McTeague - Frank Norris (great reads TXT) 📗

a headstall at the hotel that you can use,” he said, “but you’ll have to get a horse.”

In the end the dentist bought a mule at the livery stable for forty dollars. It turned out to be a good bargain, however, for the mule was a good traveller and seemed actually to fatten on sagebrush and potato parings. When the actual transaction took place, McTeague had been obliged to get the money to pay for the mule out of the canvas sack. Cribbens was with him at the time, and as the dentist unrolled his blankets and disclosed the sack, whistled in amazement.

“An’ me asking you if you had fifty dollars!” he exclaimed. “You carry your mine right around with you, don’t you?”

“Huh, I guess so,” muttered the dentist. “I⁠—I just sold a claim I had up in El Dorado County,” he added.

At five o’clock on a magnificent May morning the “pardners” jogged out of Keeler, driving the burro before them. Cribbens rode his cayuse, McTeague following in his rear on the mule.

“Say,” remarked Cribbens, “why in thunder don’t you leave that fool canary behind at the hotel? It’s going to be in your way all the time, an’ it will sure die. Better break its neck an’ chuck it.”

“No, no,” insisted the dentist. “I’ve had it too long. I’ll take it with me.”

“Well, that’s the craziest idea I ever heard of,” remarked Cribbens, “to take a canary along prospecting. Why not kid gloves, and be done with it?”

They travelled leisurely to the southeast during the day, following a well-beaten cattle road, and that evening camped on a spur of some hills at the head of the Panamint Valley where there was a spring. The next day they crossed the Panamint itself.

“That’s a smart looking valley,” observed the dentist.

“Now you’re talking straight talk,” returned Cribbens, sucking his mustache. The valley was beautiful, wide, level, and very green. Everywhere were herds of cattle, scarcely less wild than deer. Once or twice cowboys passed them on the road, big-boned fellows, picturesque in their broad hats, hairy trousers, jingling spurs, and revolver belts, surprisingly like the pictures McTeague remembered to have seen. Everyone of them knew Cribbens, and almost invariably joshed him on his venture.

“Say, Crib, ye’d best take a wagon train with ye to bring your dust back.”

Cribbens resented their humor, and after they had passed, chewed fiercely on his mustache.

“I’d like to make a strike, b’God! if it was only to get the laugh on them joshers.”

By noon they were climbing the eastern slope of the Panamint Range. Long since they had abandoned the road; vegetation ceased; not a tree was in sight. They followed faint cattle trails that led from one water hole to another. By degrees these water holes grew dryer and dryer, and at three o’clock Cribbens halted and filled their canteens.

“There ain’t any too much water on the other side,” he observed grimly.

“It’s pretty hot,” muttered the dentist, wiping his streaming forehead with the back of his hand.

“Huh!” snorted the other more grimly than ever. The motionless air was like the mouth of a furnace. Cribbens’s pony lathered and panted. McTeague’s mule began to droop his long ears. Only the little burro plodded resolutely on, picking the trail where McTeague could see but trackless sand and stunted sage. Towards evening Cribbens, who was in the lead, drew rein on the summit of the hills.

Behind them was the beautiful green Panamint Valley, but before and below them for miles and miles, as far as the eye could reach, a flat, white desert, empty even of sagebrush, unrolled toward the horizon. In the immediate foreground a broken system of arroyos, and little canyons tumbled down to meet it. To the north faint blue hills shouldered themselves above the horizon.

“Well,” observed Cribbens, “we’re on the top of the Panamint Range now. It’s along this eastern slope, right below us here, that we’re going to prospect. Gold Gulch”⁠—he pointed with the butt of his quirt⁠—“is about eighteen or nineteen miles along here to the north of us. Those hills way over yonder to the northeast are the Telescope hills.”

“What do you call the desert out yonder?” McTeague’s eyes wandered over the illimitable stretch of alkali that stretched out forever and forever to the east, to the north, and to the south.

“That,” said Cribbens, “that’s Death Valley.”

There was a long pause. The horses panted irregularly, the sweat dripping from their heaving bellies. Cribbens and the dentist sat motionless in their saddles, looking out over that abominable desolation, silent, troubled.

“God!” ejaculated Cribbens at length, under his breath, with a shake of his head. Then he seemed to rouse himself. “Well,” he remarked, “first thing we got to do now is to find water.”

This was a long and difficult task. They descended into one little canyon after another, followed the course of numberless arroyos, and even dug where there seemed indications of moisture, all to no purpose. But at length McTeague’s mule put his nose in the air and blew once or twice through his nostrils.

“Smells it, the son of a gun!” exclaimed Cribbens. The dentist let the animal have his head, and in a few minutes he had brought them to the bed of a tiny canyon where a thin stream of brackish water filtered over a ledge of rocks.

“We’ll camp here,” observed Cribbens, “but we can’t turn the horses loose. We’ll have to picket ’em with the lariats. I saw some locoweed back here a piece, and if they get to eating that, they’ll sure go plum crazy. The burro won’t eat it, but I wouldn’t trust the others.”

A new life began for McTeague. After breakfast the “pardners” separated, going in opposite directions along the slope of the range, examining rocks, picking and chipping at ledges and boulders, looking for signs, prospecting. McTeague went up into the little canyons where the streams had cut through the bed rock, searching for veins of quartz, breaking out this quartz when he had found it,