Copper Streak Trail Part 6

from crag to crag,' says I. 'A joke's a joke, and I can take a joke as well as any man; but when I'm sick in my bed, and the undertaker comes to my house and looks into my window and says, "Darlin'! I am waitin' for thee!"--that's no joke. And if Stanley Mitch.e.l.l's facetious friends begin any hilarity with me I'll transact negotiations with 'em--sure! So I put it up to you, Petey--square and aboveboard--what are they tryin' to work on Stan now?'

"'To get his mine, you idjit!' says Pete. 'Now be reasonable,' says I.

'How'd they know we got any mine?' 'Didn't you tote a sample out of that blisterin' old desert?' says Pete. 'We did,' I admits, 'just one little chunk the size of a red apple--and it weighed near a couple of ton whilst we was peris.h.i.+n' for water. But we stuck to it closer than a rich brother-in-law,' says I. 'You been had!' jeers Pete. 'What kind of talk is this? You caught that off o' Thorpe, over on the Malibu--you been had! Talk United States! Do you mean I've been bunked?' I spoke up sharp; but I was feelin' pretty sick, for I just remembered that we didn't register that sample when we mailed it to the a.s.sayer.

"'Your nugget's been seen, and sawed, and smeltered. Got that? As part of the skulduggery they been slippin' to young Stan, your package has been opened,' says Petey, leerin' at me. 'Great Scott! Then they know we got just about the richest mine in Arizona!' I says, with my teeth chatterin'

so that I stammers. 'Gosh, no! Else the coyotes would be pickin' your bones,' says Pete. 'They know you've got some rich ore, but they figure it to be some narrow, pinchin', piddlin' little vein somewheres. How can they guess you found a solid mountain of the stuff?'

"'Sufferin' cats!' says I. 'Then is every play I make--henceforth and forever, amen--to be gaumed up by a mess of hirelin' bandogs? Persecutin'

Stan was all very well--but if they take to molesting me any, it's going to make my blood fairly boil! Is some one going to draw down wages for makin' me mizzable all the rest of my whole life?' 'No such luck,'

says Petey. 'Your little ore package was taken from the mail as part of the system of pesterin' Stanley--but, once the big boss-devil glued his bug-eyes on that freeworkin' copper stuff, he throwed up his employer and his per diem, and is now operating roundabout on his own. They take it you might have papers about you showing where your claim is--location papers, likely. That's all! These ducks, here, want to go through you.

n.o.body wants to kill you--not now. Not yet--any more than usual. But, if you ask me,' said Petey, 'if they ever come to know as much about that copper claim as you know, they'll do you up. Yes, sir! From ambush, likely. So long as they are dependin' on you to lead them to it, you're safe from that much, maybe. After they find out where it is--_cuidado!_'

"'But who took that package out of the mail, Petey? It might have been any one of several or more--old Zurich, here at Cobre; or the postmaster at Silverbell; or the postal clerks on the railroad; or the post-office people at El Paso.'

"'You're an old pig-headed fool,' says Pete to me; 'and you lie like a thief. You know who it was, same as I do--old C. Mayer Zurich, grand champion lightweight collar-and-elbow grafter and liar, cowman, grubstaker, general storekeeper, postmaster, and all-round crook, right here in Cobre--right here where young Stanley's been gettin' 'em dealt from the bottom for three years. Them other post-office fellows never had no truck with Stanley--never so much as heard of him. Zurich's here.

He had the disposition, the motive, the opportunity, and the habit.

Besides, he sold you a shoddy coat once. Forgotten that?'"

Pete paused to glower over that coat; and young Mitch.e.l.l, big-eyed and gasping, seized the chance to put in a word:

"You're an ingenious old nightmare, pardner--you almost make it convincing. But Great Scott, man! Can't you see that your fine, plausible theory is all built on surmise and wild conjecture? You haven't got a leg to stand on--not one single fact!"

"Whilst I was first a-constructing this ingenious theory your objection might have carried force; for I didn't have a fact to stand on, as you observe. I conjectured round pretty spry, too. Reckon it took me all of half a second--while them two warriors was giving me the evil eye. I'll tell you how it was." He related the story of the shooting match and the lost bet. "And to this unprovoked design against an inoffensive stranger I fitted the only possible meaning and shape that would make a lick of sense, dovetailin' in with the real honest-to-goodness facts I already knew."

"But don't you see, old thing, you're still up in the air? Your theory doesn't touch ground anywhere."

"Stanley--my poor deluded boy!--when I got to the railroad I wired that a.s.sayer right off. Our samples never reached El Paso. So I wrote out my fake location and filed it. See what followed that filing--over yonder? I come this way on purpose, expecting to see those fires, Stanley. If they hadn't been there we'd have gone on to our mine. Now we'll go anywhere else."

"Well, I'll just be teetotally d.a.m.ned!" Stanley remarked with great fervor.

"Trickling into your thick skull, is it? Son, get a piece of charcoal.

Now you make black marks on that white rock as I tell you, to hold down my statements so they don't flutter away with the wind. Ready?

Number One: Our copper samples didn't reach the a.s.sayer--make a long black mark ... Therefore--make a short black mark ... Number Two: Either Old Pete's crazy theory is correct in every particular--a long black mark ... Or--now a short black mark ... Number Three: The a.s.sayer has thrown us down--a long black mark ... Number Four: Which would be just as bad--make a long black mark."

CHAPTER IV

Stanley Mitch.e.l.l looked hard at the long black mark; he looked out along the south to the low line of the Gavilan Hills; he looked at the red arc of sun peering suddenly over the Comobabi Range.

"Well--and so forth!" he said. "Here is a burn from the branding! And what are we going to do now?"

"Wash the dishes. You do it."

"You are a light-minded and frivolous old man," said Stan. "What are we going to do about our mine?"

"I've done told you. We--per you--are due to wash up the dishes. Do the next thing next. That's a pretty good rule. Meantime I will superintend and smoke and reflect."

"Do your reflecting out loud, can't you?" said Stan. His smooth forehead wrinkled and a sudden cleft appeared between his eyebrows, witness of an unaccustomed intentness of thought. "Say, Pete; this partners.h.i.+p of ours isn't on the level. You put in half the work and all the brains."

"'Sall right," said Pete Johnson. "You furnish the luck and personal pulchritude. That ain't all, either. I'm pickin' up some considerable education from you, learning how to p.r.o.nounce words like that--pulchritude. I misp.r.o.nounced dreadful, I reckon."

"I can tell you how to not misp.r.o.nounce half as many words as you do now," said Stan.

"How's that?" said Pete, greatly interested.

"Only talk half so much."

"Fair enough, kid! It would work, too. That ain't all, either. If I talked less you'd talk more; and, talking more, you'd study out for yourself a lot of the things I tell you now, gettin' credit from you for much wisdom, just because I hold the floor. Go to it, boy! Tell us how the affairs of We, Us & Company size up to you at this juncture."

"Here goes," said Stan. "First, we don't want to let on that we've got anything at all on our minds--much less a rich mine. After a reasonable time we should make some casual mention of discontent that we've sent off rock to an a.s.sayer and not heard from it. Not to say a word would make our conspirators more suspicious; a careless mention of it might make them think our find wasn't such-a-much, after all. Say! I suppose it wouldn't do to pick up a collection of samples from the best mines round Cobre--and inquire round who to write to for some more, from Jerome and Cananea, maybe; and then, after talking them up a while, we could send one of these samples off to be a.s.sayed, just for curiosity--what?"

"Bear looking into," said Pete; "though I think they'd size it up as an attempt to throw 'em off the trail. Maybe we can smooth that idea out so we can do something with it. Proceed."

"Then we'll have to play up to that location you filed by hiking to the Gavilan and going through the motions of doing a.s.sessment work on that d.i.n.ky little claim."

Feeling his way, Stan watched the older man's eyes. Pete nodded approval.

"But, Pete, aren't we taking a big chance that some one will find our claim? It isn't recorded, and our notice will run out unless we do some a.s.sessment work pretty quick. Suppose some one should stumble onto it?"

"Well, we've got to take the chance," said Pete. "And the chance of some one stumbling on our find by blind luck, like we did, isn't a drop in the bucket to the chance that we'll be followed if we try to slip away while these fellows are worked up with the fever. Seventy-five thousand round dollars to one canceled stamp that some one has his eye glued on us through a telescope right this very now! I wouldn't bet the postage stamp on it, at that odds. No, sir! Right now things shape up hotter than the seven low places in h.e.l.l.

"If we go to the mine now--or soon--we'll never get back. After we show them the place--_adios el mundo_!"

"Surely in vain the net is spread in the sight of any bird," Mitch.e.l.l quoted soberly. "So you think that after a while, when their enthusiasm dies down, we can give them the slip?"

"Sure! It's our only chance."

"Couldn't we make a get-away at night?"

"It is what they are hoping for. They'd follow our tracks. No, sir! We do nothing. We notice nothing, we suspect nothing, and we have nothing to hide."

"You want to remember that our location notice will be running out pretty soon."

"We'll have to risk it. Not so much of a risk, either. Cobre is the last outpost of civilization. South of here, in the whole strip from Comobabi to the Colorado River, there's not twenty men, all told, between here and the Mexican border--except yonder deluded wretches in the Gavilan; and none beyond the border for a hundred miles."

"It is certainly one big lonesome needle-in-the-haystack proposition--and no one has any idea where our find is, not within three days' ride. But what puzzles me is this: If Zurich really got wise to our copper, he'd know at once that it was a big thing, if there was any amount of it. Then why didn't he keep it private and confidential? Why tip it off to the G.P.? I have always understood that in robbery and murder, one is a.s.sisted only by intimate friends. What is the large idea?"

"That, I take it," laughed Pete, "is, in some part, an acknowledgment that it doesn't take many like you and me to make a dozen. You've made one or two breaks and got away with 'em, the last year or two, that has got 'em guessing; and I'm well and loudly known myself. There is a wise old saying that it's no use sending a boy to mill. They figure on that, likely; they wanted to be safe and sanitary. They sized it up that to dispatch only two or three men to adjust such an affair with us would be in no way respectful or segacious.

"Also, in a gang of crooks like that, every one is always pullin' for his buddy. That accounts for part of the crowd--prudence and a far-reaching spirit of brotherly love. For the rest, when the first ten or six made packs and started, they was worked up and oozing excitement at every pore. Then some of the old prospectors got a hunch there was something doing; so they just naturally up stakes and tagged along. Always doing that, old miner is. That's what makes the rushes and stampedes you hear about."

"Then we're to do nothing just now but to shun mind-readers, write no letters, and not talk in our sleep?"

"Just so," agreed Pete. "If my saddle could talk, I'd burn it. That's our best lay. We'll tire 'em out. The most weariest thing in the world is to hunt for a man that isn't there; the next worst is to watch a man that has nothing to conceal. And our little old million-dollar-a-rod hill is the unlikeliest place to look for a mine I ever did see. Just plain dirt and sand. No indications; just a plain freak. I'd sooner take a chance in the pasture lot behind pa's red barn--any one would. We covered up all the scratchin' we did and the wind has done the rest. Here--you was to do the talkin'. Go on."

"What we really need," declared Mitch.e.l.l, "is an army--enough absolutely trustworthy and reliable men to overmatch any interference."