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asked quietly, "why did you try to help me get away from the Apaches?"

Quickly she rolled his shirt sleeve away from his tanned wrists, and touched the white skin on his arm lightly.

"My mother," she whispered proudly. "Your mother a white woman," he exclaimed. "Yes, my father very big Cherokee chief. Steal my mother. Like very much. Die sometime," she finished with trembling lips.

"Well, you dear little waif, and is that why you helped me?" the man asked softly. "Šay to my mother, Snow-Squaw sometime maybe help white man- she began.

"What a pretty sentiment, child," the surveyor said, feelingly.

"No child," she corrected gently, "Vaneety."

"Oh, certainly! I beg your pardon, Vanity." She drew an old-fashioned flat needle case from her garment and handed it to Brisbane. He opened it, and removed his hat as he looked upon a faded daguerreotype-the sweet, girlish face of a white woman.

"Her mother!" he breathed reverently, as he looked into the shining depths of the maiden's eyes.

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"Vanity," he said unsteadily, as he handed her the little worn and faded needle case. "You must come with me. You must"No," she answered dully, the brightness leaving her eyes. "No; Vaneety go back -you, go on." Her voice sounded so hopeless and sad. It reminded Brisbane of the low moaning of the wind at sea. She pointed to the mountain on the

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"What's love?" she asked quietly. "This, Vanity," he whispered, as he pressed his lips to hers.

"Vaneety like love very much," she said sweetly, after a little.

"I'm glad you do, you beautiful darling," Brisbane said joyously. "You're going to come with me and be my wife, Vanity, and I'll teach you everything your lovely mother knew. Maybe we can find out who she was, too. How old are you, anyway, sweetheart?"

She indicated seventeen winters on her slender hands.

"And not any more summers, either, I'll vouch," Brisbane laughed.

"What a lucky fellow I am," he said, as he entered the railroad camp-two days later. "I have the maps and I have Vanity."

When the strange pale-faces came to meet them, the girl clung to Brisbane. "Come, sweetheart," he said, quietly, "they are your people as they are mine." With his arm around her, Brisbane approached the amazed and jubilant railroad men.

"Who in the world is this ?" asked the superintendent, smilingly.

"Vaneety," the girl answered proudly, with a dazzling smile.

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DEATH VALLEY BORAX BEDS

The Homeric Industry of the American Desert

BY ROBERT E. RINEHART

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'N THE HISTORY of man's hunt for mineral wealth there is no romance more fascinating than the grim story of Death Valley's borax harvest. It is woven in the tale of the once most isolated, most dreaded district of the Great American Desert. writes the chapter of the most bizarre industry the West has ever known, an industry waged far from even the crudest society that bred queer, half-salamander men who scraped borax from sun-blistered marshes and brought it miles beneath a fiery sky across a rugged arid sweep to civilization. Song and story resting for a space their well-worn theme of treasure gold can find rich romance in the quest of this Golden Fleece for which desert argonauts during a decade paid death toll to heat and thirst in Death Valley's maze of ash-heap hills and scar-like canyons.

Mineral history can well give heed to the romance of this desert industry, because the harvest of Death Valley borax was the bulk of American borax, when American borax supplied the world. Indeed, it is the record of the first important borate deposits known to trade, since previous to the discovery and working of the marshes of our Western waste, borax beds were extremely scarce throughout the world. Widespread as the mineral is now, it nevertheless is something of a parvenu, though Bulwer Lytton attempts to give it antiquity in his "Last Days of Pompeii," when he has Nero use it in his carnage shows at the Coliseum. Lytton's authority for this association of Nero and borax cannot be found. Its authenticity is questionable beyond doubt, since previous to 1742 chemistry records no knowledge of borax. About that time, green greasy borate crystals were imported from Thibet

where they were found by the natives imbedded in the mud of a certain chain of marshes. These crystals chemists named "tincal," but in the Thibetan tongue they were called "Baurach," probably the etomological derivation of borax. But with the exception of few boracic deposits in Italy, South America and California, which, furnishing a very meagre supply of borax, were of small commercial value, the mineral was more of a laboratory oddity than a common article, until 1871, when William Troup found the first "cotton-ball" marsh in Western Nevada.

Troup's find brought about a borax transfiguration in the chemical, industrial and commercial worlds. The "cottonbal!" the desert name for ulexite, a round mass of white crystals of borate of sodium-calcium-was an entirely new form of a borax deposit. But what was more to the point, it offered purer borax in an undreamed-of quantity. Chemistry at once ascertained scores of new uses for the mineral in the arts, and the demand increased as by magic.

But great as was the augmented call, the supply outstripped it. Out in the West, the desert went borax mad. Lode hunters scorned or forgot gold and silver ledges. Every prospector set out with his burro to locate a "cotton-ball" swamp. Isolated desolate nooks of the desert were explored. Many a borax prospector left his bones to bleach on the blistered flats of Western Nevada and Eastern California. Out of this stampede came scores of borax beds large and small, and as many independent refining plants scattered over the arid region. The borax traffic became the most energetic industry of the West, a veritable giant in growth.

Of this widespread "cotton-ball" gath

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ering, the Death Valley harvest was easily the most picturesque as well as the most important. Its characteristics were most typical of the bizarre peculiarities of the traffic. Its romance is the essence of this heroic age of the desert. In those days, Death Valley was a long way from cities, and city men, in spirit as well as in miles. None but an intrepid traveler ventured into the forbidding region, and reached it only after a fortnight of hard trail. Even among desert men it bore an unsavory reputation. It was spoken of as a spot of incredible heat, where water was scarce and danger plentiful. Moreover, there was a gloomy tradition that it had come by its name through the disastrous attempt of an emigrant band to make a short cut to California across the hot low hollow. All had perished, the story ran, man and beast. To this lugubrious legend "desert rats"those half-made derelicts of the sea of sun and sand-coming from the man-shunned valley, would add grewsome tales of lost prospectors wandering thirst-crazed in endless canyons till they dropped and died.

While much of Death Valley's horror, whether pictured by "desert rat" or untraveled scribe who never saw the spot, is exaggeration, its evil name is partially deserved. It has been a huge cauldron in which the desert sun has often cooked up a bitter kettle for man and beast. It is a strange, even sinister valley that sinks potlike in the desert. Around it rise high ridges of slag mountains, the Panamints on the west, with a 12,000 foot altitude, and to the east the terra cotta Funeral Range fully 10,000 feet at its highest points.

The dry bed of an ancient inland sea,

the lowest of a chain of pre-historic lakes into it drains the rocky washes of the Ralston and Amargossa Deserts. According to a monument set up in the salt sump the lowest spot of its floor, the valley is 284 feet below sea level, making it the lowest inland on the continent and perhaps in the world.

Death Valley proper, that is, from the north end of the Amargossa Wallow to the barricade of low buttes that divides it from Lost Valley, its northern extension, is about eighty miles long. Its concave floor, varying in width from ten to twenty miles, foothills to foothills, is a pebbly wash of ground and broken rock, save at the deeper dip, where the salt sump, a marsh of livid muck, lies like a lake of molten steel. But for two clumps of mesquite, it is as barren as a stone slab. Sirocco-like dust storms hurtle up and down the valley, leaving for days a grayish purple haze. Mirages are common as sunshine. Truly it is the desert's stronghold with the desert's idiosyncracies carried to an extreme. It is savagely beautiful. Viewed from Funeral peaks, the range of the entire region-the sagging valley with the pallid flat of its sump and sawlike contour of its mountain rimpresents a cyclorama awful in its sweep of sun-burnt barrenness, marvelous as the Grand Canyon in its splashes of barbaric color.

The danger of the region comes from its unnatural aridity. In this characteristic it outstrips the worst parts of the desert. A Government meteorological station maintained one year from June to September at a point midway up the valley, where there is a stream of running water,

Furnace Creek, has a record of days when the atmosphere possessed barely five per cent humidity. So far as is known, no place in the world approaches this record. But north of Furnace Creek ten or twelve miles the valley, as desert men know, is much more dangerous. For this there is a reason. In the summer the hot winds from the Mojave and Amargossa Deserts blow into the south end of the valley and race up the hollow. In their passage over the salt sump, turned by the wrathful summer sun into a huge griddle pan, they are roasted and destitute of every suggestion of moisture reach the upper ends of the valley. The atmosphere at this point is thought to attain absolute zero humidity. Through this arid air not even a seasoned desert man can travel a mile without a dozen generous draughts from his canteen. The breath drawn into the lungs fairly licks the moisture from the tissues of the body.

Neither Death Valley's evil nature nor the terror tales told of it by "desert rats" frightened W. T. Coleman, a business romanticist such as the desert attracts. Not even the almost impenetrable isolation of the region daunted him. Rather the lugubrious glamor of the name and locality appealed to him. He reasoned, too, that anything trade wishes and is willing to pay for is worth going after, no matter what the difficulty. The market was asking for borax, and upon the Death Valley swamp was plenty of "cotton-balls," not to speak of a precipitate borate sprinkled as drifted snow on the crust of the sump.

The problem was to get the borax to trade. There was but one solution, to

freight it by wagon 164 miles to Mojave, a sun-baked railroad station on the brink of the desert. It was a long, weary, costly transportation impracticable to any one but a Coleman. But he tried and did it during the "Stone Age" of the borax industry.

The world has never seen more remarkable transportation than this borax hauling from Death Valley to Mojave. It was freakish in every detail. The route led across a burning desert, free from any sign of habitation. It wound up and down grade through rocky canyons and climbed steep mountain divides. Food and water had to be packed over greater portion of the way. To make the trip possible, the distance was marked off in daily stages, with an effort to bring each night's camp at a desert well or spring; but even when the system of travel was well-developed several dry camps occurred on the long trail. The out trip to the upper end of Death Valley, when the wagons were not loaded, required ten days. The in-trip, when each outfit carried 20,000 pounds of borax a fortnight.

Ordinary wagons drawn by ordinary teams never could have accomplished this borax hauling. For it, special wagons were built at a cost of $1,000 each. They were the strangest vehicles that ever sprang into existence, tall-bedded structures with wheels seven feet in diameter and seven inches across the tire. They resembled the closed animal cages of a circus. Two such wagons, drawn usually by mules or horses, in large number, made up the extraordinary outfit that brought borax from Death Valley.

Horsemanship that was horsemanship

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The task of driving so many animals is not an easy one

piloted this aggregation of animals. Your famous whip tooling along Fifth avenue or your expert drayman picking his way through a traffic jam, considers himself a pretty good hand with the ribbons if he manages without mishap six or even four horses. Out in the desert in those days of borax freighting the driver who halted at ten and even twelve mules was a mere "rawhide." Your real "skinner" was the steersman of the borax team. At his wheels he had a span of heavy draughthorses; in the lead the cleverest, least-sinful pair of mules; and between, two by two, sixteen shades, shapes and sorts of mule devilishness. This string of animals he manipulated by means of a 120-foot jerk-line or rope. What a spectacle of horsemanship it was-to see from

roadside when this outfit, coming under full headway down grade, swung round a bend in a rough canyon trail. Such driving was sheer magic.

In the heydey of the borax freighting, Mojave was as roaring as a pay-dirt camp. Teamsters give bustle and bank to a town, and the borax carters did their part by Mojave. Gambling hells and bar-rooms ran wide open from one sunrise to the next. The stakes of the freighters kept them busy. Drivers drew their $100 a month, and swampers-the assistants who went along to cook, "flunkie," and tend the break on down grades-their $75. This money was invariably "sloughed" in the gambling hells and saloons in time to take out the next trip.

They were strange men, those drivers and swampers of Death Valley days, to be satisfied to flit back and forth shuttle-like between Mojave and Furnace Creek. They must have had a touch of "queer" in the beginning to take the job; and jolted along, week in and week out, beneath a sun that grilled the brain, breathing the parched desert air, alone with their own vacuous thoughts, they grew into the half-mad wretches about whom incredible heart-sickening tales are told. As the freighting days wore on, quarrels and bloody duels between driver and swamper became so frequent that it was the chief duty of the superintendent at Mojave to make sure that all was fair weather with a pair at the end of each trip before sending them out again together on another grind over the lonely trail. But even with this precaution, dark tragedies occurred. Occasionally one of the five outfits that plied the Death Valley route would fail to arrive at the scheduled time. Three or four days later the next team would bring in the ugly news that the missing wagons were out on the road with a gristly corpse beside them. A new grave would rise beside the trail and a new outlaw haunt the desert fastness, all because flesh and blood and brain could not stand the heat of Death Valley's sun or the grip of its uncanny silence.

Meanwhile up in the gray, gaunt valley was waged the borax gathering. At the northeast segment of the sump Coleman garnered his supply and refined it in huge

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