THE LED-HORSE CLAIM.*

THERE is certainly a great charm to many minds in American novels. When they take for their subject the new life in the Far West, there is no end to the possibilities of romance and novelty to be found in theta, though this feature in itself would not account for the now growing taste for American literature. In general, tales of adventure are not the most popular; and it might with more reason be affirmed that a story like this of The Led-Horse Claim, is interesting in spite rather than because of this flavour of the Far West. with its excitements and adventures. There is a distinct individuality about American novelists ; they are fresher, more unconventional in their views of social life than we are, and besides this, they generally show a keen perception of both humour and pathos. Then, they have a love of character-analysis which distinctly belongs to them as a nation, and a quaint and unusual way of putting their thoughts which acts like a pleasant stimulant—like pickles or red-pepper—to the jaded appetites of English novel-readers. It might be interesting to investigate how far this quaintness and unconventionality is real, and not merely apparent, in consequence of the American tone of mind being different to ours. This difference may make thoughts seem new and piquant to us which are quite ordinary to Americans themselves. However, we do not propose to enter on this discussion in the present article.

The story is a simple one and an old one, though its workingmit is fresh and delightful. A man and a girl fall in love when, from their relative positions, they should rather be enemies. Hilgard, the hero, and Cecil Conrath's brother were managers of neighbouring mines. It was openly said that there was suspicion felt on the one side, and bad-faith practised on the other. The picture of the new mining-camp in a " lofty valley of Colorado" is graphically drawn, started as it was by the refuse of civilised America, by the disappointed and the restless emigrants from Eastern cities, and the men with failures to wipe-out and with losses to retrieve or forget. This camp in its earliest youth exhibited every symptom of human nature on the decline. Then when the settlement began to show powers of paying for what it required, men of all trades followed the miner, and the professions followed the trades. These were generally represented by young men full of hope and ambition, and many of them cadets of some good Eastern family ; and it was probably this strong, though undisciplined, force of youth which saved the city and controlled the dangerous elements which would otherwise have shipwrecked it in its infancy.

The finest fellow among these young men is Hilgard, who had been sent out to these wilds with a few thousands from the home board of management, to undertake the working of the Led-Horse Mine, when, to say the least of it, it was suffering under a rather doubtful reputation in mining circles. He threw himself passionately into the work, with which he entirely identified himself. He knew the ore was there, though at present the working was through barren rock ; and he strongly suspected that it was his ore that was enriching his neighbour of the Shoshone Mine; for the experienced ear of his mining captain had recognised by the sounds which came through the intervening rock that the boundary-line had been crossed between the Claims. He knew the character Of Conrath's mining captain well enough to be sure that when he once struck the vein of ore which led across the boundary, he could no more help following it " than you can keep a hound. off a bear-track." He had proposed to Conrath to have a survey made of the mines, of which his com

pany would bear the expense ; but this had been refused in such a manner that his suspicions were only increased. The question was how to get at the truth ; and the idea of playing the part of spy, and creeping about another man's mine to find out if he was a thief and liar, was most repugnant to him. At this juncture, and when the home management were beginning to turn crusty at advancing money with no apparent result, Hilgard first becomes acquainted with Conrath's sister. The meeting is pleasantly sketched, and you feel it to be character istic of the place, and in harmony with the subsequent story :—

" One August morning of the cool autumnal summer, a lady, younger than the youngest of the youthful wives of the camp, whose pure, nnsunned complexion proved her but lately arrived, rode down into Led-Horse Gulch from the Shoshone side, and following the trail upwards among the aspens, drew rein at the mouth of a small shaft whore two men were working a windlass. She wore no habit ; the plaited skirt of her cloth walking-dress permitted her stirrup-foot to show, and a wide-brimmed straw hat shaded the heightened bloom on her cheek. There was an unpremeditation in her dress and in the vagrant gait of her pony which might have accounted for this aimless halt at the top of the shaft."

She sat there watching with idle interest the rope as it coiled round the windlass in a perfectly vague, impersonal mood, out of which she was rudely awakened by the appearance of Hilgard as he was hoisted up out of the shaft, and looked across at the girl with undisguised admiration as he swung himself lightly from the bucket on to the side.

"The unembarrassed youth who rose to his feet, taking off his hat with a bright interrogative smile, was also a part of the human machinery of the place, but his part in relation to the miners at the cranks was that of the throttle-valve rather than the driving wheels. The girl acknowledged his salute by a hot blush and the slightest of bows, as she turned her horse's head sharply away from the shaft. Her position in the face of this new element had become untenable, and she abandoned it frankly, making no attempt to explain the unexplainable. It was not her custom (so she indignantly apostrophised her girl's wounded dignity) to go riding about the camp alone, and waiting at prospect-holes for handsome young men to be hoisted out of them ! It was an incongruous accident of that incongruous place."

Then, as she turned hastily away, and confusedly guided her horse over the broken ground, she was only just saved, by a timely shout from Hilgard, from riding into an old prospecthole.

" In another second you would have been thrown. This is an old prospect-hole filled with loose earth: Your horse would have sunk in it to his knees,' he protested, in answer to her look of vexed surprise. —' I wonder my brother permits such a trap to be uncovered,' the girl said, with the emphasis of one who finds unexpected relief in another's responsibility for an awkward situation.—' I have not the pleasure of knowing your brother, but the Led-Horse has, I believe, only one superintendent '—he took off his hat again, with a gaily ironical bow' who is at your service if you please to command him. =Am I not on Shoshone ground ?'— the question was half an assertion.—' I think not ; the location-stakes follow the Gulch, a little on this side of it. You are now 150 feet within the Led-Horse lines!—The young girl could not help smiling at her own discomfiture when it had reached this point."

Hilgard is one who indulges a fine youthful scorn of sudden love or any sentiment bordering on it, and perhaps it was his lonely life which gave such prominence in his mind to this small in cident; certain it is that his thoughts recurred afterwards in a very suspicious manner again and again to every little detail of the meeting ; and he now found the line of conduct he had to take with regard to the rival though neighbouring mine equally difficult to decide on and to act up to.

The colony is not without its amusements, though as yet Hilgard had not joined in any of them. The "younger sons" give a fortnightly dance in the " Colonnade House," though the only suggestion of a colonnade in connection with the house appeared to be the row of " hitching-posts " embedded in the dried mud of the street before it. The account of this ball given by the club is exceedingly amusing, so unlike any thing that life could be, except in the rough West. Of course, this time Hilgard goes there to meet Cecil again ; and as he arrived too late to hope to find her disengaged, he resorted to a most novel expedient to get a dance. It must be admitted that the originality of his invention marks him for an American, who will not be beat, and is bound to succeed.

From the evening of that ball the fate of the two was sealed, and the very perils amidst which they were living, and the many reasons which ought to have kept them separate, only served to bring their hearts and thoughts nearer together. There is a graphic description of a visit made to the Shoshone Mine by Conrath, his sister, and a little, flirting, eman cipated Mrs. Denny, for whom Conrath was supposed to have a ireat admiration. When they had been lowered to the bottom of the shaft they walked through a long, low, damp passage, each armed with a candle, till they came to a lofty chamber cut out of the rock, which was the very heart of the vein, "an empty stope " which had furnished some of the best ore. This chamber opened on the opposite side up into another long gallery, along which Mrs. Denny insisted on going to see the men at work ; but Cecil had wearily seated herself on a heap of loose planks on the ground of the empty ore-chamber :—

"' I'll wait for you here if you don't mind. I am so very tired'— Have you another candle, Harry ?'—' Yours will last ; we shall not be long gone—Conrath and Mrs. Denny scrambled, talking and laughing, np the slope ; their voices grew thinner and fainter, and vanished with their feeble lights into the black hole. Cecil closed her eyes ; they ached with the small, sharp spark of her candle set in that stupendous darkness. What a mysterious, vast whispering-dome was this ! Tint...) were sounds which might have been miles away through the deadening rock Cecil was intensely absorbed listening to this strange, low diapason of the under-world. Its voice was pitched for the ear of solitude and silence. Its sky was perpetual night, moonless and starless, with only the wandering will-o'the-wisp candle-rays, shining and fading in its columnated avenues, where ranks of dead and barkless tree-trunks repressed the heavy subterranean awakening of the rocks. Left to their work, the inevitable forces around her would crush together the sides of the dark galleries, and crumble the rough-hewn dome above her head. Cecil did not know the meaning or the power of this inarticulate, underground life, but it affected her imagination all the more. Gradually her spirits sank under an oppressive sense of fatigue ; she grew drowsy, and her pulse beat low in the lifeless air, and her candle, in a semi-oblivious moment, dropped from her lax fingers, and was instantly extinguished. It seemed to the helpless girl that she had never known darkness before. She called aloud, a faint, futile cry, which frightened her almost more than the silence. She had lost the direction in which her brother had disappeared ; and when she saw an advancing light, she thought it must be he coming in answer to her weak call. It was not her brother ; it was a taller man—a miner—with a candle in a miner's pronged candlestick, fastened in the front of his hat. His face was in deep shadow, but the faint, yellow candle-rays projected their gleam dimly along the drift by which he was approaching. Cecil watched him earnestly, but did not recognise him until he stood close beside her. He took off his hat carefully not to extinguish the candle, which showed them to each other. Cecil, crouching pale and mute against the damp rock, looked up into Hilgard's face, almost as pale as her own. No greeting passed between them. They stared wonderingly into each other's eyes, each questioning the other's wraithlike identity.—' I heard you call,' Hilgard said ; 'is it possible you are alone in this place r —1 No,' she replied feebly, rousing herself ; my brother is here with Mrs. Denny ; they are not far away.'—' Your brother is here ? not far away,' he repeated. A cold despair came over him. There was nothing now but to tell her the truth ; in her unconsciousness of its significance she would decide between them, and be would abide the issue."

After this visit to the mine, events go hurrying on. Hilgard's suspicions were now certainties. The Led-Horse blasted through on a level with the Shoshone barricade, and their lawyers had gone down to the sessions of the district Court with important testimony ; the air was rife with rumours of coming evil, which did not fail to reach Cecil's ear, and, in the morbid state to which her anxieties and loneliness had reduced her, she resolved to see Hilgard, and entreat him to leave the place and resign the management that very day, for her sake, before there was a possibility of a conflict. This entreaty chimed in terribly with his own wishes ; he felt so sure of success now that things had been brought into Court, success which meant defeat and disgrace to Cecil's brother, that he longed to have it taken out of his own hands ; and he gives in to her prayer and promises to go, and Cecil believed he had gone that evening. She did not know what turn of fate prevented it at the last moment, and obliged him to stick to his trust and not to desert his men. She did not know that he and only one other were clown at the barricade when Conrath insisted on passing it, that there was firing, and that her brother fell at the first shot. When he was brought home to her that night shot through the heart she was able to thank God that Hilgard had gone away at her entreaty. It was next morning from Hilgard himself she learnt the fearful truth. It would spoil the story to tell more of it, and how it came to pass that their two " paths" met again in the end. It will be seen that the keynote of the Led-Horse Claim is rather pathetic than humorous, and there is an under-current of poetry through all ; but still, humour cannot be entirely absent from an American book. Mrs. Denny is not without it, nor even Hilgard himself, and plenty of a grim kind may be found in the talk of the "doctor," a well-preserved "younger son :"— " Just fancy a girl beginning a study of human nature in a mining camp, and her own nature in the bargain ! She began with Denny. I suppose the only way for a woman really to know a man is for her to marry him. If that's true, in the course of an average life, with the greatest perseverance, she couldn't get very far in the noblest study of mankind, could she ? Well, Mrs. Denny knows Denny pretty thoroughly, I suspect ; and I daresay she's been surprised at a good many things she found out in herself. She's a weak little vessel. The Lord knows what she was fashioned for ; but it wasn't for Denny, that I'll take my oath to. The Lord never fashioned any woman for men like Denny. She used to be very musical in a chirrupy kind of way, but she doesn't sing any more—says she hasn't any instrument. If there's any music in that household, she's the instrument, and Denny's the player. It's a wonder she isn't more

out of tune. She isn't the kind that rebels, and sets up her own individuality. I don't suppose she ever had much to set up. She just wobbles along, leaning a little too far one way, and then a little too far the other, and Denny prods her up to her place now and then."

Or, again, take the doctor's way of comforting Hilgard after Conrath's death :—" You are morbid, George. You're taking a bigger load on your shoulders than belongs to you ; try to look at it simply, and remember that poor Con. did not know how to live any way. He carried too much wick for his candle ; he never could have stood a draught."

In conclusion, we must add that there is a great personal charm in the writing, which is thoroughly picturesque, unconventional, and fresh. The way the story is worked-out is very skilful, and the interest is sustained to the end.