Red Mesa

“IT’S panning out mighty low-grade stuff!—Dog-gone it!”

The young man who made this ejaculation, and in a most discouraged tone, too, was slender and wiry, with sandy reddish hair surmounting a Scotch cast of features. His face was freckled and sunburned. The inextinguishable hope of youth still flickered in his blue eyes, but there was worry, anxiety, there, too—the sign of that nagging, cankering care that keeps a fellow thin.

He shook his head as he held up a test tube in its wooden holder to the sunlight.

“Won’t do!” he muttered. “Anybody can find a mine in Arizona—but few can find a paying one.”

He looked about him at the silent and colorful mountains surrounding him, hopeless misery in his eyes. They had no answer for him! The brush sunshade that he and the Indian boy who was his companion had established was Scotty Henderson’s base camp for mine prospecting. Our readers may have met him before—on the trip for the Ring-necked Grizzly in Montana or when after the Black Panther of the Painted Desert country of Arizona.

Leslie Henderson—Scotty’s real name—had a heavy load to carry, for a youth of nineteen. It weighed nothing physically but mentally it was a burden far beyond his years. And the letter from his mother that he was now carrying in a hip pocket of his riding breeches had added a sickening load upon a mind already worn with anxiety. It had told him, as gently and self-sacrificingly as possible, of his mother’s decision to sell the old Henderson place back east. The cost of living had gradually come to exceed Major Henderson’s pension, which was all the Great War had left them of his father, the good old Doctor. To a woman used to comforts and a roof over her head as a matter of course, to say nothing of the ancestral associations of that homestead, that decision of Scotty’s mother was a far heavier blow to her than her words would admit. Delicately put, it meant in plain words that Scotty would either have to strike a paying mine claim soon or else give up his heritage of independence, that heritage that every real man claims as his birthright, and take a position somewhere in some great mining corporation. And the outlook was pretty black, now.

“No go, Niltci!” groaned Scotty, emptying the green fluid in the test tube with a gesture of discouragement, “we’ll have to break camp and move on.”

With that decision the hopelessness of all this endless prospecting surged over Scotty in an overwhelming wave. Arizona had been combed all over for mines! There was plenty of this sort of thing, this scanty and scattered deposit of copper carbonate, poor in per cent of metal, all through its mountains. The real thing was far different. Not impossible to locate; for each year, even now, sees some new and fabulous lode opened up. But the scattered, thin deposit of this gulch would take a mountain railroad to develop it and the most expensive of electric process works to reduce it to metal. Take this ore back east and men could make money out of it, but that “take,” that train-haul which would cost more than the ore was worth, was the rub!

For a moment a gorgeous vista of temptation opened up before Scotty. All he really needed to do to become rich was to go east with some of these picked specimens and float a “paper” copper mine, the kind that robs thousands of poor people of their earnings by false and visionary “literature”; that were never intended to do more than line the pockets of those scoundrels who make their living cheating the public that way.

But the mute reproach of the silent mountains to that temptation was enough for Scotty. Even the poor prospector with burro and pick who had come this way before had been too honest for that! He, some one of him, had without doubt explored this very valley long before Scotty; he had looked over this ore and gone on, knowing well that in practice it would never pay.

“Nothing doing!” said Scotty to himself, his honest soul recoiling in horror before the gilded prospect of a wildcat mine floated back east. “But, while there’s life there’s dope!” he grinned. “Where next? Dashed if I know! Le’s break camp anyhow, Niltci.”

The Indian youth grunted inquiringly from where he squatted, with the stoic patience of the Indian, under their brush shade. He pointed a coppery finger out at a lariat rope stretched between two mesquites in the sunlight of the hill slope. On it hung a ragged collection of meat strips, like stockings on a clothesline. They still glistened, raw and red, in the hot blaze of the cloudless sky overhead.

“Charqui no done,” he demurred, shaking his head. “Three sleeps yet.”

He was referring to their store of dried venison; “jerky” as the cowmen call it, only he used the original Spanish name for it, charqui—dried meat.

“Gee, I’d forgot about our grub stake! Hope,” observed Scotty, “springs infernal in the human breast, Niltci! Grub’s our real problem, now. Let’s let the mine wait and play hunters a bit, eh?”

As if to answer him the musical notes of a hound belled down from a distant mountain flank. There was sparse, dry-soil timber all over these hills, piñon, spruce, stunted western yellow pine and the inevitable aspens. The hills were bare and bony, and they blazed with orange and lavender color, for it was November, but there was game in the valley timber, lots of it, deer, cougar, bobcat, and an occasional cinnamon bear. Wild turkey inhabited the depths of the cañons, so plentiful that they formed the daily fresh meat of their camp in addition to the abundant trout which the Apaches disdained to catch and eat.

Scotty listened a moment to the musical notes floating down through the valley.

“There goes Ruler!” he cried. “Let’s get the horses and see what he’s after!”

Niltci, the Navaho boy, sprang to his feet grunting assent eagerly. His lithe form bounded down the slope towards a grass meadow, his red bandanna a blazing note of color, set off by an equally blazing white cotton shirt contrasting with his long, dark blue leggins which sparkled with rows of barbaric silver buttons. In a trice he was leading back Scotty’s chestnut mare and his own flea-bitten desert pony. Ever since Niltci had miraculously “disappeared” during the religious excitements of his own people over the Black Panther, he had been with Scotty on his mining expeditions down here, far to the south in the Apache country of White River and far away from his own people. To his white friends he had owed his life that time—a debt that, to a Navaho, is never paid.

He handed Scotty the mare’s halter and started deftly saddling his own pony. Ruler’s bays came unceasingly down through the mountains. Their giant coonhound was of an indomitable persistence; he could be depended upon to follow that trail, whatever it was, for days on end without relenting.

“Up the coulée, Niltci!” shouted Scotty, vaulting his horse and clattering down the slope from camp. Behind him the fast hoofbeats of the Navaho’s pony followed. The mare crossed the creek bottom in a single jump and began working up the opposite flank in a long slant. On ahead an occasional yelp from Ruler gave inkling of his whereabouts. He was traveling fast, for the distance between them did not seem to close up. Frightened deer burst from cover and dashed down and across the stream bottom as they rode. A wild turkey, scared into flight by the showers of rolling stones struck loose by the horses, soared over the willows in the ravine and disappeared in a mass of thick green.

Then, behind Scotty, Niltci grunted eagerly and made a queer sound that was half a yelp.

“Yep! I see him, Niltci—cougar! There he goes!—regular old he-one!” gasped Scotty, jouncing in his saddle as he bent to drag his rifle from the holster. The mare shied as the heavy .405 swung out around her flanks. Scotty’s knees gripped her fast and he let the horse go with the bridle reins dropped over the pommel.

Ruler’s deep tones now came back in explosive volleys.

“Ow-ow-ow! Ow-ow-ow!” he sang, belling a hot trail.

“Heading north, up the cañon!” yelled Scotty, galloping through the timber at full speed. “Look at him go!”

He pointed out a running cougar far up on the yellow mountain sides, galloping along in easy bounds that seemed effortless. His tawny body doubled and stretched out in the queer lope of the cat tribe, now trotting with fast-moving feet, now humping up in the swinging bounds of the gallop. He seemed very like a buff and white household cat magnified to enormous size. His tail drooped behind, tapering from a thick root seemingly as wide as his hips to a ropy furry length that undulated as he sprang easily up over the rock ledges.

“Gee, he’s an old Tom, Niltci!” called back Scotty over his shoulder, “Hi-Hi!—Go it, Ruler!”

The big reddish brown coonhound yodeled in answer. He was racing along perhaps halfway between them and the cougar, a red dot on the hot sunlight, bellowing forth bursts of hound music as he ran. Above them soared the high walls of the cañon, at least a mile up to the rim, yellow and blue-shadowed and dotted with dark green conifers. A hideous gulch, as it would look to a city dweller, terminated the cañon walls as they narrowed, and it was cleft high above by a dry arroyo that was all stones and boulders. But to Scotty this was the finest place on earth, and it was a jolly old world anyhow—in spite of mines that failed to pan out! His one anxiety was that the cougar might reach the timber up on the rim plateau and then turn on Ruler before they could get up there. The cat was far up, near the head of the gulch, and going even faster than they were. Like tiny Japanese pines the distant trees on the rim seemed to welcome him, and, while the panting horses and men labored hard up the slope, the cougar bounded over a ledge of broken rock and was gone into the timber.

Niltci grunted. “Wah!” he exclaimed disgustedly. “Lose dog! Cougar kill him! No good! Take pony quick—me climb up straight.”

His little horse clattered close behind and Scotty reached back for the bridle. Niltci vaulted from the saddle and with quick lithe movements he began to climb vertically up the cañon slope. Scotty urged the mare on up the long slant that would bring him out somewhere near the beginning of the cleft that made the arroyo. He got two glimpses of Niltci’s blue leggins swarming up over vertical ledges far above him; one brief sight of Ruler scrambling up over the rim ahead on the cougar’s trail; and then he was all alone, with the empty, silent, gorgeous mountains brooding majestically around him. With his passing and the shower of stones that his pony was sending down, they would return again to the eternal peace that was theirs. Apache, frontiersman, cavalryman, prospector, all in their turn had come and gone, to disturb their meditations for a brief moment, to pass on leaving these lonely cliffs and pines their silent and inscrutable witnesses.

Scotty leaned over and whispered a word in the mare’s ear. The noble creature was giving him her best, with the boundless generosity and disinterestedness of our four-footed hunting companions, but somehow, somewhere, she found it in her to call upon an extra burst of speed, some hidden reserve in response to her master’s whisper. The top of the gulch was near now. With distended nostrils, with heaving flanks, and hoarse soughing breath the mare toiled up the last ledges and then vaulted over the rim.

An open country of great pines was that plateau. Shadows and sunlight flecked the needles under the huge ponderosas. Scotty saw a white flash running like a deer through the tree trunks—Niltci, who could run faster than a horse for a short spurt. He was far ahead, and as for Ruler, only a deep ringing bay told of his whereabouts.

“Wahoo!—Wahoo!” sang out Scotty, his whoops intended more to let them know he was up and coming than anything else. The pony he led behind him snorted and whickered at sight of Niltci and Scotty let him go free at the hint. The flea-bitten little mustang immediately loped on ahead in a fast clatter. This urged the mare to top speed again, for she would let no horse pass her, if wind and legs could prevent it!

Came a wild piercing screech and a savage miauling on ahead somewhere. It sounded hoarse and ropy and vengeful; terrifying; intended to strike a paralysis of fright into the creature attacked. Scotty realized that the cougar had turned to the attack, finding that only a dog was following him. Then Ruler’s voice floated back, yelping and barking in a mixed medley of pain and fury. Scotty knew instantly what had happened. The old Tom was mauling the dog unmercifully. He would kill Ruler if help did not come instantly. Ruler was all of eighty pounds in weight but the cougar was at least two hundred and fifty and could beat him easily in a single combat.

A piercing whoop came from Niltci in answer to Ruler’s cry of distress. Scotty at once whipped out the heavy .405 and its thunderous roar rang out. The mare ducked and shied under its cannonlike reports, but Scotty fired again and again, for he hoped the sound of the bullets ripping through the timber would frighten the cat into treeing if not too savagely engaged with Ruler.

As the mare burst out into an open glade, a wild drama under the pines across from it met Scotty’s eyes. Ruler was dodging and giving back, the cat following up and striking again and again with a tawny and scimitar-clawed forepaw—bright flashes in the sunlight as of curved steel hooks. Niltci was racing across the clearing, his bright knife flashing in the sun, his wild black hair streaming out behind him. He was sprinting his utmost to save the hound but he would be too late if one of those terrible blows ever got home on Ruler!

Scotty threw the mare back on her haunches and raised a wabbling rifle barrel. The scene through the sights was not reassuring. Dog and cougar were so instantly changing places that it was impossible to fire. All this was happening with the quickness of thought, and Scotty felt reluctant to fire even a flash shot, for Ruler was whirling about so fast that he might run into the bullet while it was getting there.

And then a queer thing happened. Another tawny and grizzled body suddenly projected itself into the fray! Where he came from Scotty could not imagine, but a volleying bay of savage barks told him that it was no cougar but another dog.

Scotty stared for a moment, rifle lowered. Then—“Blaze!” he yelled in amazed delight—“Yeeoow!—Tear him, puppy!” he whooped. The giant Airedale launched himself like a gray thunderbolt surcharged with vim and power at the cougar’s throat. As Scotty watched them, not daring to fire, the cat spun around and Ruler instantly seized a hock hold. Claws flew through the air. Blaze bounded about the cat like a rubber ball, just out of reach. A whoop of triumph came from Niltci as he closed in swiftly with upraised knife. For a tense instant Scotty sat watching a chance to fire from his saddle, his heart beating so that he could hear the pulses through his own open mouth. Then the cat whirled and soared through the air in one tremendous bound that carried him twenty feet away. He hit the ground running. There is no such speed as an old Tom can put on when in a tight place! He seemed literally to fly through the air, Blaze and Ruler a jump or two behind him. Niltci gave up the chase and snatched at the bridle of his pony as that faithful creature raced up after him. Scotty put spurs to the mare and galloped off in hot pursuit.

“Hi! Blaze! Hi! Ruler!—Wahoo!” he yelled, throwing the bridle over the mare’s neck. In answer a stentorian Whoopee! came ringing back through the forest. That was a man’s voice, and almost immediately following it there was a crash in the timber and a white horse thundered through the pines at right angles to Scotty’s course, the tree trunks seeming to pass the white flash of the horse like fence pickets.

“Left!—Left!—You pisen—li’l—horned—toad!” came Big John’s iron voice, jolting to the rhythm of his gallop. Scotty whooped back greeting at him and then wheeled obediently. The cat and both dogs were in plain sight ahead of him but Big John had an uncanny foresight in the ways of big game, and he had no doubt foreseen some sort of twist or short cut on the cougar’s part. The timber cleared ahead of Scotty now, and out to the left in it he saw a giant pine, already dying of old age. For it the cougar had turned and was now racing at top speed. He ran up its huge bole like a cat climbing a tree, a shower of bark spalls raining down from his claws. At the first big dead branch he stopped and turned below his black muzzle, spitting and snarling from an open pink mouth at the dogs underneath. Ruler was prancing around on his hind legs, yelling with eagerness, while Blaze savagely scrambled up the trunk, to lose his grip and tumble down and indomitably attempted it again.

Big John reined in the white horse. “Now’s yore chance to do the pretty, Scotty, old-timer—afore he jumps down—shoot!” he yelled.

Scotty quieted the mare and raised the .405. Its enormous bellow rang out. The cat screeched and launched forth with all four claws spread in the convulsive flurry of death. He struck the pine needles with a heavy thud and instantly the dogs charged in, growling and worrying at him, while old Tom rolled over on his back and spun his claws in the instinctive defense of a cat in his last throes. Niltci clattered up on the mustang at that instant. In a flash he had leaped from his horse, bounded to the cougar’s side and jumped away, leaving a red knife-handle sticking out behind the cougar’s shoulder blades. Again there was a flash of his nimble body and the knife came out, while blood spurted six feet from the gash. The cougar groaned and stretched out on his side, quivering and sighing peacefully as if falling asleep. His eyes glazed; then the body stiffened and stretched in a last tremor.

Blaze ran up on the carcass and bared white fangs at Ruler. His attitude was crinky, cocky as a prize fighter’s, and he honestly believed that he had killed that whole cougar all by himself! He dared Ruler to come on. As the latter had convictions of his own concerning that cat, a royal dog-fight seemed imminent—but Niltci seized the hound’s collar and held him back by main force.

Big John laughed uproariously. “Hol’ him, Injun!” he roared. “Ruler’ll be gobblin’ more’n he kin chow, fust ye know! That Blazie boy’s feelin’ reel mean an’ ornery, danged ef he ain’t!”

Scotty laughed as Big John dismounted to boot the Airedale off the cougar, for Niltci had signified that he wanted to begin skinning out but wasn’t any too anxious to go near the belligerent Blaze.

“Where’s Sid, John?” asked Scotty, collecting his thoughts for the first coherent greeting that the swift action of the hunt so far had allowed.

The big cowman’s eyes twinkled. “Sid, he ain’t travelin’ none, these days,” he grinned. “He’s back thar, somewhar, nursin’ along a sort of present for ye, Scotty.” He winked enigmatically at the youth.

“How come?” asked Scotty, mystified. “Present, eh?”

“Yaas, he’ll come a-singin’ with it, pronto. Some dago writin’ on a piece of Injun pottery, ’tis. We-all was headin’ for yore camp when we heard Ruler kyoodlin’ back thar a-piece,” he explained, “so Blazie and I, we ’lows to set in the game. But Sid he’s afear’d to ride, which-same’s because he mought break that thar curio. We found it in one of them caves, after the most all-fired climb this hombre ever got inter, I’m settin’ here to tell ye——”

“Here he comes, now!” interrupted Scotty, whipping off his sombrero to wave it at a new rider who came plodding through the pines with a led pack cayuse following him. “Whoopee!—Oh, Sid!” he yelled.

The rider waved back. The dogs put out for him pell-mell, Ruler leaping and fawning up on his saddle flanks, so overjoyed was he at seeing Sid again, the Airedale jealously shoving in to get his share of the caresses. Presently Sid rode up to where Big John and Niltci were busily skinning out the cougar and butchering big sections of the delicious meat.

“Hi, Sid!—what’s all this Big John’s telling me about a present?” Scotty greeted him. “Gosh knows, I was feeling pretty blue not so very long ago! Did you remember it was my birthday or anything?” he bantered.

“It’s a mine for you, Scotty!” announced Sid, breathlessly, his eyes alight with the joy of him who gives, “an old Spanish mine! Got the dope here on a pottery tablet that we found in a cave dwelling.”

“Gorry!—a mine!—le’s see it!” cried Scotty. “A real, sure-enough mine? I’d begun to think there was no such thing left in Arizona.”

“It’s at a place called Red Mesa, down near Pinacate, Scotty,” said Sid. “The dope’s all in Latin and I can’t read much of it, but we’ll hunt up a priest somewhere and get him to translate it——”

Scotty’s face fell, even while Sid was speaking. “‘Down near Pinacate!’” he echoed, huge disappointment in his tones. “It can’t be, Sid! Why, that’s all lava country! There’s no mesa or mineral down there.”

“How about the Ajo Mines?” challenged Sid. “And there’s lots of ore north of Sonoyta, only it costs too much to work it. You know that yourself.”

“By gosh, you never can tell!” exclaimed Scotty, excitedly. “It’s possible, though! There’s granite outcropping, even down at MacDougal Pass, only fifteen miles from Pinacate. We’ll try it!”

“Hope it isn’t in Mexican territory—but no, ‘twenty-one miles northeast of Pinacate,’ the plaque says——”

“Gee! Le’s see it!” cried Scotty eagerly.

Big John grinned sardonic grins as the two youths got the plaque out of Sid’s saddlebags and held it between them, scanning it excitedly. He heard Scotty eagerly bark out the word “‘aurum’—gold?” and shook his head.

“’Pears to me that every white man but me goes crazy over that word ‘gold’!” he growled whimsically. “Fellers will lie, steal, murder, get themselves killed with thirst or et by grizzlies—an’ all for somethin’ that they don’t want when they’ve got it!” he exclaimed. “Scotty, ef it warn’t for you bein’ a minin’ engineer I’d warn ye to leave it alone!” he said positively. “Exceptin’ it’s now November and the tanks is probably full down thar, I wouldn’t let you go, nohow.”

But Scotty was hardly listening to him. A planning look was in his eye and his engineer mind was already envisioning not the mine itself but the practical ways to get out the metal.

“Ship base in Adair Bay; burros up to the mine; carry the ore in bottoms through the Panama Canal to the East, where we can get cheap process reduction—Gee! There’s nothing to it!” he averred enthusiastically.

“C’rect—nawthin’ a-tall, li’l hombre!” grinned Big John sardonically. “No water; no feed for yore burros; no road—an’ no mine!” he declared.

“Yes, but ships, John!” urged Scotty. “That’s different. We can send out a year’s supply of hay, oats and supplies for the camp just as they do at Las Pintas, and bring back the bottoms in ore. It’s mighty different from some inland proposition, hundreds of miles from either rail or sea routes. If this tablet is reliable, the engineering side of it is a cinch! Le’s hear the ethnologist.”

Sid spoke up on this prompting: “We know well that all that country has been explored since the earliest times by the Spaniards,” he contributed. “Sonoyta has been inhabited by them for over two hundred years, and one of their oldest missions is San Xavier, the one for Papago Indians who used to hunt all that country. The friars were Dominicans—D.O.M., you see. This Fra Pedro undoubtedly got his information from some Papago visitors to the pueblo tribes. He made that pottery record and had it fired while proselyting among the pueblos of the San Pedro River—probably named the river himself after his patron saint. It all fits in, see, John? Then he got wounded or hurt, somehow, in the general massacre of the friars in 1680 and died in the refuge of that cavate dwelling. The Indians buried his plaque with him in a sort of kiva. The thing seems straight enough to me,” concluded Sid.

“Me too!” grinned Big John. “I gotto nurse you two pisen mean young reptyles down into that no-man’s land—I see that!” he snorted. “Waal, le’s git back to yore camp, Scotty, an’ I’ll git the outfit ready. Niltci’s goin’, of course. We gotto hev at least one Injun down in that country. Thar’s lots of mountain sheep down thar, an’ that means hoss feed, galleta grass. We’ll git a few pronghorns (antelope), mebbe, out’n them lava craters. Ef the tanks is not dry, we kin resk it.”