Copper Streak Trail

Copper Streak Trail, by Eugene
Manlove Rhodes

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Manlove Rhodes
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Title: Copper Streak Trail
Author: Eugene Manlove Rhodes
Release Date: December 31, 2004 [eBook #14545]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
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STREAK TRAIL***
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COPPER STREAK TRAIL

by
EUGENE MANLOVE RHODES
Author of Stepsons Of Light, Good Men And True, West Is West, etc.
1917

TO THE READER OF THIS BOOK FROM ONE WHO SAW LIFE
UNSTEADILY AND IN
CHAPTER I
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PART
CHAPTER I
The stage line swung aside in a huge half-circle, rounding the northern
end of the Comobabi Range and swinging far out to skirt the foothills.
Mr. Peter Johnson had never been to Silverbell: his own country lay far
to the north, beyond the Gila. But he knew that Silverbell was
somewhere east of the Comobabi, not north; and confidently struck out
to find a short cut through the hills. From Silverbell a spur of railroad
ran down to Redrock. Mr. Johnson's thought was to entrain himself for
Tucson.
The Midnight horse reached along in a brisk, swinging walk, an
optimistic walk, good for four miles an hour. He had held that gait
since three o'clock in the morning, with an hour off for water and
breakfast at Smith's Wells, the first stage station out from Cobre; it was
now hot noon by a conscientious sun--thirty-six miles. But Midnight
did not care. For hours their way had been through a trackless plain of
uncropped salt grass, or grama, on the rising slopes: now they were in a
country of worn and freshly traveled trails: wise Midnight knew there

would be water and nooning soon. Already they had seen little bands of
horses peering down at them from the high knolls on their right.
Midnight wondered if they were to find sweet water or alkali. Sweet,
likely, since it was in the hills; Midnight was sure he hoped so. The
best of these wells in the plains were salt and brackish. Privately,
Midnight preferred the Forest Reserve. It was a pleasant, soft life in
these pinewood pastures. Even if it was pretty dull for a good
cow-horse after the Free Range, it was easier on old bones. And though
Midnight was not insensible to the compliment Pete had paid him by
picking him from the bunch for these long excursions to the Southland
deserts, he missed the bunch.
They had been together a long time, the bunch; Pete had brought them
from the Block Ranch, over in New Mexico. They were getting on in
years, and so was Pete. Midnight mused over his youthful days--the
dust, the flashing horns, the shouting and the excitement of old
round-ups.
It is a true telling that thoughts in no way unlike these buzzed in the
rider's head as a usual thing. But to-day he had other things to think of.
With Kid Mitchell, his partner, Pete had lately stumbled upon a secret
of fortune--a copper hill; a warty, snubby little gray hill in an
insignificant cluster of little gray hills. But this one, and this one only,
precariously crusted over with a thin layer of earth and windblown sand,
was copper, upthrust by central fires; rich ore, crumbling, soft; a hill to
be loaded, every yard of it, into cars yet unbuilt, on a railroad yet
undreamed-of, save by these two lucky adventurers.
They had blundered upon their rich find by pure chance. For in the
southwest, close upon the Mexican border, in the most lonesome corner
of the most lonesome county of thinly settled Arizona, turning back
from a long and fruitless prospecting trip, they had paused for one last,
half-hearted venture. One idle stroke of the pick in a windworn bare
patch had turned up--this!
So Pete Johnson's thoughts were of millions; not without a queer

feeling that he wouldn't have the least idea what to do with them, and
that he was parting with something in his past, priceless, vaguely
indefinable: a sharing and acceptance of the common lot, a brotherhood
with the not fortunate.
Riding to the northwest, Pete's broad gray sombrero was tilted aside to
shelter from the noonday sun a russet face, crinkled rather than
wrinkled, and dusty. His hair, thinning at the temples, vigorous at the
ears, was crisply white. A short and lately trimmed mustache held a
smile in ambush; above it towered