"Do you think you would be able to find my house again?" asked the hermit as we walked along.
"No," I replied, "I"m sure we couldn"t. When we came down the mountain in the clouds that day we were so mixed up that we did not even know whether we were on Lincoln or Elkhorn, though we had kept away so much to the left coming down that we rather thought we must have got on to one of the spurs of Lincoln."
"Well, you had. I"ll show you directly what line you took."
Half a mile farther on, at the point where the stream we were following joined our own creek, our friend stopped, and pointing up the mountain, said:
"If you ever have occasion to come and look me up, all you have to do is to follow your own creek up to its head, when you will come to a high, unscalable cliff, and right at the foot of that cliff you will see the great pile of fallen rocks in which my house is hidden. You can see the cliff from here. When you came down that day you missed the head of the creek you had followed in going up, and by unconsciously bearing to your left all the time you pa.s.sed the heads of several others as well, and so at length you got into the valley which would have brought you out here if you had continued to follow it."
"I see. How far up is it to your house?"
"About five miles from where we stand."
"It must be all under snow up there," remarked Joe. "I wonder you are not afraid of being buried alive."
The hermit smiled. "I"m not afraid of that," said he. "It is true the gulch below me gets drifted pretty full--there is probably forty feet of snow in it at this moment--but the point where my house stands always seems to escape; a fact which is due, I think, to the shape of the cliff behind it. It is in the form of a horseshoe, and whichever way the wind blows, the cliff seems to give it a twist which sends the snow off in one direction or another, so that, while the drifts are piled up all around me, the head of the gulch is always fairly free."
"That"s convenient," said Joe. "But for all that, I think I should be afraid to live there myself, especially in the spring."
"Why?" asked the hermit. "Why in the spring particularly?"
"I should be afraid of snowslides. The mountain above the cliff is very steep--at least it looks so from here."
"It is very steep, extremely steep, and the snow up there is very heavy this winter--I went up to examine it two days ago. But at the same time I saw no traces of there ever having been a slide. There are a good many trees growing on the slope, some of them of large size, which is pretty fair evidence that there has been no slide for a long time--not for a hundred years probably. For as you see, there and there"--pointing to two long, bare tracks on the mountain-side--"when the slides do come down they clean off every tree in their course. No, I have no fear of snowslides.
"By the way," he continued, "there is one thing you might tell Tom Connor when you see him, and that is that Big Reuben"s creek heads in a shallow draw on the mountain above my house. If you follow with your eye from the summit of the cliff upward, you will notice a stretch of bare rock, and above it a strip of trees extending downward from left to right. It is among those trees that the creek heads.
"You might mention that to Connor," he went on, "in case he should prefer to begin his prospecting downward from the head of the creek instead of upward from Big Reuben"s gorge. And tell him, too, that if he will come to me, I shall be glad to take him up there at any time."
"Very well," said I, "we"ll do so."
"Yes, we"ll certainly tell him," said Joe. "It might very well happen that Tom would prefer to begin at the top, especially if he should find that Long John had got ahead of him and was already working up from below."
"Exactly. That is what I was thinking of. Well, I must be off. I have a longish tramp before me, and the sunset comes pretty early under my cliff."
"Won"t you come home with us to-night?" I asked. "We have only two miles to go. My father told me to ask you the next time we met, and this is such a fine opportunity. I wish you would."
"Yes; do," Joe chimed in.
But the hermit shook his head. "You are very kind to suggest it," said he, "and I am really greatly obliged to you, and to Mr. Crawford also, but I think not. Thank you, all the same; but I"ll go back home. So, good-bye."
"Some other time, perhaps," suggested Joe.
"Perhaps--we"ll see. By the way, there was one other thing I intended to say, and that is:--look out for Long John! He is a dangerous man if he is a coward; in fact, all the more dangerous _because_ he is a coward.
So now, good-bye; and remember"--holding up a warning finger--"look out for Long John!"
With that, he slipped his feet into his skis and away he went; while Joe and I turned our own faces homeward.
CHAPTER VIII
THE WILD CAT"S TRAIL
"He is quite right," said my father, when, on reaching home again, we related to him the results of our day"s work and told him how the hermit had warned us against Long John. "He is quite right. Your hermit is a man of sense in spite of his reputation to the contrary. Yetmore, of course, will do anything he can to forestall Tom Connor, but, if I am not mistaken, he will not venture beyond the law; whereas Long John, I feel sure, would not be restrained by any such consideration. He would be quite ready to resort to violence, provided always that he could do it without risk to his own precious person. The hermit is right, too, in saying that Long John is all the more dangerous for being the cowardly creature that he is: whatever he may do to head off Tom will be done in the dark--you may be sure of that. We must warn Tom, so that he may be on his guard."
"I"m afraid it won"t be much use warning Tom," said I. "He is such a heedless fellow and so chuck full of courage that he won"t trouble to take any precautions."
"I don"t suppose he will, but we will warn him, all the same, so that he may at least go about with his eyes open. I"ll write to him again to-morrow. And now to our own business. Come into the back room. I want your opinion."
It had been my father"s custom for some time back--and a very good custom, too, I think--whenever there arose a question of management about the affairs of the ranch, to take Joe and me into consultation with him. It is probable enough that our opinion, when he got it, was not worth much, but the mere fact that we were asked for it gave us a feeling of responsibility and grown-up-ness which had a good effect.
Whenever, therefore, any question of importance turned up, the whole male population of Crawford"s Basin voted upon it, and though it is true that nine times out of ten any proposition advanced by my father would receive a unanimous vote, it did happen every now and then that one of us would make a suggestion which would be adopted, much to our satisfaction, thus adding a zest to the work, whatever it might be. For whether the plan originated with my father or with one of us, as we all voted on it we thereby made it our own, and having made it our own; we took infinitely more interest in its accomplishment than does the ordinary hired man, who is told to do this or do that without reason or explanation.
It will be readily understood, too, how flattering it was to a couple of young fellows like ourselves to be asked for our opinion by a man like my father, for whose good sense and practical knowledge we had the greatest respect, and of course we were all attention at once, when, seating himself in his desk chair, he began:
"You remember that when Marsden"s cattle first came they broke a couple of the posts around the hay-corral, and that when we re-set them we found that the b.u.t.t-ends of the posts were beginning to get pretty rotten?"
He happened to catch Joe"s eye, who replied:
"I remember; and you said at the time that we should have to renew the fence entirely in two years or less."
"Exactly. Well, now, this is what I"ve been thinking: instead of renewing with posts and poles, why not build a rough stone wall all round the present fence, which, when once done, would last forever?
Within a half-mile of the corral there is material in plenty fallen from the face of the Second Mesa; and everything on the ranch being in good working order, you two boys would be free to put in several weeks hauling stones and dumping them outside the fence--the actual building I would leave till next fall. It will mean a long spell of pretty hard work, for you will hardly gather material enough if you keep at it all the rest of the winter. Now, what do you think?"
"It seems to me like a good plan," Joe answered. "We can take two teams and wagons, help each other to load, drive down together, and help each other to unload; for I suppose you would use stones as big as we can handle by preference."
"Yes, the bigger the better; especially for the lower courses and for the corners. What"s your opinion, Phil?"
"I agree with Joe," I replied. "And with such a short haul--for it will average nearer a quarter than half a mile--I should think we might even collect stones enough for the purpose this winter, provided there doesn"t come a big fall of snow and stop us."
"Then you shall begin to-morrow," said my father.
"But here"s another question," he continued. "Should we build the wall close around the present fence, or should we increase the size of the corral while we are about it?"
"I should keep to the present dimensions," said I. "There is no chance that I see of our ever increasing the size of our hay-crop to any great extent, and the corral we have now has always held it all, even that very big crop we had the summer Joe came. If----"
"Yes, "if,"" my father interrupted, knowing very well what I had in mind. "_If_ we could drain "the bottomless forty rods" we should need a corral half as big again; but I"m afraid that is beyond us, so we may as well confine ourselves to providing for present needs."
"My wig!" exclaimed Joe--his favorite exclamation--at the same time rumpling his hair, as though that were the wig he referred to. "What a great thing it would be if we could but drain those forty rods!"
"It undoubtedly would," replied my father. "It would about double the value of the ranch, I think; for, besides diverting the present county road between San Remo and Sulphide--for everybody would then leave the old hill-road and come past our door instead--it would give us a large piece of new land for growing oats and hay. And, do you know, I begin to think it is very possible that within a couple of years we shall have a market for more oats and hay than we can grow, even including the "forty rods.""
"Why?" I asked, in surprise; for, at present, though we disposed of our produce readily enough, it could not be said that there was a booming market.
"It is just guess-work," my father replied, "pure guess-work on my part, with a number of good big "ifs" about it; but if Tom Connor or Long John, or, indeed, any one else, should discover a big vein of lead-ore up on Mount Lincoln--and the chances, I think, begin to look favorable--what would be the result?"
"I don"t know," said I. "What?"