We held our second war council shortly after Phineas Everton and his daughter had disappeared over the shoulder of the spur on their way back to the Lawrenceburg. I gave my two partners the gist of the conversation with the assayer, briefly and without comment. Gifford oozed profanity; but Barrett laughed and said:
"Every little new thing we run up against merely urges us to let out one more notch in the speed of the hurry hoist. Everton's suspicion is an entirely natural one, and for my part, I only hope he and Blackwell will hang on to it. If they should, there is an even chance that they will watch their ore sheds a little closer and leave it to us to make the first move in the imagined blackmailing scheme—all of which will give us more time."
"That's all right; but we can't bet on the 'hang on,'" was Gifford's demurrer. "They may think they've got the straight of it now, but there's no law against their changing their minds mighty suddenly. Suppose Everton shows up his bit of a sample, and they both take a second whirl at the thing and pull down a guess that it isn't stolen Lawrenceburg ore, after all? We've got to improve upon this pick-a-back ore shipment of ours, some way, and do it mighty quick."
This was the biting fact; we all accepted it as our most pressing need and fell to discussing ways and means. There was already a full wagon-load of the sacked ore hidden under the sleeping-shack, and at the rate the lode was widening we could confidently figure on getting out as much more every second day, or oftener. There was a good wagon road to town from the Lawrenceburg plant, but of course we dared not use it so long as we were making any attempt to maintain secrecy. The alternative was a long haul down our own gulch, around the end of the spur, and across the slope of the mountain-side below. Even this, the only other practicable route, would be in plain sight from the Lawrenceburg workings, once the team should pass out upon the bare lower hillside.
Moreover, we were obliged to consider the risk involved in taking at least one other man—the driver of the team—into our confidence. Since the hauling would have to be done in the night, an honest man would suspect crookedness, and the other kind would blackmail us to a finish. Gifford spoke of this, saying that it was a choice between the devil and the deep blue sea.
None the less, we were all agreed that the wagon-hiring hazard would have to be taken, and at the close of the talk Barrett went to town to make the arrangement. It was after dark when he returned. His mission had been miraculously successful: he had not only found a trustworthy teamster who was willing, for a good, round sum, to risk his horses on the mountain at night; he had also interviewed the superintendent of the sampling works and concluded a deal by the terms of which the company—as a personal favor to Barrett—agreed to treat a limited quantity of our highest-grade ore in wagon-load lots, making cash settlements therefor.
It lacked only an hour of midnight when the team, making a wide detour to avoid being heard from the Lawrenceburg, reached our location on the slope of the spur. We all helped with the loading; and when all was ready, Gifford, whose turn it was to go to town, borrowed Barrett's shot-gun and climbed to a seat beside the driver.
With every precaution taken—a dragging pine-tree coupled on behind the load to serve instead of the squealing brakes, and many injunctions to the driver to take it easy and to do his swearing internally—the outfit made more noise than a threshing-machine bumping down the gulch. We kept pace with it, Barrett and I, following along the crest of the spur with an apprehensive eye on the Lawrenceburg. But there was no unusual stir at the big plant on the other side of the ridge; merely the never-ceasing clank and grind of the hoist and the pouring thunder of the ore as the skip dumped its load into the bins.
Having nothing to detain him in town, Gifford made a quick trip and was with us again a little after four o'clock in the morning. At the crack of dawn Barrett and I were in the shaft under a new division of time. Now that we had the team hauling for us, we chopped up the shifts so that there would be two of us in the hole continuously, day and night.
Again I have the memory of a week of grinding toil, broken—for me, at least—only by the nights when it came my turn to ride to town on the load of ore. On both occasions I recall that I went fast asleep on the high seat before the wagon had gone twenty rods down the gulch; slept sitting bolt upright, with the shot-gun across my knees, and waking only when the driver was gee-ing into the yard of the sampling works in town; lapses that I may confess here, though I was ashamed to confess them to my two partners.
During this second week we heard nothing from Blackwell or from any of the Lawrenceburg contingent. But several strangers had drifted along, stopping to peer down our shaft and to ask multitudinous questions. Knowing well enough that we could not keep up the killing toil indefinitely, and that the discovery crisis was only postponed from day to day, we yet took heart of grace. The purchase money for the ore was pouring in a steady stream into Barrett's bank to our credit; and with the accounting for the third wagon-load we had upward of $80,000 in the fighting fund.
Gifford went in as wagon guard on the Monday night load, and getting an early start from the mountain, he had a little time to spend on the streets in town. On his return he brought news; the news we had all been expecting and waiting for.
"The big trouble's on the way," he reported. "Bennett Avenue's all lit up with the news that there's been a new strike on Bull Mountain. I heard about it mighty near everywhere I went. Up to date nobody seems to know just where it is, or who has made it; but they've got hold of the main guy, all right. One fellow told me he had it straight from the sampling works. Some cuss on the inside, I reckon, who doesn't know enough to keep his blame' mouth shut, has gone and leaked."
"I'd like mighty well to see another eighty thousand in the bank before we have to shut our eyes and begin handing it out to the lawyers," said Barrett. "Besides, when we get ready to build a shaft-house and put in machinery, we'll have to have more ground room. After the news gets out, we'll just about have to blanket what land we buy with twenty-dollar gold-pieces."
"With the Lawrenceburg hemming us in the way it does, we won't be able to buy elbow room at any kind of a price, will we?" asked Gifford, who had not gone into the topographies as minutely as Barrett and I had.
"There are the three corners of the original triangle which we weren't able to cover in our claim," Barrett explained. "And down yonder on that gulch flat that we are using for a wagon road there is a claim called the 'Mary Mattock' which was taken up and worked and dropped a year or so ago by a Nebraska syndicate. When I was in town last week I gave Benedict, of Benedict & Myers, the job of running down the owners, with the idea that we might possibly wish to buy the ground a little later on.
"Good work!" Gifford applauded. "I wouldn't have thought of anything as foxy as that."
"I told Benedict we'd buy the Mary Mattock if we could get it at a reasonable figure, or lease it if we couldn't buy it," Barrett went on. "It is probably worthless to its present owners as it stands; its three shafts are full of water, and I'm told the Nebraskans spent fifty thousand dollars trying to pump them. But the minute the 'Little Clean-Up' gets into the newspapers, the Mary Mattock, being next door to us, will figure in the market as a bonanza, whether it is or isn't."
Gifford cut himself a chew of tobacco from his pocket-plug.
"I wish to gracious we had that other eighty thousand you're honing for, right now," he protested. "This tin-basin trot's sure getting on my nerves, as the fella said. We'd ought to have the shaft-house and machinery set up and going, this minute, and a good, husky bunch of men at work in that hole, digging out dollars where we're scratching for pennies."
"I don't want to be the shy man of this outfit," Barrett put it quickly. "We can have the machinery if you fellows think we dare use the money to buy it."
Gifford and I both said No, deferring to Barrett's better judgment. And since this talk was getting us nowhere and was wasting time which was worth ten dollars a minute, we broke it off and went to work.
It was in the latter part of this third week, on a night when my turn at the wagon guarding had come in regular course, that I was made to understand that no leaf in the book of a man's life can be so firmly pasted down that a mere chance thumbing of the pages by an alien hand may not flip it back again.
By imperceptible inchings we had been starting the wagon earlier and earlier on each successive trip; and on the evening in question it was no later than ten o'clock when I turned the consignment of ore over to the foreman at the reduction works. Ordinarily, I should have taken the road back to the hills at once, intent only upon getting to camp and between the blankets as speedily as possible. But on this night a spirit of restlessness got hold of me, and, leaving Barrett's shotgun in the sampling works office, I strolled up-town.
Inasmuch as a three-months' residence in a mining-camp is the full equivalent of as many years spent in a region where introductions precede acquaintance, I was practically certain to meet somebody I knew. The somebody in this instance proved to be one Patrick Carmody, formerly a hard-rock boss on the Midland branch construction, and now the working superintendent of a company which was driving a huge drainage tunnel under a group of the big mines of the district.
The meeting-place was the lobby of the hotel, and at the Irishman's invitation I sat with him to smoke a comradely cigar. Carmody was not pointedly inquisitive as to my doings; was content to be told that I had been "prospecting around." Beyond that he was good-naturedly willing to talk of the stupendous undertaking over which he was presiding, expatiating enthusiastically upon air-drill performance, porphyry shooting, the merits of various kinds of high explosives, deep-mine ventilation, and the like.
While he talked, I smoked on, luxuriating like a cat before a fire in the comfortable lounging-chair, the cheerful surroundings, the stir and bustle of the human ebb and flow, and the first half-hour of real idleness I had enjoyed in many days.
It was after Carmody had been dragged away by some fellow hard-rock enthusiast that I had my paralyzing shock. Sitting in a chair less than a dozen feet distant, smoking quietly and reading a newspaper, was a man whose face would have been familiar if I had seen it in the golden streets of the New Jerusalem or in the deepest fire-chamber of the other place; a face with boring black eyes, and with a cruel mouth partly hidden by freshly crimped black mustaches: the face, namely, of my sometime prison-mate, Kellow.
My shocked recognition of this man who tied me to my past annihilated time and distance as if they had never been. In a flash I was back again in a great stone building in the home State, working over the prison books and glancing up now and then to the cracked mirror on the opposite wall of the prison office which showed me the haggard features and cropped hair of the convict Weyburn.
The memory shutter flicked, and I saw myself walking out through the prison gates with the State's cheap suit of clothes on my back and the State's five dollars in my pocket, a paroled man. Another click, and I had dragged through the six months of degradation and misery, and saw myself sitting opposite Kellow in the back room of a slum saloon in a great city, shivering with the cold, wretched and hungry. Once again I saw his sneer and heard him say, "It's all the same to you now, whether you cracked the bank or didn't. You may think you can live the prison smell down, but you can't; it'll stick to you like your skin. Wherever you go, you'll be a marked man."
It is a well-worn saying that life is full of paper walls. A look, a turn of the head, the recognition which would follow, and once more I should be facing a fate worse than death. Kellow knew that I had broken my parole. He would trade upon the knowledge, and if he could not use me he would betray me. I knew the man.
Five minutes earlier I had been facing the world a free man; free to go and come as I pleased, free to sit and smoke with a friend in the most public place in the camp. But now I slid from my chair with my hat pulled over my eyes and crept to the door, watching Kellow every step of the way, ready to bolt and run, or to turn and fight to kill, at the slightest rustling of the upheld newspaper. Once safely outside in the cool, clean night air of the streets I despised myself with a loathing too bitter to be set in words. But the fact remained.
It was like the strugglings of a man striving to throw off the benumbing effects of an opium debauch—the effort to be at one again with the present. The effort was no more than half successful when I stepped into a late-closing hardware store and bought a weapon—a repeating rifle with its appropriate ammunition. Barrett had said something about the lack of weapons at the claim—we had only the shot-gun and Gifford's out-of-date revolver—and I made the purchase automatically in obedience to an underlying suggestion which was scarcely more than half conscious.
But once more in the street, and with the means in my hands, a sudden and fierce impulse prompted me to go back to the hotel lobby and kill the man who held my fate between his finger and thumb. Take it as a virtue or a confession of weakness, as you will, but it was only the thought of what I owed Barrett and Gifford that kept me from doing it.
So it was a potential murderer, at least in willing intention, who took the long trail back under the summer stars to the hills, with the rifle and Barrett's shot-gun—the latter picked up in passing the sampling works—nestling in the hollow of his arm. God or the devil could have given me no greater boon that night than the hap to meet Kellow on the lonesome climb. I am sure I should have shot him without the faintest stirring of irresolution. By the time I reached our gulch I was fuming over my foolishness in buying the rifle—a clumsy weapon that would everywhere advertise my purpose. What I needed, I told myself, was a pocket weapon, to be carried day and night; and the next time I should go to town the lack should be supplied.
For by now all scruples were dead and I was assuring myself grittingly that the entire Cripple Creek district was too narrow to hold the man who knew, and the man who was afraid.
The day following the Kellow incident being Sunday, the three of us snatched an hour or so in the early forenoon for a breathing space. Sitting around the plank table in the bunk shack we took account of stock, as a shopkeeper would say. It was apparent to all of us that the blazoning abroad of our secret could not now be long delayed. A new gold strike yielding ore worth anywhere from one to twenty-five dollars a pound was startling enough to make a stir even in the one and only Cripple Creek, and it seemed nothing short of a miracle that we had not already been traced and our location identified.
It was Barrett's gift to take the long look ahead. At his suggestion, Gifford, who was something of a rough-and-ready draftsman, sketched a plan for the necessary shaft-house and out-buildings, fitting the structures to our limited space. When the fight to retain possession should begin we meant to strike fast and hard; Barrett had already gone the length of bargaining, through a friend in town, for building material and machinery, which were to be rushed out to us in a hurry at the firing of the first gun in what we all knew would be a battle for existence.
During this Sunday morning talk I was little more than an abstracted listener. I could think of nothing but the raw hazard of the previous night and of the frightful moral abyss into which it had precipitated me. In addition there were ominous forebodings for the future. So long as Kellow remained in Cripple Creek, danger would lurk for me in every shadow. Since the calamity which was threatening me would also involve my partners, at least to the extent of handicapping them by the loss of a third of our fighting force, it seemed no less than a duty to warn them. But I doubt if I should have had the courage if Barrett had not opened the way.
"You're not saying much, Jimmie. Did the trip to town last night knock you out?" he asked.
It was my opportunity, and I mustered sufficient resolution to seize it.
"No; it didn't knock me out, but it showed me where I've been making a mistake. I never ought to have gone into this thing with you two fellows; but now that I am in, I ought to get out."
"What's that!" Gifford exploded; but Barrett merely caught my eye and said, very gently, "On your own account, or on ours, Jimmie?"
"On yours. There is no need of going into the particulars; it's a long story and a pretty dismal one; but when I tell you that last night I was on the point of killing a man in cold blood—that it's altogether probable that I shall yet have to kill him—you can see what I'm letting you in for if I stay with you."
Gifford leaned back against the shack wall and laughed. "Oh, ifthat'sall," he said. But again it was Barrett who took the soberer view.
"You are one of us, Jimmie," he declared. "If you've got a blood quarrel with somebody, it's our quarrel, too: we're partners. Isn't that right, Gifford?"
"Right it is," nodded the carpenter.
"We are not partners to that extent," I objected. "If I should tell you all the circumstances, you might both agree with me that I may be obliged to kill this man; but on the other hand, you—or a jury—would call it first-degree murder; as it will be."
Barrett looked horrified, as he had a perfect right to.
"You couldn't do a thing like that!" he protested.
"Yesterday I should have been just as certain as you are that it was beyond the possibilities; but now, since last night, it's different. And that is why I say you ought to fire me. You can't afford to carry any handicaps; you need assets, not liabilities."
Gifford got up and went to sit on the doorstep, where he occupied himself in whittling thin shavings of tobacco from a bit of black plug and cramming them into his pipe. Barrett accepted this tacit implication that he was to speak for both.
"If you pull out, Jimmie, it will be because you want to; not because anything you have said cuts any figure with us. And whether you go or stay, there will be two of us here who will back you to the limit. That's about all there is to say, I guess; only, if I were you, I shouldn't be too sudden. Take a day to think it over. To-morrow morning, if you still think it's the wise thing to do—the only thing to do—we'll write you a check, Gifford and I, for your share in the bank account; and after we get going we'll make such a settlement with you for your third as will be fair and just all around."
This put an entirely new face upon the matter. I hadn't dreamed of such a thing as standing upon my rights in the partnership.
"Like the mischief, you will!" I retorted. "Do you think I'm that kind of a quitter?—that I'd take a single dollar out of the Little Clean-up's war chest? Why, man alive! my only object in getting out would be to relieve you two of a possible burden!"
Barrett's smile was altogether brotherly. "It's the only way you can escape us," he averred; and with that the dissolution proposal was suffered to go by default.
There were half a dozen stragglers to come lounging over the spur or up the gulch that Sunday afternoon, sharp-set, eager-eyed prospectors, every man of them, and each one, we guessed, searching meticulously for the mysterious bonanza about which everybody in town was gossiping. It was only the fact that the hills were fairly dotted with embryotic mines like our own—this and the other fact that our dump showed no signs of ore—that saved us.
Two of these prying visitors hung around for an hour or more, and one of the pair wanted to go down in the shaft, which was now deep enough to be quite safe from prying eyes at the surface. I was acting as windlass-man at the time, and I bluffed him, telling him that with two men working in the hole there wasn't room for a third—which was true enough. But beyond this fact there were by this time the best of reasons for keeping strangers out of our shaft. To name the biggest of them, our marvelous Golconda vein had widened steadily with the increasing depth until now we were sinking in solid ore.
It was Gifford's turn to guard the ore load that night, and after the team got away I persuaded Barrett to go to bed. He was showing the effects of the terrible toil worse than either the carpenter or myself, and I was afraid he might break when the fighting strain came. I had yet to learn what magnificent reserves there were in this clean-cut, high-strung young fellow who, when we began, looked as if he had never done a day's real labor in his life.
Since we had never yet left the shaft unguarded for a single hour of the day or night, I took my place at the pit mouth as soon as Barrett's candle went out. It was a fine night, warm for the altitude and brightly starlit, though there was no moon. In the stillness the subdued clamor of the Lawrenceburg's hoists floated up over the spur shoulder; and by listening intently I fancied I could hear the distant rumble of our ore wagon making its way down the mountain.
In the isolation and loneliness of the night watch it was inevitable that my thoughts should hark back to the near-meeting with Kellow, and to the moral lapse which it had provoked. Doubtless every man rediscovers himself many times in the course of a lifetime. In prison I had been sustained by a vindictive determination to win out and square accounts with Abel Geddis and Abner Withers. After my release another motive had displaced the vengeful prompting: the losing fight for reinstatement in the good opinion of the world seemed to be the only thing worth living for.
But now I was finding that there was a well-spring of action deeper than either of these, and the name of it was a degrading fear of consequences—of punishment. With a most hearty loathing for the lower depths of baseness uncovered by craven fear, one may be none the less a helpless victim of a certain ruthless and malign ferocity to which it is likely to give birth. Sitting with my back propped against the windlass and the newly purchased rifle across my knees, I found that cowardice, like other base passions, may suddenly develop an infection. With nerves twittering and muscles tensely set, I was ready to become a homicidal maniac at the snapping of a twig or the rolling of a pebble down the hillside.
In such crises the twig is predestined to snap, or the pebble to roll. Some slight movement on my part set a little cataract of broken stone tumbling into the shaft. Before I could recover from the prickling shock of alarm, I heard footsteps and a shadowy figure appeared in the path leading over the spur from the Lawrenceburg. Automatically the rifle flew to my shoulder, and a crooking forefinger was actually pressing the trigger when reason returned and I saw that the approaching intruder was a woman.
I was deeply grateful that it was too dark for Mary Everton to see with what teeth-chatterings and reactionary tremblings I was letting down the hammer of the rifle when she came up. For that matter, I think she did not see me at all until I laid the gun aside and stood up to speak to her. She had stopped as if irresolute; was evidently disconcerted at finding the claim shack dark and apparently deserted.
"Oh!" she gasped, with a little backward start, as I rose from the empty dynamite box upon which I had been sitting. Then she recognized me and explained. "I—I thought you would be working—you have been working nights, haven't you?—and I came over to—to speak to Mr. Barrett."
Under other conditions I might have been conventionally critical. My traditions were still somewhat hidebound. In Glendale a young woman would scarcely go alone at night in search of a man, even though the man might be her lover.
"Barrett has gone to bed: I'll call him," I said, limiting the rejoinder to the bare necessities.
"No; please don't do that," she interposed. "I am sure he must be needing his rest. I can come again—at some other time."
I was beginning to get a little better hold upon my nerves by this time and I laughed.
"Bob is needing the rest, all right, but he will murder me when he finds out that you've been here and I didn't call him. If you want to save my life, you'd better reconsider."
"No; don't call him," she insisted. "It isn't at all necessary, and—and perhaps you can tell me what I want to know—what I ought to know before I——" the sentence trailed off into nothing and she began again rather breathlessly: "Mr. Bertrand, can you—can you satisfy me in any way that you and your two friends have a legal right to this claim you are working? It's a perfect—impertinence in me, to ask, I know, but——"
"It is a fair question," I hastened to assure her; "one that any one might ask. With the proper means at hand—maps and records—I could very easily answer it."
"But—but there may have been mistakes made," she suggested.
"Doubtless there were; but we haven't made them. The Lawrenceburg Company owns the ground on two sides of us, and for some considerable distance beyond us toward the head of the gulch; but I can assure you that our title to the Little Clean-Up is perfectly good and legal in every way."
"It is going to be disputed," she broke in hurriedly. "Mr. Blackwell has talked about it—before me, just as if I didn't count. Telegrams have been passing back and forth, and the Lawrenceburg owners in the East have given Mr. Blackwell full authority to take such steps as he may think best. I—that is, Daddy and I—have known Mr. Barrett for a long time, and I couldn't let this thing happen without giving him just a little warning. Some kind of legal proceedings have already been begun, and you are to be driven off—to-morrow."
"Oh, I guess not; not so suddenly as all that," I ventured to say. There were many questions to come crowding in, but I could scarcely expect the assayer's daughter to answer them. Her father had plainly declared his belief that we were stealing Lawrenceburg ore and planning a blackmailing scheme: had he told Blackwell? The query practically answered itself. If Blackwell had been told that we were salting our claim with ore stolen from the Lawrenceburg sheds, the "legal proceedings" would have been a simple arrest-warrant and a search for stolen property. Had Everton told his daughter? This was blankly incredible. If he had told her that we were thieves, she would never have gone so far aside from her childhood hatred of duplicity and wrong-doing as to come and warn us.
"I was afraid you might not believe me," she said, with a little catch in her voice; and then: "I can't blame you; after what you have suf—after all that has happened."
If I hadn't been completely lost in admiration for her keen sense of justice, and more or less bewildered by her beauty and her nearness, I might have caught the significance of what she was trying to say. But I didn't.
"No; I didn't mean that," I denied warmly. "I do believe every word you have said. No one who knows you could disbelieve you for a moment."
"But you don't know me," she put in quickly.
I saw how near I had come to self-betrayal and tried to fend my little life-raft off the rocks.
"You will say that we have met only once before to-night, and then only casually. Will you permit a comparative stranger to say that that was enough? Your soul looks out through your eyes, Miss Everton, and it is an exceedingly honest soul. I know you must have strong reasons for coming to tell us what Blackwell is doing; and if I didn't quite understand the motive at first—with you your father's daughter, you know, and your father in the service of the——"
"I know," she interrupted. "But you lose sight of the larger things. If you have been telling me the truth about your ownership of this claim, a great wrong is going to be done. I couldn't stand aside and let it be done, could I?"
Something in her manner of saying this recalled most vividly the little girl of the long ago, hot-hearted in her indignation against injustice of every sort.
"No, I am sure you couldn't: I don't believe you know how to compromise with wrong of any kind. But you ought not to take my unsupported word about the matter of ownership. Let me call Barrett."
"It isn't necessary. If you say that you three have an honest right to be here, I believe you implicitly. And what I have done is nothing. My father would have done it if he hadn't—if he didn't——"
"You needn't say it," I helped out. "Your father thinks we are trying to hold the Lawrenceburg people up, and I don't blame him. When he was up here the other day—the day you were both here—he thought he caught us red-handed. It wasn't so; he was quite mistaken; but for reasons which I can't explain just now I couldn't very well take the only course which would have undeceived him."
"I—I think I understand," she returned, guardedly. "You—you haven't been stealing ore from the Lawrenceburg sheds?"
I laughed and said a thing that I wouldn't have said to any other living human being on earth at that stage of the game.
"If we can manage to hold our own for just a little while longer, Robert Barrett will be a very rich man, Miss Everton. May I venture to hand you a lot of good wishes before the fact? I know this is only a very old friend's privilege, but——"
Her embarrassment was very charming, and, as I saw it, most natural.
"I—indeed, I wasn't thinking any more of Mr. Barrett than I was of—of you and—and Mr. Gifford," she faltered. "I simply couldn't bear to think of this terrible thing dropping upon you out of a clear sky if—if you hadn't been doing anything to deserve it. Can you defend yourselves in any way?"
"We can try mighty hard," I asserted. "That is what I meant when I said that we were not going to be driven off to-morrow. Possession is nine points of the law. We have our little foothold here, and we shall try to keep it. I'll tell Barrett when he wakes, and we'll be ready for them when they come. Now you must let me take you back home. You really oughtn't to be here alone, you know."
She made no objection to the bit of elder-brother-ism, but half-way up to the summit of the spur she had her small fling at the conventions.
"I don't admit that I ought not to have come alone; neither that, nor your right to question it," she said definitively. "You protest because you are conventional: so am I conventional—but only so far as the conventions subserve some good end. There are situations in which the phrase, 'it isn't done,' becomes a mere impertinence. This is life in the making, up here in these desolate hills, and we who are taking part in the process are just plain men and women."
"That is true enough," I rejoined; and other than this there was little said, or little chance for saying it, since the distance over the spur was short and she would not let me show myself under the Lawrenceburg masthead electrics.
I did not know, at the time, of any reason why I should have returned to resume my lonesome watch at the shaft's mouth like a man walking upon air, but so it was. There are women who keep the fair promise of their childhood, and we admire them; there are others who prodigiously and richly exceed that promise, and they own us, body and soul, from the moment of re-discovery.
Throughout the long night hours following Mary Everton's visit I was far enough, I hope, from envying Barrett; far enough, too, from the thought that I might ever venture to ask any good and innocent young woman to step down with me into the abyss of unearned infamy into which I had been flung, largely through the efforts of another woman who was neither good nor innocent. None the less, the delight which was half intoxication remained and the night was full of waking dreams.
The dark shaft beside me sent up its dank breath of stale powder fumes, and the acrid odor was as the fragrance of a fertile field ripe for the sickle. In this reeking pit at my elbow, gold, the subtle, the potent, the arbiter of all destinies, stood ready to fight for me. The liberty which I had stolen, but which had first been stolen from me, would shortly find a defender too strong to be overthrown by all the prejudice and injustice which are so ready to fly at the throat of helplessness. The reinstatement, which I had been unable to win as a mendicant ex-convict, I could buy with gold in the open market; and when it should be bought and paid for, all the world would clap and cry, Well done!
Barrett had gone to bed exacting a promise that I should call him at two o'clock. But I let the hour go by, and another, and yet another, until the stars were paling in the east when I got up, stiff in every joint, to meet Gifford as he came up the gulch. He was haggard and weary, trembling like an overworked draft horse, and he had to lick his lips before he could frame the words which were to be our alarm signal.
"It's all over," he croaked hoarsely. "The wagon's broke down a couple of miles below, right out on the open mountain-side. We've been working like hell all night trying to drag the load down to some place where we could hide it, but it was no good. Dixon's gone on to town to get another wagon, but the mischief is done. Come daylight, everybody on this side of Bull Mountain will know what's in that wagon, and where it comes from."
The carpenter was practically dead on his feet from the night of fierce toil, and in addition to his weariness was half-famished. He had come in while it was yet dark to get something to eat, and was planning to go back at once. I aroused Barrett promptly, and together we tramped out to the crest of the spur overlooking the Lawrenceburg workings and the mountain-side below. In the breaking dawn, with the help of Barrett's field-glass, we could make out the shape of the disabled wagon on the bare slope hundreds of feet below. Early as it was, there was already a number of moving figures encircling it; a group which presently strung itself out in Indian file on a diagonal course up to our gulch. The early-morning investigators were taking the plainly marked wagon trail in reverse, and Barrett turned to me with a brittle laugh.
"That settles it, Jimmie. The secret is out, and in another half hour we'll be fighting like the devil to keep those fellows from relocating every foot of ground we've got. Let's go back and get ready for them."
Though there was between twenty and thirty thousand dollars' worth of high-grade ore lying unguarded in the broken-down wagon two miles below, we promptly forgot it. Losing no minute of the precious time, we hastened to restake our claim, marking the boundaries plainly and putting up "No Trespass" notices to let the coming invaders know that we were alive and on the job. We knew very well that our boundary lines would be disregarded; that in striving to cover every foot of the unclaimed fragments of the original triangle, the excited gold-seekers would overlap us in all directions. But we meant to have the law on our side.
Our next move was a hurried covering of the shaft mouth with planks provided for just such an emergency; this and a barricading of the shack against a possible rush to loot it. By working fast we were ready by the time the vanguard of the rush appeared as a line of toiling climbers at the foot of the gulch. Barrett glanced at his watch.
"The early trolley will be just about leaving Bennett Avenue with the day-shift for the Ohio," he announced. "One of us must catch that car back to town to start a string of freight teams up here with men and material. Minutes now are worth days next week. I'm the freshest one of the bunch, and I'll go, if you two fellows think you can hold your own against this mob that is coming. You won't have to do any fighting, unless it's to keep them out of our shaft. Let them drive their stakes wherever they like, only, if they get on our ground, make your legal protest—the two of you together, so you can swear straight when it comes into the courts."
We both said we would do or die, and Barrett struggled into his coat and fled for the trolley terminal a mile away. He was scarcely out of sight over the crest of the spur when the advance guard of the mob came boiling up out of the gulch. A squad of three outran the others, and its spokesman made scant show of ceremony.
"We want to see what you got in that shaft," he panted. "Yank them boards off and show us."
"I guess not," said Gifford, fingering the lock of Barrett's shot-gun. Then, suddenly taking the aggressive: "You fellers looking for a mine? Well, by cripes, you get off of our ground and stay off, or you'll find one startin' up inside of you in a holy minute! We mean business!"
The three men cursed us like pickpockets, but they backed away until they stood on the other side of our boundary, where they were presently joined by half a dozen others. We had one point in our favor. In such a rush it is every man for himself, with a broad invitation to the devil to take the hindmost. Somebody called the fellow who wanted to break into our shaft for the needful evidence a much-emphasized jackass, and pointed to the wagon-tracks leading straight to our shack.
"What more do you want than them tracks?" bellowed this caller of hard names. And then: "Anybody in this crowd got a map?"
Nobody had, as it seemed; whereupon the bellower turned upon us.
"You fellers 've got one, it stands to reason. If you've got any sportin' blood in you at all, you'll be sort o' half-way human and give us a squint at it."
Again Gifford took the words out of my mouth. "Not to-day," he refused coolly. "If you want to know right bad, I'll tell you straight that there isn't anything like a whole claim left in this gulch. Now go ahead and do your stakin' if you want to, but keep off of us. You can see all our lines; they're as plain as the nose on your ugly face. I've got only one thing to say, and that is, the man that stakes inside of 'em is goin' to stop a handful of blue whistlers."
Following this there was a jangling confab which was almost a riot. Two or three, and among them the man who wanted us to show our map, openly counseled violence. We were but two, and there were by this time a dozen against us, with more coming up the gulch. They could have rushed us easily—at some little cost of life, maybe—but again the every-man-for-himself idea broke the charm. Already a number of stragglers were dropping out to skirt our boundaries, and in another minute they were fighting among themselves, each man striving to be the first to get his stakes down parallel with ours.
In such a struggle there was necessarily much reckless crisscrossing and overlapping. Claims were stepped off on all sides of us and in every conceivable direction. The law requires only the driving of corner stakes and the posting of a notice prior to the preliminary entry; and as soon as a man got his stakes driven and his notice displayed, he became a vanishing point on the horizon, joining a mad race for town and the land office.
The assault upon the harmless mountain-side did not last as long as we both feared it might, and there was no occasion for gun-play. Gifford and I patrolled the boundaries of our claim and made due protest when it became evident that anybody was overlapping us. Before the sun was an hour high the last of the locators had tailed off in the town foot-race; and though there were more coming, the most of these laggards turned back at once at sight of the forest of new stakes.
It was not until after our guard duties had ceased to press upon us that we remembered the wagon-load of precious stuff left at the mercy of a robber world on the bare hillside two miles away. Gifford ran to the shoulder of the over-looking spur with Barrett's field-glass, and I could tell by his actions that the strain was off.
"Dixon is back with another wagon, and he and a helper are transferring the ore sacks," he reported when he came in. "I told him when he left that he might get help wherever he could; that it was no use trying to keep it dark any longer."
There being nothing to prevent it now, we cooked breakfast on the camp stove, sitting afterward to eat it on the shack door-step, with the weapons handy. I think Gifford had quite forgotten that he had raided the shack chuck-box at daybreak. Anyway, his appetite appeared undiminished. He seemed to think that the worst of our troubles were over, and I did not undeceive him. The later stragglers were still tramping over the ground and reading the lately posted notices. A few of them came up to ask questions, and one, a grizzled old fellow who might have posed as "One-eyed Ike" in Western melodramas, stopped to talk a while.
"You boys shore have struck it big," he commented. "How come?"
We explained briefly the finding of the unoccupied ground and the taking of the average Cripple Creek prospector's chance, and he nodded sagely.
"Jest lit down 'twixt two days and dug a hole and struck hit right there at grass-roots, did ye? That's tenderfoots' luck, ever' time. Vein runnin' bigger?"
Gifford admitted that it was, and the one-eyed man begged a bit of tobacco for the filling of his blackened corn-cob pipe.
"Here's hopin'," he said, with true Western magnanimity; then, with a jerk of his head toward the thin column of stack smoke rising on the still morning air from the Lawrenceburg: "I know this here ground, up one side and down the other. Them fellers down yander 'll be grabbin' fer ye, pronto, soon as they know you've struck pay."
"Why should they?" I asked, scenting a possible source of information.
"They own the ground on t' other side of ye, and ever'body allowed they owned this."
"But their vein runs the other way—southeast and northwest," Gifford interposed.
The old man winked his single eye.
"Ever been in their workin's?"
Gifford shook his head.
"N'r nobody else that could 'r would talk," said our ancient. "You can't tell nothin' about which-a-way a vein runs in this here hell's half-acre. Bart Blackwell's the whole show on the Lawrenceburg, and he's a hawg. He's the one that ran them Nebraska farmers off'm the Mary Mattock down yander: give 'em notice that he was goin' to sink on them upper claims o' his'n at the gulch head, and that his sump water'd have to be turned loose to go where it had a mind to—which'd be straight down the gulch, o' course. The farmers they allowed that'd swamp 'em worse'n they was already swamped—ez it would—so they up and quit. Blackwell, he's a cuss, with a snoot like a hawg. He don't want no neighbors."
I had been observing the old man's face as he talked. It was villainous only in its featurings.
"Which are you; a prospector or a miner?" I asked.
"A little b'ilin' o' both, I reckon," was his rejoinder. "I driv' the first tunnel in the Buckeye, and they made me boss on the two-hundred-foot level. I kin shoot rock with any of 'em's long as I kin make out to let the bug-juice alone."
"Are you out of work?"
"Sure thing."
I caught Gifford's eye and the carpenter nodded. We were going to need men and more men, and here was a chance to begin on a man who knew the Lawrenceburg, or at least some of the history of it.
"You're hired," I told him; and it was thus that we secured the most faithful and efficient henchman that ever drew pay; a man who knew nothing but loyalty, and who was, besides, a practical miner and a skilful master of men.
Hicks—we carried him thus on the pay-roll, though he himself spelled it "Hix," for short, as he said—left us to go back to town for his dunnage, and Gifford, knowing that I had been on watch all night, urged me to turn in. But that was a game that two could play at.
"I'm no shorter on sleep than you are," I told him. "You were up all night with the wagon."
We wrangled over it a bit and I finally yielded. But first I told Gifford about the Lawrenceburg threat for the day, omitting nothing but the source of my information.
"So they're going to jump us, are they?" he said. "All right; the quicker the sooner. Does Barrett know?"
"Not yet. I thought we'd all get together on it this morning. Tell him when he comes back; and if anything develops before he gets here, sing out for me." And with that I made a dive for the blankets.
Between the two of them, Gifford and Barrett let me sleep until the middle of the afternoon. I could scarcely believe the evidence of my senses when I turned out and saw the miracles that had been wrought in a few short hours. While I slept, the transformation of the Little Clean-Up from a three-man prospect hole to a full-fledged mine had taken giant strides. Machinery and material were arriving in a procession of teams laboring up the gulch; a score of carpenters were raising the frame of the shaft-house; masons were setting the foundations for the engine and hoist. I had slumbered peacefully through all the din and hammering and the coming and going of the teams; would doubtless have slept longer if the workmen had not put skids and rollers under the shack to move it out of their way.
Gifford, now thirty-odd hours beyond his latest sleep, was too busy to talk; but Barrett took time to bridge the progress gap for me.
"There was nothing you could do," he explained, at my protest for being left for so many hours out of the activities. "Gifford will have to knock off pretty soon, but the work will go on just the same. Take a look around, Jimmie, and pat yourself on the back. You are no longer a miner; you are a mine owner."
"Tell me," I said shortly.
"There isn't much to tell. I caught that first car to town this morning and got busy. You're seeing some of the results, and the ready money in bank is what produced them. But we've got to dig some more of it, and dig it quick. Blackwell has begun suit against us for trespassing upon Lawrenceburg property, and as you know, every foot of ground all around us was relocated by the early-morning mob that trailed up from our broken-down wagon."
"I ought to have told you about the Blackwell move this morning before you got away, but there was so much excitement that I lost sight of it," I cut in. "I knew about it last night."
"How was that?"
"Somebody who knew about it before I did came here and told me."
"In the night?"
"In the early part of the night; yes."
"Was it Everton?"
"Not on your life. It was some one who thinks a heap more of you than Phineas Everton does."
"You don't mean——"
"Yes; that's just who I do mean. She came over expecting to find you. She wanted to ask you if we had a sure-enough, fire-proof, legal right to be here. She asked me, when she found you were in bed and asleep. I told her we had, and succeeded in making her believe it. Then she told me what was coming to us—what Blackwell had up his sleeve."
"That explains what Gifford was trying to tell me, but he didn't tell me where it came from," said Barrett.
"He couldn't, because I didn't tell him. It's between you and Polly Everton, and it'll never go any farther. I shall forget it—I've already forgotten it."
In his own way Barrett was as scrupulous as an honest man ought to be. "I wish she hadn't done it, Jimmie. It doesn't ring just right, you know; while her father is still on the Lawrenceburg pay-rolls."
Right there and then is when I came the nearest to having a quarrel with Robert Barrett.
"You blind beetle!" I exploded. "Don't you see that she did it for you? But beyond that, she was perfectly right. She saw that an unjust thing was about to be done, and she tried to chock the wheels. The man doesn't live who can stand up and tell me that her motives are not always exactly what they ought to be. I know they are!"
Barrett was smiling good-naturedly before I got through. "I like your loyalty," said he; adding: "and I shan't quarrel with you over Miss Everton's motives; she is as good as she is pretty; and that is putting it as strong as even you could put it."
It was time to call a halt on this bandying of words about Mary Everton and her motives. I had already said enough to warrant a cross-fire of questions as to how I came to know so much about her.
"We're off the track," I threw in, by way of making a needed diversion. "You began to tell me about the Blackwell demonstration. I see we're still here."
"You bet we're here; and we're going to stay. It may take all the money we can dig out of that hole in the next six months to pay court costs, but just the same, we'll stay. Blackwell tried the bullying game first; came over here this forenoon with a bunch of his men and tried to scare Gifford out. Gifford stood the outfit off with the shotgun; was still standing it off when I came up with the first gang of workmen. I had bought a few Winchesters against just such an emergency, and I passed them out to the boys and told them to stand by. That settled it and Blackwell backed down, threatening us with the law—which he had already invoked."
"Can he get an injunction and hang us up?"
"It's a cinch that he'll try. But we have the best lawyers in Cripple Creek, and they're right on the job. There will be litigation a mile deep and two miles high, but we'll get delay—which is all we are playing for, right now. If the lawyers can stand things off until we have had one month's digging, we'll have money enough to fight a dozen Lawrenceburgs."
"We are going to be terribly crowded in this little space," I lamented, with a glance at the building chaos which was already overflowing our narrow limits.
Barrett slapped me on the back. "There was one time when your Uncle Bob had the right hunch," he bragged exultantly. "Our attorneys, Benedict & Myers, have succeeded in buying the Mary Mattock for us, which gives us room for the dump. It cost us twenty thousand dollars yesterday, when the deal was closed, and to-day it would cost a hundred thousand—or as much more as you like. To-morrow morning there will be a syndicate of farmers back in Nebraska reading their newspapers and kicking themselves all over the barnyard."
"Even the Mattock ground won't give us any too much room," I suggested.
"No; but we can acquire the outer corners of our triangle, sooner or later. We can buy of these new stakers after they find that they haven't room enough to swing a cat on their little garden patches. The big fight is going to be with the Lawrenceburg. Benedict has been digging into that, and he says we are up against a bunch that will fight to the last ditch. The mine is backed by Eastern capital, and the claim the owners will make is that their upper ground here in the gulch joins the original location, and that we are trespassers."
"Give me something to do," I begged. "I can't stand around here, looking on."
"Your job is waiting for you," Barrett rejoined tersely. "You have never told me much about yourself, Jimmie, but I know you are a business man, with a good bit of experience. Isn't that so?"
"It was, once," I admitted.
"All right. You're going to handle the money end of this job in town. When you're ready, pull your freight for the camp, open an office, organize your force, and get busy with the machinery people, the banks, and the smelters. We'll be shipping in car-load lots within a week."
Two hours later I boarded a car on the nearest trolley line. On the long, sweeping rush down the hills I put in the time trying, as any bewildered son of Adam might, to find myself and to rise in some measure to the stupendous demands of the new task which lay before me.
But at the car-stopping in Bennett Avenue it was the escaped convict, rather than the newly created business manager of the Little Clean-Up, who slipped into the nearest hardware shop and purchased a revolver.