The Boys of Crawford's Basin

“There’s no end to it!”cried Joe, jumping out of his chair, striding up and down the room, and, for the last time in this history, rumpling his hair in his excitement. “There’s no end to it! There’s the hay-corral to enlarge – rock hauling all winter for you and me, Phil! We shall need a new ice-pond; for this new water-supply won’t freeze up in winter like the old one did! Then, when the ‘forty rods’ dries up, there will be the extension of our ditches down there; besides making a first-class road to bring all the travel our way – plenty of work in that, too! Then, when we bring the old lake-benches under cultivation, there will be new headgates needed and two new ditches to lay out, besides breaking the ground! Then – Oh, what’s the use? There’s no end to it – just no end to it!”

Joe was quite right. There was, and there still seems to be, no end to it.

The effect of Tom Connor’s strike on Mount Lincoln was just what my father had predicted: our whole district took a great stride forward; the mountains swarmed with prospectors; the town of Sulphide hummed with business; our new friend, Yetmore, doing a thriving trade, while our old friend, Mrs. Appleby, followed close behind, a good second.

As for Tom, himself, he is one of our local capitalists now, but he is the same old Tom for all that. Just as he used to do when he was poor, so he continues to do now he is rich: any tale of distress will empty his pocket on the spot. Though my father remonstrates with him sometimes, Tom only laughs and remarks that it is no use trying to teach old dogs new tricks; and moreover he does not see why he should not spend his money to suit himself. And so he goes his own way, more than satisfied with the knowledge that every man, woman and child in the district counts Tom Connor as a friend.

The fate of those two poor ore-thieves was so horrible that I hesitate to mention it. It was six months later that a prospector on one of the northern spurs of Lincoln came upon two dead bodies. One, a club-footed man, had been shot through the head; the other, unmistakably Long John, was lying on his back, an empty revolver beside him, and one foot caught in a bear-trap. Though the truth will never be known, the presumption is that, setting the stolen trap in a deer run in the hope of catching a deer, they had got into a quarrel; Clubfoot, striking at his companion, had caused him to step backward into the trap, when, in his pain and rage, Long John had whipped out his revolver and shot the other. What his own fate must have been is too dreadful to contemplate.

And the Crawford ranch? Well, the Crawford ranch is the busiest place in the county.

Peter, for whom my parents, like ourselves, took a great liking, quickly thawed out under my mother’s influence, and related to us briefly the reason for his having taken to his solitary life. He had been a school-teacher in Denver, but losing his wife and two children in an accident, he had fled from the place and had hidden himself up in our mountains, where for several years he had spent a lonely existence with no company but old Socrates. Now, however, his house destroyed and his mountain overrun with prospectors, he needed little inducement to abandon his old hermit-life; and accepting gladly my father’s suggestion that he stay and work on the ranch, he built for himself a good log cabin up near the waterfall, and there he and Socrates took up their residence.

There was plenty of work for him and for all of us – indeed, for the first two years there was almost more than we could do. It took that length of time for the “forty rods”to drain off thoroughly, but by the middle of the third summer we were cutting hay upon it; the ore wagons from Sulphide and from the Big Reuben were passing through in a continuous stream; the stage-coach was coming our way; the old hill road was abandoned.

In fact, everybody is busy, and more than busy – with one single exception.

The only loafer on the place is old Sox – tolerated on account of his advanced age. That veteran, whose love of mischief and whose unfailing impudence would lead any stranger to suppose he had but just come out of the egg, spends most of his time strutting about the ranch, stealing the food of the dogs and chickens; awing them into submission by his supernatural gift of speech. And as though that were not enough, his crop distended with his pilferings to the point of bursting, he comes unabashed to the kitchen door and blandly requests my mother, of all people, to give him a chew of tobacco!

But the mail-coach has just gone through, and I hear Joe shouting for me; I must run.

“Yetmore wants fifty-hundred of oats, Phil,”he calls out. “You and I are to take it up. We must dig out at once if we are to get back to-night. To-morrow we break ground on our new ditches. A month or more of good stiff work for us, old chap!”

He rubs his hands in anticipation; for the bigger he grows – and he has grown into a tremendous fellow now – the more work he wants. There is no satisfying him.

We have been very fortunate, wonderfully fortunate; but I am inclined to set apart as pre-eminently our lucky day that one in the summer of ’79, when young Joe Garnier, the blacksmith’s apprentice, stopped at our stable-door to ask for work!

THE END