Ruth Fielding In the Saddle; College Girls in the Land of Gold

“That could not possibly be, when they work so long and hard for a pinch of gold dust,” declared the college instructor.

“They fling it away just as though it come easy,” returned Min. “Believe me! it’s much better for ’em to have you folks here and blow you to their best, than it is for them to go down to Yucca and blow it all in on red liquor.”

The miners would have gone further and given up their cabins or their tents to the use of the women. But even Rebecca had enjoyed sleeping out the night before and would not be tempted. The air was so dry and tonic in its qualities that the walls of a house or even of a tent seemed superfluous.

“I do miss my morning plunge or shower,” Helen admitted. “I feel as though all this red dust and grit had got into my skin and never would get out again. But one can’t rough it and keep clean, too, I suppose.”

“That water in the sluice looks lovely,” confessed Jennie Stone. “I’d dearly like to go paddling in it if there weren’t so many men about.”

“After all,” said Ruth, “although we are traveling like men we don’t act as they would. Tom slipped off by himself and behind that screen of bushes up there on the hillside he took a bath in the sluice. But there isn’t a girl here who would do it.”

“Oh, lawsy, I didn’t bring my bathing suit,” drawled Jennie. “That was an oversight.”

“Old Tom does get a few things on us, doesn’t he?” commented Helen. “Perhaps being a boy isn’t, after all, an unmitigated evil.”

“But the water’s so co-o-ld!” shivered Trix. “I’m sure I wouldn’t care for a plunge in this mountain stream. Will there be heated bathrooms at Freezeout Camp, Fielding?”

“Humph!” Miss Cullam ejaculated. “The title of the place sounds as though steam heat would be the fashion and tiled bathrooms plentiful!”

The third day of the journey was quite as fair as the previous days; but the way was still more rugged, so they did not travel so far. They camped that night in a deep gorge, and it was cold enough for the fires to feel grateful. Tom and the Mexican kept two fires well supplied with fuel all night. Once a coyote stood on a bank above their heads and sang his song of hunger and loneliness until, as Sally declared, she thought she should “fly off the handle.”

“I never did hear such an unpleasant sound in all my life – it beats the grinding of an ungreased wagon wheel! I wish you would drive him away, Tom.”

So Tom pulled out the automatic that he had been “aching” to use, and sent a couple of shots in the direction of the lank and hungry beast – who immediately crossed the gorge and serenaded them from the other bank!

“What’s the use of killing a perfectly useless creature?” demanded Ruth.

“No fear,” laughed Jennie. “Tom won’t kill it. He’s only shooting holes in the circumambient atmosphere.”

There was a haze over the mountain tops at dawn on the fourth day; but Min assured the girls that it could not mean rain. “We ain’t had no rain for so long that it’s forgotten how,” she said. “But mebbe there’ll be a wind storm before night.”

“Oh! as long as we’re dry – ”

“Yes, Miss Ruth,” put in the girl guide. “We’ll be dry, all right. But a wind storm here in Arizona ain’t to be sneezed at. Sometimes it comes right cold, too.”

“In summer?”

“Yep. It can git mighty cold in summer if it sets out to. But we’ll try to make Handy Gulch early and git under cover if the sand begins to sift.”

“Oh me! oh my!” groaned Jennie. “A sand storm? And like Helen I feel already as though the dust was gritted into the pores of my skin.”

“It ain’t onhealthy,” Min returned dryly. “Some o’ these old-timers live a year without seein’ enough water to take a bath in. The sand gives ’em a sort of dry wash. It’s clean dirt.”

“Nothing like getting used to a point of view,” whispered Sally Blanchard. “Fancy! A ‘dry wash!’ How do you feel, Rebecca Frayne?”

“Just as gritty as you do,” was the prompt reply.

“All right then,” laughed Ruth. “We all must have grit enough to hurry along and reach this Handy Gulch before the storm bursts.”

Min told them that there was a “sure enough” hotel at the settlement they were approaching. It was a camp where hydraulic mining was being conducted on a large scale.

“The claims belong mostly to the Arepo Mining and Smelting Company. They have several mines through the Hualapai Range,” said the guide. “This Handy place is quite a town. Only trouble is, there’s two rum sellin’ places. Most of the men’s wages go back to the company through drink and cards, for they control the shops. But some day Arizona is goin’ dry, and then we’ll shut up all such joints.”

“Dry!” coughed Helen. “Could anything be dryer than Arizona is right here and now?”

The seemingly tireless ponies carried the girls at a lope, or a gallop, all that forenoon. It was hard to get the eager little beasts to walk, and they never trotted. Miss Cullam claimed that everything inside of her had “come loose and was rattling around like dice in a box.”

“Dear me, girls,” sighed the teacher, “if this jumping and jouncing is really a healthful exercise, I shall surely taste death through an accident. But good health is something horrid to attain – in this way.”

But in spite of the discomforts of the mode of travel, the party hugely enjoyed the outing. There were so many new and strange things to see, and one always came back to the same statement: “The air is lovely!”

There were certainly new things to see when they arrived at Handy Gulch just after lunch time, not having stopped for that meal by the way. The camp consisted of fully a hundred wood and sheet-iron shacks, and the hotel was of two stories and was quite an important looking building.

Above the town, which squatted in a narrow valley through which a brawling and muddy stream flowed, was the “bench” from which the gold was being mined. There were four “guns” in use and these washed down the raw hillside into open sluices, the riffles of which caught the separated gold. The girls were shown a nugget found that very morning. It was as big as a walnut.

But most of the precious metal was found in tiny nuggets, or in dust, a grain of which seemed no larger than the head of a common pin.

However, although these things were interesting, the minute the cavalcade rode up to the hotel something much more interesting happened. There was a cry of welcome from within and out of the front door charged Jane Ann Hicks, dressed much as she used to be on the ranch – broad sombrero, a short fringed skirt over her riding breeches, high boots with spurs, and a gun slung at her belt.

“For the good land of love!” she demanded, seizing Ruth Fielding as the latter tumbled off her horse. “Where have you girls been? I was just about riding back to that Yucca place to look for you.”

Jennie and Helen came in for a warm welcome, too. Ann was presented to Miss Cullam and the other two girls before explanations were made by anybody. Then Ruth demanded of the Montana girl a full and particular account of what she had done, and why.

“Why, I reckon that Miss Phelps ain’t a friend of yours, after all?” queried Ann. “She’s one frost, if she is.”

“Now you’ve said something, Nita,” said Jennie Stone. “She is a cold proposition. Can you tell us what she’s doing out here?”

“I don’t know. She sure enough comes from that college you girls attend, don’t she?”

“She does!” admitted Helen. “She truly does. But she’s not a sample of what Ardmore puts forth – don’t believe it.”

“I opine she’s not a sample of any product, except orneriness,” scolded Ann, who was a good deal put out by the strange actions of Edith Phelps. “You see how it was. My train was late. According to the telegram I found waiting for me, you folks should have arrived at Yucca hours ahead of me.”

“And we were delayed,” sighed Ruth. “Go on.”

“I saw this Phelps girl,” pursued Ann Hicks, “and asked her about you folks. She said you’d been and gone.”

“Oh!” was the chorused exclamation from the other girls.

“And she is one of my pupils!” groaned Miss Cullam.

“She didn’t learn to tell whoppers at your college, I guess,” said Ann, bluntly. “Anyhow, she fooled me nicely. She said she was going over this very route you had taken and I could come along. She wouldn’t let me pay any of the expenses – not even tip the guide. Only for my pony.”

“But where is she now?” asked Ruth.

“And where is that Flapjack person – Min’s father?” cried Jennie.

“We got here last night and put up at this hotel,” Ann said, going steadily on with her story and not to be drawn away on any side issues. “We got here last night. Late in the evening somebody came to see this Phelps girl – a man.”

“Goodness!” exclaimed Rebecca. “And she is traveling without a chaperon!”

“‘Chaperon’ – huh!” ejaculated Ann. “She didn’t need any chaperon. She can take care of herself all right. Well, she didn’t come back and I went to bed. This morning I found a bit of paper on my pillow – here ’tis – ”

“That’s Edie’s handwriting,” Sally Blanchard said eagerly. “What does it say?”

“‘Good-bye. I am not going any farther with you. Wait, and your friends may overtake you.’ Just that,” said Ann, with disgust. “Can you beat it?”

“What has that wild girl done, do you suppose?” murmured Miss Cullam.

“Oh, she isn’t wild – not so’s you’d notice it,” said Ann. “Believe me, she knows her way about. And she shipped that guide.”

“Discharged Mr. Peters, do you mean?” Ruth asked. Min was not in the room while this conversation was going on.

“H’m. Yes. Mister Peters. He’s some sour dough, I should say! He was paid off and set down with money in his fist between two saloons. They’re across the street from each other, and they tell me he’s been swinging from one bar to the other like a pendulum ever since he was paid off.”

“Poor Min!” sighed Ruth Fielding.

“Huh?” said Ann Hicks. “If he’s got any folks, I’m sorry for ’em, too.”

CHAPTER XII – MIN SHOWS HER METTLE

There were means to be obtained at the Handy Gulch Hotel for the baths that the tourists so much desired, even if tiled bathrooms and hot and cold water faucets were not in evidence.

The party lunched after making fresh toilets, and then set forth to view the “sights.” Ruth inquired of Tom for Min; but their guide had disappeared the moment the party reached the hotel.

“She’s acquainted here, I presume,” said Tom Cameron. “Maybe she doesn’t wish to be seen with you girls. Her outfit is so very different from yours.”

“Poor Min!” murmured Ruth again. “Do you suppose she has found her father?”

Tom could not tell her that, and they trailed along behind the others, up toward the bench where the hydraulic mining was going on.

Only one of the nozzles was being worked – shooting a solid stream three inches in diameter into the hillside, and shaving off great slices that melted and ran in a creamlike paste down into the sluice-boxes. Half a hundred “muckers” were at work with pick and shovel below the bench. The man managing the hydraulic machine stood astride of it, in hip boots and slicker, and guided the spouting stream of water along the face of the raw hill.

The party of spectators stood well out of the way, for the work of hydraulic mining has attached to it no little danger. The force of the stream from the nozzle of the machine is tremendous; and sometimes there are accidents, when many tons of the hillside unexpectedly cave down upon the bench.

The man astride the nozzle, however, took the matter coolly enough. He was smoking a short pipe and plowed along the face of the rubble with his deadly stream as easily as though he were watering a lawn.

“And if he should shoot it this way,” said Tom, “he’d wash us down off the bench as though we were pebbles.”

“Ugh! Let’s not talk about that,” murmured Rebecca Frayne, shivering.

“Oh, girls!” burst out Helen, “see that man, will you?”

“What man?” asked Trix.

“Where man?” demanded Jennie Stone.

“Running this way. Why! what can have happened?” Helen pursued. “Look, Tom, has there been an accident?”

A hatless man came running from the far end of the bench. He was swinging his arms and his mouth was wide open, though they could not hear what he was shouting. The noise of the spurting water and falling rubble drowned most other sounds.

“Why, girls,” shouted Ann Hicks, and her voice rose above the noise of the hydraulic, “that’s the feller that guided us up here. That’s Peters!”

“Flapjack Peters?” repeated Tom. “The man acts as if he were crazy!”

The bewhiskered and roughly dressed man gave evidence of exactly the misfortune Tom mentioned. His eyes blazed, his manner was distraught, and he came on along the bench in great leaps, shouting unintelligibly.

“He is intoxicated. Let us go away,” Miss Cullam said promptly.

But the excitement of the moment held the girls spellbound, and Miss Cullam herself merely stepped back a pace. A crowd of men were chasing the irrepressible Peters. Their shouts warned the fellow at the nozzle of the hydraulic machine.

He turned to look over his shoulder, the stream of water still plowing down the wall of gravel and soil. It bored directly into the hillside and down fell a huge lump, four or five tons of debris.

“Git back out o’ here, ye crazy loon!” yelled the man, shifting the nozzle and bringing down another pile of rubble.

But Peters plunged on and in a moment had the other by the shoulders. With insane strength he tore the miner away from the machine and flung him a dozen feet. The stream of water shifted to the right as the hydraulic machine slewed around.

“Come away! Come away from that, Pop!” shrieked a voice, and the amazed Eastern girls saw Min Peters darting along the bench toward the scene.

Peters sprang astride the nozzle and shifted it quickly back and forth so that the water spread in all directions. He knew how to handle the machine; the peril lay in what he might decide to do with it.

“Come away from that, Pop!” shrieked Min again.

But her father flirted the stream around, threatening the girl and those who followed her. The men stopped. They knew what would happen if that solid stream of water collided with a human body!

“D’you hear me, Pop?” again cried the fearless girl. “You git off that pipe and let Bob have it.”

Bob, the pipeman, was just getting to his feet – wrathful and muddy. But he did not attempt to charge Peters. The latter again swept the stream along the hillside in a wide arc, bringing tons upon tons of gravel and soil down upon the bench. The narrow plateau was becoming choked with it. There was danger of his burying the hydraulic machine, as well as himself, in an avalanche.

The tourist party was in peril, too. They scarcely understood this at the moment, for things were transpiring so quickly that only seconds had elapsed since first Peters had approached.

The miners dared not come closer. But Min showed no fear. She plunged in and caught him around the body, trying to confine his arms so that he could not slew the nozzle to either side.

This helped the situation but little. For half a minute the stream shot straight into the hillside; then another great lump fell.

At the same moment Peters threw her off, and Min went rolling over and over in the mud as Bob had gone. But she was up again in a moment and made another spring for the man.

And then suddenly, quite as unexpectedly as the riot had started, it was all over. The hurtling, hissing stream of water fell to a wabbling, futile out-pouring; then to a feeble dribble from the pipe’s nozzle. The water had been shut off below.

The miners pyramided upon him, and in half a minute Flapjack Peters was “spread-eagled” on the muddy bench, held by a dozen brawny arms.

“Wait! wait!” cried Ruth, running forward. “Don’t hurt him. Take care – ”

“Don’t hurt him, Miss?” growled Bob, the man who had been flung aside. “We ought to nigh about knock the daylights out o’ him. Look what he done to me.”

“But you mustn’t! He’s not responsible,” Ruth Fielding urged.

The miners dragged Peters to his feet and there was blood on his face. Here is where Min showed the mettle that was in her again. She sprang in among the angry miners to her father’s side.

“Don’t none of you forgit he’s my pop,” she threatened in a tone that held the girls who listened spellbound and amazed.

“You ain’t got no call to beat him up. You know he can’t stand red liquor; yet some of you helped him drink of it las’ night. Ain’t that the truth?”

Bob was the first to admit her statement. “I s’pose you’re right, Min. We done drunk with him.”

“Sure! You helped him waste his money. Then, when he goes loco like he always does, you’re for beatin’ of him up. My lawsy! if there’s anything on top o’ this here airth more ornery than that I ain’t never seen it.”

CHAPTER XIII – AN URSINE HOLDUP

Peters was still struggling with his captors and talking wildly. He evidently did not know his own daughter.

“Well, what you goin’ to do with him?” demanded Bob, the pipeman. “We ain’t expected to stand and hold him all day, if we ain’t goin’ to be ’lowed to hang him – the ornery critter!”

“You shet up, Bob Davis!” said Min. “You ain’t no pulin’ infant yourself when you’re drunk, and you know it.”

The other men began laughing at the angry miner, and Bob admitted:

“Well, s’posin’ that’s so? I’m sober now. And I got work to do. So’s these other fellows. What you want done with Flapjack?”

Ruth Fielding was so deeply interested for Min’s sake that she could not help interfering.

“Oh, Min, isn’t there a doctor in this camp?”

“Yes’m. Doc Quibbly. He’s here, ain’t he, boys?”

“The old doc’s down to his office in the tin shack beyant the hotel,” said one. “I seen him not an hour ago.”

“Let’s take your father to the hotel, Min,” Ruth said. “These men will help us, I know. So will Tom Cameron. We will have the doctor look after your father.”

“The old doc can dope him a-plenty, I reckon,” said Bob.

“Sure we’ll help you,” said the rough fellows, who were not really hard-hearted after all.

“I dunno’s they’ll let him into the hotel,” Min said.

“Yes they will. We’ll pay for his room and you and the doctor can look out for him,” Ruth declared.

“You are good and helpful, Ruth Fielding,” said Miss Cullam, coming forward, much as she despised the condition of the man, Peters. “How terrible! But one must be sorry for that poor girl.”

“And Min has pluck all right!” cried Jennie Stone, admiringly. “We must help her.”

They were all agreed in this. Even Rebecca and Miss Cullam, who both shrank from the coarseness of the men and the roughness of Min and her father, commiserated the man’s misfortune and were sorry for Min’s strait.

Tom assisted in leading the wildly-talking Peters to the hotel. Ruth and Miss Cullam hurried on in advance to engage a room for the man whom they assured the proprietor was really ill. Min, meanwhile, went in search of the camp’s medical practitioner.

Dr. Quibbly was a gray-bearded man with keen eyes but palsied hands. He had plainly been wrecked by misfortune or some disease; but he had been left with all his mental powers unimpaired.

He took hold of the distraught Peters in a capable manner; and Tom, who remained to help nurse the patient, declared to Ruth and Helen that he never hoped to see a doctor who knew his business better than Dr. Quibbly knew it.

“He had Peters quiet in half an hour. No harmful drug, either. Told me everything he used. Says rest, and milk and eggs to build up the stomach, is all the chap needs. Min’s with him now and I’m going to sleep in my blanket outside the door to-night, so if she needs anybody I’ll be within call.”

It had been rather an exciting experience for the girls and they remained in their rooms for the rest of the day. The hotel proprietor offered to take them around at night and “show them the sights”; but as that meant visiting the two saloons and gambling halls, Miss Cullam refused for the party, rather tartly.

“No offence meant, Ma’am,” said the hotel man, Mr. Bennett. “But most of the tenderfeet that come here hanker to ‘go slumming,’ as they call it. They want to see these here miners at their amusements, as well as at their daily occupations.”

“I’d rather see them at church,” Miss Cullam told him frankly. “I think they need it.”

“Good glory, Ma’am!” exclaimed the man. “We git that, too – once a month. What more kin you expect?”

“I suppose,” Miss Cullam said to her girls, “that a perfectly straight-laced New England old maid could not be set down in a more inappropriate place than a mining camp.”

The speech gave Ruth a suggestion for a scene in the picture play of “The Forty-Niners,” and she would have been delighted to have the Ardmore teacher play a part in that scene.

“However,” she said to Helen, whispering it over in bed that night, “it will be funny. I know Mr. Hammond will bring plenty of costumes of the period of forty-nine, for he wants women in the show. And there will be some character actress who can take the part of an unsophisticated blue stocking from the Hub, who arrives at the camp in the midst of the miner’s revelry.”

“Oh, my!” gasped Helen. “Miss Cullam will think you are making fun of her.”

“No she won’t – the dear thing! She has too much good sense. But she has given me what Tom would call a dandy idea.”

“Isn’t it nice to have Tom – or somebody – to lay our use of slang to?” said Ruth’s chum demurely.

The party did not leave Handy Gulch the next day, nor the day following. There were several excuses given for this delay and they were all good.

One of the ponies had developed lameness; and a burro wandered away and Pedro had to spend half a day searching for him. Perhaps the Mexican lad would have been quicker about this had Min been on hand to hurry him. But having been close beside her father all night she lay down for needed sleep while Tom Cameron and the doctor took her place.

The report from the sickroom was favorable. In a few hours the man who had come so near to bringing about a tragedy in Handy Gulch would be fit to travel. Ruth declared that she would wait for him, and he should go along with the party to Freezeout.

“But you are our guide and general factotum, Min. We depend on you,” she told the sick man’s daughter.

“I dunno what that thing is you called me; but I guess it ain’t a bad name,” said Min Peters. “If you’ll jest let pop trail along so’s I kin watch him he’ll be as good as pie, I know.”

Then, there was Miss Cullam’s reason for not wishing to start. She said she was “saddle sick.”

“I have been seasick, and trainsick; but I think saddlesick must be the worst, for it lasts longer. I can lie in bed now,” said the poor woman, “and feel myself wabbling just as I do in that hateful saddle.

“Oh, dear, me, Ruthie Fielding! I wish I had never agreed to come without demanding a comfortable carriage.”

“They tell me that there are places on the trail before we get to Freezeout so narrow that a carriage can’t be used. The wagons are going miles and miles around so as to escape the rough places of the straighter trail.”

“Goodness!” exclaimed Miss Cullam in disgust. “Is it necessary to get to Freezeout Camp in such a short time? I tell you right now: I am going to rest in bed for two days.”

And she did. The girls were not worried, however. They found plenty to see and to do about the mining town. As for Ruth, she set to work on her scenario, and kept Rebecca Frayne busy with the typewriter, too. She sketched out the scene she had mentioned to Helen, and it was so funny that Rebecca giggled all the time she was typewriting it.

“Goodness!” murmured Ruth. “I hope the audiences will think it is as funny as you do. The only trouble is, unless a good deal of the conversation is thrown on the screen, they will miss some of the best points. Dear me! Such is fate. I was born to be a humorist – a real humorist – in a day and age when ‘custard-pie comedians’ have the right-of-way.”

The third day the party started bright and early on the Freezeout trail. Flapjack Peters was well enough to ride; and he was woefully sorry for what he had done. But he was still too much “twisted” in his mind to be able to tell Ruth just how he came to start away from Yucca with Edith Phelps and Ann Hicks, instead of waiting for the entire party to arrive.