XI
“HOW did you guess?” asked Ora.
“I didn’t guess. I saw a drill hole just beyond where my men were working. I also did a little quick deduction. Miners blast just before they go off shift. The afternoon change of shift is at three o’clock. As I told you I had seen the Apex men come up about one o’clock when their compressor stopped. That hole not only told me that they were closer than we had thought, but that they were up to devilment. I guessed that they had timed to blast just before we were ready to drill at that point. Were you very much frightened?”
“I didn’t like it.” Ora knew that bravery in woman makes no appeal to the lordly male. “But I hardly had time to think; and after all you left me nothing to do.”
“Well, you were game and didn’t scream or cry,” he conceded handsomely. “Let’s light up.”
They had walked as far as the station at the foot of the shaft. Gregory unlocked the door of a small cupboard, found two candles and inserted them in miners’ candlesticks that were stabbed into the walls. They flickered in the draft as a skip rattled up from the second level, but relieved the oppressive darkness.
“Why, your hair is down!” exclaimed Gregory.
Ora put up a hand. “So it is! Well—I am sure I never should know if my hair fell down at a good play, and ours was live drama. I’ll braid it and put on my veil up above.”
He watched her for a moment as she sat on a box braiding her long fair hair, vaguely recalling the legend of the Lorelei. He noticed that her eyes as she peered up at him looked green in that uncertain light. But in a moment his thoughts wandered from her. He folded his arms and stared downward.
Ora leaned back against the wall. She saw that he had forgotten her, but had made up her mind to accept him as he was; she had no more desire to dictate his moods thanto read in advance the book of the next two months. There was the same pleasurably painful vibration in her nerves as on the night when she had piled stake upon stake at Monte Carlo. From that scene her thoughts travelled naturally to Valdobia and she suddenly laughed aloud.
“What are you laughing at?” demanded Gregory suspiciously.
“I was trying to imagine that we were imprisoned in the underground dungeon of an Italian palace in the middle ages.”
“Hard work, I should think. Although if we had a cave-in I guess the results would be about the same.”
“And you? Were you seeing your minerals winking three thousand feet below?”
He laughed then, and sat beside her. “At all events the mystery down there is more romantic than your mediæval dungeons—and so will the great underground caverns be when the ores have been taken out.”
“Pity the caverns—stopes!—have to be filled up with débris to prevent the mine caving in,” said Ora flippantly. “I went underground in Butte last week—to the eighteenth level of the Leonard. Nothing but endless streets and cross-alleys, all numbered——”
“And you didn’t find that interesting?” he asked indignantly. “To be a third of a mile below the surface of the earth and find it laid out like a city, with streets and rooms, and stations ten times as large as this, and lighted with electricity?”
“Yes, but the knowledge that you have a third of a mile of those streets and rooms—seventeen levels of them—on top of you, supported only by waste rock in the stopes, and timbers that are always snapping in two from the terrific pressure—timbermen working at every turn—‘Save YOURSELF’ the first thing you see when you leave that cage—Oh, well, I felt there was quite enough romance on top of the earth.”
“I am deeply disappointed in you. You told me once—why, even lately——”
“Oh, I haven’t changed the least little bit. Nothing in life,” and she looked at him with laughing eyes, “interests me as much at present as these two mines. But I am thankful that we are still within a reasonable distance of the surface. I am quite content to screw up my eyes andwander in fancy among the primary deposits close to the central fires. If I had a mine like yours, full of the beautiful copper ores instead of that hideous pyroxenite of mine, I should leave a glittering layer in every stope, support the roof with polished stone columns, light with hidden electric bulbs, and wander from one to the other imagining myself in Aladdin’s palace.”
“A fine practical miner you would make. It’s lucky that your mine is pyroxenite, not quartz. That is if you want to live in Europe.—Do you?”
“Of course. What have I in this part of the world? A mine cannot satisfy a woman for ever. I suppose you wouldn’t care if you never saw a woman again!”
“Oh!” He was looking hard at her.
“What else were you thinking of just now?” asked Ora, with that perverse desire to be superficial which so often possesses American women in decisive moments.
He sighed impatiently. “I’ve got a big job on my hands, one that will take me away from here more or less. Did Mark tell you of a land deal I put through?”
“I should think so!”
“Well, I’ve got to build that railroad. Apex will close down when it finds I won’t let its men work underground. Amalgamated’s next move will be to bring suit for apex rights, and get out an injunction to enjoin me from working on that vein until the case is decided. As soon as I have driven them out now, however, I must get to work on the railroad—find my engineers—Oh, there are too many details to bother you with. But it means that I must spend a good deal of time in Butte until the thing is started——”
“How delighted Ida will be!” interrupted Ora softly. “And that house will be so comfortable after your cabin.”
For a moment he did not speak. Nor did his face betray him; but she fancied that his muscles stiffened. He replied suavely: “I should have gone on to say that it is more likely I shall have to attend to the matter in Helena. That is the centre of the land interest. It is doubtful if I could find the sort of men I want in Butte.”
“Have you any other land schemes on hand?”
“Not at present.”
“What does that mean?”
“Well—when I have taken a couple more millions outof this hill I shall begin to buy land, put it under the ditch, build the short railroads that may be necessary, and sell to small farmers—in other words push along the colonisation of this state. I believe you gave me that idea—the night we talked Butte—the first time, I mean.”
“I thought you had forgotten that night altogether.”
“Forgotten it!” Ora’s heart stood still at the explicit vibration in his well-ordered voice. She leaned back and closed her eyes. He had loved her all these months, dreamed of her as she had dreamed of him. Her first sensation of wonder and delight was succeeded by a faint disappointment.
She had the instinct of the born huntress, although she was far too highly civilised to have recognised it before. She wondered if his capitulation meant her own deliverance, too ignorant in the ways of love to guess that whether this were a passing or a permanent phase depended on the man.
While Gregory hurried on to tell her of all he should be able to do for Montana with the millions at present locked in the vaults of his hill, she had a full moment of honesty, and confessed that she had come out here to make Gregory Compton love her. And he did! It was a mighty personality to conquer; and the victory had been won long since! But the disappointment passed in a cynical smile. That he had no intention of declaring himself her lover was as patent as his inhuman power of self-control. Here were barricades to storm if barricades she wanted? What difference? And did she?
He sprang to his feet and stood at the foot of the shaft, looking up.
“They’re coming down,” he said.
Joshua Mann emerged a moment later.
“Apex bunch being rounded up to go below,” he said. “Our men are on the way.”
“Steam on the air line?”
“You bet!”
“Let’s get to work.” He turned to Ora. “Stay here till I come back,” he said peremptorily. “I can’t take you up in the skip now.”
“I am quite comfortable,” said Ora, coolly. “How many men will come down?”
“Five.” And he and Mann disappeared into the tunnel.
Ora waited until the other men had descended one by one and run into the blackness. Then she dislodged one of the candlesticks from the wall and ran after them. When she reached the fault drift she thrust the long point of the candlestick into a stull before turning the corner. Then she crept toward the station, from which she could witness the punishment about to be inflicted upon the Apex men, whatever it might be.
There was a glimmer of light in the new drift. Ora saw the men binding a piece of hose to the same length of pipe. They attached the hose to the air line and held it just inside the ragged hole some twelve feet above.
There was a distant murmur of voices overhead and to the right. The solitary candle was extinguished. The murmur of voices in the drift which led from Apex shaft along the continuation of the Primo vein grew louder. Men were laughing. One man was giving orders. It appeared that they were to let themselves down and go systematically to work on the Perch vein, which was now driving under the Apex claim.
Ora heard a sharp whispered word: “Now!” and barely recognised Gregory’s voice. A second later and she was deafened by the roar and hiss of escaping steam, mingled with shrieks of agony above, and fiendish cat-calls and jeers below, all expressed in the spectacular profanity of the mining camp. The episode was over in a moment. The Apex men tumbled over one another in their anxiety to leave the scene, and those manifestly disabled—Ora could hear them gasping horribly as the steam was turned off abruptly—were dragged away. She felt her own way rapidly along the fault drift, snatched her candlestick from the wall as she turned the corner, and scampered back to the shaft station. When the men arrived she was sitting demurely on the box. Gregory evidently had telephoned from the other station, for the skip came rattling down just before his appearance at the head of his laughing, cursing column.
“Did it go off well?” asked Ora.
“Did it?” cried Mann, tossing his cap in the air.
“They’re settled for the moment,” said Gregory. “They’ll come back at us later with steam on their own air line, and slacked lime; but we’ll be ready for them. They stand no show.”
Two of the men had been left on watch. Gregory lifted Ora into the skip. He and Mann stood on the edge. A second more and Ora was holding her breath as they were hurtled upward at express speed, the metal car banging from side to side of the shaft. In something under three-quarters of a minute Gregory helped her to alight in the shaft house, while the skip descended for the miners.
“Well,” he said, smiling, as she lifted her braid to the top of her head and wound the veil about it, “have you supped full of sensations for one day?”
“The last was the worst! And I do mean the skip. Now that we are where you cannot beat me I will confess that I followed you and saw your neat little mediæval revenge from the station——”
“Hush!” Gregory glanced about apprehensively, and drew her outside. “You mustn’t tell anyone else that. You don’t want to be summoned to the witness stand, I suppose?”
Ora gasped. “I never thought of that.”
“When will women let men do their thinking?” Gregory looked the primeval male as he scowled down at her. Nor did he mitigate her alarms with the information that underground battles seldom were continued in the courts. “Now, I am going to take you to your cottage, and I want you to stay there until the trouble is over. The men are bound to get drunk and fight. Better go to Butte——”
“I won’t.”
“Very well, then, stay in your house.”
“And be bored to death? Besides. I need exercise. I’ll roam all over the place unless you promise to come to supper every night and then take me for a walk in the woods.”
His eyes flickered. “Perhaps your engineer——”
“He’s a mere child. I hate boys. And I must have exercise.”
He looked at her with apparent stolidity for another moment, but she knew that he was investigating her expressive orbs. They expressed nothing that could be construed as flirtation, coquetry, or personal interest in himself. He saw himself mirrored there merely as the friend of her husband and the husband of her friend. “Very well,” he said curtly and swung on his heel. “I suppose I must look out for you. Come along.”