Sacrifice – Chapter 7
Prologue — 7. Foundings
Thus was their encampment swelled, and hence the bounds of their secrecy, pressing outward like some battening wineskin that, for its very fullness, became ever the more susceptible to bursting. Where two tents had been now there stood six, and the men dotted the countryside, busy at their various jobs, and made up for the inconvenience of their numbers through that raw addition of might and main. And some could be seen cutting and stacking wood in a neat row for the evening fires that were propagating there as though there were a midnight rash upon the world festering the more with each passing week; and some set up a crude corral in which to accommodate their horses and mules, those beasts that would stand there placidly, their tails beating against their thighs, ruminating on all of this activity as though trying, with no great urgency, to comprehend the agitation of men; and others dressing and cutting the meat of deer and hanging it upon racks to dry, or in those first days multiplying out the sourdough starter that Horace had borne hence, following his instructions on its preparation and from that secret bounty producing their daily bread. Mostly they would squat in the river, panning, eternally panning, harrowing the earth for its glimmering traces. Others yet mined the river with tools still more exotic, such as the little sluice box that one of them, a carpenter, built with his own hands – an affair set on rockers with washboard bottoms inlaid and slots where the mud and gravel would run out. And he would squat there by the box and rock it gently as if he had sired children with the river sprites and were now tending to his wayward offspring, occasionally peeking into the crib to see if the child were yet sleeping, and even singing softly to it as it drowsed.
And slowly, slowly, the men began to creep toward the hills, testing the earth to see what treasure might be squeezed from it, seeking hungrily the gleaming tendrils cutting through the dark soil and the hard flesh of the mountain.
The calculus of how to divide the gold had complicated for this larger group. It was suggested at first that the fairest arrangement would be to let each man keep what he himself had found, but the possibility of mining the earth or employing any larger common equipment made this evidently impractical. After some initial haggling they agreed to divide their profits in seven equal ways, it being at last conceded by the original three that the increased workforce could not help but improve the payload for them all. They assigned one of the newcomers the task of determining their daily wages—a thin grayish man named Chancey Standton. Chancey was gifted in mathematics and by his very air gave off something of dryness and dispassion, and this attitude, which on other circumstances had occasioned the contempt and suspicion of his peers, here translated to trustworthiness in accountancy. To be sure, those first few days, until faith could be built between the original group and these newly arrived, Jim and Frog in particular kept careful eyes upon the scales and insisted on double-checking it to their satisfaction; but by and by they grew complacent and let Chancey to his work alone.
They were all of them sworn to utmost secrecy, and all agreed to the same pattern of occulted life that had been previously established. One of the newcomers in particular, a rough and rowdy little man named Arlin Happlemore, objected strenuously to this at first and proclaimed in his loud high-pitched voice that by God he would not be kept from the saloon and the fleshpots, surely not if he found gold in his pockets, for God had made him such and such a man and he would never dare displace what God had put right in him. And he persisted in this obstinacy until at last it was decided that they would bring whiskey hence, though the whores must wait. This concession softened Arlin sufficiently that the sense of their patience could be impressed on him with due clarity, and he grudgingly left off his lesser claim for the greater.
As for that greater claim, the original claim to this plot of mere earth, it now was evident that it belonged to all of them or to none; for such had been the natural admission of Horace and then Jim and Frog when they agreed to settle in with these newcomers and to split the profits of their labor. And as it was generally allowed that their secrecy was a thing tender and endangered—for if four roving men might happen of an accident upon an encampment of two tents, surely the greater size of their present venture would attract yet more still, as magnet to filing—so they discussed the matter with one another, and at last tasked Chancey with drawing up a document. He was provided all necessaries to this purpose, and with great solemnity he sat him down one early winter day at his measuring table and gently pushed aside the scales, and flattened out the pulpy paper with a long-fingered hand as though caressing it. Then he dipped the quill in the inkwell and with tremendous care scrawled the document out in a roughened English aiming ostentatiously at technical sufficiency, reading it out aloud to the others when he had finished, glancing at them over his thick-rimmed glasses, the lot of them stooping, hats in hand, in his tent, in an arc about the table like witnesses to some solemn pronouncement of a death or a war.
The ill-spelled words announced their intention to form a company and laid their claim to that stretch of river there beneath the Shale Hills, five miles south of Devil’s Pass, on that fork of the Payette which they named Prospecter’s Pass, and now declared must be legally noted to all the world as their own and no one else’s. When he had concluded his relation the men all nodded silently and soberly, glancing at one another as though in search of corroboration; and Chancey, looking gravely at them over his swooping mustaches and demanding if they would forward objections, amendments or addenda, at last was satisfied at their acquiescence, and set upon it his tidy, small signature before offering the quill reverently to his companions, each in turn. One by one they flanked their signatures to his own, or, as in the illiterate Frog’s case, laid their special mark upon it. Then Chancey strew sand from the riverbed upon the names, quick with gold-dust so that the words and names seemed to take on a glimmer as under the power of some incantation, and blew off the excess in a shimmering cloud and shook the document out like a rag and placed it gently into a wooden chest that had been procured for this business alone, the which he closed with a fat rudimentary padlock, and placed the thick rough key of it into the pocket of his perennial duststained wastecoat to keep it on his person, as had been agreed by all, patting it as though in assurance of its security there.
Then the men, nodding enthusiastically and grinning foolishly, departed the cramped tent, squeezing out the entrance in twos and threes, and stood about it on the fresh-fallen snow, excited by the ceremony and by this sudden sense of legality, as though the imprimatur of state and faith had been lain upon their prospects; and proceeding from one corner of the land thereabouts to another, tracking their strange prints upon the pristine white of the earth, they struck down stakes of pine wood with hacked points, beating them deep into the frozen ground with the flat backs of ax-heads, to measure out that plain of land as their own. And when the last of these posts had been planted they stood in a broken ring about it and shook hands with one another until every permeation had been run through, and passed one to another a tarnished sterling silver flask with a leaf-themed repoussé that Horace had drawn from his coat pocket. Each of them held it aloft in the air and turned round to his comrades with shining eyes before raising it to his lips and drawing his head back to sup of the spirits it contained. Last it came round to Jim, who, upon lofting it, suddenly paused and bethought himself, and shouted, looking about at his companions standing there, hats still in hand, beneath the gargantuan sky, “Gentlemen, here’s to the Shale Hill Mining Company. May it last till the devil hisself’s been strung up!” Then all the men threw their hats into the air at once and whooped and hollered in a din as though they had been but a pack of ranging beasts that had after long starvation stumbled across some great carrion carcass rotting in the wild.
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