Dead Warrior (10 page)

Packing with more speed than usual, I loaded my gear in the stage and started rounding up my animals. While I was going for the second one, something moved in the brush. There was no sound; I merely caught a glimpse of a small brown object which I took to be a bird or one of the ground squirrels common to the country. I put it out of my mind, but it stole back after I had gone a little way. The longer I thought about it, the more I felt that it could have been a patch of weathered buckskin legging.

Deciding that the best thing to do was to make sure of my rifle and shotgun, I went back to the stage, keeping my hand close to my revolver. No murderous Indian materialized,
however, and it was with a feeling of relief at a crisis passed that I opened the door of the stage.

Big Warrior was crouched inside, just in the act of dropping my rifle so he could manipulate my shotgun, which he also held. Had he met me three weeks earlier, he would have been better than quick. As it was, I had developed the habit of reaching for my revolver enough; and if my daily practice had not yet made me fast, I nevertheless got my gun free of its holster promptly, thumbing back the hammer as I drew.

My mind was clear and followed each shift in the balance between us with precision. My first thought was that I would be too late. When my gun was raised halfway, while he was still reaching for the triggers, I saw I had a chance. Then as Big Warrior swung the two barrels toward the level of my stomach, I knew I’d be ahead of him.

My bullet tore through his naked chest. I cocked my pistol again but hesitated to shoot an already mortally wounded foe. That squeamishness nearly cost me my life. Seeing the slackened fingers tighten, I jumped sidewise.

I don’t think he could see, but the fact didn’t weaken his will. He got the shot off, although when the slugs whirred through the doorway of the stage, the charge which set them in motion kicked the stock of the gun back against a dead man. He fell forward then, so that his head hung out of the coach, from which blood flowed to stain the sand not a foot from where I stood. Awed, I moved to look down upon the man.

In a moment I heard Potter’s call of inquiry. I called back to show him I was all right, but when I made no explanation, he joined me.

“Heard the shootin’,” he declared, “but couldn’t figger out why you had to use two different guns. What you got?”

Not lifting my eyes from their somber contemplation of
the Apache, I stepped out of his line of vision. “Dead Warrior,” I said.

“Tried for your guns, just like I told you he might.” The old fellow was pleased at having prophesied correctly. “They scalp better if you don’t wait for ’em to cool.”

“As long as I’m keeping my own scalp, I’ll let him have his,” I told Potter. “It was a near thing.”

“Well, I don’t scalp other people’s kills,” he stated, using a tone which implied that I had asked him to do so. “Never did in my life, and yet I’ve lifted enough hair to keep two grizzlies in a sweat.” He took out a plug of tobacco and worried a chew from it. “Big Warrior’s Dead Warrior for sure,” he continued, as soon as speech was again possible, “so ’tain’t likely he’ll get out of your buggy by himself. Whereat you goin’ to dump him?”

Unhappy at the thought of having to play sexton, I gazed about. “I suppose that gully we crossed would be the best place to bury him.”

“Huh?” He looked his astonishment before his face cleared and he nodded. “Ordinarily there wouldn’t be no sense to it, but I don’t want to keep whiffin’ him while I’m prospectin’. I’ll get my diggin’ tools, and we’ll drive down the draw until we find a good, easy place.”

If the old fellow had originally been opposed to the idea, he ended by taking quite an interest in it. “Of course, we ain’t sure we’re doin’ the right thing,” he remarked, resting on his shovel and waiting for me to loosen more dirt with the pick.

Beginning to feel the heat, I paused. “What do you mean?”

“We may not be fixin’ him the way he’d like it.” Potter spat into the half-dug grave. “If he was a Sioux, say, I’d know what to do for him. We’d stick him up on poles where we couldn’t wind either him or the buzzards, and he’d take to
it like an otter to fish. But I don’t know how old Dead Warrior’s goin’ to feel about bein’ stuck in the ground, because I don’t know nothin’ about Apaches.”

“Well, he didn’t leave a will, so we’ll just have to risk it,” I said, swinging the pick again. It landed with a jar which rasped my not yet fully healed shoulder. “Hell, I’ve hit a ledge, but maybe it doesn’t reach too far out.”

Fumbling in the loosened dirt, I found the chunk of rock bitten off by my pick and tossed it out. “It seems to be just the end of the ledge,” I reported a minute later, “so I don’t think we’ll have to guess again.”

Potter paid no attention to me. He had the fragment of rock in his hand and was picking at it with the point of his hunting knife. He was mumbling inarticulately to himself, but paused to thrust the knife toward me.

“You can call me a Flathead if that ain’t gold.” He indicated a shiny fleck on the point with his free hand. “Let’s have that pick, and I’ll take a good look at the rock.”

When he had cleared the face of it a little, he became seized with an excitement I didn’t share. The stone was certainly discolored and reflected light here and there, but that was a geological commonplace.

“All right; you’ve found gold,” I finally humored him, “but you can’t load your mine on your mule and swap it for cash. What do you do next?”

Some of the enthusiasm faded from his eyes. “Naturally I’ve got to have it assayed before I’ll know just what I’ve got. Maybe they’ll tell me that it don’t amount to nothin’ — I’ve been wrong once or twice already.” His voice trailed off with the recollection of those past failures, then he got a new grip on the optimism which keeps prospectors in business. “But I never see ore the beat of that there, and I’m
sure goin’ to hold onto it by staking a claim around this ledge.”

“There may be bigger and better finds around here,” I suggested. If he really had stumbled on something, I saw no sense in his placing his bet prior to looking the field over. “This may be nothing at all compared with what you’ll locate after a little more searching.”

“That’s so,” he agreed, “but I’ll stake this one out now anyhow. If I don’t want it myself I can take it out in the name of a sister I got back in Illinois. And then there’s Hank Stevens, who was a partner of mine, and two-three more whose names I could use, and the folks at the claim provin’ office wouldn’t likely know they was goners now.” Potter roused himself from these dreams of mineral empire to turn his beard toward me. “And you got a claim comin’ to you, on account of it was you that wanted to plant this buck.”

It was also I who had actually found the ledge of which he hoped so much, but I let that pass. “I won’t be able to wait around until you’ve finished your survey, thanks.”

My chief reaction to the discovery was annoyance. I was anxious to finish the disagreeable chore we had undertaken, and it was obvious that another burial spot must be found. What furthermore became obvious was that I would have to dig the new grave by myself. Potter went off in quest of more gold, and as I loaded the Apache into the stage once more, I could hear his hammer clicking on rocks further up the gully.

By the time I had driven the coach, now turned hearse, to another dry wash, the sun was bearing down with a force to discourage heavy manual labor. Halfway through, I knocked off for a siesta, so I didn’t finish until late afternoon.
As it was too late to go anywhere else, I returned to the water hole.

Potter had erected some cairns to mark the corners of mining claims, but I didn’t see the man himself until the sun got low enough to set aglow the butte he had compared to a beaver lodge. I was busy with water and sand, trying to remove the bloodstains from the coach floor, when I heard his voice behind me.

“You suppose that Tucson place you talked of has offices where a man can prove on claims?”

Having discovered that I would need pumice in order to do a thorough job of eradicating the stain, I turned around to be sociable. “Sure to, as it’s the territorial capital. There should be assayers on tap, too.”

“That’s where I’ll go when I’m ready to shoot. I’ll have the assays made first, then I can tell just who gets which claims. I ain’t looked it all over yet, but this place is more full of gold than a wolverine is of meanness. Some spots will turn out to beat others, though, and that’s what I’ve got to know. I’ll see that you get a real buffalo hump of a claim.”

I walked over to the ashes of our fire and commenced kindling a new one. “Why that’s mighty nice of you, Seth.”

Following me, the prospector sat down on the ground and drew out a frazzled notebook. “How you goin’ to call your claim, Baltimore?”

“I haven’t given it much thought.” Not expecting to see either him or the place again, I pursued the topic merely out of politeness. “Got any ideas?”

“Well, you could use your own name like a lot of folks do, unless you turn out to be the one that gets the claim where we started to shovel that buck under.” Potter worked his pencil across the notebook as though he were cutting letters in hardwood. “That one’s already got a name.”

Having lit the fire, I used the same match to relight my pipe. “Calling it after yourself?”

“No; after him.” The prospector waved in the general direction of where the Apache occupied an unmarked grave. “I might never’ve made the discovery if he hadn’t gone and got hisself killed, so the least I can do is to file that first one as the Dead Warrior claim.”

AFTER TUCSON CAME YUMA, where I made my stand for seven months, having run out of both funds and the incentive for further travel. As a town just across the Colorado from the terminus of the Southern Pacific railroad, it had closer connections with the Coast than with the region of my recent experiences. As for myself, I met the needs of the moment by practicing a modest amount of law and writing for the Yuma
Sentinel
.

Then going through newspaper exchanges for something worth borrowing, I found a small item about prospectors trooping to a place called Dead Warrior, which was referred to as a settlement. The discovery made me restless, but I stayed put until my interest was rearoused by an article in the Tucson
Citizen
. According to the excited author of this piece of journalism, the mines of the Dead Warrior region bade fair to cast the wealth found by Messrs. Cortez and Pizarro in the shade.

Western papers were full of such stories. Reporters were always playing up some trifling stampede as though it were a second California gold rush. Up to that point my reason was in the saddle; but my personal connection with the place in question put reason at a disadvantage. Yuma was having its
own boom times in expectation of the railroad jumping east across the river. I was just beginning to be fairly well established in a place which promised better fortune by the month. There was no sense in leaving a known good thing for what would doubtless turn out to be something a reporter found in the bottom of his glass. After telling myself that for three days, I spent the fourth plugging holes in my stagecoach and painting over the stain left by the heart’s blood of the Apache.

The place where he had died was not as I had left it. Long before I swung away from the creek, still full of water that early in the spring, I could see tents dotting the valley and in silhouette upon the big shelf of land I remembered. At the north end of this, as it turned out, was the main settlement: a cluster of canvas with a focal point in the shape of a crossroads dedicated to business.

While I was refreshing myself at the Glory Hole — an open-faced wickiup whose saloon furnishings consisted of the house sign and planks stretched across whiskey barrels — I saw a familiar figure trudging through the dust. “Hello, Duncan,” I called. “Let me buy you a drink.”

The mining engineer remembered me, but before accepting my invitation he pulled out his watch. “I guess I can consider myself off duty at this hour,” he told me. “Are you here prospecting like all the rest, Carruthers?”

“I’m just looking things over at present.” I felt better about having indulged my curiosity after discovering that a big mining company had thought it worth while to send down a representative. “Do you think they have anything here that’s worth building a town around?”

“Towns aren’t my concern,” he said, and I could tell from his expression that he thought I had been trying to pump
him. “All I know is that Pan-Western thought it advisable to have a survey made.”

“Well, how does it look to you in a general way?” His caution struck me as significant, and I tried for an approach he might not think worth guarding against. “Suppose a man wanted to invest in some business other than mining. Do you think he’d be wise to stay?”

Duncan sipped his whiskey. “I don’t like to give advice on anything but mining, and I’m paid to give that only to officers of the company, Carruthers, but it wouldn’t astonish me if business here in Dead Warrior would be better next year than it is now.”

Considerably impressed, I left my team and coach at a rope corral which advertised itself to be a livery stable. Then, for lack of any other immediate course of action, I began inquiring for Seth Potter.

Everybody knew him, including the proprietor of the tent restaurant where I paid two dollars for a thirty-cent meal, but I got several wrong directions before I was given the correct one. When I eventually found him, the old mountain man was seated on a box in front of a ramada sheltering his bedding and a litter of mining equipment. There were eight or ten men loafing in the twilight with him, but their function appeared to be that of interlocutors. The main burden of the talk was carried by Potter, who had a jauntier bearing than when I had last seen him.

I had to wait for a suitable break in the conversation. “Do you remember me, Seth?”

He had the air, as he turned to me, of a personage accustomed to be known by people whose names he could not himself recall. In a moment, however, he had risen to his feet and was shaking my hand.

“Well, how are you, boy? I was beginnin’ to be afeared some Injun had lifted your hair when you didn’t show up sooner. You want to see your claim? No, I suppose it’s too late for that now. I’ll show it to you the first thing in the mornin’, but I guess I done forgot which one is yourn at that. Let’s take a look now.”

Producing a notebook which was in far better condition than the one he had had before, he began to flip over the pages. I was both touched and embarrassed. Although I had recalled his promise to file in my name, I thought I must have forfeited title by my continued absence.

“I have no right to any claim,” I protested.

“Did you hear that, men?” Potter turned me around to face the assembled stampeders and slapped me on the chest with his unoccupied hand. “Old Baltimore here says he ain’t got no rights to a claim. Now I want to tell you something about Baltimore.”

He did, too, though the things he said had small kinship with the facts as I remembered them. “Baltimore and me was out prospectin’ here,” he began his narrative. “It didn’t look so good to me, but he says, ‘Seth, this coon’s got the feelin’ that here’s where we’ll make our strike.’”

Having endowed me with the powers of a divining rod, the old fellow next proceeded to assume his own preferred role of Indian fighter. “Well, we split up and begun to look over the washes for gold sign, but I hadn’t gone very fur when I see I was being trailed.”

Most of his audience must have heard that part of the story before, but one of them did the right thing. “Was it an Indian?”

“Son, it was the biggest Injun I ever see, and I’ve fit redskins for forty-five year. But I just kept studyin’ a chunk of rock and whistlin’, though watchin’ him out of the corner of
my eye until that buck — an Apache, I could tell he was, from the way his moccasins was made — snook up to where he was
just
about to jump me with his knife; then, I catched up my rifle and blowed him into the happy huntin’ ground, firm’ from the hip.”

While I marveled, Potter brought me back on the scene. “Well, Baltimore heard the shot, naturally, and when he come runnin’ and see the Injun, he says, ‘What’ll we do with the red son of a bitch, stick him up on poles?’ ‘Some Injuns would take to that,’ I says, ‘but not Apaches; and as long as there ain’t nobody else around to look after him, we might as well do the square thing and plant him, just like his folks would do.’ So we done it, and it was while we was diggin’ that Apache buck’s grave that we struck gold, just like Baltimore said we would.”

Having concluded his account, Seth winked at the others, then jerked his thumb toward me. “And after that he says he ain’t got no right to a claim.”

He showed me the Mosby Carruthers claim the next morning, although there wasn’t much to see. There were 160 acres of land stretched beneath what was now officially known as Beaver Lodge Butte. A couple of miles away I could see the main group of tents. Nearer at hand the scenery consisted of ledges cropping out above the shrubbery.

“You won’t have no trouble with claim jumpers,” Potter said, “because I’m sort of runnin’ this camp, you know.”

It didn’t look like anything worth stealing; but it might be valuable, and in any case I saw no way of refusing his kindness. “I appreciate this a great deal, Seth. And now you say I must prove upon it?”

“Sure. I filed it in your name, but to keep it you’ve got to make like you’re workin’ it or fixin’ to. The easiest thing is to camp here and go tell the man what you’re doin’.”

Neighboring tents and wickiups showed that others were following this procedure. “What man for choice?” I demanded.

“The mine register fellow. There’s one right here in Dead Warrior, on account of there’s so much goin’ on here.”

Upon returning to what everybody referred to as “town,” I found a tent with a sign saying, “Deputy Registrar of Mines” among the welter of canvas. The public servant officiating was bending over a ledger, exactly as he had done when I last saw him. I sat down on the empty box across the table from him and lighted my pipe.

“What happened to Powder Keg, Sam?”

Wheeler peered at me through his glasses, then grinned. “That was the biggest bust since Vesuvius blew its stack and fried Pompeii in hot lava. I won’t sadden you with the details; but when reports of this place reached us I skinned down to Tucson and got myself this job, so I could really find out what was what this time. How long have you been here, Baltimore?”

“I’m one of the oldest inhabitants returning to his native haunts,” I told him. “The nonsense seems doomed to be fixed in tradition, so you might as well hear it from me. It was my uncanny mineralogical insight which enabled old Potter to make his earth-shaking discovery.”

“So you’re in with the old boy?” Arising, Wheeler bent his chunky body at the waist. “Congratulations!”

“I’m not in with anybody.” My pipe had gone dead, and I had to strike another match. “And as for Potter, I know he thinks he has untold buried riches, but we’ve all been there before.”

“I don’t think we have.”

Coming from a man in his position, the words made me sit up. “Is it really big?”

“If it isn’t, I’m not the only one that’s being fooled,” he retorted. “Old Seth’s found some backers from Plutoville, or I don’t know capital when I see it ambling around on the hoof.”

That Potter had business connections of any sort was something I found difficult to believe. “If it’s worth anything, the moneylenders will probably get it for two plugs of tobacco and a beaver trap.”

“Toss me your tobacco, and I’ll tell you why not to believe it.” Sam got his pipe going, then put his feet on the table. “He may have no more business acumen than a straddlebug, but his sister from Illinois sent her son — as slick a young horse trader as was ever sired among the pumpkins by a passing Yankee peddler — to look after the family’s interests. He and Moneybags just left for the East to wrap up some kind of deal.”

“I saw our old acquaintance Duncan,” I offered. “He grudgingly admitted that he thought there would be a permanent operation here.”

Wheeler laughed. “Duncan tries to be stone face, but when he sees high-grade ore, he can’t help slavering like a skunk downwind from a chicken yard. He could make himself a fortune if he wasn’t born to be an organization’s sad-eyed and faithful mutt.”

“Maybe we’ll all be sleeping on gold pillows pretty soon,” I said, after I had learned from Sam just what to do in order to acquire unchallenged title to my claim, “but how are people making a living in the meantime?”

“Oh, there’s placer and small shaft mining, and panning down by the creek. The rest are doing everything from hauling in planks from the mountains, with which to timber the walls of Rome, to peddling water that only a cattleman would think of dipping sheep in. They tell me that the two men
in camp who shave use whiskey. That’s cheaper than water, incidentally.”

Having purchased a bucket of water that morning, I nodded. “I’ve got a stage I’d like to operate, Sam.”

“Then you haven’t got any problem.” From the way he took his feet off the table, I saw that he was going to make me a proposition. “Look; I am old and wilier than the serpent, and I’ve been wilier than usual since coming to Arizona. It’ll be a cinch to get enough purchasing commissions to make your trips into Tucson worth while, and you can scare up all the eastbound passengers you can hold, once you let it be known that you’re serving the new wonder camp. You still need one thing, though, and that is either I or me. Give me a percentage for being your agent here, and I’ll see that you get the mail contract, as soon as the post office is ready to go with regular deliveries.”

Somewhere in the course of my conversation with him I had lost my skepticism about both the bonanza and the dependent community. “Why didn’t Dick Jackson come along with you?” I demanded, when we had agreed upon the terms. “It isn’t like him to miss out on a good thing like this. And what about the others of the old poker crowd?”

“Tom Cary got himself a job mule skinning for the army, and Jim Powers drifted up north somewhere,” Wheeler said, “but I think we can count on Dick. The deal was that I was supposed to let him know if this place looked like Dame Rumor had a pantalette to stand in. I finally got off a letter to him the other day, and as soon as he gets it, you can expect any cloud of dust to turn into Jackson.”

The camp did not look like a zany collection of makeshift dwellings, when I stepped outside. It had rather the air of the temporary headquarters of a band united for high enterprise.

Creeping upon me was the feeling that I myself was a man
of mark for having the farsightedness and pioneer daring to be at the spot where fortunes were in the making. I tried to tell myself that optimism had better mark time, pending developments. Yet even the scenery quashed such appeals to caution. The immense stretches of empty landscape around Dead Warrior no longer looked like the end of creation but the beginning of it.

Everybody I met on the dusty thoroughfare known as Apache Street seemed to share my sense of exhilaration and general good humor. Not wanting to argue with a rattlesnake which was slithering across the street, I sidestepped into the path of a burly prospector. I was the one who should have apologized, and the knife scar on his face showed that he wasn’t always in a peaceful frame of mind; but instead of growling at me, he gave me a friendly pat on the shoulder.

“Didn’t look where I was goin’,” he said.

“Where would anybody be going at this time of day?” I wondered. He had started to move on, but he hesitated pursuant to that remark. “It must be ten o’clock,” I stated.