The Story of a Mine | Page 4

get up!"
Still no effect. Concho began to feel uneasy; never before had a mule of
pious lineage failed to respond to this kind of exhortation. He made one
more desperate attempt:

"Ah, defiler of the altar! lie not there! Look!" he threw his hand into the
air, extending the fingers suddenly. "Behold, fiend! I exorcise thee! Ha!
tremblest! Look but a little now,--see! Apostate! I--I--excommunicate
thee,--Mula!"
"What are you kicking up such a devil of row down there for?" said a
gruff voice from the rocks above.
Concho shuddered. Could it be that the devil was really going to fly
away with his mule? He dared not look up.
"Come now," continued the voice, "you just let up on that mule, you
d----d old Greaser. Don't you see she's slipped her shoulder?"
Alarmed as Concho was at the information, he could not help feeling to
a certain extent relieved. She was lamed, but had not lost her standing
as a good Catholic.
He ventured to lift his eyes. A stranger--an Americano from his dress
and accent--was descending the rocks toward him. He was a slight-built
man with a dark, smooth face, that would have been quite
commonplace and inexpressive but for his left eye, in which all that
was villainous in him apparently centered. Shut that eye, and you had
the features and expression of an ordinary man; cover up those features,
and the eye shone out like Eblis's own. Nature had apparently observed
this too, and had, by a paralysis of the nerve, ironically dropped the
corner of the upper lid over it like a curtain, laughed at her handiwork,
and turned him loose to prey upon a credulous world.
"What are you doing here?" said the stranger after he had assisted
Concho in bringing the mule to her feet, and a helpless halt.
"Prospecting, Senor."
The stranger turned his respectable right eye toward Concho, while his
left looked unutterable scorn and wickedness over the landscape.
"Prospecting, what for?"

"Gold and silver, Senor,--yet for silver most."
"Alone?"
"Of us there are four."
The stranger looked around.
"In camp,--a league beyond," explained the Mexican.
"Found anything?"
"Of this--much." Concho took from his saddle bags a lump of greyish
iron ore, studded here and there with star points of pyrites. The stranger
said nothing, but his eye looked a diabolical suggestion.
"You are lucky, friend Greaser."
"Eh?"
"It IS silver."
"How know you this?"
"It is my business. I'm a metallurgist."
"And you can say what shall be silver and what is not."
"Yes,--see here!" The stranger took from his saddle bags a little leather
case containing some half dozen phials. One, enwrapped in dark-blue
paper, he held up to Concho.
"This contains a preparation of silver."
Concho's eyes sparkled, but he looked doubtingly at the stranger.
"Get me some water in your pan."
Concho emptied his water bottle in his prospecting pan and handed it to

the stranger. He dipped a dried blade of grass in the bottle and then let a
drop fall from its tip in the water. The water remained unchanged.
"Now throw a little salt in the water," said the stranger.
Concho did so. Instantly a white film appeared on the surface, and
presently the whole mass assumed a milky hue.
Concho crossed himself hastily, "Mother of God, it is magic!"
"It is chloride of silver, you darned fool."
Not content with this cheap experiment, the stranger then took
Concho's breath away by reddening some litmus paper with the nitrate,
and then completely knocked over the simple Mexican by restoring its
color by dipping it in the salt water.
"You shall try me this," said Concho, offering his iron ore to the
stranger;--"you shall use the silver and the salt."
"Not so fast my friend," answered the stranger; "in the first place this
ore must be melted, and then a chip taken and put in shape like
this,--and that is worth something, my Greaser cherub. No, sir, a man
don't spend all his youth at Freiburg and Heidelburg to throw away his
science gratuitously on the first Greaser he meets."
"It will cost--eh--how much?" said the Mexican eagerly.
"Well, I should say it would take about a hundred dollars and expenses
to--to--find silver in that ore. But once you've got it there--you're all
right for tons of it."
"You shall have it," said the now excited Mexican. "You shall have it
of us,--the four! You shall come to our camp and shall melt it,--and
show the silver, and--enough! Come!" and in his feverishness he
clutched the hand of his companion as if to lead him forth at once.
"What are you going to do with your mule?" said the stranger.

"True, Holy Mother,--what, indeed?"
"Look yer," said the stranger, with a grim smile, "she won't stray far,
I'll be