Part 13

The men told me that he had been a section-hand himself and then a boss, and that he had worked his way to the position of superintendent in a long service with the company. The feeling that they bore him was one of admiration, not unmixed with fear. They respected his knowledge of every detail of their work, and a certain liking for him grew out of the fact of his having been a laborer like themselves, but they feared him with an awesome fear.

I remember his passing one afternoon while we were at work. We had stood aside at the coming of a freight train, and, as we stepped back to our work, we caught sight of a wiry little man standing on the rear platform of the caboose, his hands clasping the railing and his eyes intent on the road-bed. Osborn thought that he saw the flutter of a piece of paper in the dust raised by the passing train, and suspecting that it was an order for himself, he dropped his tools and searched the embankment, and even the neighboring cornfield to the leeward, with an eagerness that might have marked a hunt for hid treasure. He could find nothing, however, and for the rest of the day, and I know not for how much longer, the incident was upon his mind with a sense of keen anxiety.

When the day appointed for distributing the sleepers came, we boarded at Buda an eastbound passenger train, and were pressed into a smoking-car already overcrowded by bosses and section-hands. Osborn vouched for us to the conductor, as the other bosses did for their men when we picked up a gang at almost every station.

It was a welcome escape to get off at Grand Island. Like boys set free from school we clambered over the long freight-train, laden with sleepers, that stood waiting for us on a siding. Our orders were perfectly clear. We were to distribute ourselves through the train and, at a given signal, to unlade the sleepers as fast as we could, throwing them along the road-bed well free of the line. Each man was to remember, moreover, that, at the end of his own section, he was to leave the train.

I found myself in a box-car with three other navvies, all strangers to me. Sleepers lay piled to the roof from end to end of the floor, with only a passage across the middle wide enough for us to begin the work. A blue-eyed young Swede and I had just agreed to be partners when the Superintendent passed in his way along the train, noting the number of men in each car.

In a few moments we were off, and we had not gone far before the prearranged signal came. Then we bent to the work with a will. It was a break in the regular routine and we took it as a lark. Two men attacked one side of the passage and the Swede and I the other. Soon it was a race between us to see which could unload the faster.

The train moved slowly, discharging sleepers that piled themselves in grotesque confusion along the sides of the embankment, while above the noise of the cars, rose the voices of the men as they shouted excitedly in the unwonted rivalry.

Before I realized that we had gone half so far, I caught sight of the Buda station. Our car was nearly empty, and as nearly empty at our end as at the other, the Swede and I thought, but our fellow-navvies claimed a victory when, at the end of the section, I jumped to the ground with much care to avoid the flying sleepers. Osborn was there, and soon the other members of the gang gathered, and then we returned to the usual work until six o’clock.

For two weeks or more I remained at work on this section, then I knew that I must be going; for the autumn was at hand, and I aimed to cross the Rockies and reach the milder climate of the Southwest by the beginning of winter. But the actual parting with the gang presented the usual embarrassments. I had become used to the men, and they to me, and we worked together harmoniously and were on terms of easiest friendliness. Besides, no one had appeared who would take my place, and there were many sleepers to be laid.

I always stipulated with my employers at the beginning of an engagement that I wished to be free to go when I pleased, as they were free to discharge me when they wished, but this rarely smoothed the way of going, for they lost sight of the agreement as they grew accustomed to me as a hand.

When I told Osborn one evening that I must be gone in a day or two, his eyes took on a look of perplexity that did not relieve my embarrassment, and he began to plead the pressure of the work and the difficulty of getting section-hands until I felt like a deserter. But there was no help for it, and early one September morning, after reluctant good-byes to the family and the men, I set off down the line with my wages in one pocket and in another a luncheon that the boss’s mother put up for me.

When the sun was setting that evening, I had entered a region where the cornfields were fewer, where the cattle country had begun, and the alkali shone white in the soil, and the bones of dead cattle lay bleaching on the plain.

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“A BURRO-PUNCHER”

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“A BURRO-PUNCHER”

Mike Price was a prospector by nature; his prospecting through the summer and autumn of 1892 in the Wagon Wheel Gap country of southwestern Colorado was a mere incident in a long career. Phœnix, Ariz., was his head-quarters, and he would fain return there for the Indian summer of its winter climate; for he hated snow and the hard cold of the Rocky Mountain camps, where, as he said, a man must hibernate until spring. But Phœnix was the best part of 600 miles away across a thinly settled frontier. Burros and blankets and food for the journey were to be had only for ready money, and Price had not “struck it rich”; indeed, he had not struck it at all. One after another the parts of his camping outfit had gone into a pawnbroker’s shop at Creede, in the progress of a luckless season, until the late autumn found him without burro or blanket or bacon, and bereft even of the “gun” (a six-shooter) which General —— had given him in recognition of his services as a scout.

It was late November when I met him, and Price was making a precarious living at odd jobs for civil engineers. One of these was my friend Hamilton, who had known Price for years and who proved himself a friend in need to both of us, for he brought us together and proposed the journey which took us to Phœnix, and which gave me six weeks’ experience as a “burro-puncher.”

You could trust Hamilton to find a way out. There is scarcely a phase of frontier life that he did not know from personal experience, and he saw at a glance that Price’s position and my own would exactly complement each other in furthering a plan which was common to us both. Price wanted to reach Phœnix, and so did I; he knew the way but was without the means of travel, while I, knowing nothing of the country, yet had some store of savings.

Wages were high at Creede. The miners were getting $3, and I, as an unskilled laborer, working with a gang that was cutting a road down Bachelor Mountain from the New York Chance Mine to Creede, was paid $2.50 a day. Our board and lodging cost us $7 a week, but they were worth it, and, even at that rate, there remained a considerable margin for possible saving.

Hamilton knew my plans; he was one of the few whom I had told, in the course of my wandering, of the object of the expedition. We had been spending an evening with a company of kindred Bohemians at the house of a mine superintendent, and were returning together to his quarters in the quiet of two o’clock in the morning through a world white with the first snow of winter and dazzling under a full moon.

I had money enough to take me to Phœnix by rail, and it seemed the height of folly to go in any other way, so I began to explain why I wished to walk and why I had already walked most of the way from the Atlantic. Hamilton listened patiently, but without interest, I thought, until abruptly he turned upon me with approval, immeasurably beyond my desert, yet showing so sympathetic an insight into the possible service of such work, that I saw again, as by a flash, the rich human quality that had already endeared the man.

“And so you worked with the road gang on Bachelor Mountain to get enough to grub stake you to Phœnix?” he said, and he laughed aloud. Then he swore—deeply, resonantly, and from the heart.

Price was sent for on the next day, and, in the afternoon, he turned up in Hamilton’s office, a dark, bearded, keen-eyed Irishman, slender and wiry, and all alert at the prospect of getting back to “God’s country,” which in his phrase meant Arizona. Soon, not merely Hamilton and I, but our friends the barrister and the editor and the grave mine superintendent were involved in preparation for the trip. We accompanied Price to the pawnbroker’s shop, where he identified his belongings, and I redeemed them. Then we all set about selecting additional blankets and a fresh store of food.

Our pack animals could not have carried their loads, had we taken all that was pressed upon us for the journey. Price borrowed a shot-gun from the private arsenal that was put at our disposal, and I a six-shooter, and we gladly accepted gifts of tobacco until our pockets were bursting with plenty.

Weird as it was, our little caravan was but the typical prospector’s outfit as we moved in single file through the winding street of the mining camp, an object of interest only to the four friends who bade us good-by with many slaps on the back and with affectionate oaths. Price was mounted on his Indian pony and I on Sacramento, a burro of uncommon size, while our effects were packed on the backs of two other burros, Beecher and California by name, with two of California’s foals trotting abreast as a running accompaniment to the show.

Past the shops and saloons and dance-halls and hotels we wound our way on among the frail shanties at the outskirts of the camp, until we struck the wagon trail that led southward through a ranching country in the direction of the pass over the mountain to Durango. Snow lay lightly on the ground; vast tracts, however, had been swept clear by the wind, so that ours was an unobstructed course, except where we had to plough through occasional drifts, which our animals did with ease, tossing the feathery flakes until they flashed again in the clear sunlight of a frosty morning. The burros were at their best, keeping the trail at a steady pace that never hinted at the habit of wandering. Price was high-spirited at the thought of Phœnix, and, between snatches of song, he regaled me with the glories of the Indian summer which we should find across the range. I could well share his light-heartedness. As far as Creede I had walked alone, picking the way with ease, but, between Creede and Phœnix, there lay a stretch of the fast-fading frontier which I longed to cross on foot, yet knew that I could not without a guide. And here, as by miracle, one had appeared in the person of Price, who knew the land and them that dwelt therein, and who was more than guide in being a philosopher and friend. The keen air quickened our blood, as we breathed deep of its rarefied purity and felt the mild warmth of the winter sun like the glow of rising spirits. The mountain-peaks rose white and still above the dark ruling of the timber line, yet radiant in the light, and serene in a peace that passeth knowledge; and the head waters of the Rio Grande swept past us in streams that were dark against the snow, but ablaze where they reflected the sun.

It was long past noon before I thought of stopping, and then I found that there were to be no mid-day stops on this expedition, for the days were so short that camp had to be made between four and five in the afternoon, and, as it was difficult to get started in the morning much before eight o’clock, we could give at the best but little more than eight hours in the day to travel.