Where Strongest Tide Winds Blew

McReynolds Robert

Where Strongest Tide Winds Blew

I.

UNDER THE SWORD OF DAMOCLES

We built our cabin high on the slopes of the Sangre de Christo range, overlooking the broad, level San Luis Valley, in Colorado. At the rear of the cabin rose a towering cliff or rather a huge slab of rock standing edgewise more than two hundred feet high, apparently the upheaval of some mighty convulsion of nature in ages gone. Near the base of this cliff flowed a clear crystal spring.

Some hundred yards west of the cabin was the mouth of a tunnel into which we had drifted with pick, shovel and giant powder, a distance of 300 feet in five months of hard toil. A trail led from the tunnel to the cabin along the mountain side, which was thickly studded with tall pines. Another trail led down the mountain slopes in a winding way to the valley, almost a mile below. Above, reaching far into the blue dome of the sky, rose the peaks of the snow-capped Sangre de Christo, glistening in the morning sunlight, which threw gaunt, fantastic shadows in cañon and deep ravine.

It was a wild, weird scene, where man, in strength and vigor, seems to imbibe a portion of the divine essence that lives, and moves, and has its being in the vast solitudes.

We struck pay rock at the first thirty feet of tunneling, so Amos’ assay showed, and the rock had gradually increased in value, week by week. Buchan would take samples of the ore every week or ten days and walk a distance of twenty-five miles to Saguache, where old man Amos, expert geologist and assayer, would for two dollars and fifty cents make out a clean printed slip with figures in red ink, showing so many ounces of lead, copper, silver and gold to the ton.

The ore had not yet reached a value which would pay to ship it, but the increase of values was so steady, and Amos was so extravagantly encouraging, that we were always in buoyant expectation of rich ore. He would say, “You boys have a wonderful prospect. Keep right on with your work; it is getting richer with every stroke of your pick and you are likely to uncover a million dollar drift any day.”

Buchan would bring the assay certificate back to the cabin, where we would sit late by the light of the pine knots in the fire place and talk of the golden millions which capitalists would yet gladly pay for a half interest in the “Aberdeen.”

That was the name Buchan had given the mine, after his home town in Scotland, of which he always spoke with a fond tenderness.

Winter had come and we, John Buchan, Will Carson, and myself, had chipped in almost our last dollar and brought a wagon load of flour, bacon and canned goods from Saguache to the foot of the mountains, then carried them on our backs to the cabin. We quit work on the mine for ten days and chopped firewood, which we corded at the rear of our house. All hands felt that we were as snugly housed for the winter as the big grizzly bears in their lairs among the rocks.

Snow had been falling for several days and it lay deep on the mountain slopes and in the wide expanse of the valley below. We had not had an assay for two weeks and all were anxious for another report from Amos. Buchan wanted his mail also, and he took a small bag of the rock and tramped the twenty-five miles to Saguache. It was a three days’ trip wading through the unbroken snow drifts, and it was night when he returned, weary, footsore and angry.

I can see him yet, tears trickling down his honest face, as he tried to tell something about Amos. He spoke of “the scamp, the villain, and robber,” and then choked with rage. Like all Scotchmen, the more he thought of the wrong done him, the angrier he became; he would be more angry tomorrow and it would be the day after that his anger would reach the climax, and begin to subside. This was not a peculiarity of Buchan. It is a characteristic of the Scotch.

We made him a cup of coffee and seated him comfortably before the fire. When he calmed down somewhat, he explained.

“The first thing I did the next morning after reaching Saguache, was to eat breakfast, and then I took the samples of ore to Amos’ assay office. He was garrulous as usual, and said to come in two hours and he would have the certificate of the assay ready for me. When I again called he handed me the certificate and I paid him the usual two dollars and fifty cents. It showed nine dollars and ninety cents to the ton. The usual increase of ten per cent. over the last assay.

“I crossed over to the postoffice, and while waiting for my mail, I noticed the snow standing ten inches high on the cap of the flue of Amos’ assay furnace. I thought, how in the deuce did he assay our ore without melting the snow on the cap of the flue? The more I thought about it the more I was mystified. I went across to his office and said, ‘Amos, I suppose you gave us the usual fire test on this ore?’ ‘Yep,’ he answered. ‘Then tell me,’ I cried, ‘how in the devil did you make the fire test without melting the snow off the cap of your furnace flue?’ ‘Too cold to melt,’ he replied.

“Then I rushed past him into the back room. The furnace was cold and the frost had gathered on the iron door. I don’t suppose there had been a fire in it for a week. I took Amos by the whiskers and told him to own up that he had not made a fire test of our ore. Then he acknowledged that he had been guessing at it all along.”

“You don’t mean there is a doubt about us having pay rock?” we yelled in a chorus.

“All kinds of doubt,” said Buchan. “I am told there is a suspicion that Amos gives everybody an assay showing values, where there are no values–this for the purpose of keeping up work in the district–and to those who have found values, he gives them an assay showing nothing. At the same time he gives Rayder, the Denver capitalist, a tip and he buys up the property for a song, giving Amos a fat commission for his part in the deal. The chances are that we have no more gold in our rock than there is in that jug handle.”

The news was astounding. We sat for a while by the fire like men stricken dumb. There was no doubting Buchan’s statement. Deception was no part of his nature. He was nearly twenty-six years of age, athletic, strong and quick of perception. He had seen much of the world and knew men. No, there could be no doubt; he was not mistaken.

We were heartsick. Almost our last dollar had gone to pay for the bogus assay. Our golden dream of months was vanishing. Carson broke the silence.

“I will go to Saguache tomorrow. I shall pulverize that jug handle and take it to Amos; he does not know me; I shall have him assay it, and if he gives me gold values there will be trouble!”

I was awakened the next morning by the sound of a hammer. Carson was pulverizing the jug handle. After a hasty breakfast, he buckled on his cartridge belt with a Colt 44-six shooter in his holster, and was soon wading through the snow-drifts down the trail towards Saguache. I watched him through the window until he was lost to view.

The sun rose in a clear sky; the glistening peaks of the Sangre de Christo shone white against a turquoise blue; clumps of snow melted from the branches of the pines and made hollows in the smooth banks of white where they fell.

I turned to Buchan. He was tossing restlessly in his bunk.

“I would hate to be Amos if he gives Carson an assay of values from that jug handle.

“Yes, yes,” he muttered incoherently. “The day of reckoning comes to all. I have seen it. I have seen the sky turn black, the waves rise mountain-high out of the sea, the earth rock and reel, the dead roll out of their coffins in the cerements of their graves, the living fall upon their faces to hide from the wrath of Almighty God! I have seen it just as Paul tells about it. I have heard the roar of the winds, seen palaces crumble and fall–like John of Patmos, I lift up my voice–I, John.”

I was at his side in a moment, and saw that he was delirious. The exertion through the snow the day before, the loss of sleep and intense anger, had made him ill. I knew of a few simple remedies at hand, and in a little while I had him sleeping soundly.

The sun became warmer as the day advanced. The snow melted on the cabin roof and froze in drooping icicles at the eaves. All day I went noiselessly about the cabin, letting Buchan sleep. A premonition of impending danger crept over me. I tried to throw off the dread feeling by reading, but I could not concentrate my thoughts on the pages of the book. Strange thoughts came like they did to the man who was being taken to the guillotine and begged time of his captors to put his thoughts on paper. I thought I would write mine that day, or remember them at least, but I cannot recall them. I only know they were strange and fascinating, as if I was living another life, on another planet.

I brought in wood and water for the night. The sound of the door slamming awoke Buchan. He arose and sat by the fire, which blazed up brightly from its fresh supply of pine logs.

“Better, I see,” I observed, “but heavens you were locoed this morning! talking about the resurrection, the quaking earth, and the dead rolling out from their graves!”

“All true,” he said, quietly. “I have seen those things, and what has happened once may happen again.”

I was standing by the window, looking out over the snow covered San Luis valley, when even as he spoke I felt the ground tremble. There was a rush of air and the cabin became filled with a fine snow that was stifling, then a thunderous roar, and all was utter darkness.

I was choking with the snow particles. I groped to the door and opened it and felt a solid bank of snow.

I realized then that we were buried beneath a snow slide.

We worked for hours, in silence and darkness, digging our way through the snow and shoveling it back into the cabin as we tunneled toward the cliff. It was early morning when we saw the light of day.

Once in the open where we could breathe the pure air we beheld a sight that would appall the strongest heart. The great flat rock, that had stood on edge at the back of the cabin, was now slanting at a sharp angle above our heads. The avalanche from near the summit of the Sangre de Christo had struck the cliff and with its incalculable tons tilted it, piling itself hundreds of feet in the depth about us. The cliff might fall at any moment and blot us out of existence.

Reaching a point of sight near the open space at the edge of the base of the cliff we could see something of the awful havoc wrought by the avalanche. Huge rocks had been loosened from their foundations and with the speed of a meteor dashed to the valley below. Great pines one hundred feet in height had been torn up by their roots and hurled down the mountain side by the tremendous weight of the avalanche.

The cliff had sheltered our cabin and saved our lives.

We cleared the snow away from the chimney and out of the cabin. Our wood was dry and we soon had a cheerful fire blazing and the tea kettle boiling. But living under that slanting cliff, from which we could not escape, we felt, indeed that the sword of Damocles hung by a spider web above our heads.

When we had rested some and refreshed ourselves with coffee, we tunneled from the open space under the cliff to near the entrance of the mine, intending to live in the tunnel until the melting snows of the spring released us from our prison. But when we had tunneled through the snow to near the entrance of the mine, we found our way blocked by a debris of rock and trees which would require weeks of labor to remove. Tunnels in other directions gave us no better results, and we became resigned to our fate, returning to the cabin to while away the dreary hours until the hanging cliff above should become our grave stone.

Days of gloom and monotony came and went. We dug the snow away from our windows and tunneled a hole to the top which gave us a glare of reflected light.

Buchan had hitherto been silent as to his past life. By a few stray remarks we had caught glimpses of his romantic career, but now he began relating in detail incidents of his early life in Scotland, or on the high seas, and later in Peru. His stories were so full of human interest and replete with love and romance, that I became more than ever interested in him. But my hearing was bad, and it had been getting worse since the day of the avalanche, so I prevailed upon him to write. I could read better than listen, besides he would write his better thoughts and nobler sentiments when he would not speak them.

It was writing these memoirs of his eventful life that furnished him pastime and I was employed in reading them, during the two months of our imprisonment in our snow bound cabin.

By the dim light of the window by day and the blaze of a pine log at night, he wrote upon the scraps of paper found about the cabin. As I now review the pile I find it made up of paper bags, margins of newspapers, fly leaves from a few old books, and much of it on strips of a yellow window shade, also on the backs of fancy calendars with which Carson had adorned our cabin, and almost a whole chapter I find penciled finely on a pair of lady’s cuffs that were strangely out of place in a miner’s hut.

Buchan does not know that I am going to give his story to the public and I shall have to take chances and risk his displeasure. In that event I have the defence of pleading that no man has the right to withhold so good a tale from the world.

II.

IN DAYS OF INNOCENCE

As I peer into the dim past that haunts the scenes of my childhood in Aberdeen, Scotland, a thousand memories troop by like the scenes of a panorama with the footlights turned low; and when I contemplate them in a meditative hour it leaves me with as lonesome a feeling as if I had listened to the old time song, “Home Sweet Home,” which I have heard a thousand times in distant climes, sometimes sung to crowded audiences at the opera, and again by the pioneer as he rattled his prairie schooner over the plains.

It is a song that never grows old and never will so long as men leave the home of their childhood, around whose hearthstones still play ghost-like, the recollections of bye-gone years, tenderly touching their sympathies as they pause for a moment in their monied pursuits in other lands.

The old red school house on Princeton street, with the tall lank figure of Ellwood for its presiding master and who believed in and practiced the command of the Holy Writ: “Spare the rod and spoil the child,” was to me in those years of tenderness, a dismal contemplation. But Sundays had a brighter hue when Mother would dress me in full Highland suit of tartan, and adorn my cap with an eagle feather, surmounted with a brooch of the design of an arm with a dagger, bearing the motto, “We fear nae fae.” With my small claymore and buckled shoes and plaid, how proudly I would walk up to the barracks at Castle Gate, where the sentry would salute me, and give me permission to enter.

But those days had their troubles as well as pleasures. The West North street boys had a grievance against those of the East North street and one Saturday both sides met in battle array, armed with wooden swords, near the North church at Queen street. After a determined resistance West North street was victorious, when someone presented us with a flag. It was a common piece of bunting, but to our young heroes it was something to be looked up to and defended with our lives before the honor of West North street should be sullied.

That banner cost us many a headache, and many a soiled suit of clothes after the usual Saturday battle. On one occasion we sallied forth as usual to the battlefield, carrying our banner, and shouting derisively at our foe. The enemy had been reinforced and after a hard struggle, they captured our flag and carried it off in triumph to East North street.

Our fellows were a crest-fallen lot, as we sat on the steps of the church looking the picture of dejection. However, a few days later, I summoned the boys to meet in an old building in Ferrier’s Lane. There were fifteen of us and we came armed with our wooden swords. After much debate over the loss of our flag, a committee was appointed to notify the East North street fellows, that we were ready to offer battle, and dared them to meet us the following Saturday and bring the captured flag. They accepted the challenge. When we met again in the old building by the hazy and flickering light of a tallow candle, with upraised swords we swore to re-capture our flag, uphold the honor of our street or die in the attempt. I was chosen captain on this occasion, and never did a general rack his brain more for a plan of success than I did to win this battle. Finally I hit upon a stratagem and after school submitted it to all. It was to proceed to the usual place of battle, but at the corner of Queen street five boys were to be stationed out of sight, and when both armies met they were to rush in on their standard bearer and capture the flag. We met, and even to this day I shudder at the ferocity of that battle. Twice I was knocked down; several times our street was on the retreat when someone shouted–“Remember our oath!” and then another desperate rush, and along with the charge of the five secreted ones which so surprised the East North street boys that they finally yielded, and we carried off our flag in triumph. John Taylor’s head was cut, John Ingerham’s eyes were black, my right knee cap was out of place and six or eight others were more or less wounded. The boys of East North street fared about the same. Good old Doctor Ellis living in King street witnessed the fight, but he kept my secret, for I told Mother that I was hurt in running a race.

And so those delightful days of early boyhood passed like one long summer day. But a change came. My father died and in a few months more, my loving Mother, after a lingering illness, passed away. I then left the home of my childhood to live with my older brother, James.

Although every possible kindness was shown me, there was lacking a mother’s love, a mother’s sympathy and cheering words, things that touch the tender chords of a boy’s heart. At that time I was sent to the Ledingham Academy, but it was useless. The golden veil through which I had looked out on the world was lifted, the chain of love and affection broken. I saw the great ships come with their strange men from other ports of the world. I saw them unfurl their snowy sails and speed over the blue waters bound for the shores of other climes. I watched them until they were but a speck of white down on the blue horizon, and I longed to be on board–to feel the ship roll upon the billows and hear the wind whistling through the rigging, to climb aloft and view the limitless expanse of ocean and feel that I was a part of these white specters of the sea.

One day I saw in the windows of Knox & Co., a sign which read:

“Two apprentices wanted for the sea.”

I went in and told them I wanted to become a sailor. About this time another lad about one year older than myself came in on the same errand. An old gentleman, after surveying us both for some moments, remarked that in his opinion we were too young, but told us to wait a few minutes as Captain McKenzie would be in soon.

When Captain McKenzie came in he asked us if it was with the consent of our parents that we made application. Being answered in the affirmative by James Mitchell, the other boy, I answered that my father and mother were dead, but my brother would sign the necessary papers.

III.

THROUGH MISTS OF THE SEA

Captain McKenzie sprang from his berth in the wildest excitement. A moment before a low voice called “Captain,” at his state room door. “Who is there?” he asked. “Donovan,” came the guarded reply. “Captain, the mate has conspired with the crew to mutiny and your throat will be cut in an hour.”

James Mitchell and I were apprentices on board the bark “Aven of Aberdeen.” My brother James having reluctantly consented that I should follow the fortunes of the sea, signed the indenture papers.

The brig was bound for Archangel, Russia, and we had on board a large amount of specie and plate, the private fortunes of a Russian Jew returning to his native land after many years of success as a merchant in Alexandria. Our berth was near the captain’s, and Mitchell had heard the warning given by Donovan. He was out of his berth in an instant and gave me to understand there was mutiny aboard. Together we entered the captain’s cabin.

The Jew was apprised of the situation. It was the intention of the mate and crew to murder him and the Captain and put the vessel about for a piratical cruise in the Indian Ocean. They were a motley gang of foreigners, low bred and capable of any crime when led by a man like the mate, fresh from a career of lawlessness on the China coast.

The Jew was the most abject picture of terror I ever saw. His hands trembled and he shook like a man in a chill. He wanted to hide, but that was useless. Captain McKenzie armed himself with a belaying pin. He placed one in the hands of each of us boys and bade us follow him in silence. We cautiously went on deck and we found the helm deserted, and the mate and the entire crew sitting together and drinking in the fore part of the ship.

Captain McKenzie sprang into their midst and with one blow from the pin killed the mate. This subdued the others and they slunk away to their duties. The captain then called the men in front of him and after ordering Donovan to the helm, told them he was done with them and that their future conduct would determine their fate. At the same time he threatened to kill the first man that manifested a mutinous disposition, or dared to cross a given line on the deck without his permission. He then ordered the mate’s body overboard and told the men to return to their duties.

The Captain and Donovan took turns at the helm, while Mitchell or I was stationed as a lookout to give instant warning of any suspicious movements on the part of the crew. For more than a week we stood to our posts of duty, when one morning we sailed into the smooth waters of the port of Archangel, weary and exhausted from the intense nervous strain and loss of sleep.

The Captain notified the British consul and a file of soldiers came on board and arrested the crew. Six of them were afterwards sent to prison for life.

The home voyage of the Aven was fraught with all the dangers of the sea. We had secured another crew in Archangel but their seamanship was bad. When a sudden storm would strike us it required herculean efforts on the part of the captain and Donovan to prevent the ship from being driven ashore on the rocks.

Snow was falling and a wintry wind dashed the waves over our decks and coated the bulwarks with a mail of ice. Sleet and snow clung to the rigging, making every effort to handle the ship a hazardous one. For three days we battled against the elements and then we came in contact with ice floes. Once our position was so perilous that the Captain ordered the boats provisioned and ready to be lowered when the vessel should be crushed in the ice. By skillful maneuvering we escaped from the ice floes and had a pleasant day or two in smoother seas.

It was night and I was standing by the taffrail, when suddenly a giant specter seemed to come up from out of the sea, bearing directly down upon us. Her great lantern swung in a glow in a fog, by which I discerned moving objects.

“Collision! Collision!” I shouted at the top of my voice. The cry was taken up by the sailors, and ere it had died away there was the crashing of timbers, falling spars and the shouts of men.

We had been struck a glancing blow abaft midships but the damage was not serious enough to sink us. The other vessel, which proved to be the brig “Rapid,” belonging to the same company at Aberdeen, stood off until its crew ascertained the extent of our damage, then sailed away in the darkness.

A month’s delay on the docks at Aberdeen repairing damages, and we were again on the high seas bound for the ports of South America.

When off the West Indies the sky suddenly became overcast, and we were soon overtaken by a hurricane. The captain saw it coming and prepared for it, yet when it took the ship it roared and laid her down so that I thought she would never get up again. All that day and night we had heavy squalls, and by morning the gale was still increasing. Birds of sea and land came on board. Driven by the winds, they dashed themselves down upon the deck without offering to stir until picked up, and when let go they would not leave the ship, but endeavored to hide from the wind. By ten o’clock at night the storm had spent its fury, and when I went to my bunk I found it full of water. With the straining of the ship, the seams had begun to leak. I was surprised to note among the ship’s crew that the most swaggering, swearing bullies in fine weather were now the most meek and mild-mannered of men when death was staring them in the face.