The young man in the London-cut clothes might have climbed back to the car over the coal; or Gallagher would have stopped for him. But he elected to stay in the cab, and he was still there, hanging from the open window on Jackson's side, when the one-car special woke the echoes with its whistle, clattered in over the switches at Horse Creek, and came to a stand opposite the MacMorroghs' commissary.
It was Brian MacMorrogh who came across the tracks to greet Adair, and, since this was their first meeting, he made the mistake of his life in calling the young director by name.
"The top of the morning to you, Misther Adair. Is it Misther Colbrith you'd be looking for?"
"It is," said Adair shortly, not failing to remark that the barrel-bodied, black-bearded man seemed to recognize and to be expecting him.
"'Tis two hours gone they all are," was the oily-voiced explanation. "Up the grade and over to Copah. But they'll be back to-morrow, Heaven savin' thim, and we'll make you comfortable here—as comfortable as we can."
"That will be quickly done," said Adair, swinging down from the engine step. "Just give me a horse andtell me which way they have gone, and I'll overtake them."
But here the barrel-bodied one spread his hands helplessly.
"'Tis just our luck!" he protested, in the keenest self-reproach. "There isn't a horse or a mule in camp that you could get a mile an hour out of. In fact, I'm thinking there isn't anny horses at all!"
Since the weather was rather threatening, and the promise of October in the inter-mountain region is not to be lightly trifled with, Mr. Colbrith pressed for an early start on the seventeen-mile buckboard jaunt to Copah over the detour survey.
It was by his express command that the private-car party was called at daybreak, and that breakfast was served in the Nadia at six o'clock. And at seven sharp, which chanced to be the precise time of day when Adair's commandeered Italians were spiking the last of the displaced rails into position at the gap in the track thirty-three miles away, the buckboards were drawn up at the steps of the president's car.
For reasons charitable, as well as practical, Ford had planned to leave Frisbie out of this second dance of attendance upon the president. The track-layers were well up toward the head of Horse Creek gulch, with Brissac to drive; but during the night the Louisianianhad reported in with a touch of mountain fever, and Ford had asked Frisbie to go up and take his place.
This was one of Ford's peg-drivings for the day; and another was timed for the moment of outsetting. For conveyances for the party there were the two double-seated buckboards used on the canyon trip the previous day, and one other with a single seat; but there were only two drivers, the third man, who had brought the single-seated rig from Copah, having been prevailed upon by Ford to disappear.
Ford directed the distribution of the trippers arbitrarily, and was amazed when the president acquiesced without protest. Mr. Colbrith, the doctor's wife, and Penfield, were to go in the leading vehicle; Aunt Hester Adair, Miss Van Bruce, and the doctor, in the second; and Ford drove the single-seated third, with Miss Alicia for his companion.
"I think you must have taken Uncle Sidney unawares," said Alicia, when the caravan was toiling at a slow footpace along the rough wagon road paralleling the Horse Creek grade.
"You mean that he might have objected to your driver? You are a whole lot safer with me than you would be with one of those livery-stable helpers up ahead."
"Oh, no; I didn't mean just that. But you know he usually plans all the little details himself, and—"
"And the fact that somebody else plans them is sufficient excuse for a rearrangement. That is one of the penalties he pays for being the big boss," laughed Ford. Since the yesterday was now safely yesterday, and to-day was his own, there was no room for anything but pure joy.
"You are a 'big boss,' too, aren't you?" she said, matching his light-hearted mood.
"I was, in a way, until your uncle came over and eclipsed me."
"And you will be again when Uncle Sidney moves a little farther along in his orbit."
"That remains to be seen. There is yet plenty of time for him to abolish me, permanently, before he goes on his way rejoicing."
"But you are not going to resign, you know," she reminded him.
"Am I not?" Then he took his courage by the proper grip and went on with sudden gravity: "That rests entirely with you."
"Mr. Ford! Aren't you a little unfair?" She did not pretend to misunderstand him.
"I am open to convincement," he affirmed.
"It is making me Uncle Sidney's executioner, on one hand; or yours, on the other."
He pressed the point relentlessly.
"There are only two horns to the dilemma: either Mr.Colbrith, or a man named Stuart Ford, will have to walk the official plank. Because Mr. Colbrith is your relative, I'm willing to be the victim. But you must say that it is what you wish. That is my price."
"I say it is unfair," she repeated. "Why should you put the burden of the decision upon poor me?"
"Because, if you were not concerned, there would be, to put it in good Hibernian, only one horn to the dilemma—and your uncle would be impaled upon that one."
"Mercy!" she shuddered, in mock dismay. "That sounds almost vindictive. Are you vindictive, Mr. Ford?"
"Terribly," he laughed. "The black-hearted villain of melodrama isn't a patch on me when I'm stirred." And then, more seriously: "But it isn't altogether a joke. There is another side to the thing—what you might call the ethical, I suppose. There are a score or so of men in the company's service—Frisbie and his subordinates—whose jobs hang upon mine. A worse man than I ever aspired to be might be loyal to his friends."
"I wouldn't think of questioning your loyalty to your friends," she admitted.
"Also," he went on determinately, "there is the larger question of right and wrong involved. Is it right for me to step aside and let an organized system of graft and thievery go on unchecked? I know it exists; I have evidence enough to go before a grand jury. I'm not posingas a saint, or even as a muck-raker; but isn't something due to the people who are paying the bills?"
"Now you are involving Uncle Sidney again; and I can't listen to that."
"He is innocent; as innocent as some hundreds of other narrow-minded, short-sighted old men whom chance, or the duplicity of the real rascals, puts at the head of corporations."
"Yet you would make him suffer with the guilty."
"Not willingly, you may be sure. Not at all, if he would listen to reason. But he won't. He'll stand by North till the last gun is fired; and while North stays, there'll be graft, big or little, as the opportunities warrant."
Alicia held her peace while the caravan was measuring another half-mile of the boulder-strewn road. Then she said: "I feel so wretchedly inadequate to help you, Mr. Ford. I wish you could wait until you have talked it over with brother."
"So do I. But I am afraid postponement doesn't lie with me, now. From your uncle's manner and from what he said to me yesterday, I can't help feeling that the crisis is right here. For two days Mr. Colbrith has been very plainly leading up to some sort of dramatic climax. I can't remotely guess what it is going to be; though I can guess that the plot isn't his."
Again she took time to consider, and when she spokethey were nearing the scene of strenuous activities at the moving track-end.
"You don't think you could postpone it?" she asked, almost wistfully, he thought. "I think—I hope—my brother will become interested again. It is your fault that he lost interest, Mr. Ford."
"My fault?" reproachfully.
"Certainly. You didn't give him enough to do. He was happy and contented while you kept him hard at work. But after the bonds were placed and the money raised—"
"I'm a miserable sinner!" Ford confessed. "And I had promised you, too! But the battle has been so fierce at this end of the line; and I couldn't be in two places at one time. Your brother should have been made first vice-president, instead of North. Perhaps we can bring it about yet—if you don't call it all off."
"There it is again," she retorted. "You are dragging me in—and trying to bribe me, too!"
"God forbid!" he said, so earnestly that she forgave him. And then: "I wish your brother were here—now."
"So do I," she admitted. Then she told him of the wire summons sent from Denver, and of the shadowy hope she had based upon it.
"Where was your brother then?" he asked.
"I don't know, positively. I hope he was in NewYork. He was to come over in theCampania, in time for the shooting at Mount Ptarmigan."
"You've had no word from him?"
"None."
They were up with the track-layers, now, in a country of huge bare hills and high-lying, waterless valleys; and the president had halted the caravan to give his guests a chance to see a modern railroad in the actual throes of evolution.
In a specialist in the trade, Ford's genius might have invoked enthusiasm. Speed was the end to which all of the young engineer's inventive powers had been directed; and the pace was furious. On the leveled grade ahead of the track-laying train an army of sweating laborers marched and counter-marched like trained soldiers, placing the cross-ties in position. On a train of specially constructed flat-cars another army was bolting together a long section of track, clamping the double line of rails at intervals to hold them to gauge. At the word, "Ready!" a hauling chain, passing through an anchored pulley-block far up the grade and back to the freed engine of the construction train, was made fast to the forward end of the bolted section; a second word of command, and the engine backed swiftly, dragging the prepared section off over the rollers of the flat-cars and into place on the ties. With the clanging fall of the final pair of rails, a third army, spike-drivers these, fell uponthe newly placed steel, shouting their chantey as they swung the great pointed hammers; and in the midst of this fresh turmoil the train, with its brigade of bolters deftly preparing another section, was slowly pushed to the new front for another advance.
"It is like clockwork," was Miss Alicia's enthusiastic comment. "Did you invent it, Mr. Ford?"
Now the combination of flat-car bolting-table, and the shifting and laying by sections, was Ford's invention, but he modestly stood from under.
"Frisbie gets the medal," he said. "It's all in the drill—every man knowing what he has to do, and doing it at the proper moment. I'd give something if I had Dick's knack in detail organizing."
She looked up, laughing. "You have the funniest way of ducking to cover if you think a bit of honest appreciation is coming your way, Mr. Ford. You know you told Mr. Frisbie how to do it."
"Did I? I suppose it wouldn't be polite to contradict you."
"Or any use. Is Mr. Frisbie here now?—Oh, yes; there he is." And then, in a half-awed whisper: "Who is that dreadful, Grand-Opera-villain looking man he is talking to?"
Ford's eyes sought and found Frisbie. He was standing a little apart from the turmoil, talking to a man on horseback; a man with half-closed, beady, black eyes,drooping mustaches, and a face reptilian in its repulsiveness.
"That is 'Mexican George'; the MacMorrogh Brothers' 'killer'," said Ford evenly. "Have you ever heard of a professional man-killer, Miss Adair; a man whose calling is that of a hired assassin?"
She shuddered. "You are jesting, I know. But the word fits his face so accurately. I saw him lounging about the store at the camp yesterday, and it gave me the creeping shivers every time I looked at him. Do you ever have such instantaneous and unreasoning hatreds at first sight?"
"Now and then; yes. But I was not jesting about Mexican George. He is precisely what the word implies; is hired for it and paid for it. Nominally, he guards the commissary and stores, and is the paymaster's armed escort. Really, it is his duty to shoot down any desperate laborer who, in the MacMorroghs' judgment, needs to be killed out of the way."
"Mercy!" Miss Alicia was shuddering again. "What hideously primitive conditions! What is this terrible man doing out here?"
"Oh, he is a free lance; comes and goes as he pleases. No, he's not quarreling with Dick"—answering her look of anxiety.
"How do you know he isn't?"
Ford laughed. "Because Dick wouldn't let him getthat near. He knows—Hello; I wonder what your good uncle wants of us."
Mr. Colbrith was standing up in his place in the leading buckboard and making signals to the rear guard of two. Ford shook the reins over his broncos and drove around.
The president was fingering his thin beard and waving an arm toward the track-layers.
"Mr.—ah—Ford," he began critically, "is it necessary to have such a vast army of men as that to lay the track?"
"I don't think we are over-manned," said Ford good-naturedly. It was comparatively easy to be patient with Alicia looking on and listening.
But it was against Mr. Colbrith's principles to let a man off with a single rebuttal.
"I am not at all convinced of the worth of these new-fangled ideas, Mr. Ford; not at all. We built the Pacific Southwestern main line in the old, approved way—a rail at a time—with less than one-quarter of the men you have over there."
"I don't question it: and you were three years building some six hundred miles in a prairie country. We are to-day just six weeks out of Saint's Rest with the track gang, and in six more, if the weather holds, we shall be laying the switches in the Green Butte yards. That is the difference between the old way and the new."
The president was turned aside but not stopped.
"I understand," he objected raucously. "But your expense bills are something tremendous; tre-mendous, Mr. Ford! You have spent more money in three months than we spent in a full year on the main line."
"Quite likely," agreed Ford, losing interest in the pointless discussion. "But with us, time is an object; and we have the results to show for the expenditure."
At this, Mr. Colbrith took refuge in innuendo, as seemed to be his lately acquired habit.
"You are very ready with your answers, Mr. Ford; very ready, indeed. Let us see if you can continue as you have begun."
It was Miss Alicia who resented this final speech of the president's when the buckboards were once more in motion, following the unrailed grade around the swelling shoulders of the huge hills.
"I think that last remark of Uncle Sidney's was rather uncalled for," she said, after Ford had driven in grim silence at the tail of the procession for a full mile.
"It is one of a good many uncalled for things he has been saying to me since the day before yesterday," was Ford's rejoinder.
"Yet you can still assure me that you are not vindictive."
"I am not—at the mere actors in the play. But Iconfess to an unholy desire to get back at the prompter—the stage manager of the little comedy. I am only waiting for your decision."
"Please!" she said; and he saw that the blue eyes were growing wistful again.
"I'm done," he said quickly. "I shan't put it up to you any more. I'll do what I think I ought to do, on my own responsibility."
But now, woman-like, she crossed quickly to the other side.
"No; you mustn't deprive me of my chance," she protested soberly. "After a little while I shall tell you what I think—what I think you ought to do. Only you must give me time."
His smile came from the depths of a lover's heart.
"You shall have all the time there is—and then some, if I can compass it. Now let's talk about something else. I've been boring you with this despicable business affair ever since you gave me leave on that foot-race down Plug Mountain Tuesday afternoon."
"What shall it be?" she inquired gaily. And then: "Oh, I know. One day last summer—just as we were leaving Chicago in the Nadia—you had begun to tell me about a certain young woman who had money, and who was—who was—"
"—who was without her peer in all this world," he finished for her. "Yes; I remember."
"Do you still remember her, as you do the conversation?" she went on teasingly.
"I have never lost a day since I first met her."
"Good Sir Galahad!" she mocked. "And is she still worth all those sacrifices you said you would be willing to make for her?"
"All, and several more."
Silence for a little time, while the hoof-beats of a horse fox-trotting behind them drew nearer. It was the sinister-faced Mexican who ambled into view, and when he overtook the rearmost of the buckboards he was a long time in passing.
"That dreadful man!" murmured Alicia; and she did not go back to the suspended subject until he had trotted on past the caravan. Then she said slowly, taking her companion's complete understanding for granted: "It must be delicious to be away out over one's depth, like that!"
"It is," said Ford solemnly. "It's like—well, I've never been sick a day in my life since I can remember, but I should think it might be like a—a sort of beneficent fever, you know. Haven't you ever had a touch of it?"
"Possibly—without recognizing it. Can you describe the symptoms?"
"Accurately. One day I awoke suddenly to the realization that there was one woman, in the world: beforethat, you know, there had always been a good many, but never just one. Then I began to discover that this one woman was the embodiment of an ideal—my ideal. She said and did and looked all the things I'd been missing in the others. I wanted to drop everything and run after her."
"How absolutely idyllic!" she murmured. "And then?"
"Then I had to come down to earth with a dull, stunning swat, of course. There were a lot of commonplace, material things waiting to be done, and it was up to me to do them. Before I saw her, I used to think that nothing could divide time with a man's work: that there wouldn't be any time to divide. Afterward, I found out my mistake. Sleeping or waking, every day and all day, she was there: and the work went on just the same, or rather a whole lot better."
The long drive was in its final third, and the wagon track, which had transferred itself to the top of the level railroad grade, admitted speed. By degrees the caravan became elongated, with the president still in the lead, the man on horseback indifferently ahead or behind, and the other two vehicles wide apart and well to the rear. Their isolation was complete when she said:
"Do you want me to say that I don't recognize any of the symptoms, Mr. Ford?"
"Do I—No! Yes!—that is, I—Heavens! that is aterrible way to put it! Of course I hope—I hope you are in love—with the right person. If you're not, I—"
She was weeping silently; weeping because it would have been a sin to laugh.
"You—called it a comedy a little while—ago," she faltered. "In another minute it will be a tragedy. Don't you think we are getting too far behind the others?"
He whipped up obediently, but the horses were in no hurry. At the rounding of the next shouldering hill the railroad grade entered a high, broad valley, the swelling hills on either side dotted with the dumps and tunnel-openings of the Copah gold-diggers. Ford had not been through the upper part of the district since the previous summer of pathfindings, and at that time it was like a dozen other outlying and hardly accessible fields, scantily manned and languishing under the dry rot of isolation. But now—
He was looking curiously across at the opposing hillsides. Black dots, dozens of them, were moving from ledge to ledge, pausing here and there to ply pick and shovel. Now and then from some one of the dry arroyos came the echoes of a surface shot; dynamite cartridges thrust into the earth to clear away the drift to bed-rock. Ford called his companion's attention to the activities.
"See what it does to a mining country when a railroad comes within shouting distance," he said. "The last time I was over here, this valley was like a graveyard. Nowyou'd think the entire population of Copah was up here prospecting for gold."
"Is that what they are doing?" she asked. Then suddenly: "Where is your mine?—the mine with my name?"
He laughed.
"I told you the simple truth. I don't know where it is; though I suppose it is up this way somewhere. Yes, I remember, Grigsby said it was on Cow Mountain."
The hill on their side of the valley threw out a long, low spur and the railroad-grade driving track swept in a long curve around the spur and crossed over to the foot of a slope dotted with the digging manikins.
"By Jove!" said Ford, still wondering. "There are twice as many prospectors out here as there were inhabitants in Copah the last time I was over. The camp ought to vote bonds and give the railroad company a bonus."
Farther along, the grade hugged the hillside, skirting the acclivity where the shaft-houses of some of the older mines of the district were perched on little hillocks formed by their own dumps, within easy tramming distance of the railroad. Opposite and directly below the nearest of these shaft-houses the two leading buckboards had stopped; and the president was once more standing up and beckoning vigorously to the laggards in the single-seated vehicle.
Ford spoke to his horses and grimaced as one who swallows bitter herbs.
"I wonder what I've been doing now—or leaving undone?" he queried.
He was not kept long in suspense. When they drove up, the president was still standing, balancing himself with a hand on the driver's seat in front. His thin face was working nervously and the aggressive chin whiskers moved up and down like an accusing finger.
"Dear me!" said Alicia, under her breath; "Uncle Sidney is really angry, this time! What could have hap—" She glanced up at the mine buildings perched above the roadway and smothered a little cry. Ford's eyes followed hers. All across the slab-built shaft-house and the lean-to ore sheds was stretched a huge canvas sign. And in letters of bright blue, freshly painted and two feet high, ran the boastful legend:
THE LITTLE ALICIA MINEthe only paying producer in the districtStuart Ford & John Grigsby, Props.
Stuart Ford & John Grigsby, Props.
The white-haired old man standing in the leading buckboard was trembling with righteous indignation. Pointing a shaking finger at the incriminating sign, he broke out in a storm of accusation.
"So, Mr. Ford! This is why you changed the route ofthe extension and added twelve miles to its length!" he raved. "This explains why you suddenly found the shorter route impracticable! Answer me sir: when did you become interested in this mine?"
There was a little stir of consternation among the listeners; and it did not help matters that the man on horseback ambled up at the moment and drew rein behind the doctor's vehicle. Ford's hands were gripping the reins until the stiff leathers were crumpled into strings; but it was Alicia's touch on his arm that enabled him to reply coldly:
"It was something over two months ago, I believe. I can give you the exact date when we reach Copah, though you will permit me to say that it is none of your business."
Mr. Colbrith exploded like a hastily fired bomb.
"I propose to make it some of my business! Was it before or after your purchase here that you decided upon the change of route? Answer me that, Mr. Ford!"
Ford wheeled his bronchos and closed the shouting gap.
"Sit down, Mr. Colbrith," he said half-menacingly. "If it is your purpose to humiliate me before your guests, I shall drive on and leave you."
"You don't answer my question; you can not answer it! You instructed your assistant to change the line of this railroadafteryou had bought this mine!"
"And if I did?"
"You did. And by so doing, Mr. Ford, you diverted the company's money to your own personal ends as wrongfully as if you had put your hands into the treasurer's strong-box. In other words, you became what you have accused others of being—a common grafter!"
Answer me, sir! When did you become interested in this mine?
Ford's face was very white, and his lips were drawn into thin lines when he opened them to reply. But the restraining hand was on his arm again, and he obeyed it.
"I don't care to talk with you, about this matter or any other, here and now. Later on, perhaps, when you can speak without being abusive, I shall take the liberty of telling you what I think of you." And at that, he gave his horses the rein and drove on, swiftly, abruptly, leaving the president and his guests to follow as they would.
For some minutes neither of the two in the flying buckboard could find words wherewith to bridge the miserable chasm so suddenly opened between them. Miss Alicia's eyes were tear-brightened and unfathomable; Ford's were hard, and there was a steely light in them. It was Alicia who spoke first.
"I know it is not true, of course—what Uncle Sidney accused you of," she offered. "But tell me how it happened?"
"I don't know—unless the devil planned it," said Ford bitterly. "I bought the mine one day last summerwhen I was in Copah, without premeditation, without seeing it—without knowing where it was situated, just as I have told you. Some little time afterward, Frisbie came to me with the plan for the change of route. I had considered it before, but had made no estimates. Frisbie had made the estimates, and we decided upon it at once. I haven't been over here since: it wasn't necessary, and I had other things to do."
"Did Mr. Frisbie know about your purchase of the mine?"
"No. I don't think he knows of it yet. To tell the truth, I was a little ashamed: it was a touch of the mining fever that everybody gets now and then in a mining country. Dick would have guyed me."
"But Mr. Frisbie must have been over the line a great many times: how could he miss seeing that enormous sign?" she persisted.
Ford shook his head.
"I venture to say that the paint isn't yet dry on that sign. It was put there for a purpose, and your uncle was told to look for it. Grigsby is just the sort of fool to jump at the chance to advertise the mine, and somebody suggested it and gave him the tip that the president of the railroad was coming in this way. Mr. North is a very careful man. He doesn't neglect any of the little details."
The high valley was falling away into a broken gulch,and the railway-grade driving-path clung closer to the hillsides. At the next turn the town of Copah came into view, and the road became a shelf on the slope two hundred feet above the main street and paralleling it. Alicia was looking down upon the town when she said:
"What shall you do?"
Ford's laugh was not mirthful.
"I have already done it. I shall perhaps be permitted to see you all safely back to the Nadia, and over the rough track to Saint's Rest. More than that I fancy Mr. Colbrith will not allow—and possibly not that much."
Miss Adair was still looking down upon the town; and now Ford looked. Instantly he saw that something unusual was going on. Notwithstanding the number of men afield on the hills, the main street of the camp was restlessly alive. Horsemen were galloping back and forth; in front of the outfitting stores freighters were hastily loading their pack animals; at every gathering place there were knots of excited men talking and gesticulating.
Ford was puzzled. At another time he would quickly have put the obvious two and two together to make the equally obvious four. But now he merely said: "That's curious; mighty curious. Where do you suppose all those people came from?"
Alicia's rejoinder was not an answer to the half-mechanical query.
"Mr. Ford, a little while ago I told you I must have time to consider: I—I have considered. You must fight for your life and your good name. You must make Uncle Sidney see things as they are—that they are not as he thinks they are."
"I can't," he said stubbornly. "Your condition reverses your decision. If I am to fight with any hope of winning, after what has transpired to-day, Mr. Colbrith will have to be eliminated."
He had pulled the broncos down to a walk. There was a soft thudding of hoofs on the yielding earth of the grade behind, but neither of them heard.
"You are disappointing me," she protested, and now the hesitation was all gone. "A few minutes ago, before this miserable thing happened, you were telling me of your ideal ... a woman may have an ideal, too, Mr. Ford."
"Yes?" he said eagerly.
"My ideal is the knight without fear and without reproach—and also without limitations. He will never say, 'I can not.' He will say, 'I will,' and not for my sake, but because his own sense of justice and mercy and loving-kindness will go hand in hand with his ambition."
"One word," he broke in passionately; and now the soft thudding of hoofs had drawn so near that the presence of the overtaking horseman might have been felt."My little allegory didn't deceive you; you are the one woman, Alicia, dear. I didn't mean to tell you yet, though I think you have known it all along: I had an idea that I wanted to do something worthy—something big enough to be worth while—before I spoke. But you have given me leave; don't say you haven't given me leave!"
"You have taken it," she said softly, adding: "And that is what a woman likes, I think. But you mustn't spoil my ideal, Stuart—indeed, you mustn't. You are young, strong, invincible, as my knight should be. But when you strike you must also spare. You say there is no way save the one you have indicated; you must find a way."
He smiled ruefully.
"You give the cup of water only to take it away again. I'd rather build ten railroads than to attempt to smash North and his confederates through your uncle. You see, I'm frightfully handicapped right at the start—with this mine business hanging over me. But if you say it has to be done, it shall be. I'll win Mr. Colbrith over, in spite of all that has happened; and he shall fire North and the MacMorroghs first and prosecute them afterward. I've said it."
It was just here that the broncos shied—inward, toward the hill. Ford gathered the slack reins, and Miss Adair looked up and gave a little shriek. Noiselessly,and so close upon the buckboard that he might have touched either of its occupants with his rawhide quirt, rode the Mexican. When they discovered him he was leaning forward, his half-closed eyes mere slits with pin-points of black fire to mark them, and his repulsive face a stolid mask. Ford's hand went instinctively to the whip: it was the only available weapon. But the Mexican merely touched his flapping sombrero and rode on at the shuffling fox-trot.
"That man, again!" shivered Alicia, when the portent of evil had passed out of sight around the next curve in the grade.
But Ford's concern was deeper than her passing thrill of repulsion.
"Did you notice his horse's hoofs as he went by?" he asked soberly.
"No," she said.
"I did. He dismounted somewhere behind us and covered them with sacking."
"What for?" she asked, shivering again with the nameless dread.
"You recall what I was saying when the broncos shied: his object was to creep up behind us and listen. He has done it more than once since we left the end-of-track, and this time—"
"Yes?"
"This time he heard what he wanted to hear."
Beyond the curve which had hidden the Mexican, the wagon-road left the grade, descending abruptly upon the town. Ford looked back from the turn and saw that the other two vehicles were not yet in sight.
"Shall we wait for your aunt and the others?" he asked.
Her smile was a sufficient reward for the bit of tactful forethought.
"I'm sure we have left the conventions far enough behind not to be unduly terrified by them. I am not afraid to go in unchaperoned. Besides, I heard Uncle Sidney telling Doctor Van Bruce that our rooms at the hotel had been engaged for us."
Ford drove carefully down the steep side street which was the approach to the hotel. An excited throng blocked the sidewalk, and the lobby seemed to be a miniature stock exchange. Single-eyed, Ford fought a passage through the crowd with Alicia on his arm, heeding nothing until he had seen her safely above stairs and in the sitting-room of the president's reservation, with a cheerful fire in the big sheet-iron stove for her comforting. Then he went down and elbowed his way through the clamorous lobby to the clerk's desk.
"Suppose you take a minute or two off and tell me what this town has gone crazy about, Hildreth," he said, with a backward nod toward the lobby pandemonium.
"Why, Great Scott! Mr. Ford—have you got this farinto it without finding out?" was the astounded rejoinder. "It's a gold strike on Cow Mountain—the biggest since Cripple Creek! We've doubled our population since seven o'clock this morning; and by this time to-morrow.... Say, Mr. Ford; for heaven's sake, get your railroad in here! We'll all go hungry within another twenty-four hours—can't get supplies for love or money!"
Ford turned away and looked out upon the stock-selling pandemonium with unseeing eyes. The chance—the heaven-sent hour that strikes only once in a life-time for the builders of empire—had come: and he was only waiting for the arrival of the president to find himself rudely thrust aside from the helm of events.
"No, Mr. Ford; there is no explanation that will explain away the incriminating fact. This is a matter which involves the good name of the Pacific Southwestern company, through its officials, and I must insist upon your resignation."
The battle was on, with the two combatants facing each other in the privacy of the president's room in the Copah hotel. Since Alicia had made him exchange the sword of extermination for the olive branch, Ford was fighting on the defensive, striving good-naturedly and persistently to keep his official head on his shoulders.
"I've admitted that it looks pretty bad, Mr. Colbrith; but you will concede the one chance in a hundred that no wrong was intended. I merely did, on the ground, what thousands of investors in mining chances do the world over—bought an interest in a mine without knowing or caring greatly into what particular mountain the mine tunnel was driven."
Mr. Colbrith frowned. He was of that elder generation of masters which looked with cold disapproval upon any side ventures on the part of the subordinate.
"The company has paid you liberally for your time and your undivided attention, Mr. Ford. No man can serve two masters. Your appointment as assistant to the president did not contemplate your engaging in other business."
Ford carefully suppressed the smile which the bit of industrial martinetry provoked.
"As to that," he said placably, "I can assure you that the gold-digging has been purely an investment on my part."
"But an investment which you should not have made," insisted the president judicially. "If it had not tempted you to the breach of trust, it was still inexpedient—most undeniably inexpedient. An official high in the counsels of a great corporation should be like Cæsar's wife—above suspicion."
This time Ford's smile could not be wholly repressed. "I grant you it was foolhardy, in the economic point of view," he confessed. "I took a long chance of going ten thousand dollars to the bad. But mine-buying is a disease—as contagious as the measles. Everybody in a mining country takes a flyer, at least once. The experienced ones will tell you that nobody is immune. Take your own case, now: if you don't keep a pretty tight hold on your check-book, Mr. Colbrith, Cow Mountain will—"
The president frowned again; more portentously, this time.
"This levity is most reprehensible, Mr. Ford," he said stiffly. "I trust I know my duty as the head of a great railway company too well to be carried away on every baseless wave of excitement that fires the imagination of the mining-camp I chance to be visiting." Mr. Colbrith was not above mixing metaphor when the provocation was sufficiently great.
"Baseless?" echoed Ford. "Surely you don't doubt ... Why, Mr. Colbrith, this strike is the biggest thing that has happened in the mining world since the discovery of the wedge-veins in Cripple Creek!"
The president shrugged his thin shoulders as one whose mission in life is to be sturdily conservative after all the remainder of mankind has struck hands with frenzied optimism.
"Nonsense!" he rasped contemptuously. "What happens? Two men come to town with certain rich specimens which they claim to have taken out of their prospect hole on Cow Mountain. That was at seven o'clock last night, less than twenty-four hours ago, and some two or three thousand lunatics have already rushed here in the belief—founded upon a mere boast, it may be—that a great gold reef underlies Cow Mountain. By this time to-morrow—"
Ford took him up promptly. "Yes; and by this timeto-morrow the Denver Mining Exchange will be howling itself hoarse over Copah mining shares, like those curb-stone fellows down-stairs; the hunt will be up, and every feeder the Pacific Southwestern system has will be sending its quota of gold-seekers to the new field. That isn't what you were going to say, I know; but it is what is going to happen. Mr. Colbrith, it's the chance of a century for the Pacific Southwestern company, and you are deliberately trying to fire the one man who can make the most of it."
The president's lack of sense of humor made it hard for him at times. He was sitting very erect in the straight-backed hotel chair when he said: "Mr. Ford, there are occasions when your conceit is insufferable. Do you imagine for a moment that you are the only engineer in the United States who can build railroads, Sir?"
"Oh, no."
"Then perhaps you will be good enough to explain your meaning?"
"It was a poor attempt at a jest," said the young man, rather lamely. "Yet it had the truth behind it, in a way. I predict that this is the beginning of one of the biggest mining rushes the world ever saw. We are within one hundred and forty miles of Copah with a practicable railroad; we are within twelve miles with a track which must be made practicable while the band plays. If you discharge your entire engineering corps at this crisis—"
"I beg your pardon," interrupted the president crustily. "I have not asked your force to resign."
"Not meaning to, perhaps," countered the young man, maliciously rejoicing in the hope that he had found one vulnerable link in the president's coat of mail. "But if I go, the entire department will go. Every man in it is my friend, as well as my subordinate; and they know very well that if they shouldn't go, your new chief would fire them and put in his own men."
"Ha!" said the president, straightening up again. "Am I to understand that you are threatening me, Mr. Ford."
"No, indeed; I am only stating a fact. But it is a pretty serious fact. Let us suppose, for the sake of the argument, that my prediction comes true; that within thirty-six or forty-eight hours Saint's Rest is packed with people trying to get to Copah. Your new chief, if you shall have found him, will hardly be in the saddle. When he comes he will have to reorganize the department, break in new men, learn by hard knocks what I have been learning in detail—"
Mr. Colbrith thrust out a thin lip of obstinate determination.
"And if he does, your hypothetical rush will simply have to wait, Mr. Ford. We have the key to the Copah door."
"Don't you fool yourself!" snapped Ford, forgettinghis rôle of the humble one for the moment. "The Transcontinental is only forty miles away at Jack's Canyon, with a pretty decent stage road. Long before you can get the extension in shape to carry passengers, or even freight, the other line will be known from Maine to California as the keyholder to this district!"
That shot told. The president was not yet convinced that the Copah boom was real; but there was the chance that it might be—always the chance. And to the over-cautious the taking of chances, however remote, is like the handling of a snake: a thing to inspire creeping horrors.
"If you could convince me, Mr. Ford, that your interest in that mine did not influence you in changing the route of the extension," he began; but Ford took him up sharply. "I can't; and I can say no more than I have said."
Mr. Colbrith got up and went to the window to look down upon the excited throng in the street. It did look real.
"Perhaps we might leave matters as they are, pending a future investigation, Mr. Ford," he said, turning back to his victim, who was methodically clipping the end from a cigar.
"No," was the brittle rejoinder.
Again the president took time to look down into the crowded street. His next attack was from the rear.
"But I have understood that you do not wish to resign. Let us be magnanimous, Mr. Ford, and agree to hang this matter up until this supposed crisis is past."
"No," was the curt reply. "I have changed my mind. I don't think I want to work for you any longer, Mr. Colbrith."
"Not if I withdrew my—ah—objections?"
"No."
Silence again. The packed lobby of the hotel had overflowed upon the plank sidewalk, and the din of the buyers and sellers rose like the noise of a frantic street fight. Ford's half jesting remark about the possibility of the microbe finding its way into the blood of the president was not so pointless as the old man's retort sought to make it appear. It was the wheat pit which had given Mr. Colbrith his first half-million; and as he listened to the hoarse cries, the thing which he hoped was safely caution-killed began to stir within him. Suddenly he picked a word of two out of the sidewalk clamor that made him turn swiftly upon the silent young man.
"They are selling 'Little Alicia'—your stock—down there!" he gasped. "Have you—have you—"
"No; I haven't put mine on the market. It's some of my partner's, Grigsby's, stock. I suppose he couldn't stand the push."
Once more the president listened. Only an ex-wrestlerin the wheat pit could have picked intelligence out of the Babel of puts and calls.
"It's up to a hundred and fifty!" he exploded. "What did you pay for your shares, Mr. Ford?"
"Twenty," said Ford coolly.
"Good Heavens! I—I hope you hold a safe majority?"
"No; we broke even, Grigsby and I. I have fifty per cent."
The president groaned.
"I—I'll excuse you, Mr. Ford. Get down there at once and buy that other necessary share!"
Ford shook his head with predetermined gloom. "No, Mr. Colbrith, I'm not buying any more mining stock. What I did buy seems to have cost me my job."
"But, my dear young man! This is a crisis. You are likely to lose control of your property! Or, at least, it is soaring to a point at which you will never be able to secure the control."
Ford came up smiling. "You forget that this is mere mad excitement, Mr. Colbrith," he said, handing back the President's own phrase. "To-morrow, I dare say, I shall be able to buy at twenty again."
The president came away from the window and sat down. His face was twitching and the thin white hands were tremulous.
"There may be more in this gold discovery than I havebeen willing to admit," he said abstractedly, "and in that case ... Mr. Ford, upon what terms will you consent to go on and whip this line of ours into shape?"
Ford came out of the fog of discouragement with a bound.
"A complete change in the management of the Pacific Southwestern, Mr. Colbrith. North and his grafters must go."
The President did not fly into wrathful shards, as Ford fully expected. On the contrary, he was fingering the white goat's-beard with one nervous hand, and apparently listening half-absently to the clamor in the street.
"Don't be unreasonable, Mr. Ford," he said quite mildly. "You know we can't consider anything like that at the present moment."
"It must be considered," Ford persisted. "Ever since I quit being a division superintendent, North has obstructed, lied about me, fought me. The time has come when, if I stay, I must have a free hand. I can't have it while he is out of jail."
"That is strong language to apply to our first vice-president, Mr. Ford. And I can only believe that you are prejudiced—unduly prejudiced. But all this may be taken up later. As you suggest, we may be losing very precious time."
Ford got to his feet.
"Promise me that you will give the Denver management as thorough an investigation as you have given me, Mr. Colbrith; do that, and give me absolute authority over the MacMorroghs and their men for one week; and before the week's end we'll be hauling passengers and freight into Copah over our own rails."
For a moment the president seemed to be on the point of yielding. Then his habitual caution thrust out its foot and tripped him.
"I can't be pushed, Mr. Ford," he complained, with a return of the irritated tone. "Let the matter rest for the present. And—and you may consider yourself relieved from duty until I have gone a little deeper into these charges against you. Mr. North accuses you, and you accuse Mr. North. I must have time to approach those matters deliberately. I don't know which of you to trust."
It was a deadlock. Ford bowed and laid his hand on the door.
"You are still the president of the Pacific Southwestern, Mr. Colbrith, and while you remain president—"
The old man's pride of office took fire like tow in a furnace.
"What do you mean by that, Mr. Ford? Make yourself clear, sir!" he quavered.
"I mean just this: if your niece, Miss Alicia Adair, hadn't been good enough to say that she will be my wife, I'd carry this thing up to the board of directors and domy level best to have you put where you could do the least harm."
"You? Alicia?" the old man shrilled. And then, in an access of senile rage that shook him like a leaf in the wind: "I said you were suspended—you are discharged, sir—here and now! If you give another order as an official of the Pacific Southwestern company, I'll—I'll put you through the courts for it!"
Ford opened the door and went out, leaving the president clutching his chair with one hand and balling the other into a shaking fist. The die was cast, and he had thrown a blank at the very moment when the game seemed to be turning his way. What would Alicia say?
As if the unspoken query had evoked her, the door of her room opened silently and she stood before him in the corridor.
"Tell me," she commanded.
"We have fought it out, and I've had my beating," he said soberly. "When I thought I had him fairly down,—he was actually begging me to stay on with the company,—we got tangled up again over North, and he fired me bodily."
"Did you—did you tell him about our—"
"Yes; and that was what set off the final fireworks."
She put her hands on his shoulders and made him face her squarely.
"Stuart, did you lose your temper?"
"I—I'm afraid I did—just at the last, you know. It's simply an unspeakable state of affairs, Alicia, dear! At a moment when we should be setting the whole world afire in a superhuman effort to flog this piece of construction track into shape, your uncle paralyzes everything!"
The constraining touch of her hands became almost a caress. "What shall you do, Stuart? Is there nothing to be done?"
He took his resolution on the spur of the moment.
"Yes, thank heaven! Your uncle has got to find a printing press, or at least a telegraph wire, before he can make my discharge effective. Before he can do that, or until he does it, I'm going to pull the throttle wide open and race that discharge circular, if I go to jail for it, afterward! Who knows but I shall have time to save the day for the company after all? Good-by, dearest. In twenty minutes I shall be riding for the MacMorroghs' camp, and when I get there—"
"You are going to ride back?—alone? Oh, no, no!" she protested; and the clinging arms held him.
"Why, Alicia, girl—see here: what do you imagine could happen to me? Why, bless your loving heart, I've been tramping and riding this desert more or less for two years! What has come over you?"
"I don't know; but—but—oh, me! you will think I am miserably weak and foolish: but just as you saidthat, I seemed to see you lying in the road with your horse standing over you—and you were—dead!"
"Nonsense!" he comforted. "I'll be back here to-morrow, alive and well; but I mustn't lose a minute now. It's up to me to reach Horse Creek before the news of the gold strike gets there. There'll be a stampede, with every laborer on the line hoofing it for Copah. Good-by, sweetheart, and—may I?" He took her face between his hands and did it anyhow.
Five minutes later he was bargaining for a saddle horse at the one livery stable in the camp, offering and paying the selling price of the animal for the two days' hire. It was a rather sorry mount at that, and when he was dragging it out into the street, Jack Benson, the youngest member of his staff, rode up, that moment in from the tie-camp above Cow Mountain.
"Don't dismount, Jack," he ordered curtly. "You're just in time to save me eight or ten miles, when the inches are worth dollars. Ride for the end-of-track and Frisbie on a dead run. Tell Dick to hold his men, if he has to do it at the muzzle of a gun, and to come on with the track, night and day. He'll have to raise the pay, and keep on raising it—but that's all right. It's an order. Rush it!"
Benson nodded, set his horse at the path leading up to the railroad grade, and spurred up the hill. Ford gave a final tug at his saddle cinches, put up a leg andbegan to pick his way down the thronged street in the opposite direction.
Thirty seconds afterward a man wearing the laced trousers and broad bullion-corded sombrero of a Mexican dandy came out of his hiding-place behind the door of the livery stable office, thoughtfully twirling the cylinder of a drawn revolver.
"I take-a da mustang," he said to the boy who had held Ford's horse during the short interview with Benson. And when the bronco was brought out, the Mexican, like Ford, looked to the cinches, mounted, and rode down the street leading to the lower mesa and the river.
He rode easily, as one born to the saddle, the leathers creaking musically under him to keep time to the shuffling fox-trot of the wiry little range pony. Once free of the mining-camp and out upon the mesa, he found a corn-husk wrapper and his bag of dry tobacco and deftly rolled a cigarette, doing it with one hand, cow-boy fashion. When the cigarette was lighted, the horseman ahead was a mere khaki-colored dot, rising and falling in the mellowing distance.
With the eye of a plainsman he measured the trail's length to the broken hill range where the Pannikin emerges from its final wrestle with the gorges. Then he glanced up at the dull crimson spot in the murky sky that marked the sun's altitude. There was time sufficient—and the trail was long enough. He did not push his horse out of the shuffling trot. At the portal hills the horseman now disappearing over the rim of the high mesa would slacken speed. In the canyon itself a dog could not go faster than a walk.
On the lower mesa the Mexican picked up the galloping dot again, holding it in view until it halted on the river bank a hundred yards below the entrance to the canyon. Since the water was low in the ford, the river bank hid the crossing, and the Mexican drew rein and waited for the dot to reappear on the opposite shore.
A slow minute was lost; then a second and a third. The man in the corded sombrero and laced buckskins touched his horse's flank with a spur and crept forward at a walk, keeping his eyes fixed upon the point where the quarry ought to come in sight again. When three more minutes passed and the farther shore was still a deserted blank, the Mexican dug both rowels into his mustang and galloped down to the river, muttering curses in thepatoisof his native Sonora.
Apparently the closing in had been delayed too long. There were fresh hoof-prints in the marl of the hither approach to the shallow ford, but none to match them on the farther side. The Mexican crossed hastily and searched for the outcoming hoof-marks. The rocky bar which formed the northern bank of the stream told him nothing.
Now it is only in the imagination of the word-smith that the villain in the play is gifted with supernatural powers of discernment. Ruiz Gregorio Maria y Alvarez Mattacheco, familiarly and less cumbrously known as "Mexican George," was a mere murderer, witha quick eye for gun-sights and a ready and itching trigger finger. But he was no Vidoeq, to know by instinct which of the two trails, the canyon passage or the longer route over the hills, Ford had chosen.
Having two guesses he made the wrong one first, urging his mustang toward the canyon trail. A stumbling half-mile up the narrow cleft of the river's path revealing nothing, he began to reconsider. Drawing a second blank of the same dimensions, he turned back to the ford and tried the hill trail. At the end of the first hundred yards on the new scent he came again upon the fresh hoof-prints, and took off the brow-cramping hat to swear the easier.
Two courses were now open to him; to press hard upon the roundabout hill trail in the hope of overtaking the engineer before he could reach the Horse Creek camp, or to pass by the shorter route to the upper ford to head him off at the river crossing. The Mexican gave another glance at the dull red spot in the western sky and played for safety. The waylaying alternative commended itself on several counts. The canyon trail was the shorter and it could be traversed leisurely and in daylight. Pressing his livery hack as he could, Ford would scarcely reach the crossing at the mouth of Horse Creek before dusk. Moreover, it would be easier to wait and to smoke than to chase the quarry over the hills, wearing one's pinto to the bone.
Ruiz Gregorio Maria set his horse once more at the task of picking a path among the canyon boulders, riding loosely in the saddle, first in one stirrup and then in the other, and smoking an unbroken succession of the corn-husk cigarettes.
One small cloud flecked the sky of satisfaction. His instructions had been explicit. If Ford should resign, quit, wash his hands of the Pacific Southwestern, he might be suffered to escape. If not—there was only one condition attached to the alternative: what was done must be done neatly, with despatch, and at a sufficient distance from any of the MacMorrogh camps to avert even the shadow of suspicion.
Now the upper crossing of waylayings was within a stone's throw of the end-of-track yards; nay, within an amateur's pistol-shot of the commissary buildings. But Ruiz Gregorio, weighing all the possibilities, found them elastic enough to serve the purpose. A well-calculated shot from behind a sheltering boulder, the heaving of the body into the swift torrent of the Pannikin, and the thing was done. What damning evidence might afterward come to the light of day, if, indeed, it should ever come to light, would be fished out of the stream far enough from any of the MacMorrogh camps.
Thus Ruiz Gregorio Maria y Alvarez, lolling lazily in his saddle while the hard-breathing mustang picked a toilsome path among the strewn boulders and throughthe sliding shale beds. He went even further: an alibi might not be needful, but it would be easy to provide one. Young Jack Benson, if no other, would know that Ford had taken one of the shorter trails from Copah to the camp at Horse Creek.Bueno!He, Ruiz Gregorio, could slip across the river in the dusk when the thing was done, skirt the headquarters camp unseen, and present himself a little later at Señor Frisbie's camp of the track-layers, coming, as it were, direct from Copah, almost upon the heels of Señor Benson. After that, who could connect him with the dead body of a man fished out of a river twenty, fifty, a hundred miles away?
There was a weak link in the chain. Ruiz Gregorio's child-like plot turned upon one pivot of hazard—hazard most likely to be ignored by so good a marksman as the "man-killer." One shot he might permit himself, with little danger of drawing a crowd from the mess tent and the sleeping shanties in the Horse Creek camp. Two would bring the men to their doors. Any greater number would be taken as the signal of a free fight needing spectators. Hence the first shot must suffice.
The Mexican bore this in mind when, arriving at his post opposite the camp in the early dusk, he chose his ambushing boulder so near the descending hill trail that a stout club might have been substituted for the pistol. The weather promise was for a starless night, but the electric arc-lights were already scintillating at theirmastheads in the headquarters railroad yard across the Pannikin. Later, when the daylight was quite gone and the electrics were hollowing out a bowl of stark whiteness in the night, Ruiz Gregorio wished he had chosen otherwise. The camp lights shone full upon him and on the mustang standing with drooped head at his elbow, and the trail on the other side of the boulder was in shadow.
He was about to take the risk of moving farther up the hill-path to a less exposed lurking place, was hesitating only because his indolent soul rebelled at the thought of having to drag Ford's body so many added steps to its burial in the river, when the clink of shod hoofs upon stone warned him that the time for scene-shifting had passed. Pushing the mustang out of the line of sight from the trail, he flattened himself against the great rock and waited.
Ford rode down the last declivity cautiously, for his horse's sake. The trail came out of the hills abruptly, dropping into the rock-strewn river valley within hailing distance of the camp. Well within the sweep of the masthead lights across the stream, the boulder-strewn flat was as light as day, save where the sentinel rocks flung their shadows; and promptly at the first facing of the bright electrics, Ford's horse stumbled aside from the path and began to take short cuts between the thick-standing boulders for the river. This was how the Mexican, instead of having his victim at a complete disadvantage, found himself suddenly uncovered by the flank, exposed, recognized, and hailed in no uncertain tones.
"Hello, Mattacheco! what are you doing here?" Ford had a flash-light picture of the horse standing with his muzzle to the ground; of the man flattened against the rock. Then he saw the dull gleam of the lights upon blued metal. "You devil!" he shouted; and unarmed as he was, spurred his tired beast at the assassin.
Here, then, was the weak link in Ruiz Gregorio's chain twisted to the breaking point at the very outset. Instead of taking a deliberate pot-shot at an unsuspecting victim, he was obliged to face about, to fire hastily at a charging enemy, and to spring nimbly aside to save himself from being ridden down. The saving jump was an awkward one: it brought him into breath-taking collision with the upjerking head of the mustang. When he had recovered his feet and his presence of mind, the charging whirlwind had dashed through the shallows of the Pannikin, and a riderless horse was clattering across the tracks in the railroad yard.
The Mexican waited prudently to see what the camp would say to the single shot. It said nothing; it might have been deserted for all the indications there were of life in it. Ruiz Gregorio snapped the empty shell from his weapon, replacing it with a loaded one, and mountedand rode slowly through the ford. The riderless horse disappearing across the tracks gave him good hope that the hasty shot had accomplished all that a deliberate one might have.
There was no dead man tumbled in a heap in the railroad yard, as he had hoped to find. Silence, the silence of desertion, brooded over the masthead arcs. Painfully the Mexican searched, at the verge of the river, in the black shadows cast by the crowding material cars. Finally he crossed over to the straggling street of the camp, walking now and leading the spent mustang. Silence here, too, broken only by the sputtering sizzle of the electrics. The huge mess tent was dark; there were no lights, save in the closed commissary and in the president's car: no lights, and not a man of the camp's crowding labor army to be seen.
At a less strenuous moment the man-killer would have been puzzled by the unusual stillness and the air of desertion. As it was, he was alertly probing the far-flung shadows. The engineer, if only wounded, would doubtless try to hide in the shadows in the railroad yard.
The Mexican left his horse in the camp street and made an instant search between and under the material cars, coming out now and again to stare suspiciously at the president's private car, standing alone on the siding directly opposite the commissary. The Nadia was occupied. It was lighted within, and the window shadeswere drawn down. Ruiz Gregorio could never get far from the lighted car without being irresistibly drawn back to it, and finally he darted back in time to see a man rise up out of the shadow of the nearest box-car, spring to the platform of the Nadia and kick lustily at the locked door. The door was opened immediately by some one within, and the fugitive plunged to cover—but not before the Mexican's revolver had barked five times with the rapid staccato of a machine gun.
When Ruiz Gregorio, dropping the smoking weapon into its holster, would have mounted to put into instant action the plan of the well-considered alibi, a barrel-bodied figure launched itself from the commissary porch, and a vigorous hand dragged horse and man into the shadow of the stables.
"Off wid you now, you blunderin' dago divvle!" gritted the MacMorrogh savagely. "It's all av our necks ye've put into a rope, this time, damn you!"
The Mexican had dismounted and was calmly reloading his pistol.
"You t'ink-a he's not-a sufficiently kill? I go over to da car and bring-a you da proof,si?"
"You'll come wid me," raved the big contractor. "'Tis out av your clumsy hands, now, ye black-hearted blunderin' cross betune a Digger Indian and a Mexican naygur! Come on, I say!"
The back room of the commissary to which the MacMorrogh led the way held three men; Eckstein, and the two younger members of the contracting firm. They had heard the fusillade in the camp street and were waiting for news. Brian MacMorrogh gave it, garnished with many oaths.
"The pin-brained omadhaun av a Mexican has twishted a rope for all av us! He's let Ford come back, alive; let him get to the very dure av the prisident's car! Then, begorra! he must mades show himself under the electhrics and open fire on the man who was kicking at the dure and looking sthraight at him!"
Eckstein asked a single question.
"Did he get him? If he's dead he can't very well tell who shot him."
"That's the hell av it!" raged the big man. "Who's to know?"
Eckstein spat out the extinct cigar stump he was chewing.
"We are to know—beyond a question of doubt, this time. Who is in the Nadia, besides Ford?"
"The two naygurs."
"No one else?"
MacMorrogh shook his head. "No wan."
"You are sure Mr. Adair and Brissac are out of the way?"
"They got Gallagher to push them up to Frisbie's track camp in Misther North's car an hour before dark."
"None of your men are likely to drift in from the other way up the line?"
"Not unless somebody carries the news av the gold sthrike—and there's nobody going that way to carry it. The camp's empty but for us."
Eckstein rose and buttoned his coat.
"You have held your own strikers—the men you can depend upon: how many do we count, all told?"
"Thirteen, counting the five av us here, and the felly that runs the electhric light plant."
"H'm; it's a hell of a risk: thirteen men knowing what only one should know—and what that one should hurry to forget. But your butter-fingered Mexican has left us no choice. Ford knows enough now to send some of us over the road for life. If he got into that car alive, he must never come out of it alive."
Brian MacMorrogh had unlocked a cupboard in the corner of the room. It was a well-filled gun-rack, and he was passing the Winchesters out to his brothers.
"'Tis so," he said briefly. Then: "There's the two naygurs in the car: what av thim, Misther Eckstein?"
Eckstein took one of the guns and emptied the magazine to make sure of the loading.
"We are thirteen to one; the negroes don't count," he replied coldly. "Call in your men and we'll go and do what's got to be done."