Bret Harte - The Story of a Mine

It was a steep trail leading over the Monterey Coast Range. Concho was very tired, Concho was very dusty, Concho was very much disgusted. To Concho’s mind there was but one relief for these insurmountable difficulties, and that lay in a leathern bottle slung over the machillas of his saddle. Concho raised the bottle to his lips, took a long draught, made a wry face, and ejaculated:

“Carajo!”

It appeared that the bottle did not contain aguardiente, but had lately been filled in a tavern near Tres Pinos by an Irishman who sold had American whisky under that pleasing Castilian title. Nevertheless Concho had already nearly emptied the bottle, and it fell back against the saddle as yellow and flaccid as his own cheeks. Thus reinforced Concho turned to look at the valley behind him, from which he had climbed since noon. It was a sterile waste bordered here and there by arable fringes and valdas of meadow land, but in the main, dusty, dry, and forbidding. His eye rested for a moment on a low white cloud line on the eastern horizon, but so mocking and unsubstantial that it seemed to come and go as he gazed. Concho struck his forehead and winked his hot eyelids. Was it the Sierras or the cursed American whisky?

Again he recommenced the ascent. At times the half-worn, half-visible trail became utterly lost in the bare black outcrop of the ridge, but his sagacious mule soon found it again, until, stepping upon a loose boulder, she slipped and fell. In vain Concho tried to lift her from out the ruin of camp kettles, prospecting pans, and picks; she remained quietly recumbent, occasionally raising her head as if to contemplatively glance over the arid plain below. Then he had recourse to useless blows. Then he essayed profanity of a secular kind, such as “Assassin,” “Thief,” “Beast with a pig’s head,” “Food for the Bull’s Horns,” but with no effect.

Then he had recourse to the curse ecclesiastic:

“Ah, Judas Iscariot! is it thus, renegade and traitor, thou leavest me, thy master, a league from camp and supper waiting? Stealer of the Sacrament, get up!”

Still no effect. Concho began to feel uneasy; never before had a mule of pious lineage failed to respond to this kind of exhortation. He made one more desperate attempt:

“Ah, defiler of the altar! lie not there! Look!” he threw his hand into the air, extending the fingers suddenly. “Behold, fiend! I exorcise thee! Ha! tremblest! Look but a little now,—see! Apostate! I—I—excommunicate thee,—Mula!”

“What are you kicking up such a devil of row down there for?” said a gruff voice from the rocks above.

Concho shuddered. Could it be that the devil was really going to fly away with his mule? He dared not look up.

“Come now,” continued the voice, “you just let up on that mule, you d–d old Greaser. Don’t you see she’s slipped her shoulder?”

Alarmed as Concho was at the information, he could not help feeling to a certain extent relieved. She was lamed, but had not lost her standing as a good Catholic.

He ventured to lift his eyes. A stranger—an Americano from his dress and accent—was descending the rocks toward him. He was a slight-built man with a dark, smooth face, that would have been quite commonplace and inexpressive but for his left eye, in which all that was villainous in him apparently centered. Shut that eye, and you had the features and expression of an ordinary man; cover up those features, and the eye shone out like Eblis’s own. Nature had apparently observed this too, and had, by a paralysis of the nerve, ironically dropped the corner of the upper lid over it like a curtain, laughed at her handiwork, and turned him loose to prey upon a credulous world.

“What are you doing here?” said the stranger after he had assisted Concho in bringing the mule to her feet, and a helpless halt.

“Prospecting, Senor.”

The stranger turned his respectable right eye toward Concho, while his left looked unutterable scorn and wickedness over the landscape.

“Prospecting, what for?”

“Gold and silver, Senor,—yet for silver most.”

“Alone?”

“Of us there are four.”

The stranger looked around.

“In camp,—a league beyond,” explained the Mexican.

“Found anything?”

“Of this—much.” Concho took from his saddle bags a lump of greyish iron ore, studded here and there with star points of pyrites. The stranger said nothing, but his eye looked a diabolical suggestion.

“You are lucky, friend Greaser.”

“Eh?”

“It IS silver.”

“How know you this?”

“It is my business. I’m a metallurgist.”

“And you can say what shall be silver and what is not.”

“Yes,—see here!” The stranger took from his saddle bags a little leather case containing some half dozen phials. One, enwrapped in dark-blue paper, he held up to Concho.

“This contains a preparation of silver.”

Concho’s eyes sparkled, but he looked doubtingly at the stranger.

“Get me some water in your pan.”

Concho emptied his water bottle in his prospecting pan and handed it to the stranger. He dipped a dried blade of grass in the bottle and then let a drop fall from its tip in the water. The water remained unchanged.

“Now throw a little salt in the water,” said the stranger.

Concho did so. Instantly a white film appeared on the surface, and presently the whole mass assumed a milky hue.

Concho crossed himself hastily, “Mother of God, it is magic!”

“It is chloride of silver, you darned fool.”

Not content with this cheap experiment, the stranger then took Concho’s breath away by reddening some litmus paper with the nitrate, and then completely knocked over the simple Mexican by restoring its color by dipping it in the salt water.

“You shall try me this,” said Concho, offering his iron ore to the stranger;—“you shall use the silver and the salt.”

“Not so fast my friend,” answered the stranger; “in the first place this ore must be melted, and then a chip taken and put in shape like this,—and that is worth something, my Greaser cherub. No, sir, a man don’t spend all his youth at Freiburg and Heidelburg to throw away his science gratuitously on the first Greaser he meets.”

“It will cost—eh—how much?” said the Mexican eagerly.

“Well, I should say it would take about a hundred dollars and expenses to—to—find silver in that ore. But once you’ve got it there—you’re all right for tons of it.”

“You shall have it,” said the now excited Mexican. “You shall have it of us,—the four! You shall come to our camp and shall melt it,—and show the silver, and—enough! Come!” and in his feverishness he clutched the hand of his companion as if to lead him forth at once.

“What are you going to do with your mule?” said the stranger.

“True, Holy Mother,—what, indeed?”

“Look yer,” said the stranger, with a grim smile, “she won’t stray far, I’ll be bound. I’ve an extra pack mule above here; you can ride on her, and lead me into camp, and to-morrow come back for your beast.”

Poor honest Concho’s heart sickened at the prospect of leaving behind the tired servant he had objurgated so strongly a moment before, but the love of gold was uppermost. “I will come back to thee, little one, to-morrow, a rich man. Meanwhile, wait thou here, patient one,—Adios!—thou smallest of mules,—Adios!”

And, seizing the stranger’s hand, he clambered up the rocky ledge until they reached the summit. Then the stranger turned and gave one sweep of his malevolent eye over the valley.