The Boys of Crawford's Basin

“Well!” I exclaimed. “Whoever would have thought there was a house in here?”

“No one, I expect,” replied the man. “At any rate, with one exception, you are the first strangers to cross the threshold; and yet I have lived here a good many years, too. Come in and make yourselves at home.”

Though we wondered greatly who our host could be and were burning to ask him his name, there was something in his manner which warned us to hold our tongues. But whatever his name might be, there was little doubt about his occupation. He was evidently a mighty hunter, for, covering the walls, the floor and his sleeping-place were skins innumerable, including foxes, wolves and bears, some of the last-named being of remarkable size; while one magnificent elk-head and several heads of mountain-sheep adorned the space over his fireplace.

Our host having lighted a fire, was busying himself preparing a simple meal for us, when there came a gentle cough from the direction of the doorway, and there on the threshold stood the raven as though waiting for permission to enter.

The man turned, and seeing the bird standing there with its head on one side, said, laughingly: “Ah, Sox, is that you? Come in, old fellow, and be introduced. These gentlemen are friends of mine. Say ‘Good-morning.’”

“Good-morning,” repeated the raven; and having thus displayed his good manners, he half-opened his wings and danced a solemn jig up and down the floor, finally throwing back his head and laughing so heartily that we could not help joining in.

“Clever fellow, isn’t he?” said the man. “His proper name is Socrates, though I call him Sox, for short. He is supposed to be getting on for a hundred years old, though as far as I can see he is just as young as he was when I first got him, twenty years ago. Here,” – handing us each a piece of meat – “give him these and he will accept you as friends for life.”

Whether he accepted us as friends remained to be seen, but he certainly accepted our offerings, bolting each piece at a single gulp; after which he hopped up on to a peg driven into the wall, evidently his own private perch, and announced in a self-satisfied tone: “First in war, first in peace,” ending up with a modest cough, as though he would have us believe that he knew the rest well enough but was not going to trouble us with any such threadbare quotation.

This solemn display of learning set us laughing again, upon which Socrates, seemingly offended, sank his head between his shoulders and pretended to go to sleep; though, that it was only pretense was evident, for, do what he would, he could not refrain from occasionally opening one eye to see what was going on.

Having presently finished the meal provided for us, we suggested that we ought to be moving on, so, bidding adieu to Socrates, and receiving no response from that sulky philosopher, we followed our host into the open.

That he had not exaggerated when he said he knew every foot of these mountains, seemed to be borne out by the facts. He went straight away, regardless of the fog, up hill and down, without an instant’s hesitation, we trotting at his heels, until, in about an hour we found ourselves once more below the clouds, and could see not far away our two mules quietly feeding.

“Now,” said our guide, “I’ll leave you. If ever you come my way again I shall be glad to see you; though I expect it would puzzle you to find my dwelling unless you should come upon it by accident. Good-bye.”

“Good-bye,” we repeated, “and many thanks for your kindness. If we can do anything in return at any time we shall be glad of the chance. We live in Crawford’s Basin.”

“Oh, do you?” said our friend. “You are Mr. Crawford’s boys, then, are you? Well, many thanks. I’ll remember. And now, good-bye to you.”

With that, this strange man turned round and walked up into the clouds again. In two minutes he had vanished.

“Well, that was a queer adventure,” remarked Joe. “I wonder who he is, and why he chooses to live all by himself like that.”

“Yes. It’s a miserable sort of existence for such a man; for he seems like a sociable, good-hearted fellow. It isn’t every one, for instance, who would walk three or four miles over these rough mountains just to help a couple of boys, whom he never saw before and may never see again. I wish we could make him some return.”

“Well, perhaps we may, some day,” Joe replied.

Whether we did or not will be seen later.

CHAPTER V

What We Found in the Pool

Though we got back to camp pretty late, we set to work to load our poles at once, fearing that there was going to be a fall of snow which might prevent our getting them to town. This turned out to be a wise precaution, for when we started in the morning the snow was already coming down, and though it did not extend as far as Sulphide, the mountains were covered a foot deep before night.

This fall of snow proved to be much to our advantage, for one of the timber contractors, fearing he might not be able to fill his order, bought our “sticks” from us, to be delivered, cut into certain lengths, at the Senator mine.

This occupied us several days, when, having delivered our last load, we thanked Mrs. Appleby for the use of her back yard – the only payment she would accept – and then set off home, where we proudly displayed to my father and mother the money we had earned and related how we had earned it; including, of course, a description of our meeting with the wild man of the woods.

“And didn’t he tell you who he was?” asked my father, when we had finished.

“No,” I replied; “we were afraid to ask him, and he didn’t volunteer any information.”

“And you didn’t guess who he was?”

“No. Why should we? Who is he?”

“Why, Peter the Hermit, of course. I should have thought the presence of the raven would have enlightened you: he is always described as going about in company with a raven.”

“So he is. I’d forgotten that. But, on the other hand he is always described also as being half crazy, and certainly there was no sign of such a thing about him that we could see. Was there, Joe?”

“No. Nobody could have acted more sensibly. Who is he, Mr. Crawford? And why does he live all by himself like that?”

“I know nothing about him beyond common report. I suppose his name is Peter – though it may not be – and because he chooses to lead a secluded life, some genius has dubbed him ‘Peter the Hermit’; though who he really is, or why he lives all alone, or where he comes from, I can’t say. Some people say he is crazy, and some people say he is an escaped criminal – but then people will say anything, particularly when they know nothing about it. Judging from the reports of the two or three men who have met him, however, he appears to be quite inoffensive, and evidently he is a friendly-disposed fellow from your description of him. If you should come across him again you might invite him to come down and see us. I don’t suppose he will, but you might ask him, anyhow.”

“All right,” said I. “We will if we get the chance.” And so the matter ended.

It was just as well that we returned to the ranch when we did, for we found plenty of work ready to our hands, the first thing being the hauling of fire-wood for the year. To procure this, it was not necessary for us to go to the mountains: our supply was much nearer to hand. The whole region round about us had been at some remote period the scene of vigorous volcanic action. Both the First and Second Mesas were formed by a series of lava-flows which had come down from Mount Lincoln, and ending abruptly about eight miles from the mountains, had built up the cliff which bounded the First Mesa on its eastern side. Then, later, but still in a remote age, a great strip of this lava-bed, a mile wide and ten or twelve miles long, north and south, had broken away and subsided from the general level, forming what the geologists call, I believe, a “fault,” thus causing the “step-up” to the Second Mesa. The Second Mesa, because the lava had been hotter perhaps, was distinguished from the lower level by the presence of a number of little hills – “bubbles,” they were called, locally, and solidified bubbles of hot lava perhaps they were. They were all sorts of sizes, from fifty to four hundred feet high and from a hundred yards to half a mile in diameter. Viewed from a distance, they looked smooth and even, like inverted bowls, though when you came near them you found that their sides were rough and broken. I had been to the top of a good many of them, and all of those I had explored I had found to be depressed in the centre like little craters. From some of them tiny streams of water ran down, helping to swell the volume of our creek.

Most of these so-called “bubbles,” especially the larger ones, were well covered with pine-trees, and as there were three or four of them within easy reach of the ranch, it was here that we used to get our fire-wood.

There was a good week’s work in this, and after it was finished there was more or less repairing of fences to be done, as there always is in the fall, and the usual mending of sheds, stables and corrals.

The weather by this time had turned cold, and “the bottomless forty rods” having been frozen solid enough to bear a load, Joe and I were next put to work hauling oats down to the livery stable men in San Remo, as well as up to Sulphide.

Before this task was accomplished the winter had set in in earnest. We had had one or two falls of snow, though in our sheltered Basin the heat of the sun was still sufficient to clear off most of it again, and the frost had been sharp enough to freeze up our creek at its sources, so that our little waterfall was now converted into a motionless icicle. Fortunately, we were not dependent upon the creek for the household supply of water: we had one pump which never failed in the back kitchen and another one down by the stables.

The creek having ceased to run, the surface of the pool was no longer agitated by the water pouring into it, and very soon it was solidly frozen over with a sheet of ice twelve inches thick, when, according to our yearly custom, we proceeded to cut this ice and stow it away in the ice-house; having previously been up to the sawmill near Sulphide and brought away, for packing purposes, several wagon-loads of sawdust, which the sawmill men readily gave us for nothing, being glad to have it hauled out of their way. We had taken the opportunity to do this when we took our loads of oats up to Sulphide, thus utilizing the empty wagons on the return trip.

The pool, as I have said, measured about a hundred feet each way, though on account of its shallowness around the edges we could only cut ice over a surface about fifty feet square. Being frozen a foot thick, however, this gave us an ample supply for all our needs.

The labor of cutting, hauling and housing the ice fell to Joe and me, my father having generally plenty of other work to do. He had taken in a number of young cattle for a neighboring cattleman for the winter, and having sold him the bulk of our hay crop and at the same time undertaken to feed the stock, this daily duty alone took up a large part of his time. Besides this, “the forty rods” having become passable, the freighters and others now came our way instead of taking the longer hill-road, and their frequent demands for a sack, or a load, of oats, and now and then for hay or potatoes, added to the work of stock-feeding, kept my father pretty well occupied.

Joe and I, therefore, went to work by ourselves, beginning operations on that part of the pool nearest the point where the water used to pour in. We had taken out ten or a dozen loads of beautiful, clear ice, when, one day, Yetmore, who was riding down to San Remo, seeing us at work, stopped to watch us.

He was a queer fellow. Though he must have been perfectly well aware that we distrusted him; and though, after the late affair of the lead-boulder – a miscarriage of his schemes which was doubtless extremely galling to him – one would think he would have rather avoided us than not, he appeared to feel no embarrassment whatever, but with a greeting of well-simulated cordiality he dismounted and walked over to the pool to see what we were doing. Perhaps – and this, I think, is probably the right explanation – if he did entertain the idea of some day “getting even” with us, he had decided to postpone any such attempt until he saw an opportunity of doing so at a profit.

“Fine lot of ice,” he remarked, after standing for a moment watching Joe as he plied the saw. “Does this creek always freeze up like this?”

“Yes,” I replied. “It heads in Mount Lincoln, and is made up of a number of small streams which always freeze up about the first of November. That reduces the flow to about one-third its usual size; and when the little streams which come down from three or four of the ‘bubbles’ freeze up too, the creek stops entirely; which makes it mighty convenient for us to cut ice, as you see.”

“I see. Is the pool the same depth all over?”

“No,” I answered. “Just here, under the fall, it is deepest, but round the edges it is so shallow that we can’t take a stroke with the saw, the sand comes so close up to the ice. In fact, in some places, the ice rests right upon the sand.”

“How deep is it here?”

“Four or five feet, I think. Try it, Joe.”

Joe, who had just laid down the saw and had taken up the long ice-hook we used for drawing the blocks of ice within reach, lowered the hook, point downward, into the water. Then, pulling it out again, he stood it up beside him, finding that the wet mark on the staff came up to his chin.

“Five feet and three or four inches,” said he.

“Is the bottom solid or sandy?” asked Yetmore.

“I didn’t notice. I’ll try it.”

With that Joe lowered the pole once more.

“Seems solid,” he remarked, giving two or three hard prods. But he had scarcely said so, when, to our surprise, several bits of rough ice about as big as my hand bobbed up from the bottom.

“Hallo!” exclaimed Yetmore. “Ground ice!”

“What’s ground ice?” I asked.

“Why, ice formed at the bottom of the pool. It is not uncommon, I believe, though I don’t remember to have seen any before. Pretty dirty stuff, isn’t it? Must be a sandy bottom.”

So saying, he stooped down, and picking up the only bit of ice which happened to be within reach, he examined its under side. As he did so, I saw him give a little start, as though there were something about it to cause him surprise, but just as I reached out my hand to ask him to let me see it, he threw it back into the water out of reach – an action which struck me as being hardly polite.

“I must be off,” said he, in apparent haste, “so, good-bye. Hope you will get your crop in before it snows. Looks threatening to me; you’ll have to hurry, I think.”

This prediction seemed to me rather absurd, with the thermometer at zero and the sky as clear as crystal; but Yetmore was an indoor man and could not be expected to judge as can one whose daily work depends so much upon what the weather is doing or is going to do. It did not occur to me then – though it did later – that he only wanted us to get to work again at once, and so divert our minds from the subject of the ground ice.

As I made no comment on his remark, Yetmore walked away, remounted his horse and rode off; while Joe and I went briskly to work again.

We had been at it some time, when Joe stopped sawing, and straightening up, said:

“It’s queer about those bits of ground ice, Phil. Do you notice how they all float clean side up? Wait a bit and I’ll show you.”

Taking the ice-hook, he turned over one of the bits with its point, showing its soiled side, but the moment he released it, the bit of ice “turned turtle” again.

“Do you see?” said he. “The sand acts like ballast. It must be heavy stuff.”

“Yes,” said I. “Hook a bit of it out and let’s look at it.”

This was soon done, when, on examining it, we found the under side to be crusted with very black sand, which, whatever might be its nature, was evidently heavy enough to upset the balance of a small fragment of ice.

“What is it made of, I wonder?” said Joe.

“I don’t know,” I replied, “but perhaps it is that black sand which the prospectors are always complaining of as getting in their way when they are panning for gold.”

“That’s what it is, Phil, I expect,” cried Joe. “And what’s more, that’s what Yetmore thought, too, or else why should he throw that bit of ice back into the water so quickly when you held out your hand for it? He didn’t want you to see it.”

“It does look like it,” I assented. “Poke up a few more, Joe, and we will take them home and show them to my father: perhaps he’ll know what the stuff is.”

Joe took the ice-hook and prodded about on the bottom, every prod bringing up one or two bits of ice, each one as it bobbed to the surface showing its sandy side for a moment and then turning over, clean side up. Drawing these to the edge of the ice, we picked them out, laying them on a gunny-sack we had with us, and when, towards sunset, we had carried home and housed our last load, and had stabled and fed the mules, we took our scraps over to the blacksmith-shop, where the tinkle of a hammer proclaimed that my father was at work doing some mending of something.

He was much interested in hearing of the ground ice and of the way it brought up the black sand with it, and still more so in our description of Yetmore’s action.

“Let me look at it,” said he; and taking one of our specimens, he stepped to the door to examine it, the light in the shop being too dim. He came back smiling.

“Queer fellow, Yetmore!” said he. “One would think that the lesson of the lead-boulder might have taught him that a man may sometimes be too crafty. I think this is likely to prove another case of the same kind. I believe he has made a genuine discovery here – though what it may lead to there is no telling – and if he had had the sense to let you look at that piece of dirty ice, instead of throwing it back into the water, thus arousing your curiosity, he would probably have kept his discovery to himself. As it is, he is likely to have Tom Connor interfering with him again – that is to say, if this sand is what I think it is. I don’t think it is the ‘black sand’ of the prospectors – it is too shiny, and it has a bluish tinge besides – I think it is something of far more value. We’ll soon find out. Give me that piece of an iron pot, Phil; it will do to melt the ice in.”

Having broken up some of our ice into small pieces, we placed it in a large fragment of a broken iron pot, and this being set upon the forge, Joe took the bellows-handle and soon had the fire roaring under it. It did not take long to melt the ice, when, pouring off the water, we added some more, repeating the process until there was no ice left. The last of the water being then poured away, there remained nothing but about a spoonful of very fine, black, shiny sand.

The receptacle was once more placed upon the fire, and while my father kept the contents stirred up with a stick, Joe seized the bellows-handle again and pumped away. Presently he began to cough.

“What’s the matter, Joe?” asked my father, laughing.

“Sulphur!” gasped Joe.

“Sulphur!” cried I. “I don’t smell any sulphur.”

“Come over here, then, and blow the bellows,” replied Joe.

I took his place, but no sooner had I done so than I, too, began to cough. The smell of sulphur evidently came from our spoonful of sand, and as I was standing between the door and the window the draft blew the fumes straight into my face. On discovering this, I pulled the bellows-handle over to one side, when I was no more troubled.

The iron pot, being set right down on the “duck’s nest” and heaped all around with glowing coals, had become red-hot, when my father, peering into it, held up his hand.

“That’ll do, Phil. That’s enough,” he cried. “Give me the tongs, Joe.”

My father removed the melting-pot, and making a hole with his heel in the sandy floor of the shop, he poured the contents into it.

“Lead!” we both cried, with one voice.

“Yes, lead,” my father replied. “Galena ore, ground fine by the action of water.”

“Do you mean,” I asked, “that there is a lead-mine in the bottom of the pool?”

“No, no. But there is a vein of galena, size and value unknown, somewhere up on Lincoln Mountain. The fine black sand sticking to the ground ice was brought down by our stream, being reduced to powder on the way, and deposited in the pool, where its weight has kept it from being washed out again.”

“I see. And do you suppose Yetmore recognized the sand as galena ore? Would he be likely to know it in the form of sand?”

“I expect so. He’s a sharp fellow enough. He must have seen pulverized samples of galena many a time in the assayers’ offices. I’ve seen them myself: that was what gave me my clue.”

“And what do you suppose he’ll do?”

“He is pretty certain, I think, to try to get hold of some of the stuff, so that he may test it and make sure; though how he will go about it there’s no telling. It will be interesting to see how he manages it.”

“And what shall you do, father? Go prospecting?”

My father laughed, knowing that this was a joke on my part; for I was well aware that he would not think of such a thing.

“Not for us, Phil,” he answered. “We have our mine right here. Raising oats and potatoes may be a slow way of getting rich, but it is a good bit surer than prospecting. No, we’ll tell Tom Connor about it and let him go prospecting if he likes. You shall go up to Sulphide the first Saturday after the ice-cutting is finished and give him our information. There’s no hurry about it: he can’t go prospecting while the mountains are all under snow. Come along in to supper now. You’ve fed the mules, I suppose.”

It was a snapping cold night that night, and about half-past eight I went into the kitchen to look at the thermometer which hung outside the door. As I came back, I happened to glance out of the west window, when, to my surprise, I thought I saw a glimmer of light up by the pool. Stepping quickly into the house again, I went to the front door and looked out. Yes, there was a light up there!

“Father,” I called out, “there’s somebody up at the pool with a light.”

My father sprang out of his chair. “Is there?” he cried. “Then it’s Yetmore, up to some of his tricks. Get into your coats, boys, and let’s go and see what he’s about.”

As we went out I took down the unlighted stable-lantern and carried it with me in case we might need it, and shutting the door softly behind me, ran after the others. We had not covered half the distance to the pool, however, when the light up there suddenly went out, and a minute later we heard the sound of galloping hoofs, muffled by the thin carpet of snow, going off in the direction of Sulphide. Our visitor, whoever he was, had departed.

“Well, come on, anyhow,” said my father. “Let us see what he was doing.”

As the thermometer was then standing at three degrees below zero, we knew that the sheet of clear water we had left in the afternoon should have been solidly frozen over again by this time. What was our surprise, therefore, to find that such was not the case: there was only a thin film of ice; it was but just beginning to form.

“That is easily explained,” remarked my father. “The ice did form, but some one has chopped it out and thrown it to one side there. See?”

“Yes,” replied Joe, “and then he took the ice-hook, which I know I left standing upright against the rocks, and poked up the ground ice. See, there are several bits floating about, and I remember quite well that we cleared out every one of them this afternoon. Didn’t we, Phil?”

“Yes,” said I, “I’m sure we did, because I remember that those two or three bits that had no sand in them we threw into that corner instead of pitching them into the water again. I suppose it’s Yetmore, father.”

“Oh, not a doubt of it. Did he leave any tracks?”

By the light of the lantern we searched about, and though there were no tracks to be seen on the smooth ice, there were plenty in the snow below the pool. They were the foot-prints of a smallish man, for his tracks, in spite of his wearing over-shoes, were not so big as the prints made by Joe’s boots – though, as Joe himself remarked, that was not much to go by, he being a six-footer with feet to match, “and a trifle over,” as his friends sometimes considerately assured him.