Tilden—old Dog Town, remember—is the county seat of McMullen County. Not far from it is what is still known as the “old Tolbert Ranch,” though a man named Berry bought it years ago. I have heard the following story so many times, in so many places, that I have half come to believe it true.
Tolbert was a miser in the early days, when men kept their money about them. It is said that he would never kill a maverick, no matter how hungry he was, but would always brand it. He never bought sugar or molasses; bacon was a rare luxury; he and his men lived chiefly on jerked venison and javelina meat. When he was working and had a crew to feed, he always told the cocinero to bake the bread early so that it would be cold and hard before the hands got to it. When he died, none of his money could be found. So, even to this day, people dig for it around the old ranch house.
One man who was working on the place some fifteen years ago saw two men in a wagon go down a ravine that runs near the ranch. He thought they were hunters; but when the strangers passed him on their way out the next morning, he noticed that one of them had a shotgun across his knees. When the ranch hand rode down into the ravine a few days later, he found that the wagon tracks led away from a fresh hole under a live oak tree, and that near the hole were pieces of old steel hinges that looked as if they had been cut off with a cold chisel. However, not many people think that the two strangers got Tolbert’s money.
Berry got that, and he never hunted for it either. He had moved onto the ranch when he bought it, and a number of years had passed. One day, when he had nothing else for his Mexican hand to do, he told him to put some new posts in the old corral fence, which was made of pickets that were rotting down. The hand worked along, digging post holes and setting new posts, until about ten o’clock. Then, at about the third post from the south gate, he struck something so hard that it turned the edge of his spade. He was used to digging post holes with a crowbar and a tin can, and so he went to a mesquite tree where the tools were kept and got the crowbar.
But the crowbar would no more bite into the hard substance than the spade would. The sun was mighty hot, anyway, so the man went up to the house, where Señor Berry was whittling sticks on his gallery, and told him that he could not dig any more, that at the third post hole from the south gate it looked as if the devil himself had humped up into a rock that nothing could get through. Berry snorted around considerably at first, but directly he seemed to think of something and told his hand, very well, not to dig any more, but to saddle up and go bring in the main remuda.
Now, only the day before they had had the main remuda in the pen and had caught out fresh mounts to keep in the little horse pasture. By this time the other horses would be scattered clear away on the back side of the pasture. The hand wondered what the patrón wanted the remuda for again. But it was none of his business. The ride would take him the rest of the day, and at least he would not have to dig any more post holes before mañana.
After the hand had saddled his horse, drunk a cafecita for lunch, wasted half an hour putting in new stirrup-leather strings, and finally got out of sight, Berry slouched down to the pens. He came back to his shade on the gallery and whittled for an hour or two longer until everything around the jacal—even the hand’s wife—was taking a siesta. Then he pulled off his spurs, which always dragged with a big clink when he walked, and went down to the pen again. The spade and the crowbar were where the hand had left them. Berry drove the crowbar down into the half-made hole. It almost bounced out of his hand, and he heard a kind of metallic thud. No, it was not flint rock that had stopped the digging.
Berry went around behind the water trough to the huisache where his horse was tied and led him into the pen. Then he set to work. He began digging two or three feet out to one side of the hole. The dry ground was packed by the tramp of thousands of cattle and horses. He had to use the crowbar to loosen the soil. But it was no great task to clear out a patch of earth two or three feet square and eighteen or twenty inches deep. Berry knew what he was about, and as he scraped the loosened earth out with his spade, he could feel a flat metal surface that seemed to have rivets in it. It was the lid of a chest, and when he had uncovered it, Berry drew up one of the firm, new posts to use as a fulcrum for the crowbar. With that he levered up one end of the chest. As he suspected, it was too heavy and too tightly wedged for him to lift out. He kicked a chunk under the raised edge and then looped a stout rope about the exposed end. He had dragged cows out of the bog with his horse, and he knew that the chest was not so heavy as a cow. He had only fifty yards to drag it, and that downhill, before he would be in the brush, where he could pry the lid off.
When the hand got back that night, his mujer told him that Señor Berry had gone to San Antonio in the buckboard, and that he had left word for the remuda to be turned back into the big pasture and for the repair of the corrals to be continued. “They say” that the deposit Berry made at the Frost National Bank was a clean $17,000, nearly all in silver.
