't been able to catch the inspiration of the mineral-hunt; but you have, and you've worked hard and earned a better send-off."

"Huh! far as earnin' goes, I reckon it's a stand-off 'twixt the two of us. You've certain'y done your share o' the pullin' and haulin', if you have been sort o' like what the boys call a 'hoodoo.'"

Jeffard blew a cloud of smoke toward the gray rock-beard hanging ghostly beneath the black mouth of the excavation in the opposite hillside, and was far from taking offense. "Meaning that I haven't been enthusiastic enough to fill the bill?" he asked.

"I guess that's about it. And it always seemed sort o' cur'ous to me. Money'd do you a mighty sight more good than it would me."

Jeffard smoked his pipe out, debating with himself whether it was worth while to try to explain his indifference to his companion. He did try, finally, though more for the sake of putting the fact into words than in any hope of making it understandable to Garvin.

"I'm afraid it isn't in me to care very much about anything," he said, at the end of the reflective excursion. "Six months ago I could have come out here with you and given you points on enthusiasm; but since then I've lived two or three lifetimes. I'm a very old man, Garvin. One day, not so very long ago, if you measure by weeks and months, I was young and strong and hopeful, like other men; but instead of burning the candle decently at the proper end, I made a bonfire of it. The fire has gone out now, and I haven't any other candle."

The big prospector was good-naturedly incredulous. "You've had the fever, and you're rattled, yet; that's all that's the matter with you. You've been flat down on your luck, like one or two of the rest of us; but that ain't any reason why you can't get up ag'in, is it?"

Jeffard despaired of making it clear to any simple-hearted son of the wilderness, but he must needs try again.

"That is your view of the case, and it would be that of others who knew the circumstances as well as you do. But it doesn't fit the individual. David said he would wash his hands in innocency, and perhaps he could, and did – though I doubt it. I can't. When you picked me up that night on the shore of the pond, I'd been wandering around in the bottomless pit and had lost my way. I knew then I shouldn't find it again, and I haven't. I seem to have strayed into a region somewhere beyond the place where the actual brimstone chokes you; but it's a barren desert where nothing seems quite the same as it used to – where nothing is the same, as a matter of fact. Do I make it plain?"

"You bet you don't," responded Garvin, out of the depths of cheerful density. "You've been a mile or two out o' my reach for the last half-hour 'r so. Ther' ain't no use a-cryin' over spilt milk, is what I say; and when I go kerflummix, why, I just cuss a few lines and get up and mog along, same as heretofore."

Jeffard laughed, but there was no mirth in him.

"I envy you; you are a lucky man to be able to do it. I wish in my soul I could."

"What's the reason you can't?"

"That is precisely what I haven't been able to make you understand. But the fact remains. The Henry Jeffard my mother knew is dead and buried. In his place has arisen a man who is acquainted with evil, and is skeptical about most other things. Garvin, if you knew me as well as I know myself, you'd run me out of this valley with a gun before you slept. I owe you as heavy a debt of gratitude as any one man ever owed another, and yet if your welfare stood between the beginning and the end of some devil's service in which I might be commissioned, you wouldn't be safe to sleep in the same cabin with me."

"Oh, you be damned," said the big man, relapsing into a deeper depth of incredulity. "You've got a devil 'r two, all right, maybe, but they're the blue kind, and they'll soak out in the washin'. Fact o' the matter is, our cussed luck in this yere hole in the ground has struck in on you worse'n it has on me. You'll be all right when we get some place else and strike it rich."

Jeffard refilled his pipe and gave over trying to define himself in set terms. When next he broke silence it was to speak of the impending migration.

"I suppose we pull out in the morning?" he said.

"Might as well. We've played the string out up yere. Besides, summer's gone, and a month of fall, and the grub's runnin' shy."

"Where next?" inquired Jeffard.

"I dunno, hardly. 'Tain't worth while to strike furder in, this late in the season. We've got to be makin' tracks along back t'wards the valley afore the snow comes, and that'll be pretty quick now. What d' you say to tryin' some o' the gulches o' the Mosquito?"

"Anywhere you say. I'm with you – if you care to take me after what I've tried to tell you. But you'd much better go alone. You had it right a while ago; you have yoked yourself to a Jonah."

"Jonah nothin'!" growled the soft-hearted giant. "Nex' time I set out to devil you, I'll drill a hole aforehand and put in a pinch o' dannymite along with the joke. Then when I tech it off, you'll know."

The moon was riding high in the black arch of the sky, and the gray dump on the opposite mountain stood out in bold relief. Jeffard rose and leaned against the doorpost.

"Garvin, you have never yet told me who staked us for this trip," he said, broaching a subject which had more than once asked for speech.

The miner laughed. "You never asked. It's the same old man that staked me when I was yere the first time."

"When you dug that hole up yonder in the hill?"

"Um – hm."

"Who is he?"

Garvin hesitated. "I had a fool notion I wouldn't tell you till we'd struck somethin' worth while," he said finally. "If so be we've got to go back with our fingers in our mouths, I put it up that maybe you'd feel easier in your mind if you didn't know. You're so cussed thin-skinned about some things that a feller has to watch out for you continnyus."

Jeffard dug the kindly intention out of the upbraiding, and forebore to press the question. After all, what did it matter? Whatever befell, he was under no obligations to any one save Garvin. And in the itemizing of that debt, an obligation which made him restive every time he thought of it, he lost sight of the question he had intended asking about the peculiarity of the snuff-colored rock in the abandoned tunnel.

A little later, Garvin got up with a mighty yawn, and said: "If we're goin' to get out o' here afore noon to-morrer, I reckon we'd better be huntin' us a little sleep."

"Turn in if you like; I'm not sleepy yet," said Jeffard; and when Garvin was gone in, he fell to pacing up and down before the cabin door with his hands behind him and the cold pipe between his teeth.

To what good end had he been preserved by Garvin's interference on that night of despair two months before? Had the reprieve opened up any practicable way out of the cynical labyrinth into which he had wandered? Had his immense obligation to the prospector quickened any fibre of the dead sense of human responsibility, or lighted any fire of generous love for his kind?

He shook his head. To none of these questions could he honestly append an affirmative. In the desolate wreck he had made of his life no good thing had survived save his love for Constance Elliott. That, indeed, was hopeless on the side of fruition; but he clung to it as the one clue of promise, hoping, and yet not daring to hope, that it might one day lead him out of the wilderness of indifference. While he dwelt upon it, pacing back and forth in the moonlight, he recalled his picture of her standing in the dust-filtered afternoon sunlight, with the dim corridor for a background.