Signed and witnessed

by H. de Vere Stacpoole

Illustration: "'It was the El Madrono business; I dare say you've heard tell of, and a lawsuit bit a big chunk out of the profit, or I'd have been a clean million to the good.'"

 

SIGNED AND
WITNESSED

By H. DE VERE STACPOOLE

ILLUSTRATED BY W. R. S. STOTT

IN Western New Mexico, south of the Santa Fe railway, stands the most interesting cliff in the world. On it are inscribed in letters cut with dagger-points the names of Commander don Juan de Oñante and others, the first Spanish explorers of this land, names over three hundred years old.

Amongst these august signatures, till obliterated by the avenging hand of Lummis, were to be found the common names of common men, tourists of recent years, and we were talking of these vandals and their desecrations when Mr. Shireman of—Oklahoma I think it was he came from—spoke up.

"If those chaps had known they wouldn't have stuck their names there. It's no use abusing them, the amount of condensed and bottled ignorance in this world is past belief and a man may be a saint and a sage and still be one of the bottles.

"Moreover, he may be a sight happier."

It was in the smoke-room of a Seattle boat and through the port you could see the near pine-covered hills and the beaches of Vancouver Island.

The thrud of the screw and the lift of the keel followed Shireman's remarks with others from the beams a-creak and the lamps swinging in their gimbals.

The gentleman from Oklahoma continued after a moment's pause: "It's strange you mentioning those writings just here and now, and my saying that on the spur of the moment, so to speak, not thinking of Billy Nutt who's just jumped into my head though it's twenty years since I saw him last. Twenty-one years to be correct. Twenty-one years and three months and four days to be precise, for I've one of those memories that never forget a date.

"I met him at San José, which is the southernmost of the Perlas Islands in Panama Gulf, just above 8 degrees north. San José doesn't belong properly to that latitude. It belongs to Hades and was towed out of there, climate and devils and all complete, with the devils turned to mosquitoes and lizards and scorpions, and anchored in the Gulf of Panama.

"Billy was on the beach scratching himself and prospecting for the gold of a wreck which was supposed to have been hove up there forty years before, but wasn't. If it was, the land crabs had eaten its bones and the scorpions cashed in the gold bars, and when I came there Billy had come to the same conclusion and was preparing to hike off in search of something else.

"That chap wasn't a man so much as a syndicate; he'd been in fifteen treasure expeditions and there wasn't a gold rush from the Chilcoot to Ballarat, as you might say, that he hadn't been leading the running, according to his own prospectus, which also stated that he'd made three fortunes.

"Barring being able to read and write he was the ignorantest creature ever born, but for all that he held you like a story-book.

"I must tell you that a year before this I'd cleared up more than half a million dollars out of phosphates. It was the El Madrono business; I dare say you've heard tell of, and a lawsuit bit a big chunk out of the profit, or I'd have been a clean million to the good. However, I took five hundred thousand dollars and put them in the bank, which is the best place for dollars, and started in to amuse myself.

"I was twenty years younger then; all the same, a fortnight of San Francisco amusements was as much as I could stand, the pumps sucked, and out I put in an old schooner I hired from McGinnis to hunt the coast for more dollars.

"I'd had enough of Music Halls and such; I was clean crazy for the great open spaces stunt and I was keen to see the prospects of the shark-fishing business in Lower California as a field for the investor. I found Magdalena Bay over-fished and the American fleet at gun practice there. It was a fine sight, but I hadn't come out to see sights, so I put on down the coast making for Panama and Balboa.

"Money smells as well as talks. I tell you I hadn't been in those parts three days before every sort of shark was following after me. Pearl islands, treasure hid in the Galapagos, sunk wrecks only five fathoms deep, gambling hells in St. Louis Potosi, opium-smuggling, the chance of leading a rebellion in Chile and making myself president so that I could scoop the treasury—easy money was lying all round me only waiting for me to put out my hand, but I wasn't having any.

"I put out and reached San José Island, and it was there, as I was telling you, I met Billy.

"I brought him on board the ship for fun, same as you might bring a monkey. His talk on the beach had amused me, and down in the cabin when we had settled to our drinks I began to talk myself, telling him I'd come along down looking out for business and how the whole cheese was full of rats and nothing left but the rind.

"'That's so,' says Billy, 'it's rotten apples these days; what between the Chinks and the Yanks there isn't a handle you can turn that hasn't been twisted off its crank, to say nothing of this wireless that brings a gun-boat on top of you if you as much as sneeze. Blackbirding and barratry and gun-running and opium-smuggling—where are they? All gone. There hasn't been a revolution bigger than a child's Catherine wheel in donkeys' years, and every stake worth taking in Mexico has been put in the kitty by the chap Diaz. I tell you, times is bad, all the yeggs that haven't grabbed seats in Washington are on their uppers or joined the Salvation Army, and on top of the lot where's the minerals? Where's gold? I'm asking you that, where's gold? Old Mother Earth hasn't said a word since she said "Klondyke"; then she croaked, seems to me. I tell you, since I was cleared out of my last fortune I spent one night on a bench in Central Park, N'York, and I couldn't sleep a wink. I sleep best in the open, but I couldn't sleep a wink thinking of the spending I'd seen all day and the sure certainty of a gold famine. It's dead sure to come and then they'll be catching old-timers like myself and putting us through the third degree to find out where the gold mines have hid themselves. Search me, I don't know where they are. I've raked the whole world for metals, but I don't know where they are; they ain't there. But I could tell them where silver is, and, mark you, the time for silver is coming.

"'Yes,' he goes on, 'I know where there's silver enough to sink the Cunard line if it was put aboard for cargo, and that's the first and foremost reason of my being in these parts. I took up this wreck business on the off-chance, but silver is what I came for and what I'm going to get if I can find a partner with two dollars and the pluck of a sand-flea,' he says, getting up and walking the cabin like a chap with a toothache. 'Silver, stacks of silver, easy to come at and easy to smelt, silver enough to make Rockefeller's eyes bug out of his head—and only waiting the guy to take it.'

"He's here," said I.

"Then that chap sat down opposite me and put his hand in his pocket as if to take out a prospectus, did it automatically and from habit as it were, but he fetched out nothing.

"'I've no papers,' he said, 'but I've got the location in my head, safe and sound. I could lead you to it in the dark.'

"If it's as easy as that," said I.

"'I was speaking figurative,' he cut in.

"Well," I said, "now spit it out, spit it out, we've got all the evening and all that Bourbon to work on. Give us the story, but first say, if you've known of this stuff all this while and can find it in the dark, why haven't you found it?"

"'Picking up a silver mine isn't exactly like picking up a pin,' he says; 'you want capital to work it and you want a partner to trust.'

"Then he began his yarn. I've told you he was ignorant; that chap didn't know the difference between Julius Cæsar and Judas Iscariot, but he could talk.

"'St. Miguel Bay lies near due west of where we are lying now,' said he, 'and there I put in Christmas day three years ago with a chap by name of Ramon Gomez. I'm telling you it was like me and you. Gomez had the location of this mine in his head and I had the dollars to get the concession and help to work it. Naturally I wouldn't part with the bricks till I'd seen the ground and he was taking me to his exhibit by way of a trading boat we'd picked up from the Gulf of Montijo which was where I'd met him.

"'It put us out at Real de St. Maria, which is near the foothills of the Sierra del Sapo, and there we hired mules and bought picks and provisions and assaying scales and set off for the mountains.

"'It wasn't a short way but there were roads of sorts between village and village, and sure enough when we got to the spot there were the indications, black lumps of horn silver leading to a cliff of a mountain that's pretty well all silver, to judge by the specimens I took.

"'"This is good enough for me," said I, "and good enough for my money." I was so full of the find that I brought out my bank-roll to show him, nine thousand dollars all but a hundred, which was a tom-fool act seeing he thought all my money was in the bank at Panama. Then we packed the mules and started.

"'We'd got to a cliff edge path when what seemed to me the shadow of a big bird hit the rump of the mule in front of me and I turned. It was no bird, it was a spade Ramon had lifted to flatten me, and next moment we'd clinched and the next he was over the edge. I looked over. That cliff was eight hundred foot to the valley bottom if it was an inch, and four hundred foot down there was a screw pine sticking out with Ramon on it, falling as you may say, and caught in the act.

"'He was waving his arms.

"'Then a condor dropped from nowhere and began to make sweeps round him, and more came in a hurry like chaps to a quick-lunch counter, and there he was waving his arms, for the tree had speared him through the back of his coat, which gave all at once and he fell the other four hundred foot on to the valley rocks.

"'The birds dropped near as quick and that was the end of Ram.

"'He'd tried to do the same to me so I didn't set up any lamentations. I hiked on and reached St. Maria, and I tell you I had a big thirst on me.

"'Night I got there, I tried to leave it behind me in a bar, and then, somehow or another, I got into a faro joint and woke in the morning with a mesquite head on me and my roll gone.

"'Since then I've never been able to catch those dollars again. I've been in a small way scraping here and scraping there with that silver mine in my head, as you may say, and no chance of working it.

Illustration: "'We're not the first here.'"

"'I tried to interest Lorillard in San Francisco; he wouldn't look at it, only looked at my boots, which was mostly uppers. I tried one or two chaps more, and one chap told me to go to J. P. Morgan and the other told me to go to Hull. You get me, a down-and-out trying to sell a silver lode is on as likely a tack as a chap trying to sell mufflers in Hades, so I left for the sea again as greaser on the Hawaiian line and skipped and got into a pineapple cannery and got the bucks together and went into a wrecking job, rose to four hundred and chummed with a Chink, ran dope and rose to two thousand eight hundred and speculated in coco-nuts, took the lot and speculated on this treasure hunt—and here I am bust again.'

Illustration: "And there before me cut on the rock was the word: 'Cortez.' Deep cut, though worn with weather, there it was. No Christian name, no date. It wanted nothing of that, no more than the name of Napoleon or Alexander would have done."

{{|II.}} "That's what Billy told me down in the cabin," said the man from Oklahoma, "and he told it as if he was telling the truth. I said to him, 'Billy,' I said, 'your trials and afflictions have my sympathy, but I'm not parting with any money over this proposition, it's too good.' 'What do you mean?' he asks. 'I mean,' said I, 'there's too much silver in it; it's not a mine according to you, it's a mountain.' 'That's so,' said he, 'a mountain of dollars is what you might call it. I'm not asking you to put money into it, I'm asking you to take money out of it; you don't believe me when I say this is the biggest thing on earth—well now, do I look a fool, do I look like a man who'd hike over those mountains unless he was sure of where he was going and what he was wanting? That's what I'm proposing to do if you'll come for the walk with me. When you've seen the stuff and touched it you'll be ready enough to put up the money to get the concession and start the working. I can't say fairer than that. I want nothing at the start, only the price of mule hire and the promise of a half-share in the profits.'

"'We'll talk of it in the morning,' I said, and we did.

"I fell to agreeing with him; the thing seemed good enough to speculate a few hundred dollars on, and I only had to put the boat over to St. Miguel Bay to be right on the base of the expedition.

"Two days later we got to a town where we put up at an inn that was half a verandah with chaps sitting about iii basket chairs and smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee. That was their business in life and the town went to sleep at one o'clock p.m., having stuffed itself with garlic and tomatoes, not waking till after three in the afternoon, when it pulled up its blinds and ordered coffee.

"After dark it let off fireworks, and after that the mandolines would begin serenading girls, the sound of these mixed with the guitars from the tango hells and the cats and the bull-frogs and the mosquitoes and chaps being murdered down back alleys and telling the world of their troubles; all of which kept on till four in the morning, or maybe five, when the cocks and the church bells took on.

"And all that work was backed with nothing stronger than coffee and lemonade and cigarettes; an amazing place, but difficult if you were on business and hustled for time.

"We set out to hire mules next day and struck a church festival—nothing doing, and the next day was a national celebration and a free-fight with the anti-nationalists. I tell you we mixed with that town and before we'd been mixing with it long, we found we were being followed by a chap with rings in his ears.

"'Well,' said Billy, 'it's either that chap Ramon or his brother. It can't be him, for I saw him killed dead with my own eyes and the birds eating him. It must be his brother. When I got back that time I told the story of how he'd missed his footing and killed himself, and the police believed me, but there's always the family to be reckoned with in a place like this, and they never forget.'

"That sounded cheerful. I began to wish I hadn't come, but I wasn't going to back out now I'd put my foot into the thing, and next day, seeing no more of the chap with the jewellery, we got our mules and grub for three weeks and put out.

"From there we reached Passo, a village in the foothills, and from there Madelion, a place high up in the mountains, and from there the trail led south by thousand-foot precipices and down dips that nothing but a mule could have taken, the big birds watching us and nothing else.

"However, we hadn't come out to seek company, and went happy enough till towards noon the day we left Madelion Billy took a back look and. said we were being followed.

"And sure enough we were, for miles back along the track, we saw a fellow with a mule.

"We sat down and he came to a halt; we went on and he did ditto. He was following us sure enough, and that night when we camped I couldn't rest. I know, we set watches, tossing a coin for who'd turn in first. I won and turned in, but couldn't get to sleep thinking of that chap behind us, maybe on us, any moment; then when my four hours was up Billy took the straw and began to snore directly he lay down.

"That was the sort of man he was, without education and without all the frills that education gives to the imagination; he'd never read stories of Red Indians on the war-path or vendettas and so on, he had no worries about a future life, and as for dying he had never studied on the matter; he just went asleep and slept like a tombstone till it was time to start.

"Then as we hitched up he noticed that I was frazzled.

"'Billy,' I said, 'this thing is going to do me in; what between the mountain air and that guy that's after us I'm in for one of my attacks of insomnia.'

"'What's that?' said Billy.

"'It's the Latin for not being able to get to sleep,' I said.

"Billy scratched his head and looked back along the track and there, sure enough, was the chap at his usual distance some three miles off.

"'He's after me, not you,' said Billy, 'and I'm not worrying any.' 'Maybe not,' I said, 'but we're made different; it will do me in, for a man's no use without sleep, and I can't get a wink, ever, with the feel of that behind me.'

"Billy was an understanding man, though ignorant. When we camped that night he said he'd have to attend to this thing; told me to lie down and keep quiet and left me, hiking back along the way we'd come.

"Then I lay under the stars listening till the moon came riding over the peaks.

"This part of the mountains we were in now was the Sierra del Darien, which is a continuation of the Sierra del Sapo. There was no wind and no sound, the whole world was dead asleep as the mules, till, of a sudden, came the noise of a shot a great way off. It might have been Billy's Lugger automatic or it mightn't.

"Nearly an hour later he returned. 'I reckon we can get to sleep now,' he said. 'Billy,' I said, 'won't they find the mule? What have you done with her?' 'Hove her traps over a precipice,' said he, 'and gave her a whack on the rump. She'll run wild in the mountains—Get to sleep.'

"There was no one following us next day. All the same I was being followed. I knew that inquests were barred out in the mountains by the birds, but birds don't swallow jewellery—and I said, 'Billy, what about those ear-rings?' 'Got them in my pocket,' said Billy.

"I said nothing more. It came to me that he'd been to collect that jewellery not for himself, but for the sake of his partner who couldn't sleep; something sort of grand in that, wasn't there? Done for me what he wouldn't do for himself."

III.

The man from Oklahoma paused for liquid refreshment, and a person in the corner by the door cut in, "I don't know where you're getting to with this story," said he; "seems to me you started off from those autographs cut on rocks and went on to——"

The same thing, if you'll listen," replied the Tale Teller. "Well, as I was saying, or would have been saying if you'd kept your chin out, we went on and middle of next day, 'Here we are,' said Billy. 'Smell that,' and he picked up a chunk of dark stuff and it was horn silver.

"He led the way up a little cañon to a cliff where the outcrop was, and sure as he'd told me, that cliff was all outcrop and the hill it was part of the same by all indications. Silver mine! It was a hill of silver.

"I sat down at the foot of it, and held my head to keep it flying off me.

"From where I sat I could see beyond the cañon the Pacific; we must have been six thousand feet up and the ocean a hundred miles away, so you couldn't see ships, just a blue streak with a few white clouds across the rim.

"I remember the thought came to me sitting there of how mining was to be carried on at that height. One could do smelting in the cañon, but what bothered me was the getting the bar silver down to St. Miguel Bay, till I remembered the existence of mules. It was the country of mules; they were the railways and omnibuses of the place, cheap transport and lots of it. I was putting up a hymn of praise to the man who invented the breeding of mules when I heard Billy, who was prospecting along the cliff, let out a swear as if a wasp had stung him.

"'We're not the first here,' he cries; 'a chap's been cutting his silly name on the rock.'

"I jumped like a pea on a struck drum, and next moment I was beside him.

"'There,' said he, pointing, and there before me cut on the rock was the word:

"'Cortez.'

"Deep-cut, though worn with weather, there it was. No Christian name, no date. It wanted nothing of that, no more than the name of Napoleon or Alexander would have done.

"It took maybe ten seconds for the thing to sink into me and then up came from the back of my memory the words of the Immortal poet John Keats about brave Cortez and his men standing on a peak in Darien gazing upon the Pacific in a wild surmise——

"'What are you going on like that for?' says Billy, watching my face. 'We're safe enough. You can't stake a claim by writing your name on it; the chap's done no work, and if he comes back on us there's no court in the Americas that wouldn't hoof him out.'

"'Hoof him out,' I said, ' why, you fool, that's Cortez!'

"'I don't care if he was J. P. Morgan,' says Billy, 'he's no rights here. Cortez—and who is he, anyhow?'

"'He's dead,' said I.

"'Then what are you cutting up about?' asked Billy.

"'It's just this way, Billy,' said I, as one might be explaining things to a child. 'We're on the Darien mountains, and it was here maybe four hundred years ago that the Spaniard chief called Cortez led his men, hunting for silver, maybe, same as we are, and there he cut his name on the rock and here he stood, maybe where we are now, gazing at the Pacific in wild surmise. You see he'd come to find silver, and suddenly found he'd found the Pacific. No one had heard of the Pacific in those days.'

"'You'll be telling me next they'd never heard of "Frisco,"' said Billy.

"I left it at that. There was no use in talking to him on it, no more use than lecturing a starfish on astronomy. He went off to tend the mules and left me in peace before that mighty name written on the face of the world, as you may say, and fronting the west and the vast Pacific Ocean.

"Next day, having taken samples of the rock, we started the mules and began our hike back. Billy happy and beaming, but I wasn't happy. That name was following me worse than Ramon had done.

"Well I knew that once we'd got our concession and started our company it would have to come down. The whole face of that hill would come down.

"I said this to Billy, and he agreed. I was saying at the start off that the amount of bottled ignorance in the world has never been taken stock of, and that a man may be happier if he's one of the bottles. It was so with Billy; he'd never read Keats' poem, so he didn't appreciate the horror of what we were lending our hand to. I said to him, Billy, if this thing got about, if a whisper of it went to the world, every archæological society in the United States, to say nothing of the uplift clubs, the reading societies, young women's associations, and so on, would be on their feet. You'd have a procession of five million people hiking to here.'

"'I reckon that's true,' says he, 'but where's the trouble? No one can touch an ounce of the stuff if we once get our concession.'

"I left it at that. There was no use in sailing on that tack with Billy, but I'd made up my mind that unless an earthquake did the trick that name was not going to come down—at least with my assistance.

"It would be like taking down Westminster Abbey—or the dome of St. Peter's at Rome. I had money enough, anyhow, and the only question was how to head Billy off.

"I did it by pointing out that the Dagoes would never let us pull off a concession, that all we'd get would be knives in our backs, that if we did get a concession it would take eighteen thousand years to get the mine working in that country where you never could get anything done till to-morrow, and that, anyhow, it took a gold mine to work a silver mine.

"He came to see all that, but what shook him off most was Ramon's family, who went for us with questions when we got to San Juan."

 

A fat man who was seated near the man from Oklahoma and who had been listening with open mouth and rapt attention struck himself on the thigh.

"Well, this is the most extraordinary thing in the whole world," said he. "This gets me completely. I know the Sierra del Darien, ought to since I have been all over that range when I was a boy of eighteen, that would be near twenty years before you were there. I'm now seventy-one, though I don't look more than fifty; still, that's my age. Now tell me, you went from Passo to Madelion, and then took the south trail till you reached that cañon which was facing west—it is the only cañon facing west, as you will have observed. I went up that cañon same as you did, but knowing nothing of geology, my party did not recognise the silver-ore nature of the place. But you knew it was silver ore, yet you refused to profit by it for the sake of the wonderful historical interest of that spot.

"Sir, you did honour to yourself and your great country, as a Canadian I say that, but you sacrificed your interests in vain. To my shame be it said—excuse my emotion—I was a boy full of life and the mischief of youth. It was I who cut that name upon the rock, the sacred name of Cortez, saying some fool will find this some time—and look! My act has found me out."

"But this is great," said the man from Oklahoma, "the stuff is there still, only waiting to be lifted, and the only barrier gone!—Great!—it's more than that, it's Fate. Sir, come into the bar."

They went out for drinks, and a lumberman from Seattle rose up and stretched.

"That's the most extraordinary coincidence that has ever come to my knowledge," said he.

"That yarn!" I said.

"I'm not talking of any yarn," said he, "I'm talking of the meeting here in the same place and the same moment of time, so to speak, of those two chaps—the two biggest liars on the Pacific coast."

Which was the nearest thing to truth that had been heard in that smoke-room for a long time past.