The Story of a Mine - Bret Harte

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      “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.

      Wherefore, in after years, when their story was related, with the devotion of true Catholic pioneers, they named the mountain “La Canada de la Visitacion del Diablo,” “The Gulch of the Visitation of the Devil,” the same being now the boundary lines of one of the famous Mexican land grants.

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      Concho was so impatient to reach the camp and deliver his good news to his companions that more than once the stranger was obliged to command him to slacken his pace. “Is it not enough, you infernal Greaser, that you lame your own mule, but you must try your hand on mine? Or am I to put Jinny down among the expenses?” he added with a grin and a slight lifting of his baleful eyelid.

      When they had ridden a mile along the ridge, they began to descend again toward the valley. Vegetation now sparingly bordered the trail, clumps of chemisal, an occasional manzanita bush, and one or two dwarfed “buckeyes” rooted their way between the interstices of the black-gray rock. Now and then, in crossing some dry gully, worn by the overflow of winter torrents from above, the grayish rock gloom was relieved by dull red and brown masses of color, and almost every overhanging rock bore the mark of a miner's pick. Presently, as they rounded the curving flank of the mountain, from a rocky bench below them, a thin ghost-like stream of smoke seemed to be steadily drawn by invisible hands into the invisible ether. “It is the camp,” said Concho, gleefully; “I will myself forward to prepare them for the stranger,” and before his companion could detain him, he had disappeared

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