Chapter C: F. L (6)

In later years we have pretty thoroughly made up for that aggravation; for nowadays I am the host, and wouldn’t think of starting on a journey without inviting him to come along; and we bring back all sorts of interesting plunder from everywhere, until the house we occupy together looks more like a museum than anything else. He himself admits that it’s a good deal ahead of the old way; but even the delight of collecting—and no boy or man half knows what life is until he “collects” something, and earnestly—even that pleasure would not compensate me for the loss of his company. He is the very best traveling companion I ever found; so ready to do whatever you wish, so full of information, so helpful in emergencies of any sort. Some people who have traveled with him have tried to tell me that he cowardly deserted them in time of danger; but there must be two sides to this story, for I have seen him in a great many tight pinches, and he was clear-headed and quick as a wink to do the right thing. To tell the truth, he has saved my life a score of times, all by his dexterity; so you may be sure that when people talk of his running away and leaving them in the lurch, I resent the imputation, and conclude they were the ones really to blame. In knocking about the frontiers I have found a good many men, of several different colors, who make you feel, “Well, if it came to a fight for life, with my back against a rock, _that_ would be a good fellow to have beside me.” But among all those brave men—all of whom I admire, and some of whom I love—I would rather have him by me, in a pinch, than any other one.

You must not think from this that my friend is a desperado, or a professional fighter, or anything of the sort. On the contrary, his disposition is as peaceful as his habits are quiet, and he hates any sort of a row. It is only in the crises which any man may meet, and every man must sometimes meet who travels outside the beaten tracks, when it is necessary and manful to fight, that he suddenly turns combative and pitches in. Ordinarily, he is a plain, practical business man, who, for his own part, might have retired long ago, but remains in the firm for the sake of the junior partners. He works harder than any of them—and then, when business hours are over, diverts himself and his friends by little exhibitions of his matchless skill as a conjurer. At such times he likes to forget work and worry altogether, and to be jolly and free of care and full of pranks as a boy. I have seen people so inconsiderate as to insist on boring him by “talking shop” out of office hours, but he always resents it. He is rather nervous and very impressionable, apt to fall into the mood of those who are with him; and he sometimes gets so tired and confused as to show very little of his usual wisdom. Indeed, I have seen him, when very weary, make a flat failure of some trick at magic, which ordinarily he could do with astounding cleverness.

Undoubtedly his greatest claim to public respect is in the quiet, every-day wisdom of his practical career; but his gifts as a magician are so brilliant and so fascinating that one naturally thinks of them first. And, in spite of his long business training, there isn’t a mercenary streak in him. Some of his most wonderful performances are given gratis, and he even seems to prefer an audience of one to what the managers would call “a paying house.”

Eh? You would like to know what he can _do_ that is so much bigger than the tricks of the wizards that get their $200 a night? Well, if I were to tell you all I’ve _seen_ him do, we wouldn’t be done this side of 1900; but here are some few things, and if you do not admit that Herrmann and all the rest are mere greenhorns to him, I’ll agree never to go near another of his performances.

I never knew him to fry eggs in a stove-pipe hat, nor to pick twenty-dollar gold pieces out of people’s eyes, nor to chop off a man’s head and then stick it on again, nor any of those threadbare sensations, though he sometimes practices simple illusions like making things appear where they are not, or causing them to seem not to be where you really know they are. But those are trifles, just to keep his hand in; his claim as champion conjurer of the world rests on very different accomplishments. For instance, one of his favorite tricks is to take a careless fly-away boy and turn him into a strong, wise man—turn him “for keeps,” too. I’ve seen him do that a hundred times, and you will agree that that is a very useful trick, as well as a very difficult one. When one sees how smoothly he does it, one is doubly sorry that he doesn’t get _all_ the boys up on the stage and experiment on them; but, of course, a complete change of personality is a serious thing, and he would not be justified in taking any such liberties without the full consent of the subject.

An almost equally remarkable trick, and one he is equally fond of, is to take a thoroughly homely girl and put a brand-new face on her. Not exactly a beautiful face, for he says that is none of his business, but a face that every one likes to look at. Yet I know girls so foolish as to decline treatment by this great specialist, and to think cosmetics better.

My friend’s hobby for experimenting upon young people, and his innate fondness for them, as shown by his patience with their frequently slighting treatment of him, made me remark one evening: “How is it you are so good-natured with these rattleheads? Nobody else would have the patience. Even when a fellow has snubbed you in the most discourteous way you seem to bear no grudge, but to be always ready to do him a good turn if there is a chance.”

“Well,” said my friend, slowly, dropping a new sleight-of-hand he was practicing, “you see, I was once young and a fool myself, and had to grow and develop; and the process was so tedious that I’m not apt to forget. And, somehow, I feel as if I should always keep young in spite of the years. There is always something to interest me, and that keeps me from growing old.”

“By the way,” I put in, “when did you begin conjuring? Such marvelous proficiency as yours can have been attained only by lifelong practice. Did you take it up deliberately, or drift into it by chance?”

My friend gazed soberly for a moment at the crackling cedar sticks in my adobe fireplace—he had come out to visit me in New Mexico—before replying.

“Do you know, this reminds me very strongly of my own early life. These Indians who are your neighbors, this simple way of life, recall old times. You might not believe it, but my own folks were nomad savages, and my infancy was passed among scenes compared to which your surroundings here are highly civilized. Yes, I don’t wonder you are astonished; in sober earnest, you cannot imagine how brutal and squalid were the surroundings. Nothing to wear, very little to eat, and that little always raw; in fact, not one of the conveniences which even an Indian now deems necessary to his existence. Why, we hadn’t even a way to warm ourselves; and as for houses or clothing, they were quite unknown. Education? Not a bit more than the monkeys have. I was nearly a grown man before I learned to read and write.”

“Why, you have risen even further than from rail splitter to president!”

“Ah, Lincoln got as high as man can get. We were very dear friends, and I believe I helped him materially in the great crises through which he was called upon to lead the nation. At any rate, he always consulted me before taking any important step.”

Now in any one else, this would have seemed the end of impudence and mendacity, if not half blasphemy. But when my friend the magician said it, I knew it must be true. He went on in his quiet way:

“But we were talking of my youth. You asked how and when I first took up conjuring. To tell the truth, I can hardly remember. I was certainly very young, and the discovery of my powers was quite accidental. One of my first tricks was very simple; but perhaps it was most important of all. It lifted my people from a lower plane than any savage now occupies, to high civilization. Every person every day uses that little invention of mine—and 99 per cent of them without stopping to thank the inventor. By simply taking two sticks and rubbing them together—this way—I produced a substance which had never been seen on earth before, but which is now the first absolute necessity in every household. If it were abolished, the world’s progress would stop. It’s a very curious substance. The materials of which it is composed are invisible and intangible; but _it_ can be seen further and felt more than anything else in the world. You can’t touch it; and yet, here, if you could not sometimes _almost_ touch it you would perish. You have to feed it as carefully as you would a horse, and much oftener; and, unlike any other laborer I know of, it will never work between meals. But while it eats, it will work like mad. Another queer thing about it is that it would live forever if you fed it forever; but it dies as soon as it stops eating. But you can bring it to life again in a minute, strong and active as ever. It is terribly mischievous, too; if you give it proper attention, it cuts up no pranks; but if you are careless, it sometimes sneaks off and does more damage in one short romp than a hundred men could replace by a lifetime’s earnings. Then it’s curious what a hatred it has for a still commoner substance which I _didn’t_ invent. Bring the two together and there is a noisy and desperate fight, and one or other of the combatants is annihilated. Yet if you place them just near enough to each other, but so confined that they cannot grapple, they work together with an energy which I saw move a hundred buildings once—each building over thirty feet long. Ah, you wonder more at some of my other tricks, probably because you are less familiar with them; but I tell you that is just about the biggest single thing I ever did. There would have been neither geography nor history; we should never have heard of Cæsar or Napoleon or Washington or much of anybody else, if I hadn’t stumbled on that little secret of rubbing the sticks, while I was still what you might well call a green, awkward boy.”

“Yes,” I admitted, “I guess, after all, your fire trick is about the greatest thing of all—though I hadn’t just looked at it in that light before. Really, about every single thing we depend on depends on that. And that was about your first turn in magic?”

“Ye-es, perhaps the first important one. It was a great start, too, for after that I advanced pretty rapidly in proficiency, until I became, as you know, able to do pretty nearly whatever I try.”

That is not putting it too strongly—he _can_ do almost anything he seriously turns his hand to. After what I have seen him accomplish, there are few things I would deem it hopeless for him to attempt. Our stage magicians are at their wits’ end to devise some new trick; but he invents a thousand a day—the poorest more wonderful than their masterpiece. Now there’s his own life preserver, for instance—a ridiculous little affair in something like thirty pieces; the simplest thing, yet of almost infinite uses. It is, among many other remarkable qualities, the greatest preservative known. An article so ephemeral that a breath of air would whisk it away, so perishable that not all the Arctic ice could save it, can by this means be kept a thousand years—aye, or ten thousand, for that matter—as good as new. Yes, a man’s very speech may become visible and eternal—all because my friend once did a little conjuring for a Greek, who raised most remarkable harvests from seed our florists never handle. I don’t know just where it _does_ come from nowadays—for we still see that sort of crop once in a while. Perhaps Cadmus himself was a politician, and the dragon’s teeth are an heirloom in the family.

Those early conjurings are not more astounding than the new ones he is constantly devising. Nowadays he can sit down in Washington or London or Berlin, and, by a few taps on a table, turn a million men into a machine for destruction. He will take your ear in New York and hold it to the lips of your friend in Chicago, and then make it as easy for the Chicagoan to hear what you say in reply. Your voice, which, so far as any ability of yours goes, is lost forever as soon as spilled, he can bottle up so perfectly that your great-grandchildren’s great-grandchildren shall listen to what you said two hundred years before they were born, and hear it in your very tones. You see, my friend is making life a good deal larger, and death a good deal smaller—and he is not done yet!

But I should be. There is simply no use trying to enumerate his magic, for it has no end. Besides, you can get a much better notion of his powers by watching him than thus at second hand from me. But how are you going to find him, when he doesn’t advertise? Why, of course! How stupid of me to have forgotten to tell you that his name is—Thought.

The Silver Omelet.

The Silver Omelet.

Doubtless you should not be blamed for a sniff of incredulity when I come to mention the size of it, though you certainly have not made as many omelets as I did in the years of keeping house on the frontier “all by my lonesome,” and though you probably could not turn one now by flapping it to within six inches of the ceiling and catching it, t’other side up, in the frying pan, as every fit frontiersman should. But blink as you will, it is a solemn truth that we are now sitting down to an omelet two feet and a half thick and a little matter of one hundred and ten feet across! And worth more than all the food your whole household could eat in a generation.

The worst of it was that the _chef_ was away. Don Ygnacio, who had served up these gigantic dishes for thirty years, and had the knack of them, was to-day in Dolores; and in charge of the range was a fuzzy-faced lad of eighteen who had never turned a Guanajuato omelet in his life.

Guanajuato, you must know, is one of the oldest and richest silver-mining districts in the world. Founded over three hundred and fifty years ago, this picturesque Mexican city has produced more than a billion dollars in bullion, and not tired yet. In 1527 a Spanish miner invented in Mexico the cheapest and simplest method yet known for reducing silver ores—the so called “patio process”—by which the great bulk of the silver of Mexico and Peru has been extracted for so many centuries. To this day the haciendas for patio reduction are among the most interesting features of the great silver camps of Spanish America. Each hacienda is a little walled city—with its strong ramparts, and corner towers loop-holed for muskets; its huge sheds for the primitive ore-grinding; its pleasant offices and home for the _administrador_; its quarters for employes; its stables for hundreds of mules; and its enormous stone skillets wherein the hugest omelets in the world are “cooked.”

_Torta_ in Spanish America is the usual word for omelet. It is literally a “cake,” and “of eggs” is implied. But the miners use it specifically for the omelet of wet-ground ore seasoned with the necessary chemicals to assemble the silver. In looks it is simply a stupendous mud pie.

In the hacienda of the Cypresses one of these omelets was even now cooking. Patient burro caravans had packed down from the wonderful old bonanza mine of the Valenciana enough _cargas_ of that broken gray rock to make forty-six “heaps” of 3200 pounds each. The ore had been fed to the great trundling _molina_, whose ponderous, upright, iron-bound wheel grudgingly followed the straining mules round and round its pivot, crunching the rock finer and finer, till the particles sifted through the screen to the bins below. Thence it had been shoveled into the wet-grinding _arrastras_—thirty big stone tubs, around which the mules circled with their “whims,” dragging granite blocks which scrubbed the wet gravel into fine paste. Then the mud went to the great _cajete_ (tank), where the surplus water was “wept away,” as they say; and finally to the stone-walled, stone-paved patio, to become a torta.

Almost anyone with eyes could crush rock, dry or wet; but when it came to sampling that precious mud, deciding precisely how much silver it carried to the ton and how refractory it was, and therefore just how much salt and just how much mercury must be put in for seasoning, why, then was no time for a greenhorn. Fifty thousand dollars is no joke, any way you look at it; and when you come to hunting for $50,000 by the invisible atom in a hundred and fifty tons of mud, it is as serious as anything well can be.

But Don Ygnacio had had to go, and with four of the trustiest servants, all armed; for in those days, a generation ago, the brigands were a fear on every highway of Mexico. And there was no one to leave in charge except Alberto, his nephew.

Luckily there had been time to set a recipe for the torta just turned into the pan. “So much salt and so much _azogue_,”[41] said Don Ygnacio; “that, I think, will suit. But watch it well; and if not, season it by the formula. Care, then, and much luck!”

Every day of the seventeen since then, Alberto had paced the flagging by the patio, and the passages of the great sheds where dry mill and wet mill were chewing their noisy mouthfuls for a new torta, now and again turning his eye covertly to the last room on the administrador’s porch, behind whose heavy door he had heaped the forty-pound bars of massy silver from the last omelet. The washing and concentration and smelting he had superintended without much difficulty, and had seen that $49,000 worth of metal safely stored.

So far as the present torta went, his assays indicated that Don Ygnacio’s hasty estimate had been precisely right. But he certainly hoped the old manager would be back in time to decide if the usual eighteen days had been enough “cooking”—and, doubly, to fix the seasoning for the next omelet. And in all, it was a heavy responsibility for a boy who had studied a hundred tortas, but never been charged with one before; and it was to be noticed that his shoulders were not quite so miraculously square as on the first day, nor his chest so thick, now that he came down from the arrastras to the patio.

In this quarter-acre mud omelet the beating and the cooking went on together. A score of barelegged men and grown boys waded thigh-deep in the mess, driving their mules (blindfolded, poor beasts, to protect their eyes), and holding down the drag-boards, to mix the mercury and its prey.

It was close to noon. In five minutes the wading mules would be done with their exhausting day’s work of six hours. Alberto walked down toward the well-tower beside the patio, and something drew his eyes to an overgrown lad slouching behind one white mule at the edge of the mud. Poor dullard! It was one thing to wade in mud at eighteen cents a day, and quite another to manage mud which was worth a comfortable year’s salary per ton.

“S-s-t!”

Alberto started. Surely it could not be! Well, it _was_! This perambulating mudlark was actually “s-s-t”-ing to him!

“Care!” whispered the Indian lad, as Alberto came alongside the stone curb. He looked only at his mule, hauling at the tired beast and scolding it for some imaginary offence, and between his objurgations dropping whispered “asides.”

“_Arre_, ill-said brute! (_Young Excellency, the bandits!_) For how long must I enshow thee to walk well? (_And some of those in the hacienda!_) Miserable! For what is the rein? (_They are making to rob—to-night!_) _Arre_, lazy-bones!”

The stolid face had not once changed; and now that another driver approached, he went sus-ushing off through the mud with never a sidelong glance.

Alberto felt himself grown suddenly pale; but he was no fool. He glanced at the intruder. It was a new man from the country—a tall, powerful fellow with a huge scar on his cheek, shifty eyes, and a beak which had already earned him the nickname of Narigudo—“Big Nose.” He in turn sent a sly, sharp look first at the young Indian ahead, then at the young manager. The latter was already walking quietly toward the well-house.

The silver bell in the old belfry clanged noon. The waders, of two legs and four, clambered out from the mud. In a moment blindfolds and harness lay on the flagging, and the mules, suddenly optimistic, went braying and scampering out through the great gate to bathe and drink by the highway in the little stream which has carried more precious burdens, doubtless, than any other brook on earth.[42] A moment later there was a more deafening clatter, as the hundred mules from the mills came gallopading down the flags in a very avalanche. _They_ would have to work six hours more; but they knew the noon hour. Resistless as a charge of cavalry, they swept around the corners and out of the gate in a jam which seemed sure to kill some of them.

Alberto had laughed a thousand times at this daily avalanche; but now he saw it with far-off eyes. He dipped his hand in a bucket of the pump-wheel and bathed his head, wherein a thousand or more little prickles snapped. It was enough to make anyone’s brain crackle—robbers all about, accomplices in the hacienda itself, nearly fifty thousand dollars in the room at the head of the corridor, and he alone!

This boy had been carefully reared. He was unused to danger and to responsibility; and now he was fearfully scared. And yet—well, he had inherited something from the men who conquered that wilderness so many centuries ago.

In five minutes the young _administrador_ was making his rounds as usual, now and then stopping to pick up a sample of ore and examine it with great apparent interest. Among the groups of laborers he passed at lunch he felt, with a little shiver, that some eyes were on him even more sharply than they are always on the _administrador’s_ back; but outwardly he gave no sign, as he figured away at very much the toughest problem he had ever dreamed of.

Suddenly he struck his head, and turned and walked down to the patio. In full view of the men he took a careful sample from the mud omelet here and there, scrutinized it critically, and carried it off to the assay-room. In ten minutes he was out again; and walking up among the laborers, he said: “A holiday for all, this afternoon. For to me the torta looks to be cooked, and Don Ygnacio should be here to-night, who will know. Go, then; but at dawn again.”

That was an end of lunch, of course. The men sprang up with “Infinite thanks, sir!” and were already making for the gate, except Narigudo and four others, who mumbled over their last enchilada, instead of throwing it away, and looked first at their mates and then at one another.

“Señor, I do not think it done,” broke out “Big Nose,” sullenly.

“Who gave thee a candle in this funeral?” Alberto retorted, coolly. “Answerest thou to the owner whether there be loss or gain?”

Narigudo said no more, but rose to follow his comrades as Alberto disappeared in the office. When the boy emerged, five minutes later, the place was deserted.

Rather simple, after all! Only five traitors, apparently; and for the present _they_ were gone. Now, just to lock and bar the big gate, and think what next.

In much more comfortable mind after bolting the only entrance to the walled hacienda, Alberto strolled up to the great shed, and halted a moment by the big trundle-mill, pondering. So far, so good; and now what? Leave the place locked, and ride up to the city to warn the authorities?

A sound that you might hardly call a sound, so faint was it, startled his tense nerves; and as he wheeled the blood went from his face. Fifteen feet away, barefoot, Narigudo stood in the door of the ore-shed, with an ugly smile.

“Young Excellency,” he drawled, insolently, “you have locked me in. Give me the keys to go!”

At this Alberto found his voice. “In this hacienda,” said he, steadily, “it is accustomed to obey the _administrador_, and not to command him. I will let you out when I go to the gate.”

“Ah, it’s the _administrador_, is it? Then give me the keys before I eat an _administrador_!” The tone had changed from insolence to rage, and the angry fellow sprang forward.

Alberto wavered in his tracks, and then straightened with a snap. The key of the bullion-room? Never!

He plucked the heavy keys from his belt and flung them fiercely, just as that big hand clutched his shoulder. Narigudo hurled him against the wheel-post with a curse, and sprawled forward in a desperate effort. But the keys, just eluding his fingers, clanked down into the deep drain.

“Only wait!” he roared. “I shall have it just the same, and you shall pay the trouble!”

He plunged into the opening with a backward glare that made Alberto’s heart stand still. It was no use to run—he was locked in, too. Just to wait to be murdered!

But then the boy leaped forward with a new light in his eyes. A big wooden trough stood there—uptilted upon one face. There was a muffled bellow; but he hunched his shoulder to the mass, and inched it forward, and sank upon it with a queer, sobbing laugh. A fine trap for the big rat!

But he had forgotten the difference between a strong boy’s strength and a powerful man’s. His seat heaved under him; clearly, if his weight were removed, Narigudo could lift it. The fellow had all his mighty back in play, and seemed like to overturn his prison door, jailer and all.

Alberto could not even groan. It was impossible to stay here, as great dangers were to be guarded against elsewhere. But he saw plainly that he could not get far before Narigudo would be out, and——! There was no weight nearer than the ore-sacks, and he dared not desert the trough long enough to go half-way to them. In a nightmare of terror he crouched on the trough, trying to make himself heavy, and praying to all the saints.

Suddenly he gave a wild shout. The whim! There stood the great vertical wheel; its pole, ten feet away, was two feet from the ground. _If—!_ Thank God, there was no ore in its path!

Alberto leaped up, dancing noisily on the trough. He sprang to the floor and back, ran off two strides, and rushed upon the trough again. _Now_ his head was clear as a bell.

In another dash he seized the ponderous pole and wrenched at it with all his force. The mill creaked and gave an inch or two. Back he pounced noisily upon the trough, and back again to the pole for another mighty tug; and again, and a dozen times again. Each time the reluctant wheel groaned a few inches forward upon its circle, and now the end of the pole barely overlapped the end of the trough.

All was quiet below. The prisoner, puzzled by these crazy antics overhead, was waiting for a clew to what it all meant. Now, indeed, he began to heave again; but Alberto, braced backward on the trough, was slowly, surely dragging the pole in. Another fierce jerk, and his task was done. The great horizontal stick overhung the very middle of the trough.

The boy rose with an effort and leaned against the wheel. A wan smile came on his lips as the trough rose with a jerk—just three inches. Then it thumped against the pole and went down with a bang. The trap was locked, and Alberto never stopped till he sank breathless on the office steps.

It was already turning dusk; there was no time to lose. Muskets plenty were in the armory, but Narigudo had the key. However, there was one gun in the office, and Alberto loaded it with nervous fingers. Then he climbed into the loop-holed turret which overhung the gate, and crouched, waiting. But another thought seemed to come, for he chuckled and ran down the court. When he came back to the tower, twenty minutes later, the stables were empty, and so was the office drawer from which Don Ygnacio distributed _cohetes_ on the eve of a feast-day. On the other hand, a hundred sleepy mules were huddled in the entrance, with a rope stretched taut behind them, and back of the rope a great many little heaps of small, red cylinders.

At nine o’clock there was a faint tap at the gate. “Narigudo!” someone whispered; and in a moment, louder and impatiently, “Narigudo! Art thou asleep? Open!”

Alberto almost laughed. Then he drew back his shoulders and said, sharply: “Not a shot till I say the word! As for you, stupids, you see the gate! And your Narigudo—he is well boxed up!”

There was a quick scuffling below. Evidently the bandits had run back under the bottom of the tower, puzzled by this turn of affairs. For half an hour there was a trying silence; then a sudden rush, and something smote the gate with a tremendous crash.

“Not yet!” cried Alberto. “Wait for the word!”

But the robbers were not to be fooled. If there were really defenders, they would have fired before now; and again the battering-ram made the great gate tremble.

Alberto’s finger itched on the trigger. Should he shoot? Before he could reload, they might have the gate down. And then——?

He leaned the long musket against the wall and crept down into the courtyard just as the thunderous crash came again. Evidently the gate was beginning to give.

Another smash, and a leaf of the gate began to creak with that ominous, growing creak that goes before a fall. Just then there was a little flash in the courtyard, and a queer _s-s-sizz-sizz_, pop! bang! _Bang!_ _B-b-b-b-ang!_ The gate reeled and fell outward, and with the roar of a landslide a hundred terrified mules burst through the gap, trampling and scattering like chaff the knot of bandits gathered to burst in.

And then from far up the cobble-paved highway came a stentorian yell, and pistol shots, and a new clamor of iron hoofs. Two minutes later Don Ygnacio and his men swept into the courtyard, where a collapsed young hero lay beside a vast litter of bursted firecrackers.

A Duel in the Desert.

A Duel in the Desert.

Of the innumerable tragedies of the wilderness—the grim procession of life and death, the irreconcilable conflict of the animals as bounden as we are to appetite and passion and self-preservation—probably every hunter of considerable experience has seen the eloquent tokens; and every reader has heard at least of the sensational cases. The wonder is, perhaps, that these latter are so few; that only one death out of a million is so far outside the vast inclusive rule as to be of interest to us dull-eyed observers. For the law of conflict is inexorable. Outside of man and his protected servitors, only a tiny fraction of a per cent. of the animals die “a natural death”—that is, without violence. Of teeming sea and teeming forest, a vast majority of the denizens perish “with their boots on”—overwhelmingly a prey to that insatiate “hollow feeling” which Nature has put for warder of the feral population, lest it overwhelm the earth. The “defensive” animals fall, as a rule, to the appetite of their predatory neighbors; the predatory beasts, in turn, have a reasonable expectation of death at the “hands” of their rivals in the tribe, their foes outside, or the only unnatural killer, Man. Every acre of field and forest has had its myriad tragedies of the humble wild-folk—though we are too unobservant to note the fact. A few bleaching bones, a wisp of fur or feathers, a dim scurry in the dust—this and no more is the chronicle of the snuffing out of a life as gladly lived, as hardly parted with as our own. Many authors have become famous by their skillful dissection of the Beastliness of Man; but we too seldom remember (unless while reading the Jungle Stories or Wahb) the Humanity of the Beasts, which is quite as true a part of natural history. This is mostly because in our civilized cushioning we know nothing real about the beasts. They are very little more to us than so many forms of speech, raw material for perfunctory literature or for “hunting,” whose only serious penetration is put up in brass cylinders by the U.M.C. Co. It is nothing short of astounding how little the average “hunter” knows of the game he kills, except so much of its habit as shall enable him to kill it. Indeed, the very name “Game” is perhaps significant of this blindness. It _is_ a game, and a great game, if shrewdly played; but pity the man who can see in it nothing but the killing! He is as far from being what I would soberly call a hunter as the fellow whose only notion of whist is to play trumps at every lead is far from being a whist player. One who knows as well as anyone, and as well loves, the wild thrill of the chase, who has hunted and been hunted, and found the keenest “sport” when the “game” turned the tables and he had to fight hand-to-hand for his own life, is not apt to be foolishly sentimental. But he is very apt to pity those who have never learned the higher side of hunting. To watch a beaver colony at work; or a vixen with her pups; or a bear family at play; or the wild stallion herding his flirtatious _manada_ and falling like a thunderbolt upon some mustang Lothario; or partridge or wild turkey at mating time—_experto credite_, it is quite as much “fun” and rather more woodcraft than trapping or killing or “creasing.” Which is saying a great deal. And to such as mix the game with brains, these things become more and more the refinement and expertness of it. As a matter of fact, a fox is a much smarter hunter than any man who hunts only to kill. His eyes and ears are far better, his nose is a genius of which no human has so much as an inkling, his foot-fall is infinitely softer, his strategy far more competent. For that matter, more foxes escape the allied force and wit of a score of men and a half-score of hounds than partridges or quail escape the unaided campaign of one fox. As to that, in the average foxhunt, at least (and leaving out of the count the trapper and real wilderness hunter), one hound is worth in effectiveness half a hundred people. Without a single dog to lead them, the whole chase could as soon stay at home.

More picturesque, perhaps, than the every-day sacrifice of a life to an appetite is the animal duel to the death; and particularly when both parties fall. Feral combats—mostly deriving from sexual jealousy, for it is comparatively rare that predatory beasts shall fight outside their kind—are innumerable, though in a small minority of cases fatal to either combatant; perhaps fifty times as rarely to both. Even in the extreme event, there is generally little visible record left, and that of a sort that shamefully few of our hunters can identify. The best known—because the most unmistakable—is the entanglement of buck deer by their horns in such inextricable fashion that the duellists starve to death. This is not so extremely rare. I have found such grappled skulls thrice—in Maine, in the Sierra Madre of Mexico, and in Colorado so noble a duo of elk heads locked in this Chinese puzzle of death that the inaccessibility of the range and the impossibility of bringing out these ponderous relics have given me a standing grievance these seventeen years. The swordfish pinned by his beak to starve beside the pierced hull; the rat in the fatal nip of a big clam; the buffalo and the cinnamon bear fallen together dead—all these I believe to be authentic; and of the mutual Pyrrhic victory of two rattlesnakes I have seen the proof.

But beyond reasonable comparison, the most extraordinary “document” I have ever seen or heard of in this sort is the absolutely unique relic found in 1900 by Edwin R. Graham in the desert county of Inyo, Cal., near Coalingo, and now in the museum of the Leland Stanford Jr. University. There is no possible question of its authenticity. All the ingenuity of man could not make a tolerable counterfeit of it. Nor do I believe there is any reasonable doubt that it is the most remarkable record ever found of a fight to the death.

It is unflattering but typical of our civilized observation that thousands of people—including a great many “hunters”—identified these mummied protagonists as “a coyote and an eagle.” Even the photograph shows what they are, as well as the vindictiveness of their death-struggle.

A prowling wildcat (evidently too hungry to be fanciful) finds a great horned owl blinking upon the brink of a cliff, and pounces upon it, catching a wing hold. The owl, somewhat armored, even against those terrible teeth and claws, by its quilting of feathers, flings itself upon its back; pounding fiercely with its free wing, tearing with its hooked beak, and clenching its talons into the flesh with that peculiar mechanical lock-grip of its kind—a grip which death does not loosen, as more than one hunter who picked an owl up unripe has learned to his sorrow. That even this large owl could not kill a full-grown wildcat in any ordinary combat, probably every hunter knows. But this owl chanced to get a clutch on the wildcat’s open fore paw, one of his claws clinched behind a tendon—and there it still is, traceable even in the photograph. Perhaps he could not have withdrawn it himself, had he been the survivor of the struggle. The cat’s jaws are still locked upon the broken bone of the owl’s left wing. Neither is otherwise very badly mangled; and doubtless the cat would have torn to shreds “the body of this death” and gone about his business with no more handicap than that ineradicable talon in his paw.

But in their wild and blind mêlée they overstepped the verge of the cliff, and down they went together. The 40-foot fall does not seem to have broken their clinch at all. If it did, they renewed it. But, though no fractures were sustained, the stumble doubtless stunned the cat; and there, irretrievably grappled in immortal hate, they died together of thirst and loss of blood. There at the foot of the cliff they were found; desiccated by the furnace airs of the desert, light as mummies, but unbroken; their very eyeballs dried in their sockets; the plumage of the owl practically complete, and enough fur of the wildcat’s muzzle and paws left by the moths to identify it even to those who could not recognize its unequivocal anatomy.

A ’Rastle with a Wildcat.

A ’Rastle with a Wildcat.

One of my very first experiences in the West was a midnight tussle with a fifty-four pound wildcat in a lonely cabin in the Greenhorn Mountains of Colorado. I shall never forget my horror at the sight of that huge puss on a beam over my head; for I had had a serious experience with the wildcat of the Northeast, and supposed that this fellow, who was twice as big, was likewise twice as much to be dreaded.

I did not know that the Rocky Mountain wildcat is not nearly so fierce, and that he never attacks man as does sometimes his cousin of the Maine and New Hampshire forests; and I had very slight hopes for the outcome of a struggle twice as severe as that which a furry freebooter in the Pemigewassett wilderness gave me a good many years ago. I need not have worried. The Colorado Cat was easy game; and when the last charge in my six-shooter had brought him to the floor, his life was soon ended.

That first encounter, in New Hampshire, was more than thirty years ago—years filled with roving adventure and many other things which are apt to crowd the past back into forgetfulness. But I remember it as though it had been yesterday. Small, white “exclamation-points” on my chest, with several other scars, occasionally call it to mind.

I had grown from a consumptive boy to a small but thoroughly athletic young man. Wrestling, boxing, canoeing, hunting and fishing had brought me into good condition, and every muscle was hard as wire. But for that fact, I should not be writing this; for the fight took my utmost ounce of strength. Had it come a year earlier, my grave would be in the wilderness to-day.

Of the yearly thousands who visit the great summer hotels of the White and Franconia Mountains, extremely few ever penetrate the Pemigewassett wilderness. The wild ranges wall its sides, and between them is a huge and virgin forest, full of game, dotted and seamed by lakes and brooks that swarm with trout. In this almost untrodden wild rises the east branch of the Pemigewassett, the beautiful little river which later becomes the Merrimac.

I was hunting and fishing that spring on the head waters of the east branch. My canoe swam a lovely but nameless lakelet, and my camp, roofed with birch-bark, was near the shore. There were three brooks running into the lake noisily; and at the south end the clear young river slipped silently out through the dark trees.

It was the last day of May, and still cold in that mountain bowl. I had a fat deer hung high beside my shelter; so there was meat for some time. In a little while the fishing would be very tame, for there the trout have not fully learned what a deceiver man is, and there is little sport in standing almost astride a rill, and with a five-foot willow pulling a dozen or twenty fish out of one pool. But now I knew the big fish were around, and I determined to spend the day with my rod.

By ten o’clock I was well over toward Mount Lafayette, on the largest of the brooks which came into my lake from the west; and, descending the steep banks to the bed of the stream, prepared to fish down toward camp.

The brook fell very rapidly here, in a series of short falls, at the bottom of each of which was a deep, lovely pool of water, so clear that it seemed only air with a light tinge of green. I could see pebbles ten feet below the surface, and the brown flashes of the sportive trout.

In five minutes I was landing my first fish, a game half-pounder, and others bit as fast as I could attend to them.

There was no need of covering much ground. I could have caught in fifty yards all I could eat in a week. But I kept moving homeward, taking only one or two of the largest fish from a pool and throwing back any accidental small ones.

In this way I had gone down, perhaps, half a mile, when I came to the largest pool I had found on that brook. Here it seemed likely that there might be some particularly large trout. In fact, the first one I struck seemed to be much larger than any on my string; but he snapped the hook and was gone with a splash.

I had drawn an extra hook from my box and was “ganging” it upon the line, when some impulse caused me to look up. As I did so, the tin box fell clattering upon the rocks and my rod at my feet.

The brook here had cut a narrow gorge through a ridge, and the pool at whose head I stood touched on each side the very foot of a rocky wall nearly forty feet high. I was standing on a ledge whence the brook dropped, perhaps, ten feet into the pool, and the banks were not nearly so high there. Still, I presume the tops were fifteen feet above my head.

A giant pine had fallen across the gorge from bank to bank, making a knotty bridge, which was almost over me, but a little in front; and upon that great log was the Something which had brought my heart up into my mouth with such a bump.

On the dark side of the tree, behind the stump of a huge limb, flat and motionless as you could press your hand upon the table, lay almost the last thing in the world that I desired to see there—a wildcat.

Whether it was crouching there when I came, or, as is more likely, had crawled out from the bank to surprise me, I never knew; but there it was confronting me.

I could just see the fierce glints in its eyes; and when its gaze met mine, the tip of the ears, outlined on a patch of sky, seemed to flatten. My rifle was in camp, for it was too long a walk to bring it when I wished to fish. I had not even a revolver—nothing but a keen-edged, clip-point hunting-knife, which hung in its sheath on my left hip.

I hardly dared move, but that knife I must have. Slipping my right hand cautiously behind my back, I reached far around, till at last it touched the welcome hilt, and I began to slip the sheath slowly around my belt to the right side, where the knife could be drawn less ostentatiously.

All this time I had never taken my eyes from those of the unwelcome intruder, and I kept scowling at him with a savage expression which was meant to alarm him, but which sadly flattered my real feelings.

How long we stood eyeing each other thus, I do not know. It seemed an age and must have been several minutes. Neither of us moved. He lay crouched and menacing; I stood outwardly defiant, with my hand on that precious buckhorn handle. And then my wet feet, chilled with the icy water of the brook, betrayed me. I felt a sneeze working toward the surface.

Now, when _I_ sneeze, it is no gentle _tschoo!_ but half a dozen or more wild and uncontrollable explosions, which never fail to bring tears to my own eyes, if they are lucky enough not to scare some unsuspecting stranger.

I struggled to choke that sneeze, to hold it back; but I might as well have tried to hold the foaming brook.

_Ker-cheooo! Ker-cheooo! Ker-cheooo-oo!_ With each eruption my head flew down and my body shook; and as I straightened up after the fifth burst, I saw—through the mist that filled my eyes—something dark descending upon me like a great, hazy bird.

I had not once changed my position since first seeing the wildcat. He was a trifle to my left, and my left foot and shoulder were pointed up-stream. Our lives hang on such trifles as that! Now, with the trained instinct of the boxer—who has first to learn to act without stopping to think how to act—I threw my left hand up and out! Half-way to arms-length it met that furry avalanche, and broke its force. The cat landed full against my side.

Its sharp hind claws sank into my thigh, and the sharper fore claws clutched me in the pectoral muscles in front and between the shoulder-blades behind. The pain was cruel, but I had no time even to cry out. At the instant I expected to feel those merciless jaws on my neck, and that would be the last.

The wildcat knows where the jugular vein is as well as the best surgeon of them all; and it is for that that he invariably jumps. Animals killed by these cruel ambuscaders are sometimes left whole and unmangled, save for that wicked little gap at the side of the throat.

But my boxing lessons had saved me. As my left hand went out in that “straight counter,” it struck full in the throat of the cat; and with the swift inspiration of desperate men, I clutched the folds of fur there with all my might.

The cat strained hard to pull-in to me—and that was a cruel leverage it had in my own flesh. But my arm, never a weak one, was doubly strong now; and, though I could not force him from his hold, I kept his head well away from mine, which I “ducked” to increase the still unsatisfactory distance.

Then, drawing the keen six-inch blade, I drove it against his side. His left side was, of course, the one exposed to me; but we were so “mixed up” that I could take no accurate aim at his heart, and just thrust blindly and madly at that stretch of mottled fur.

Nothing will ever dim my recollection of that desperate struggle; and yet I seemed in a sort of trance. You have had nightmares, wherein some savage beast pursued you, and you slammed vain doors on him which he brushed open, and fired ineffective rifles at him whose diminished pop did not affect him in the least; and, do what you would, nothing availed against that implacable danger. So it was with me. I seemed under a spell.

Those awful claws were tearing me everywhere; that fatal head was struggling to break down my tiring arm; and the desperate thrusts of the knife with all the force of my right arm seemed not even to penetrate the tough hide. They went deep enough, as I found later, but at the moment I was sure they hardly scratched him.

Since that day I have been through a great many of the things of whose suspense we say, “They seemed eternities,” but never one, I think, that seemed so endless as that. And yet it could hardly have lasted a minute. I was growing very weak. Blood was running down in my boots, and my weary left arm was no longer rigid. My right was no longer fully under control, and once, when the knife glanced a rib, it nearly flew from my hand.

Once, too, I struck high, and the cat caught my right wrist between his savage teeth and tore out a piece. Was he invulnerable? I began actually to believe so—to fancy that, after all, it must be a hideous dream.

You may imagine from that into what a state my mind had come. But still I plied the knife, and still with cramped and trembling arm held off the creature’s jaws.

And then, on a sudden, a great wave of joy swept over me, and I yelled madly. The curving claws, set deep in my back and breast, relaxed. It was only the least bit in the world, but I could feel the exquisite pain of that slight withdrawal; and in another instant they came out altogether, and my foe fell limp upon the rocks beside me, where he never moved again.

I looked at him once; my eyes grew dim, and I fell across him.

When I recovered consciousness, we were lying in a heap, wet with our common blood. I crawled a couple of feet to the brook, and the icy water revived me, so that at last I could rise and limp about the field of our strange battle.