Seni Bellefonte, Pa., March 2, 1928 omen I HAVE A BOY. T've a wonderful boy, and I say to him, Son, Be fair, and be square in the race you must run. Be brave if you lose and be meek if you win, .. Be better and nobler than I've ever been. Be honest and fearless in all that you do And honor the name that I have given to you. I have a boy and I want him to know, We reap in life just about as we sow, And we get what we earn, be it little or great, Regardless of luck and regardless of fate. I will teach him tnd show him, the best that I can, That it pays to be honest and upright, a man. I will make him a pal and a partner of mine, show him the things in this world that are fine. I will show him the things that are wick- ed and bad, For I figure this knowledge should come from his dad. I will walk with him, talk with him, play with him, too, And to all of my promises, strive to be true. And We will grow up together, I'll too be a boy, And share in his trouble and share in his joy. We'll work out our problems together and then We will lay out our plans when we both will be men. And, oh, what a wonderful joy it will be, No pleasure in life could be greater fo me, —Hugh Marion Pierce ————— eee rs WHEN DREAM GULCH PAID. A steady hand on the wheels, Jim Marshall piloted his car easily up the perilous grade that winds arcund the perpendicular side of Jackass Moun- tain. Into the dizzy heights the road crept like, in places, a mere trail no wider than the wheels, where the sheer walls of the canyon dropped away for thousands of feet. Jim stopped the machine on the di- vide, a dot at the apex of the world. He locked the brakes and gazed off across that gorgeous panorama of wild jagged beauty, of depths and heights and green forests, broken here and there with silver lakes and the silken skein of a winding river. Over this very read, \vhen ii was a trail so narrow that jackasses could not pass, the hordes had tramped in their mad rush to Dream Gulch. Ov- er it his father, Two Bairel Marshall, had come when he carried his riches to the outside world. Through Two Barrel’s eyes Jim had seen it, and he recognized the landmarks, the little intimate details of the great picture. There was friendly old Bear Mountain over there against the horizon. and down there below was the gulch between the two ridges. “Dream Gulch!” he exclaimed. Old Two Barrel Jasper Marshall had made his stake in the rush of ’83 and then he had lost it, practically all of it, in fighting a bitter up-hill battle through forty-odd years. He had died two weeks hefore—with his boots on—still finghting, as he had wanted to die. He had left his son, Jini, a gray- eyed, square-jawed young fellow like he had once been, but little. out of the wreckage—a few thousand dollars at most. But Jim had the pioneering blood of his father in him, and he was ready for the battle. Free, twenty-six, ful of life, he was answering the call which had been tugging at him ever since he could reinember. Old Two Barrel had been wont to draw back the curtain which shut out his past life and lead young Jim into the wonderland of he Wild West; the excitement of the gold rush, the hardships, the battle for existence, the romance of blood and love and hate. Two Barrel and his partner, Chailie Wilson, had staked discovery claim in Dream Gulch in the spring of ’83; and they had seen cities spring up there in the wilderness over night. They had seen the as::ndancy, then the decline and decay, of Dream Gulch. “Ig’s dead an’ gone now, Senny,” old Two Barrel had said often. “But the real strike was never made there. The ledge from which that placer washed was never found, an’ some day there’!l be another strike in Dream Gulch.” . That was the lure which had in- duced Jim Marshall to come across the continent. He stood beside the car with the world at his feet. His face, bronzed from the outdoors which he loved, was set with that sterness which had been his father’s when he fought his battles. Then it relaxed into tender lines and his eyes softened. It seemed to him for a moment that that big, gruff, kindly man who had been his father, was standing there beside hia i he looked off into the spaces be- ow. “Dream Gulch!” he said again, half aloud. “The lost gold ledge. Dad, it’s a fine legacy you have left me.” There it was below him exactly as he had known it would look. Slowly the car crept down, down, twisting and winding along the face of the mountain. A great snowshoe rabbit, a mottied gray in its late Fall coat, sat hunched up in the road ahead of him and Jim honked his horn shrilly, laughing at the sudden antics of the wild creature as it leaped for the safety of the brush above the grade. The vibrating echo of the blast came back to him from a dozen angles of the canyon wall, growing in vol- ume. Suddenly it seemed sacrilegious to Jim to break that great silence of the of this modern implement of civiliza- tion, and after that the car slipped forward noiselessly. : For miles the road unwound itself with no other traveler over its whole ! course until Jim came at last to the bottom and at the head of the ravine which slashed back into the Coeur d’Alene range like a yawning chasm. And there Jim began to feel the full glamor of the north Idaho gold camps of ’83 weaving the spell of their ro- mance about him. Before him, where the gulch emp- tied into the valley between the ranges, spread the old tumble-down log cabin city of Delta. To Jim it seemed he had walked its single long wide street when it teemed with the jostling crowds of seven thousand miners, prospectors, adventurers, gamblers, women; when it was a blaring, boisterous city of life—and sudden death. It sprawled before him exactly as it had been built nearly half a cen- tury before when Two Barrel Mar- shall walked its streets with his cor- duroy pockets bulging with his pouches of gold dust. But it was not the dead city Jim had expected. The low buildings with fallen roofs and sagging walls, the silent dance halls and saloons and gambling dens were there. But there was also evi- patched-up store building and post- office combined, which had added to itself the modern touch of a gas pump. The jarring note of that glaring red gas pump in Delta’s silent street startled Jim. “I’ll be darned!” he said, half aloud. “What in thunder would anyone want to put a gas station clear up in here for?” He let the car idle to a stop in front of the store while he looked up and down the deserted thoroughfare, placing various buildings—buildings he knew from the stories of his fath- er. His eyes wandered on down past the last rotting structure and on up the gulch. That gentle tugging at his heart which was the siren lure he had followed was pulling strong again. Up there was where Two Barrel Marshall had washed the yellow gold from the gravel. Up there romance had lived; up there the lost gold ledge was hidden. “That’s it!” he said aloud, as if he had made a new discovery of an old and friendly beacon. Suddenly Jim stepped on the accel- erator and the car leaped forward, spitting a cloud of gas fumes into the astonished face of the rugged store- keeper who had stepped up at that instant. His eyes on the narrow road, Jim watched the curves ahead as the car courses of the gulch, dotted with the torn with the sluice dams and up- turned gravel and caved-in shaft holes of the placer diggings. His nerves were at tension—ting- ling. He was looking for something ahead which he had never seen but which he knew he could find. The miles slipped’ by and then suddenly he threw on the brakes bringing the car to a sharp stop. There beside the roadway stood Thiad. Jim knew it at once—the long for- gotten city which, in its day, had outrivaled Delta in the madness of its blood and in its lust for gold. What tales of Thiad Two Barrel Marshall had told his son in his childhood as they sat before the open fireplace, the lights turned off. Thiad slept the long sleep, as still and silent as those human beings be- neath the sunken-in rectangles of sod on the hillside of the town. It was an eerie, ghostly place of haunting memories; but to Jim Marshall it had life, breathed, pulsated with life as it had when Two Barrel Marshall had reigned as chief of the vigilantes dur- ing its brief existence. It had lived, and to Jim it still lived. He remembered as though he had been there himself the murder of Jeff Hunter; the raid of the gold robbers on the sluice boxes; the hanging of the two who had been left after the battle and who had been given sum- mary justice by that rough mining camp court. Those pictures which his father had drawn for him, and they had fired his imagination. There before him was the old dance hall and saloon, the Thiad Palace. Jim slipped from the seat of the car and walked over to it. “Third rafter from the east end,” he muttered aloud. He counted the wobbling, warped rafters under the broad, sunken porch and there it was! Jim’s blood was racing hot in his veins and he breathed heavily. Four feet apart on the third rafter were dangling two knots of heavy hemp rope, frayed, ready to fall apart. The two robbers had been hanged there from that third rafter, and their bodies left dangling in the breeze for twenty-four hours, while the thou- sands of Dream Gulch looked and took warning. Jim turned slowly to his car again, unaware of the two faces—coarse, brutal faces with shifty eyes—which peered out at him between the yawn- ing log walls of the Thiad Palace. A moment before when Jim’s car had come to its sudden stop, these two had been sitting facing each other across a worm-eaten pine table, their heads close together, their voices lowered to undertones as they studied a sheet of oiled paper on which they had drawn a crude map with a pencil. Jim climbed into his car again with the resolve that another day, perhaps the next, he would return to Thiad and putter about its buildings, nosing into places where Two Barrel Mar- shall had once been a power. Today, though, he was anxious to see the whole of Dream Gulch. The grade up the gulch grew steep- er; then all at once it flattened out in- to a little level swale. Here, close beside the road, stood an old-fashioned structure, composed of four stripped cedar poles, freshly hewn and standing upright to bear bie waignt of a sloping cedar-shake roof. dence of three resident families and a | droned on and on along the winding | decaying cabins of another day and | Jim had observed numerous simi- lar structures in the gulch as he went along, but they were rotting, tum- : bling to the ground. Under the roof of this one, however, was a wooden windlass, standing over a wide exca- vation. Beside the opening was piled ! a gravel dump, sloping down to the 2 creek bed which ran the length "of the gulch, : | A new rope wound about the wind- ‘lass suggested a well and Jim stopped ‘the car to investigate. { But standing beneath the roof of | the open structure and peering down "into the cavity below, he made out the stooped form of a man at the . bottom of the hole bending over a i shovelful to the load, then straighten | like bucket. Jim watched him heap the final shovelful to the load, then straighten | his bent back with gnarled hands to his hips as he turned a venerable face upward to the light. “Hello, down there!” Jim called a greeting. The old man started; then slowly . began to climb the fifteen feet to the ! surface, using cleats which had been ‘ nailed across a corner of the cribbing. Not a word did the veteran say un- i til he stood straight and tall before Jim, his sharp eyes peering at the i younger man out of a face covered | with a flowing white beard. “They’s some ’spicious characters sneakin’ ‘round the gulch,” he broke | the silence finally. “Got t’ be kinda i keerful.” Jim smiled broadly. “I thought this was a well.” he said. The pupils of the old man’s blue eyes grew wide with a slowly dawn- ing amazement. “Same looks an’ same voice,” he said irrelevantly. He came a step nearer until his face was close to Jim’s. He was broader, taller, more massive than Jim, with the power of the outdoors, “Yuh ain’t him, air yuh?” he de- manded, a slow, eager hopefulness in his voice. Jim stared; then suddenly he thrust out a hand and seized the work-hard- ened fist of the other. “Reckoned mebbe I might be a-git- tin’ twisted in my head, sorta seein’ things,” the old man went on unstead- ily. “I ain’t though. It’s yuh, aint it, Two Barrel, like yuh was back in ’83 2, “Charlie Wilson!” Jim answered with firm conviction. “I am Two Bar- el’s boy, Jim.” For a long moment Charlie Wilson and Two Barrel Marshall’s son stood there looking straight into each oth- er’s faces, their hands gripped. The old man spoke first. “Sonny, whar’s Two Barrel?” he asked, his face softened with a flood of memories, his voice wistful. “I been a-waitin’ here fer nigh on t’ : forty years fer him t’ come back.” “Gone,” Jim answered simply. Charlie Wilson dropped the hand of the other and shook his head slowly. “Reckon it ware my fault,” he said. “I done lost that ’er address he give me an’ I didn’t know whar he were. “I rode into ’Frisco after him an’ me done cleaned up,.an’ I lived like a king thar. Then when it ware gone, I done some prospectin’ in Nevady; then come back her t’ clean up agin. Two Barrel waren’t here, nobuddy waren’t here. Dream Gulch had done played out. “Sonny, I stayed here, think’ meb- be Two Barrel ud come back. a-lookin fer the lost ledge but I ain’t found it yet. I reckoned it 'ud come, { though; then I aimed t’ go an’ find Two Barrel, fer him and me ware partners in Dream Gulch.” it—in the east,” Jim said. Charlie Wilson looked up again, his eves bright. “In Montaney ?” he asked. “Reck- cned mebbe I'd head over thar some time if I could git a grub stake.” “Michigan,” Jim answered. “Ain’t never heard much o’ gold diggin’ thar,” Charlie Wilson mused; then he grew silent. Slowly he turned to his windlass, and putting his strength to it, hoisted the bucket of gravel. With the load at the surface, he carried it to the edge of the dump and turned it over, watching it spread out and roll down the slope. Then he lowered the bucket into the shaft while Jim stood by watching. It seemed to Jim that the old man had forgotten his presence, but he had not. The bucket down, he made a hitch in the rope so that the wind- lass could not unwind; then he faced the younger man. “I been a-puzzlin’,” he said. There was much of the softness of tone that comes to one who has lived in the solitudes in his voice. “I been a-puz- zlin’ like if Two Barrel ware gone an’ yuh was his boy, yuh’d be having his part of Dream Gulch.” “I came out here to help find the lost ledge,” Jim answered eagerly, playing up to the other. “Wall,” Charlie went on, “I done prospected these here hills ‘till they ain’t no place left much t’ prospect: but we’ll make it. We can wash plac- er from the diggin’s t’ grub stake us.” “Is there still placer gold here?” Jim asked, his blood firing as the fev- er crept through him. “It’s down deep—along bedrock— twenty feet under some places,” Char- lie explained. “It’s thar, though, lots o’ it.” “Why did the miners leave the gulch then?” he wanted to know. “The water got into the gravel and they ain’t never been enough to work the sluices since,” Charlie explained. “The rich gold was took out; but they is a mighty fine pay streak up the gulch yit.” “Couldn’t we put in a dam up at the head of the gulch somewhere and hold the spring water to wash the gravel with?” Jim demanded, his en- thusiasm growing. Charlie shook his head sadly. “That ’ud take a right smart sum o’ money,” he said. “An’ it "ud be only a chanct they was enough in thep ay streak t’ make it back.” “I’ve got some—a few thousand,” Jim offered. “We'll go partners on ” it. “Best do like I been a’doin’,” Char- lie hesitated. “Summer times I been a-lookin’ fer the ledge. Come fall I been | “Two Barrel made a strike and lost | SRE a TAS MA SO eI SO | hills with the harsh, discordant note an’ winter, I pile out enough gravel from the diggin’s t’ wash while the spring thaw is on an’ they’s a flood o’ water in the gulch. That-a-awy I clean out enough t’ grub stake fer the next summer. Only they’s times when I git off’n the paystreak, an’ they ain’t much t’ clean up.” oy Jim reached out his hand again, suddenly, and took the other’ in a firm grip. ; “Charlie Wilson,” he said, “ you | and I signed up as partners. We'll make Dream Gulch pay. i “And now, he added, “I’ve come a long way today and I’ve seen a lot and I've got a whale of an appetite. Have you by chance got a cabin and some grub that wants to be eaten?” | “Sartin sure,” Charli~ grinned. “It’s the same old cabin Two Barrel an’ me built, an’ yuh can pile yer beddin’ on Two Barrel’s bunk, Sonny.” | There was ring in his voice and his old eyes were kindly with the lights of new fires as he visioned the future and the new strike which was sure to | come. | Indian summer was passing and the ' nip of late fall was creeping over the Coeur d’Alene when Jim came to Dream Gulch so that there was no time to be lost. Charlie Wilson gave up his work in the placer hole, and together the two inspected the myriad of prospect shafts, with which Charlie had pock- marked the mouhtains about the gulch in his search for the ledge. They selected as the site for their dam a narrow point in the gulch near its head where some ancient slide had almost closed the passage. i This would make a reservoir of the gulch itself to collect and hold the! spring flood water for use in washing their gravel throughout the year. A concrete dam was essential to hold a sufficient body of water; so Jim went to Wallace and secured the serv- ices of an engineer and a small crew of men. Then he laid in the materials and supplies enough to last through the winter. He and Charlie Wilson turned to and worked as members of the crew, rushing the dam with all possible speed before freezing weather should set in. For the first time in over for- ty years Dream Gulch echoed to the activities of industry and commercial development. The word went about among old- timers scattered through the hills and the towns of North 1daho that a crazy young fool was blowing his money in Dream Gulch, and many there were that fall and early winter who went in to take a look at him and see what he was doing. Most of these had tried their hands at washing gold in Dream Gulch, and they shook their heads. i “It won’t pay you,” Jim was told more than once. “There’s only the fine stuff left along bedrock, and you can’t hold enough water to go down after that.” The glamor of it was in his blood though, and Jim paid no attention. He was not even regretful when he drew a check for the last dollar of his in- heritance. The dam was finished, and was ready for the spring floods, and Jim promised a cleanup for the next summer. And then about the time the dam was finished the first trouble loomed. The two rough, shifty-eyed miners who had watched the movements of Jim Marshall the day he first passed through Thiad and we had estab- lished themselves in the old deserted town for the winter while they were working at a prospect in the hills back of the place had, on several oc- ' casions, come up the gulch to watch , the progress of the dam building. Instinctively Jim mistrusted them and watched them carefully. On one occasion, thougl:, when Jim was making a final trip to Wallace for the last of the winter’s supplies just as the first snow was gathering, the older of the pair, tnown as Hec LeBioc, nailed him and asked him if he would be able to bring his wife and step-daughter out from town. The idea of women wintering in the ghostly city startled Jim, and he showed it in his face. “They’s others that’ll bring the old | lady and gal out,” Hec growled. Don’t know’s I want yuh mixin’ up with my wimmin folks anyhow.” “It wasn’t that,” Jim assured him. ' “It was only the idea of women stay- | ing jn Dream Gulch through a win- | ter.’ “That’s my business,” Hee snapped. | “They’l take care of themselves.” ! So in Wallace Jim called for Mrs. ; LeBloc and her daughter. The moth- | er was a rather ordinary type of hill- | woman who had toiled ail her life and received the hard knocks of a rather hit and miss existence with the stolid indifference of her race. Her face still showed the traces of a faded beauty, and she was friendly toward Jim. But the daughter, Vera Jarvis, was different. When Jim saw her, he was glad that she was not the daughter of Hee LeBloe, while his resentment was aroused that she should even be com- pelled to come in contact with men like LeBloc and his partner. She was a slim, little creature with wide, round blue eyes that were like something Jim had seen in the hills —the far-away azure of the peaks along the Coeur d’Alene range after the sun had set. There was about her a timid, shy wildness; she was like a fawn that is startled—yet is unafraid. Jim stared frankly as he held out his hand to her. “I'm mighty glad to meet you, Miss Jarvis,” he said, when Mrs. LeBloc had spoken the girl’s name. “She’s like me,” Mrs. LeBloe had added with ill-concealed pride. “Pur- ty. Winkie Dunning’s crazy over her. Shouldn’t be s’prized they’d be a wed- din’, come spring.” The girl flushed painfully, but said nothing. Jim winced. Winkie was the younger partner of Hee LeBloc and the more cunning of the two from what Jim had observed. Vera sat silent beside Jim in the front seat of the car as he made the return trip to Dream Gulch. Mrs. Le- Bloc was in the back seat with sup- plies piled high about her. It had turned. bitter cold and al- ready, higher up in the mountains, there was a blanket of snow on the i when he should do nhysical battle work of digging out the gravel, ground. This made traveling peril- | ous, and several times as they went up over the divide, the car made dan- gerous slips which almost precipitated it over the grade. Once Mrs. Bloc screamed and tried to plunge from the car, but the girl sat still, her face white but her small hands held steadily in her lap. “Does it scare you?” Jim asked her. “Not—much,” she answered with- out looking at him. At another time when Jim saved them from death only by a miralce, he smiled down at her reassuringly, and she looked up at him, her blue ! eyes wide with excitment. “I wish I could drive a car—like that,” she said. Her voice was low, soft. “T’ll teach you!” Jim promised. When at last they came to Thiad, and the men piled out to meet them, Jim felt his resentment growing at their familiarity with the girl. Winkie Dunning came up close to her. “Got a kiss fer me, kid?” he de- manded crudely, and Jim wanted to strike him. But the next instant his heart bounded with joy. The girl was | looking at Winkie steadily out of | calm, level eyes. “Don’t you ever touch me!” said. “Oh, ho! Little spitfire” he laughed | coarsely. “We'll see, cutie!” There was a sudden glint of fire In her eyes which reassured Jim. As he drove on up the gulch to Charlie Wil- son, his mind was picturing the time she | with Winkie Dunning. Winter came that night and for five months Dream Gulch, with its queer little assortment of settlers, the two men and two women hibernating in the best of the old buildings at Thiad and the two men three miles up the gulch at Charlie Wilson’s cab- in, was locked up like an old mine shaft, shut away from the outside world. The snow fell steadily for a week, filling the gulch until the dump piles and the mine shafts and the old build- ings were hidden beneath a level blanket, the trees bent under their burden. The snow was an omen of good luck, though, to Jim Marshall and his old partner, for it meant there would | be plenty of water with the first gen- eral thaw and their reservoir would be filled. As the weeks passed, Jim absorbed that slow, unquenchable spirit which fired his partner, the gold fever of the prospector whose life is the fu- ture when he shall make his strike. His body ached and his blistered hands had smarted those first few weeks. But he had come to be as hard as nails, able to stand the strain of steady labor longer than Charlie Wil- son, whose strength and endurance he had envied and marveled at in the beginning. They were great partners, those two, and were accomplishing wonders with their work. In the diggin’s along the gulch they were following bedrock and piling up so much gravel that they knew when the water came they would have enough to make a big cleanup. Then they would be re- warded for their labor, when Dream Gulch paid. When the first hard freeze came, and the snow formed a crust that id would hold Jim’s weight, he put on the crude bear’s paw snowshoes which Charlie fashioned from strips of a buck’s hide and twisted willows, and Sramped the three miles down to Thi- aa. i He found the people there fairly comfortable in a mud-chinked cabin but the reception he got was not of the warmest. The girl, Vera, greeted him with shy friendliness in the pres- ence of the others, while Winkie Dun- | ning, who evidently had made small | progress in his love-making, showed ' open hostility, sneering at him as an | Eastern dude come there to mix in other people’s affairs. Jim held his tongue, but his visit was short, and he went back to his Aonther time, unable to stay away from Thiad, he started out but came on Vera in the gulch, half-way be- tween the two places. She was stand- ing on a knoll of snow which marked the presence of an old cabin beneath her and was gazing across the guich up into the mountains. She was wearing bear’s paw snowshoes like his own. From under a red, woolly tam peeped the fringe of her rich chest- nut brown hair. Jim watched her for a time, his pulse quickened. The cold winter sun glinting over the snow caught and tangled in a stray lock of her hair and brought out the rich red gold in it. In her sweater and slim fitting khakis she was an elfin of the winter —a sprite of the big woods and the mountains. “Y00-hoo-00!” he called softly. She turned quickly, swift alarm on her round face, as a timid creature of the hills would turn, ready for instant flight. Then she saw Jim and smiled, waiting for him to come up to her like things of the wild do when their mates come to woo. “Vera!” he said, his voice vibrant with an awakening emotion as he looked deep into the blue depths of her eyes. They were soft and sub- missive now as he had seen the eyes of deer when they came up close to his cabin in the early morning. He reached his hands out and for a mo- ment she put hers in them trustingly. “Vera!” he whispered again. “I was coming to find you—Jim,” she said, dropping her hands to her sides. And Jim saw then that her face was clouded with worry. “They are going to jump your claims and take the work you have done. I heard them planning. They recorded the claims just before snow came.” “But Charlie Wilson has those claims!” Jim exclaimed. “They can’t do that.” “He has just been working the prospects without recording the claims, never thinking anyone else would come in here,” Vera answered. “I heard Hec and Winkie talking it over, and they looked it up. They think you are making a rick strike. Oh, what can you do! I-—I tried to tell you when you were there at our place, but Winkie watched me all the time. He says he will kill you. And if they knew I was here with you, they would kill me now.” Jim’s lean jaw squared, and his hard fists knotted. “The dirty skunks!” he said “I'll go down there and drive them from that place like I would rattlesnakes!” He meant it, too. If Charlie Wil- son had seen him then he would have known that Two Barrel Marshall was: alive again in this son. But Vera Jar- vis laid a small, firm hand on his arm and looked up into his face. “Please!” she said. “They would on- ly kill you. I know them. Mother will help us if I tell her. They are afraid of her.” “I was not thinking of the claims,” Jim answered. “I was thinking of you.” ‘ “Jim—don’t!” : Slowly the tenseness went out of his face and his muscles relaxed. “I wanted you to know and he prepared. But I must go now, before they fol- low me and find me out.” Jim did not try to go with her. He stood there watching her as she went over the snow, walking easily, swing- ing her bear’s paws deftly across the crust. And just as she vanished | among the trees, she turned and she waved to him. When Jim told Charlie Wilson of the impending danger, the old veter- an sat silent for several minutes, gaz- ing into the embers of the fire. Then he stood up to his great height, his broad old shoulders squared, his face grim, “They hanged gold robbers in this place,” he said ominously. “Two Bar- rel Marshall ware judge o’ the court which hanged ’em down at Thiad. They’ll be no gold robbers here while Charlie Wilson an’ Two Barrel's boy is able t’fight. “The third rafter from the east,” Jim said slowly. “I saw it, Charlie. The knots of the rope are still there,” He was silent, then, for a moment, like Charlie. Then he said, as though he were speaking to himself: “Gold fever. Mad hate and blood— and love! Dream Gulch had ’em and they’re still here!” Charlie Wilson had taken his old muzzle loading rifle down from its pegs above the door and was care- fully cleaning, oiling, and adjusting it, making ready for an emergency. . The partners worked steadily in the iggings after that, taking out more and more of the bedrock gravel, and stored it ready to wash. Everything depended upon these operations as they had invested everything thy had in them. They were constantly watching: for the first hostile move on the part of their enemies down the gulch, but as the weeks advanced through the winter and into the first mild weather of spring the two men at Thiad gave ‘no sign. “Reckon they’s apt to be some bad slides when the thaw starts,” Charlie told Jim, looking up into the hills where the snow was drifted in great banks. But Jim was more concerned about the dam in which their nioney was in- vested. “If a chinook strikes the gulch and takes that snow out the way you say those chinooks act in a few days the dam is liable to break,” he worried. But the thaw was gentle and slow, when it did come, and almost before they realized that winter was gone, ; Spring had come. The great reservoir behind the concrete bulwark of the aam began to fill, and finally the wat- er had raised until it spilled over the: top. Jim and Charlie then turned to the sluices and began to work on the great cleanup. And that was the time Hee Le- . Bloc and Winkie chose te make their | raid. One afternoon as Jim and Charlie worked in the sluices, the two men; appeared suddenly above them with rifles in their hands. “We got these claims staked an’ the records on ’em,” Hee LeBloe an- nounced withQut preliminaries, “You birds move out o’ here, an’ be fast about it!” Jim dropped his shovel and leaped from the gravel pit straight at the throat of the speaker. “Ill get you, you thieving claim- jumper!” He gritted his teeth! his face was terrible to see. Charlie Wilson was only a second behind him, driving his heavy old frame toward the younger of the two invaders, who stood with rifle ready. Both of tbe claim-jumpers fired, point blank at the men. Jim was so close upon Hec and his movements had been so sudden that Hee’s shot went wild. Before he could draw the rifle back and use it as a club to beat off his assailant, Jim struck him a stunning blow in the face and had his fingers in his coarse neck. The rifle flew from Hec’s grips and the two: went down fighting. Winkie had more time though, and his shot grazed Charlie’s skull, Char- lie fell stunned, and Winkie leveled his rifle for another shot at the old miner. The picture flashed across Jim’s vision as he struggled with Hec, and he rolled toward Winkie, bringing his own assailant with him. As Winkie fired Jim’s heavily booted foot went out and caught him on the shin with such a blow that he cursed with the pain of it. The rifle ball went harm- lessly over Charlie Wilson, and the next Jim knew, Winkie was on top of him, beating him in a mad, wild fury of anger. It was an uneven battle with the two on him, but Jim fought with the last ounce of his strength to hold his fingers in the jugular vein in Hee Le- Bloe’s neck. While Winkie struck at him with corded fists, kicked him with heavy niiner’s boots and trampled over him, Jim kept that hold. The blood was streaming from the wounds in his face and body, and he was blinded, beaten almost insensible—yet his fin- gers held their grip. Then slowly he felt Hee’s struggles lessen, and as he slipped into uncon- sciousness and the grip of his fingers slackened, he knew that Hec LeBloc, too, was unconscious. (Continued on Page 6, Col. 1)
Significant historical Pennsylvania newspapers