Here they occupied themselves for two days studying maps and trying to get information from all sorts of people who knew this part of the republic.
“Now look here, you puppies,” Howard explained. “Where you see a railroad, there’s no use going there. There aren’t any motorroads. So let’s forget about these roads. Don’t even look near dirt roads. Wherever there is a railroad or any other road, there’s no use going close. Because railroad-constructors and roadbuilders usually examine every bit of soil near the roads while they are building them. That’s only natural, and it’s part of their business. So it would be waste of time to look for anything around places where engineers have been at work.”
“I think I see what you’re driving at.” Dobbs began to understand Howard’s plans.
“Not so difficult to see, boys, after I’ve made it clear what is virgin soil and what isn’t.” Howard went with a pencil over the map he had spread out before him. “We have to go where there is no trail. We have to go where we can be positive that no surveyor or anybody who knows something about mining has ever been before. The best spots are those where you feel sure that anybody who is paid for his job would be afraid to go and would not think it worth while to risk his hide for the salary he gets. Only at such spots is there a chance that we might find something. These are the regions we have to make out on this map.”
He drew a few lines over small sections of the map, made a few dots here and a few dots there. For a while he looked at these vague sketches, seemingly weighing one against the other. Then, with a definite gesture, he made a little circle on the map at a certain point. “Here’s where we are bound. Hereabouts.” He thickened the little ring with his pencil. “The exact site doesn’t matter very much—not in detail, so to say. Let’s see the spot at close range and then decide what to do. Here on this map I can’t make out properly whether it’s mountain, swamp, desert, or what. But that shows that the makers of the map themselves don’t know for sure what there is. Once on the spot, all you have to do is to wipe your eyes and look carefully around you. I once knew a feller who, believe it or not, could smell gold if it was close, just as an ass will smell water if he is thirsty and wants to drink. And this reminds me, boys, we’ll have to go Out to a few villages near by to buy burros, which we need for carrying our packs and for other services at the camp.”
So they spent the next three days buying burros from the Indian peasants.
Chapter 5
Curtin and Dobbs learned soon that without Howard they would have been utterly helpless. Had they been alone, they would not have been able to follow even a trail. They had no idea how to keep the burros at the camp during the night, how to pack them the right way, or how to make them go over the rocky paths across the high mountains, where often the boys themselves could not get hold with their feet.
On this trip the boys had to do without such little conveniences as were always found even in the most primitive oilcamps. It took them almost a week to learn how to pitch camp under such difficult conditions as they found here every day. This was no boy scouts’ hike and camp-fires were not built according to instructions in printed guides for hunting parties. Here it meant work, and nothing but hard work. Often at night when they were so tired that they could sleep like blocks they had to get up and search for the burros that had gone astray. There were many other things to attend to even more disagreeable and more wearisome and annoying.
There were many days and more nights when both of them said that if they had known beforehand what it meant to go prospecting, they would have preferred to stay in town and wait for a job to turn up.
Every day their respect for old Howard grew greater and greater. That old fellow nevet complained, never whined, never felt too tired to lend here a pull and there a push. He appeared to become younger and more active with every mile that the little train made toward its goal. He climbed steep rocks like a cat and trotted for long, dreary hours across arid stretches without even mentioning a drink of water.
“Never fail to understand the reason why gold is so precious,” he said occasionally when the boys were all in. “Perhaps you know now why one ounce of gold costs more than a ton of cast iron. Everything in this world has its true price. Nothing is ever given away.”
The trip alone was of minor importance. The main thing was how to find the metal and how to get it after having found it. In this respect Dobbs and Curtin were still at a greater loss than in knowing how to drive a little bunch of donkeys to a certain place. When still in town, they had thought that prospecting for gold was just like picking up stones in a dry riverbed. Their idea was that you cannot make a mistake, that when you see something that glitters, it must be gold. To their amazement, they found almost every day patches of ground that were covered with glittering yellowish powder, and they found the same glittering sand in brooks and creeks. Whenever they saw this sort of sand, they were sure that it must be the right stuff or at least something that was heavily charged with gold. Howard did not laugh at them. He just said: “I’ll tell you when to pick up. This here stuff wouldn’t pay you a dinner for a truckload unless you can sell it in town right in front of a house under construction.”
Gold doesn’t call out loud to be picked up. You have to know how to recognize it. “You have to tickle it,” Howard would often say, “you have to tickle it so that it comes out laughing. You may walk over it twenty times a day and you won’t see it if you don’t know its call.”
Old man Howard knew gold and what it looked like in the raw. He saw it even if there were only a trace of it in the vicinity. He could tell from the landscape if there might be gold around or not. He knew whether it would pay to spend a day or two at a certain place to dig and to wash and to make tests so as to be sure that to work the ground would pay enough wages for a living. Whenever he stopped to get his frying-pan from the pack and wash a few shovelfuls of dirt in a brook, the boys would know that he had made a discovery.
Five times they found gold. But the amount which could be taken by the primitive means they could afford was not sufficient to pay them a good day’s wages. Once they came upon a site that was very promising, but the water necessary for washing the sand was six miles away. So they had to give up the find.
“Now, don’t you kids think it’s child’s play to prospect for gold,” Howard said to his partners, who were about to lose the last flicker of hope. “Gold means work, and very hard work at that. Just discard everything you have ever read in stories in the magazines. Forget it. It’s all lies. Bunk, that’s what it is. Don’t believe that millions are lying around. There are very few men in the world, or in all history, who have actually made millions by digging for gold. You can’t make it single-handed if you want to have the millions, believe me.”
One morning they found themselves entirely surrounded by wild, desolate mountainous country. It looked as though they could not go on nor go back. Panting and gasping, cursing and swearing, the two boys were trying, by cutting the thick underbrush and by climbing the rocks, which seemed inaccessible, to open a trail by which they could go on and at the same time get out of the wilderness. The difficulty became so great that they lost all hope and were ready to give up the whole outfit, leave everything behind, and return to a civilized world, where there were no jobs, but also no such hardships to endure. They were at the edge of what any sane person can bear.