Westwood High School - Chipmunk Yearbook (Westwood, CA)

Page 19 text:

The Only Chance LAST summer Jack and 1 were sitting in the assay office. We heard a “dash—pop—rattle dash— bang, and an old delapidated heap of “junk,” bearing on the radiator a “Ford stopped before the door. Two boys about fifteen and sixteen years old stepped, or rather jumped, out for the locks on the doors had long ago been broken and two big ten penny spikes held the doors in place. They hauled out two large sample sacks, entered the office, seated themselves on the table and motioned toward the sacks. I studied the two before doing as they hade me. They both were rather tall and slender, but strong and healthy. Their clothes showed the sort of work they had teen doing, so dirty and grimy were they. Jack stepped to the sacks and drew out a large piece of rock. It was certainly good ore. It must have run 90 per cent copper. The boys smiled and said. “How much will it run? 20 per cent?” I said nothing but turned on the pulverizer and tossed in the rock, took out the powered ore and started to test it. After forty- five minutes, I turned and said, “It runs 891copper, $8 gold and $3 silver.” Hoth boys sprang up and said. “In that other room where we can talk. I led them into the private office and we all sat down. They then told by turns a startl- ing story. They were boys from Ohio, who had come to California to hunt for gold during their summer vaca- tion. The claims, six in number, were located in their father’s name, and they had been working them. They had gotten out the samples that I have mentioned, when four armed men came, tied them up and relocated the claims themselves, saying that their papers had not been filed right. The men then started for the county seat on horseback. They asked me to help them get back their mines, saying that we might go 50-50 with them. We de- cided to do this and signed an agreement at once with the boys, whose names were Ernest and William Thomp- son. Soon we were tearing along the road to the county seat in a big Packard twin-six. at forty-five miles an hour. What was our dismay on reaching a steep rocky canyon, about eight miles from the county seat, to find the bridge blown away by dynamite, and that we were shut off and our chances apparently lost. Here we sat. stunned for a few minutes. Then a plan suddenly occurred to me. After ten minutes dis- cussion we decided to try it. We ran along the top of the canyon to where logs were being taken across on cables. There was still sixty pounds of pressure in the boiler, and we soon had a hot fire under the boiler and the steam gauge steadily climbing. We then at- tached the chokers around each of the car’s wheels and out across the river we swung, with the exception of Jack, who had to stay on the other side to run the engine. Then over he came, hand over hand, as soon as we were safely on the other side. A run of twenty miles brought us to the county seat in time to register and save the claims. Today the mine is making a thousand dollars a day, and all is lovely. But oh. the cussing we got from the claim jumpers and the engineer who ran the donkey engine. FLETCHER WALKER. Jr. 15