The old man seemed to be in his most hilarious mood. To him, with so many experiences to draw from, such complications were the regular thing when you are after gold.
“Well, tell my old gra’mother I have burdened myself with a couple of fine lodgers, two very elegant bedfellers who kick at the first drop of rain and crawl under mother’s petticoat when thunder rumbles. My, my, what great prospectors a driller and a tool-dresser can make! Drilling a hole with half a hundred Mexican peons around to lend you hands and feet! I still can do that after a two days’ spree, you bet. Two guys and what shit! Two guys reading in the magazines about crossing a lazy river up in Alaska and now going prospecting on their own.”
“Shut your stinking trap!” Dobbs howled. He took up a rock and threatened to use it.
“Throw it, baby, throw it. Welcome. Just do it. You will never leave this wilderness without my help, if you know what is good for you. You two would die here more miserably than a sick rat.”
Curtin tried to quiet Dobbs. “Leave the old man alone. Can’t you see he’s nuts?”
“Nuts, hey? Is that what you mean?” Howard, instead of being angry, just laughed in a satanical way. “Nuts? Now, I’ll tell you somethin’, you puppies. What did I say? Yes, two fine lodgers I’ve burdened myself with. You two are so dumb, so immensely stupid and dumb, that even a secret-service flat would stand amazed at such dumbness. And that’s something.”
Dobbs and Curtin began to listen to the old man. They looked at each other and they looked again at Howard. They seemed to become convinced that the old man had really gone mad, perhaps from the hardships or from senility.
“And what I was saying,” Howard went on, “you two are so dumb that you don’t even see the millions when treading upon them with your own feet.”
The two boys opened their mouths wide. It was clear they had not understood the full sense of what Howard had said. Not yet. But after a minute they came to. Seeing Howard still grinning at them while he held, in both his hands, sand picked up from the ground, letting it run through his fingers, it dawned upon them that the old man was as sane as ever and that what he said was true.
They did not start a dance out of this joyful relief nor did they holler to clear their breasts of the anguish that had filled them during these last few days. A long breath they took and then sat down and fingered the soil, looking at it carefully.
“Don’t you expect to find nuggets of molten gold.” Howard was still standing upright. “It’s not that rich. It’s only heavy dirt. And it’s not here either. Here are only traces of the stuff. It comes from somewhere farther up there.” Howard pointed up to certain rocks which they had been about to cross. “There is where we have to go. And if I am not mistaken, it will be there that we will settle for a few months. Let’s go.”
While this stretch which they had now to cover was short, it meant harder work than any other trail they had encountered so far on the expedition. The distance was less than two miles, but it took them a whole day to reach the site indicated by Howard.
When the outfit arrived at the spot, Howard said: “We’d better not pitch camp right here where the works are. We should build the camp a mile or even a mile and a half away. Some day you may learn why this is for the best.”
It had got dark, and so for this night they camped right there. Next morning, however, Howard and Curtin went exploring for a good camp-site while Dobbs remained with the animals.
Having found a suitable place sufficiently far off the field, camp was built at the spot where it was to stay.
“Suppose somebody should accidentally come upon this camp, you two fellers understand we are just hunters, professional gamehunters for hides of commercial value. And don’t you make any mistake. It may cost you dearly.” Howard surely knew what he was talking about.
Chapter 6
If Dobbs and Curtin had ever worked hard in their lives, they would have thought that what they were doing now was the hardest work anywhere in the world. For no employer would they have labored so grindingly as they did now for themselves. Each working-day was as long as daylight would make it. Convicts in a chain-gang in Florida or Georgia would have gone on hunger-strike, and not have minded the whippings either, had they had to work as these three men were doing to fill their own pockets.
The field which they were exploring was embedded in a craterlike little valley on the top of high rocks. The altitude of the mountains and the low pressure of the atmosphere made work still harder than it would have been under better conditions.
In daytime the heat was scorching, and the nights were bitterly cold. There were none of the conveniences which even a working-man in a civilized country—yes, even a soldier in the trenches—is used to and thinks he cannot live without.
One should not forget that though the Sierra Madre is in fact a sister to the Rocky Mountains, it is in the tropics. There is no winter, no snow and ice, and consequently all plants, shrubs, insects, and animals keep alive all the time, and very much alive at that.
There were mosquitoes biting day and night. The more you sweat, the more they like sucking your blood. There were tarantulas the size of a man’s hand, and spiders the same size, not very pleasant to have for permanent neighbors. And then there was the real genuine pest, a little yellowish-reddish scorpion the sting of which kills you within fifteen hours.
Gold has its price. Make no mistake as to that, and forget the Stories and the blah of promoters who want to sell worthless ground at the price of cultivated orange-groves in the Royal Valley.
“Never have I dreamed that I would have to work like this,” Curtin growled one morning when Howard was shaking him by the collar to get him up from his cot.
“Never mind,” the old man calmed him, “I’ve worked this way more than once in my life and often for years. I’m still alive, and, what is more, still without a bank account to help me along for the rest of my life. Well, get up and make the burros carry the water up.”
As the working-field had no water, it had to be carried on burros’ backs from a brook about three hundred and fifty feet lower than the field. When, in the beginning, they had found that there was no water for washing the dirt, and that the water was so far down, it was proposed that the diggings should be carried by the burros down to the brook to be washed there. After long deliberation it was decided that it would be better to carry the water up to the field than to carry the dirt down. By digging out tanks and by using channels easily built from wood, the water once carried up to the field could be used over and over again before it evaporated. A wheel was constructed with empty tin cans and small wooden cases, and with the help of a burro this could be made to draw the water from the tank, lift it with those cans and cases up to the upper tank, from where, on opening the shutter, it would run down the channels to wash the sand.
Howard was an all-around expert. Whenever he came out with a useful idea, Dobbs and Curtin would ask themselves earnestly what they would have done in this wilderness without him. They could have met with a field rich with fifty ounces to the ton of raw dirt and not have known what to do with it, how to get it out, or how to keep alive until time to carry it home.
Howard even burned lime out of the rocks, mixed it with sand and clay, and built a tank that would lose not a drop of water except what evaporated. With the same stuff in other combinations he tightened the wooden channels and the basins so that here, too, no water was wasted.
The men had breakfast long before sunrise to start work as early as possible. Often they could not work during the noon hours, as the terrific heat made their heads hum and their limbs ache.