Forty-one Thieves: A Tale of California, Angelo Hall [finding audrey txt] 📗
- Author: Angelo Hall
Book online «Forty-one Thieves: A Tale of California, Angelo Hall [finding audrey txt] 📗». Author Angelo Hall
Honest John Keeler, after a year spent in tracking criminals, had little liking for this new mission. It seemed as if his old friend thought all men rogues. Such a sweeping condemnation would include himself, and he resented the insinuation. However, the old man was still feeble. So Keeler set out on foot across the mountains.
It had been some time since he had been as far as Chipp's Flat. There he sought out the old cannon, long since dismounted, and sitting down upon it he thought of the changes wrought in that neighborhood within his recollection. In Civil War times, eighteen years before, miners of Chipp's Flat and vicinity had enlisted in the Union Army. There had been a full company of a hundred men, and the cannon had been a part of their equipment. But the cannon had not left that California mountain-side; and the soldiers themselves had got no further East than Arizona, for in those days there was no transcontinental railroad. Now that there was one, Chipp's Flat had no need of it. Save for two or three scattered houses the mining town had disappeared. The mountain ridge had been mined through from Minnesota, and now that the gold-bearing gravel had been exhausted, Chipp's Flat, except in name, had gone out of existence.
The next thing of interest was the dirty blue water of Kanaka Creek, and the clatter of the stamping mills on the other side of it; for Keeler was not much used to quartz mining. The name "quartz mining" seemed misleading, for the wash from the crushed rock was distinctly blue. It was evident that these quartz mines were paying well, as Alleghany had every appearance of a live mining town. Keeler stopped at the hotel there for dinner. It seemed strange that intelligent men should so lose their heads. Great quantities of liquor were being consumed at the hotel bar, poker games were in full blast, and there was a cemetery handy.
Keeler was glad to leave Alleghany to climb over the mountain ridge to Forest City. Now to the eastward the lofty peaks of the Sierras hove into view, dwarfing the mountain ridges of the gold fields. He paused to inspect the ancient stream of lava which crossed his path, and considered once more those convulsions of the earth which had thrown the ancient river beds to the hill-tops, and of which California earthquakes are a constant reminder.
Arrived at the summit of the ridge, he looked down upon Forest City, a straggling village in a barren valley denuded of forests. Church, school, and cemetery gave the place an air of permanence; but some day it might disappear, like Chipp's Flat. It lay almost beneath him, so steep was the road down the mountain. Beyond, up the bare valley of a mountain stream, lay the trail to Downieville, nine miles away. His mission to Hintzen performed, he would spend the night at Forest City, and push on to Downieville the next morning.
Hintzen kept the general store at Forest City, a business more certain and profitable than gold-mining; and having a reputation for strict honesty, he had become a sort of agent and business manager for the miners. He was one of the few men Robert Palmer trusted; therefore he received the document from Keeler's hand without surprise. But he could not repress a smile at the testator's extreme caution and resolved forthwith to ask for a list of his friend's securities.
"How is the old man now?" he asked.
"Mr. Palmer has had a close call," replied Keeler. "But he is good for a couple of years yet, I reckon."
"Sit down, Keeler, while I write him a note. You'll find a whiskey toddy up there at the end of the counter.—Beg your pardon. Forgot your temperance principles. There's fresh spring water in that bucket."
Next morning Keeler pushed on up the ascending valley of the mountain torrent. The horns of a wild sheep by the wayside reminded him of earlier days when game was plentiful. The only wild creatures along the trail to-day were rattlesnakes. With these he was well acquainted. But it did give him a start to find one twined about a branch of a bush.
An hour's steady climbing brought him to the top of the watershed between the North and the Middle Yuba. Here a scene of wild grandeur lay before him. Bare crags on either hand guarded the pass over the divide. Immediately in front lay a whole system of deep cañons, clothed with primeval forests, wild and forbidding. Beyond towered a chain of rough, bare mountain peaks. Keeler paused to wonder anew at the vastness of the Sierras.
Then he plunged down from the ridge and was soon traversing one of the most lonesome and gloomy trails in all the mountains. The tree trunks were covered with yellowish green moss. In one place stood a pine stump fifty feet high with the upper hundred feet of the tree thrust into the earth beside it. At another place a huge log blocked the trail. Then he crossed a brook and was among chaparral and manzanita bushes. Then he was among the pines again, listening to their voices, for a breeze was blowing up the cañon. Now he came to a spooky region which had been swept by fire, with bare tree trunks, broken and going to decay, standing like ghosts of the forest. Beyond was a clump of young firs with gray stems, so straight and perfect as to be almost uncanny. Or was it the traveler's overwrought imagination?
Now the trail turned at right angles along the steep side of a cañon, and he heard the music of the mountain torrent far below. Half a mile further on, where the trail crossed the brook at the head of the cañon, it doubled back on itself along the other side. The traveler refreshed himself at a mossy spring by the side of the trail, then, as he emerged from the cañon at a sudden turn, Downieville appeared. It lay far below him, at the forks of the North Yuba. How musically the roar of the river came up through the autumn stillness! Sign boards pointing to the Ruby Mine, and to the City of Six, prepare the traveler for the discovery of some settlement in the wilderness. But he is hardly prepared for such a beautiful and welcome sight. Here, tucked away among the mountains as tidily as some Eastern village, lies the county seat of Sierra County. But this is California and not Maryland, for yonder comes a mountaineer up the trail with his pack horses.
Keeler lost no time in descending and transacting his business at the court-house. But after his lonesome walk over the mountains something he saw here appealed to his imagination. It was a human skull, which had belonged to a murderer. The murdered man was a Frenchman, killed for his money. This was Keeler's first visit to Downieville since the crime, and as he had known the Frenchman he determined to visit his grave.
The cemetery is up the river beyond the edge of the town; and here, in more senses than one, a traveler finds the end of the trail. Men and women whose life journey had begun in New England, Old England, Wales, Ireland, France, Denmark, or Russia, had here come to their journey's end.
At the cemetery gate, fastened by a wire, was the quaint sign:
PLEASE PUT THIS WIRE ON AGIN
TO KEEP IT SHUT."
A beautiful clear mountain stream flows along one side of the ground and pours into the river below. A lone pine chants requiems over the dead; and yellow poppies with red hearts spring out of the graves. Many of the headstones are boards, naturally; and one poor fellow, whose estate at death was probably a minus quantity, is commemorated by a strip of tin with his name pricked into it. There is a fair proportion of pretentious monuments, which were drawn by ten-horse teams from some distant railroad station.
Marked by such a monument was the grave which Keeler sought. The symbolism was striking,—a broken column, an angel holding out an olive branch, and Father Time. And this was the verse of Scripture carved in stone:
he heapeth up riches and cannot
tell who shall gather them."
Forgetting the murdered Frenchman in the forcefulness of the text, Keeler wondered if Robert Palmer's journey, too, would end like this.
CHAPTER XIV Golden OpportunitiesIn California Opportunity knocked at every gate—not once but many times. It returned again and again, most persistently, and intruded alike on men awake and feasting, or asleep and dreaming. John Keeler had hardly spent an hour in Downieville before he had met a Golden Opportunity. On approaching the town he had passed several short tunnels dug into the hillside, and at the court-house he met the owners of one of these tunnels. Smith came from Ohio,—he had for many years been a teacher, and was a member of the Grand Army of the Republic. His partner, whom he introduced as a Confederate veteran, was a Virginian. As partners, the blue and the gray were almost irresistible. Three hundred dollars invested in their shaft would mean a rich strike.
But other Opportunities had left Keeler rich in experience and short of cash. He could not use Robert Palmer's money as his own; so he could only smile, rather sadly, and wish his new friends success. How many of his acquaintances had invested good money in a hole in the ground! Even the most prudent, in some unguarded moment, had parted with thousands of dollars, like the dog in the fable which dropped the real bone to seize the shadow. There was Mack, proprietor of the hotel at Graniteville, making lots of money at his business and losing it all in mining ventures. Only the other day Mack had remarked that if his savings had been allowed to accumulate in some good bank he would now be worth some fifty thousand dollars. As it was, he was as poor as his humblest guest. Even Dr. Mason, canny Scot though he was, could not forget the sight of ninety thousand dollars' worth of gold bullion he had once seen piled up at North Bloomfield, and so was persuaded to gamble with his earnings. He had lost as much as Mack. How rosy is the rainbow, and how evanescent the pot of gold at the end of it! California had swallowed up more wealth than its gold could ever repay, as Keeler well knew. It was only occasionally that some lucky devil, or some prudent, saving man like Robert Palmer, after thirty years in the gold fields, had anything to show for it.
So Keeler, pondering the deceitfulness of riches, sadly made his way back across the mountains. Even then Fate was weaving her web about his old friend Palmer, who was soon to lie in a pauper's grave. Francis seized a Golden Opportunity.
Francis had so far prospered that he had moved to San Francisco. In the city he could watch the stock market, as he told himself privately. To his friends he announced that failing health demanded the change, albeit the exhilarating air of the Sierras was far more beneficial than the dampness of the sea coast. But Francis, inheriting ten thousand dollars from one of his deceased brothers, had moved to San Francisco, taking with him sundry hundreds and thousands of dollars, entrusted to him by his Pennsylvania friends for investment. Everybody had faith in the integrity of Henry Francis.
The next summer, when the blue-bells were in blossom at Grass Valley, he passed through that prosperous mining town on the narrow gauge bound for Nevada City and Moore's Flat. This was the summer of 1881, nearly two years after the murder of Cummins. A still, small voice accused him of something akin to highway robbery; and it gave his conscience a twinge to pass the well-known stump which had concealed the robbers. It was bad enough that the robbers were still at large, a fact that reflected upon him. "Bed-bug Brown's" mission had proved a fiasco. But the thing that really worried Francis was his own mission and not the fruitless one of Brown's. If his own proved fruitless his conscience might be better satisfied.
But business is business, and the day was fine. Francis was
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