Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California by Geraldine Bonner
page 17 of 409 (04%)
page 17 of 409 (04%)
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First it was his youth in the Southwest when he had been Tom Michaels, a miner, well paid, saving his wages. Then his marriage with Juana Ramirez, the half-breed girl at Deming, and the bit of land he had bought--with a mortgage to pay--in the glaring, green river valley. Glimpses of their life there, children and work--stupefying, tremendous work--to keep them going and to meet the interest; he had been a giant in those days. And even so he hadn't been able to do it. Six years after they took possession they moved out, ruined. He remembered it as if it had been yesterday--the adobe house with its flat roof and strings of red peppers hanging on the walls, the cart piled high with furniture, Juana on the front seat and Pancha astride of the mule. Juana had grown old in those six years, fat and shapeless, but she had been dog-loyal, dog-loving, his woman. Never a word of complaint out of her--even when the two children died she had just covered her head with the blanket and sat by the hearth, stoical, dry-eyed, silent. He could see now that it was his dream of making money--big money--that had been wrong. If he'd been content with a wage and a master he'd have done better by her, but from the start he'd wanted his freedom, balked at being roped and branded with the herd. That was why he drifted back to mining, not a steady job, though he could have got it, but as a prospector, leaving Arizona and moving to California. There were years of it; he knew the mineral belt from the Panamint mountains to the Kootenai country. Juana and Pancha plodded from town to town, seeing him at intervals, always expecting to hear he'd struck "the ledge," and be hardly able to scrape a living for them from the bottom of his pan. |
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