XXIn the Ore Shed
WHEN David came to his senses he found himself lying on bare ground in the dark. There seemed to be a weight like that of an elephant’s knee pressing upon his chest, and it was with the greatest difficulty that he could get his breath. Somewhere near at hand he could hear sounds as of a woman sobbing. Next he realized vaguely that his boots had been taken off. Groping aimlessly in the dark, his hand found the woman. She was kneeling beside him, and at his touch the sobs became a choking cry.
“Davie, dear; is it yourself that’s alive?” The voice seemed to come from an immense distance, but he heard it and recognized it.
“You, Judith?”—then, jerkily: “What’s—happened—to me?”
“’Tis killed dead you are!” she whimpered.
“Nothing like it.” The words were coming a bit easier now and he did not have to stop andgasp between each pair of them. Also, he was beginning to remember some of the events precedent. “Did—did the house fall down on me?” he asked.
“Jim Lushing—the black curse be upon him!—he shot you; didn’t you know that?”
“I don’t remember. Whereabouts am I hit?”
“I wouldn’t be knowing that at all, Davie; I’m just this minute here. The shed watchman came and told me that Lushing had killed you in Jack’s place down the street. ’Twas scared they were to have you found dead in that place, so they carried you here.”
“Scared?” said David.
“For what your men might do; there’s a many of them in town, and they’d have wrecked the place. Where is it hurting you, Davie, dear?”
“I feel as if somebody had given me the heart punch—I believe that’s what the ring-fighters call it. But it’s letting up a bit now. Where am I?”
“In the Murtrie ore shed. They’d be putting it up to Mike Drogheen, the watchman, to say he’d shot you—taking you for an ore thief.”
“And paying him well for it, I suppose.” He was groping carefully for the wound and found only a rip in the left breast of the brown duck shooting-coat. There was no blood; only a tremendoussoreness. He raised himself and sat up. “If we only had a light of some sort,” he muttered.
“Wait,” she said, and ran away to come back within the minute with the watchman’s lantern. “Poor old Mike’s hiding beyond in the blacksmith shop, scared trembling at the lie he’s thinking he’s got to tell. Don’t sit up, Davie; you might be bleeding to death.”
David was groping again, and this time, out of the ripped pocket of the brown coat he fished an engineer’s field-note book. Then he knew why there was no blood, and why the body area behind the pocket was as painful as if it had been beaten with a hammer. Lushing’s shot had been a glancing one, and the thick note-book had turned it aside. There was little left of the book save the perforated leather cover and a mass of torn leaves.
“The fellows who carried me off must have been pretty badly rattled, not to have found out that I wasn’t even scratched,” he commented.
“’Tis no wonder. When Mike brought me here, the doctor himself would have said you were dead. There was no breath in you at all, and your heart had stopped entirely.”
“What became of Lushing?”
“’Tis little I know, or care—the black dog! Mike says they told him you’d half killed him.”
“I think I meant to,” said David soberly. “And after this, I suppose I’ll have to kill him—or let him kill me. But that’s a future. He knows what he’s got to do if he wants to keep on living. Where are my boots?”
She found the boots with the help of the lantern and gave them to him. He put them on, though the effort, and the lacing of them, made him grit his teeth and swear.
“What did they want to take my boots off for?” he growled.
“Don’t you know?” she asked. “’Tis that way in the camps. They wouldn’t be letting anybody die with his boots on, if they could help it.”
“Rotten superstition!” he complained, and swore again.
The woman heard wonderingly.
“’Tis you that have changed, Davie, till I’d hardly be knowing you,” she said.
“Yes; I’ve changed. And so have you, Judith. Are you living with Dargin?”
“I am not!”
“But from what they tell me, you might as well be. You’ve taken help from him.”
“And if I have; ’tis nothing I’ve taken that an honest woman might not take.”
“You’re telling me the truth?”
“I am. When did I ever lie to you, Davie?”
“Never,” he conceded. But the main question was yet untouched. “I know how you came here to Powder Can—Plegg told me,” he went on bluntly. “It’s no place for you, here in Powder Can. You know that, don’t you?”
“Where would I be going, then?”
David held his head in his hands and tried to think. With the return of his faculties the spirit of morose disheartenment and impatient resentment which had brought him to the mining-camp, and had been the chief factor in precipitating the quarrel with Lushing, was reasserting itself. Since the bitter moods grow by what they feed upon, he could see nothing in just perspective. What a fool’s Paradise he had been living in since the Grillage private car had come to anchor in the construction yard! He had been crying for the moon, and the moon had been kind enough to shine for him—when there was no one else to shine upon. But now there were others....
“I don’t know,” he said abstractedly, in answer to her question as to where she should go. “It’sa pretty tough old world, Judith.” Then, suddenly: “Are you still blaming me?”
“For what would I be blaming you?”
“For chasing around with you in the old days and giving you the idea that I was going to marry you some time?”
“That’s all past and gone, Davie, dear.”
“Past and gone, maybe, but that doesn’t let me out. I know you’ve got your father, but I can’t help feeling more or less responsible for you. It has worried me a lot.”
“You shouldn’t be worrying.”
“I can’t help it. Last year, after I went to Wisconsin, I had a sort of plan worked out, and I wrote you twice before I found out that you’d left Middleboro. What you need—what you’ve always needed, Judith—is something that you could put your whole heart into, like—well, like music. My notion was that you could go to some good conservatory and study, and I was ready to help you. Is it too late to consider something of that kind now?”
She shook her head. “’Tis much too late, Davie.”
“You mean that you’re tied up with this man Dargin?”
“We’ll leave Jack Dargin be. There’s the oldfather; he’s not what he used to be, Davie; what with mother dying, and me——”
“I know,” he interposed hastily. “Plegg told me about that, too. But here’s more trouble, Judith. This man Dargin is your friend, or at least I’m trying to believe that he has befriended you, and I’ve got to chase him and his bunch out of Powder Can. I came over here to-night to tell him so. That muddles things still worse.”
“You’d better be letting Powder Can alone.”
“No, I can’t do that; it’s cutting too much out of the efficiency record on the job. I can’t fight Lushing and his outfit, and a booze joint as well. And right there, you break in. From what you’ve admitted, a lick at Jack Dargin is going to hurt you worse than it will him. And I don’t want to hurt you, Judith.”
“You shouldn’t be thinking so much about me.”
“Yes, I should; you need somebody to think about you. I wish you’d consider that notion of mine. You could take your father with you. He is too good a workman to be throwing himself away in a mine repair shop. He can get a better job anywhere he goes. I could get Mr. Grillage to help a bit in that direction. He knows everybody, everywhere.”
“He’d be wanting to know why,” she objected.
“What if he does? I’ll tell him why.”
“Tell him that you’re trying to help a poor girl back to her feet?—and you wanting to marry his daughter?”
“Who told you I wanted to marry his daughter?”
“There’s little goes on in the camps that we don’t hear in Powder Can. There’s never a man of yours to come over here without having his say about you and the daughter of the man you’d be working for. ’Tis well I know it was Vinnie Grillage you were telling me about that night at home when you were leaving. I’d not be messing up your life and hers, Davie.”
He forced a sour smile. “My part of it is already messed up. Vinnie has been good to me—chiefly because we were kiddies together, long before I knew you, Judith. But that’s all there is to it. There are two other entries now, and I’m out of the race. Does that make it any easier for you to think of my plan?”
“It does not!” she flashed out, almost vindictively, he thought.
Since there seemed to be nothing more to be said, he got upon his feet, scarcely realizing that the girl stooped and put her arms around him andhalf lifted him. For a few seconds the dimly lighted interior of the ore shed spun around in dizzying circles, and the bullet bruise throbbed like a whirlwind of hammer blows. But he found he could breathe better standing.
“I must get back to camp,” he said. “Have you any idea what time it is?”
“’Tis early yet.” Then, anxiously: “You couldn’t be walking all that way, Davie!”
“Yes, I can; I’ll be all right in a few minutes more. Can you show me the way out of this place? I don’t want to go through the town unless I have to.”
She did not show him; she led him, with a strong arm under his to steady him. At the wagon gate at the rear of the ore yard he would have sent her home, but she would not go. “’Tis not fit you are to be going alone,” she said; and in spite of his urgings she went on with him, choosing a path that skirted the shoulder of the hill and left the town to the right. In sober silence they walked on until half of the distance between Powder Can and the construction camp lay behind them. Then David Vallory made his urgings mandatory.
“You must go back,” he insisted. “I’m quite all right, now. If Dargin should hear of this——”
“What is it Jack Dargin can do to you?” she interrupted shortly.
“It is something about the work; something that he knows. If he should tell Lushing——”
She interrupted again. “What has Jack got against you that would make him be giving you away to Jim Lushing?”
“I told you a little while ago. I’m trying to wipe him and his man-traps off the map, and he doubtless knows it.”
“Jack Dargin would only be respecting you the more for that. Sure, it’s himself that knows how bad Powder Camp would be needing a cleaning up.”
“But, good heavens, girl! Dargin is the head and front of the lawlessness himself!”
“’Tis so; but that makes no difference. You can’t tell what’s in the heart of a man, Davie—and I know Jack Dargin; that side of him that not you, nor any one else knows. He’d fight you; maybe he’d kill you. But he’d respect you the more.”
There was a grim humor in the paradox, but David Vallory was not in the mood to appreciate it.
“He’ll be gunning for me; and so will Lushing. But I don’t care; I’ll fight the whole outfit, if Ihave to. I was fool enough to go into that dive to-night unarmed, but that won’t happen again. Lushing had pulled a gun on me; that was one reason why I jumped him. The next time——”
“’Tis little you’d know about the shooting, Davie.”
“What I don’t know I can learn. Now you are going straight back home from here ... no, not another step with me. Good-night—Glory—and—God bless you!”
Once again, if David Vallory could have had a small modicum of the gift of omniscience; could have detached his astral body, let us say, to send it back over the road he had just traversed; there would have been revelations, puzzling, perhaps, but still not without interest to one fighting against the powers of darkness. At the side of the road the detached messenger would have found a woman, crumpled in a forlorn heap on the cold ground, and sobbing as if her heart would break. Still farther back, in the mining-camp itself, the astral David might have looked into a shabbily luxurious upper room where a curious confirmation of Judith Fallon’s prediction touching the contradictory motives which may lie side by side in the human heart was staging itself.
After the fight in the card-room and its supposedtragical outcome, the down-stairs game-room had been hastily closed. As on the night of Plegg’s eavesdropping, the upper room held two occupants, and they were the same two whose voices had reached the first assistant through the partly opened gallery window. And, as before, the lop-shouldered man was the bearer of news.
“By cripes! I guess I know what I’m talking about?” he snarled. “I’ve just come from there. He’s gone, I tell you; lit out—skipped. The watchman swears he don’t know nothin’ about it—didn’t go near the shed after they took him there.”
The master gambler, again with his hands in his pockets, and again tilting gently in the wooden-seated chair, nodded his approval. “I’m glad of it,” he said.
“The hell you are! And him tryin’ to butt in on your game and run you out?”
“That’s what I said”—curtly.
“And you ain’t goin’ to use that dope that you pulled out o’ me at the end of a gun?”
“Not in a thousand years, Simmy. Haven’t you been with me long enough to know that I’m no damn’ worm to crawl up a man’s leg and bite him to death? You say the young duck’s alive and has made his get-away. That’s all right. Ifhe comes at me like a two-fisted man, maybe I’ll send him word that he’d better come heeled. But that’s all.”
“You won’t take the dope and do him up the way I was tellin’ you?”
“Nothing doing.”
“Well, then, by cripes! I know somebody that will take it—and pay good money for it!” shrilled the disappointed one.
“Grillage, you mean?”
“No; I tried him, and what do I get? He tells that big, black nigger porter of his to put me out of the car. I’ll show him—him and Vallory at the same clatter!”
The master gambler got up, as if to signify that he had heard enough.
“Better look out that you don’t get stepped on—like other worms—Simmy,” he warned; and then, reaching for the hanging lamp over the table to turn it out: “Get a crawl on you; I’m going to shut up shop.”