The Line of Least Resistance/Chapter 1
I
THE world to an end shall come in eighteen hundred and eighty-one." Lamentably accurate as to horseless carriages and other doleful prophecies Mother Shipton was yet not infallible. The year passed with no such annoying event; the periled ant-hill world continued frantically ant-busy with vital affairs, which now are forgotten or as frantically undone.
In 1881, Garfield was assassinated. In New York City, "Crazy Luke," persistent in a Hudson River Tunnel hallucination, became a nuisance to harassed capital and was properly sent to the insane asylum. Infant damnation was abolished at Cincinnati. Washington was deep in the A, B, C, D of a new navy, planning the Atlanta, Boston, Chicago and Dolphin, monsters of three thousand tons.
Kansas and Nebraska were mortgaged, emitting—profanity was wicked, exhausted and unsatisfactory—weird, harebrained heresies, now orthodox. These fanatic dissatisfactions were to become Grange Societies, Populism, and, by a particularly subtle and insidious system—a consistent series of crushing defeats—to disconcert and capture one and both of Populism's successful antagonists, and so depart, having made two Populist parties grow where none grew before. Singularly enough, that son of York—at that time affording much quiet amusement to the old hands at Albany—who was to lead this wintry discontent to blooming summer, or, at least, to ride before it—was now devoting his few odd moments to refuting the heresies he was to enforce so strenuously, and to exposing the fallacies of his own later career. It is gratifying to know that our ethical and political standards are permanent and absolute at last, after centuries of change and foggy confusion.
For the rest, the Eastern question and colossal Russia engrossed an agitated Europe. The Japanese were becoming known as a bright little people, really quite intelligent; in revolving Mexico, Gonzales was President per Dictator Diaz; in South Africa, one Paul Kruger was experimentally playing cat's-cradle with the British Lion's tail.
In 1881 New Mexico expected statehood forthwith; the Lincoln County War was dying down; Pat Garrett had successfully killed Billy the Kid; Governor Lew Wallace had written Ben-Hur in the Adobe Palace, undistracted; the Santa Fe Railroad was completed to El Paso; Dundee and other towns without a past were simultaneously enjoying the present and a heavily discounted future.
Why, in '81-'83, Dundee in the desert counted her sons by more joyous hundreds than ever by scores in her subsequent drowsy quarter-century as a cowtown; why some of these hundreds wore silk hats unreproved, some clave to cleft sombreros and some held by skull-cap and duster; why the incumbents of such diverging gear dwelt millennially together, with no unseemly contention for the lion's part; why Dundee boasted two general stores of amazing efficiency where whatsoever thing demanded was mysteriously produced at once; why there was a one-story adobe hotel of vast acreage, forever crowded with affluent transients; why there were rival stage-lines to the Black Range country, sixty miles westward, with a service of a daily six-horse coach either way, not to mention the frequent extras; why the railroad had hastily surveyed a "feeder" for that same Black Range clientage, to be built at once to flourishing Chloride, Fairview, Grafton and Hermosa; why, pending such building, the sidetracks of Dundee were crowded with cars—freight, ore and private; why, night and day, the freight depot was blockaded by waiting freight out fits—ten to twenty horses or mules or oxen, an enormous wagon strong enough for anything in the way of boilers or machinery that could possibly be loaded upon it, and one or more smaller "trail wagons," constituting an outfit; why, in short, gold eagles were then more prevalent in Dundee than were dimes thereafter—all these things may require some explanation.
You would certainly have demanded such explanation, later revisiting the pale glimpses of Dundee; when the long, white tent-streets had folded and vanished in the night, Arabian fashion; when the wooden buildings had been torn down and moved to tributary ranches; when the larger and more capable of the amazing general stores had providentially burned—its provident and capable owner, with the insurance money, flitting to the Cœur d'Aléne country; when the other store and the hotel—both of uninflammable adobe—were partly occupied as headquarters of warring cattle companies. The square stakes of the Black Range branch line remained, a commentary on departed glories. They are there yet. Good wood, in that dry, pure air, does not rot or "powder post" as in some more favored sections. Through the long, pleasant evenings, Dundee, reclining on tarpaulined beds in its vasty starlit sleeping quarters, was prone to wax reminiscent as to that golden age; mournfully proud, like Mr. Kipling's Mulvaney, "Oi wuz a corpr'l wanst. Oi've been rayjooced—but Oi wuz a corpr'l wanst." At such times Dundee fondly recurred to the survey stakes, as Private Mulvaney to those brief, vanished chevrons.
Let us return to our millennial muttons.
Boston built the Santa Fe Railroad, with the brains and money so characteristic of her. Incidentally, she rebuilt frequently such jerkwater part of it as bordered upon the Rio Grande del Norte—sometimes reasonably called Rio Bravo—until, after the ninth consecutive encore, she surmised that those rude, unlettered persons who had aforetime made early casual mention of the Grande, or Bravo, as a fickle and migratory stream, had meant thereby no idle persiflage, but a friendly, unofficial warning. Convinced by the facts, Boston made a late, literal and lateral movement of track and right-of-way—two hundred miles of it. But this is a detail. As said above, Boston built the Santa Fe, and then ventured forth in private cars to view the investment.
The why of what next befell is insufficiently explained. "The lands of the sun expand the soul"—los paises del sol dilaten el alma. This dicho of our Latin neighbors seems the likeliest solution. Perhaps the taintless air was heavy and the glamour of incredible vast horizons stirred the blood. Or, perhaps, it was a sympathetic spiritual strike, incited by bodily freedom from wonted shackles, climatic, sartorial and conventional. Be that as it may, this is the indecorous thing that chanced. Skull-cap coquettishly aslant, with a chuckle, hilarious but not maudlin, staid and thrifty Boston clapped hand to pocket and proceeded to gamble, joyously, deeply, freeheartedly. Not with cards—dear me, no! With mines—gold, silver, copper and things.
To hold a claim, ten feet of assessment work must be done each year, for which payment was had at a flat rate of ten dollars the foot. That was a good time and place; two languid men could thus attain a hundred dollars in from four to six days, according to the rock encountered and the degree of languor exhibited. Energetic folk and Welshmen did it in half the time.
Boston was not blind, but this newly-acquired, careless prodigality thrilled the Bostonian veins with morbid pleasure. A good round price, certainly, said Boston with an airy shrug, also a late acquisition. But, after all, why shouldn't these poor fellows have their bit for such hard toil, where one perspired so freely and soiled one's clothes so very much? It was dangerous too. One might walk into the shaft, or neglect to absent oneself when one set off a blast.
Promising "mines" did "gophering" or development work by contract at the same liberal rate. The heterogeneous population walked with a jaunty and springy swagger—that non-equestrian part of it not engaged in stock-raising. It did not, at this date, drink to excess. It was more amusing to keep sober. It seldom gambled—it wasn't exciting enough. It preserved an invincible good nature. What was there to quarrel about? It took no thought for the morrow. Why should it? New Mexico was roughly, say, four hundred miles square. That was one hundred and sixty thousand square miles—call it one hundred and fifty thousand. In a square mile there were thirty and seven-eighths mining claims, each fifteen hundred by six hundred feet—make it thirty even. Four and a half million claims in New Mexico alone, each calling for a hundred dollars in assessment work every year!—four hundred and fifty million dollars—not counting steady "producers" and development work, or the not infrequent sales at fancy prices. Lump it all at that—cut it in half—two hundred and fifty million dollars a year at the least! Smooth and unperplexed faces were worn; eyes jolly, twinkling, heedless; smiling mouths. Ay de mi! Never were such times since Paris of the Bubble!
Such was the optimistic arithmetic. To be rigidly impartial, the party of the second part calculated as artlessly. And here is a curious thing. Long after those golden days this bit of learned legal phraseology clings persistently to the speech of all who go down into the earth in buckets. He with whom the Southwest has dealings connected with the animal or vegetable kingdom, or prepared foods, is a man. But if the deal is as to things metalliferous the absent, be he "the foe, the victim, or the fond ally," loses all personal nomenclature and pronominal rights, and is mysteriously referred to, irrespective of person, number, gender and "the party."
A similar relic obtains as to the mine itself. It is not now so called unless it is a "producer." When on the market for sale, lease or bond or seeking capital for development work, it is invariably spoken of as "a proposition." With proverbial beginners' luck, Boston made a few notable winnings. Gleeful letters went forth to favored cities on Boston's calling list; the skull-cap took on a tilt positively rakish, and Boston made new bets on the layout.
There are rumors of cold decks, slipped cuts and similar malign devices. If such there were they but accelerated the inevitable end. Ten dollars a foot from the grass-roots down would have done the business, unaided by art. There came a day when Boston went back with a headache—expense money wired.
The bereaved residue, thus cruelly deprived of sustenance, for the most part resumed wrinkles and human traits; became thirsty, acquisitive and quarrelsome, with respective tendencies toward D. T., train robbery and homicide; and so drifted away before the swelling tide of keen-eyed and long-legged Texans, the cowmen who were for a space to inherit the land.
There was a minority, both of those that drifted and of those that lodged, who kept sweet and sound, loyal and sunny and kind and gay to the end; who, like the Jolly Old School master, were "sure of happiness, living or dead." Nameless here, save for a few, that pulsing, great-hearted, generous life gives warmth and color to every mellow memory of those far-off dreamy days; their friendly ghosts flit dimly to and fro on shadowy errands; not on the firing-line, but a sure reserve in need; in Dundee, or what place they were, their strength a refuge, covert from the storm, shelter from mighty winds, the shadow of a great rock in a weary land.