And at the word the big engine lifted its voice with a shout and a bell-clang, and shook itself free for the race.
FromLeadville to the point in the sky-line of the Continental Divide where the southern shoulder of Mount Massive dips to Hagerman's Pass, the railway grade climbs with the old Glenwood trail; and when Malta was left behind and the ascent fairly begun, Jeffard had fleeting glimpses of the road over which he and Garvin and the patient burro had toiled eastward the day before. From outer curves and promontories doubled at storming speed the hoof-beaten trail flicked into view and disappeared; and at times the brief vistas framed a reminiscent picture of two foot-weary pilgrims plodding doggedly in the wake of a pack-laden ass.
It was impossible to conceive that these phantoms belonged to to-day's yesterday. The crowding events of a few hours had already pushed them into a far-away past; their entities were lost in the kaleidoscopic whirl which had transformed the two men no less than their prefigurings. What had the foolish witling raving yonder on his way to despoilment and death with the two plunderers in common with the self-contained son of the wilderness, who had but yesterday been his brother's keeper in a world of disheartenment? And this other; steam-hurrying on his way to the same goal, with set jawand tight lips and resolute purpose in his eyes; by how much or little could he be identified with the undeterminate one, whose leaden-footed trudgings the storming locomotive was taking in reverse?
Through some such cycle the wheel of reflection rolled around to its starting point in things present, and Jeffard awoke to the moving realities of steep grades and breath-cutting curves, yawning abysses and hurtling cliffs, flitting backward to the cacophoneobbligatoof the exhaust and the clangorous cries of racking machinery. The engineer braced on his box was a muscular giant, with the jaw of a prizefighter, and steel-gray eyes that had long since looked death out of countenance. Jeffard took his measure in an appraisive glance. "If your engineer is good for anything," Bartrow had said; and the glance slew the conditional doubt. What a fearless driver of fast locomotives might do toward reversing the fate of the besotted one would be done.
In the mean time the race was to the judicious rather than to the swift. The interminable succession of grades and curves clogged the wheels, and the great engine snorted and wallowed on its upward way, slowing down at times until the throbbing puffs of the escaping steam seemed to beat no more than leisurely minuet-time. But the climbing miles to the summit of the pass were measured doggedly, if not with speed. No trifling advantage of tangent or "let-up" was passed without fresh spurrings of the throttle; and when the engine swept around the long curve which is the approach to the telegraphstation at the summit tunnel, the engineer glanced at his watch and nodded across to his passenger.
"We're goin' to make it," he said, in answer to Jeffard's shouted inquiry. "It'll be a close call, but the old Ninety-seven's a bird."
At the station the operator tossed a telegram through the cab window. It was from Bartrow, and its major purpose was to give the figures of the assay, which he had obtained from the little German. They were sufficiently significant, and Bartrow's added urgings were unnecessary. "I'm standing over the train dispatcher here with a club," he wired. "Don't make any economical mistake at your end of the string."
The engineer had finished oiling around and had clambered back to his box. The water supply was replenished, and the fireman was uprearing the tank-spout. Jeffard crossed the footboard and thrust a little roll of bank notes between the fingers of the brawny hand on the throttle lever. The engineer smoothed the bills on his knee and wagged his head as one doubtful.
"That's pretty well up to a month's pay."
"Well, you are going to earn it."
"Better keep it till I do," said the stalwart one, offering it back.
"No; I'm not afraid to pay you in advance. You are going to do your best, and I am not trying to bribe you. It's yours, whether we make it or not."
The big man thrust the bills into his pocket andopened the throttle. "You go over there and sit down and hold your hair on," he commanded. "I'm goin' to break the record when we get out into daylight on the other side o' the mountain."
Jeffard was still groping for hand and foot holds on the fireman's seat when the locomotive rolled out of the western portal of the summit tunnel and the record-breaking began. Of the brain-benumbing rush down the gorges of the Frying Pan on a flying locomotive, one recalls but a confused memory; a phantasmagoric jumble of cliffs and chasms, backward-flitting forests and gyrating mountain peaks, trestles and culverts roaring beneath the drumming wheels, the shrieks of the whistle and the intermittent stridor of escaping steam in the iron throat of the safety-valve; a goblin dance of matter in motion to a war blast of chaotic uproar. One sets the teeth to endure, and comes back to the cosmic point of view with a deep-drawn sigh of relief when the goblin dance is over, and the engine halts at the junction where the Aspen branch leaves the main line and crosses the Frying Pan to begin the ascent of the Roaring Fork.
From this point the competing railways parallel each other, and at the junction the trains on either line are within whistle call. To the engineer's question the telegraph operator nodded an affirmative.
"Yep; she's just gone by. That's her whistlin' for Emma now. What's the rush?—backed to beat her into Aspen?"
The engineer nodded in his turn, and signed theorder for the right of way on the branch. A minute later the junction station was also a memory, and Jeffard was straining his eyes for a glimpse of the passenger train on the other line. A short distance to the southward the rival lines meet and cross, exchanging river banks for the remainder of the run to Aspen. The passenger train was first at the crossing, and Jeffard had his glimpse as the engine slackened speed. Not to lose a rail-length in the hard-fought race, Jeffard's man ran close to the crossing to await his turn, and the light engine came to a stand within pistol shot of the train, which was slowly clanking over the crossing-frogs. Jeffard slipped from his seat and went over to the engineer's gangway. It would be worth something if he could make sure that Garvin was on the train.
The espial was rewarded and punished in swift sequence. The trucks of the smoking-car were jolting over the crossing, and Jeffard saw the head and shoulders of the insane one filling an open window. It was conspicuously evident that Garvin had drained the bottle to the frenzy mark. He was yelling like a lost soul, and shaking impotent fists at the halted engine. Jeffard's eye measured the distance to the moving car. It was but down one embankment and up the other.
"That's my man," he said quickly to the engineer. "Do you suppose I could make it across?"
"Dead easy," was the reply; and Jeffard swung down to the step of the engine to drop off. The impulse saved his life. As he quitted his hold ahairy arm bared to the elbow was thrust out of the window next to the yelling maniac. There was a glint of sun-rays on polished metal, and a pistol ball bit out the corner of the cab under the engineer's arm-rest. Jeffard desisted, and climbed to his place when the moving train gathered headway.
"Damn a crazy loon, anyway," said the engineer, much as one might pass the time of day. "They'd ought to have sense enough to take his gun away from him."
Jeffard explained in a sentence. "It wasn't the crazy one; it was one of the two cut-throats who are kidnaping him—the fellows I'm trying to beat."
"The fellers you're goin' to beat," corrected the engineer. "We'll head 'em off now if the Ninety-seven goes in on three legs. The gall o' the cusses!—why, they might ha' shot somebody!"
From the crossing in the lower valley neither line encounters any special obstacle to speed; and under equal conditions a locomotive race up the Roaring Fork might be an affair of seconds and rail lengths for the victor. But the light engine with regardless orders speedily distanced the passenger train with stops to make; and when the smokes of the mountain-girt town at the head of the valley came in sight, the big engineer pulled his watch and shouted triumphant:—
"Eleven-forty,—and their time's twelve-five. We'll be twenty minutes to the good in spite o'"—
It is conceivable that he would have used a strongfigure, but the depravity of things inanimate took the word out of his mouth. There was a tearing crash to the rear; a shock as if a huge projectile had overtaken them; and the flying locomotive came to earth like an eagle with a mangled wing. It was a broken axle under the tender; a tested steel shaft which had outlived the pounding race across the mountains only to fall apart in the last level mile of the home stretch. Jeffard clambered down with the enginemen, and saw defeat, crushing and definite, in the wreck under the tender. But the big engineer was a man for a crisis. One glance at the wreck sufficed, and the fireman got his orders in shot-like sentences.
"Up with you, Tom, and give her the water,—both injectors! Drop me the sledge, and get the pinch-bar under the head o' that couplin'-pin when I drive it up. Give her a scoop 'r two o' coal—'nough to run in with. By cripes! we'll beat 'em yet!"
The minced oath came from beneath the engine, and was punctuated by mighty upward blows of the sledge hammer on the coupling-pin, whose head was rising by half-inch impulses from its seat in the footplate. Jeffard saw and understood. The engineer meant to cut loose from the wreck and finish the run without the tender.
"Use me if you can," he offered. "What shall I do?"
"Climb up there and help Tom with that bar. If we can pull this pin we're in it yet."
Jeffard laid hold with the fireman, and together they pried at the reluctant pin. It yielded at length, but when the engineer had disconnected the water and air hose and mounted to his place in the cab, the roar of the oncoming passenger train was ajar in the air.
"You stay with the wreck, Tom, and flag it!" was the final command; and then to Jeffard, as the engine shot away from its disabled member: "How much time have you got to have?"
"I don't know. It depends upon how much those fellows have found out, and how drunk my partner is. At the worst, a minute or two will serve."
It was still to be had, but in the very yard a thrown switch intervened, and the small margin vanished. The passenger train was in, and Jeffard saw defeat again; but he dropped from the locomotive and ran up the yard, forgetting in the heat of it that he had elided two meals in the twenty-four hours. The final dash brought its reward. He took the first vehicle that offered and reached the principal hotel in time to see Garvin and his keepers descend from a carriage at the entrance.
"Yes, sir; in one moment. Those three fellows who came in just now? They've gone up to their room. Be with us over night?"
Thus the hotel clerk in answer to Jeffard's gasping inquiry. To whom the proletary, fighting desperately for some semblance of equanimity:—
"I—I'll be here indefinitely; no, I have nobaggage; I'll pay in advance. Can you give me the room next to these men? The crazy one is my partner, and I'll be responsible for him."
The clerk hesitated, but Jeffard won his cause without knowing it by the necessary parade of bank-notes in the pecuniary affair.
"Certainly, sir; the boy will show you up. You won't trouble him? All right; Number Nineteen—second floor, third door to the right. Dinner is served, when you're ready."
If Jeffard had forgotten his directions the uproar in Number Eighteen would have guided him. Garvin's voice, uplifted in alternate malediction and maudlin bathos, jarred upon the air of the corridor. Jeffard paused. The long chase was ended and only a pine door intervened between pursuer and pursued. He laid a hand on the doorknob. His breath came hard, and the veins in his forehead were like knotted whipcords. While he paused some broken babblings from within wrought a swift change in him. The knotted veins relaxed and he laughed, not mirthfully but with a cynical upcurve of the lip. His hand slipped from the doorknob, and he stole away, cat-like, to let himself noiselessly into the adjoining room.
There was a door of communication between the two rooms, bolted on Jeffard's side, and with the knob removed. He went on his knees to the square hole through the lock, but the angle of vision included no more than a blank patch of the opposite wall. Then he laid his ear to the aperture. Outof the jangling discord beyond the door came fragmentary lucidities pieceable together into a strand of sequence. Garvin had told all he knew, or all he could remember, and the robbery paused at the trivial detail of the most feasible route over the mountains from Aspen. But to make sure, and possibly to provide against the contingency of having to eliminate Garvin, some rude map was needed; and this one of the plunderers was evidently trying to draw under instructions from the witling. At the mention of a map, Jeffard rummaged his pockets without taking his ear from the door. From one of them he drew a crumpled bit of paper, thumbed and crease-broken. It was Garvin's map of the claim and the trail, passed over for inspection in the hollow of a certain lambent evening months before and never returned.
Who shall say what was behind the inscrutable darkling of the eyes of him when he returned the paper to his pocket and bent to listen with four senses lending their acuteness to the fifth? Was it a softening memory of the loving-kindnesses of one James Garvin to a man soul-sick and body-wasted, snatched as a charred brand out of a fire of his own kindling? Or was it the stirring of a ruthless devil of self; a devil never more than dormant in any heart insurgent; a fell demon of the pit whose arousing waits only upon opportunity, whose power is to transform pity into remorseless ingratitude and ruth into relentless greed? There was room for the alternative.
"Here; take another nip o' this and pull yourself together,"—it was the voice of the hawk-faced one. "If you wasn't such a howlin' idiot you'd see that we're the only friends you've got. I keep a-tellin' you that that slick pardner o' yours was on that wild ingine, and if you don't sink a shaft on your wits he's a-goin' to do you up cold!"
The appeal brought blood as a blow. The crash of an overturned chair was followed by an explosion of cursings, the outcries of a soul in torment. And when the madman choked in the fullness of it, a voice said: "Pick up that chair, Pete, and pull him down. He'll be seein' things in a minute, and that'll settle the whole shootin'-match." There was a struggle short but violent, the jar of a forcible downsetting, and a sound as of one flinging his arms abroad upon the table. After which the tormented one became brokenly articulate. What he said is unrecordable. With maudlin oath and thick-tongued ravings he rehearsed his fancied wrongs and breathed forth promises of vengeance, calling down the wrath of the spheres upon one Henry Jeffard and his posterity to the third and fourth generation.
"That's all right; I'd kill him on sight, if I was you. But just now you're killin' time, instid. First you know, he'll be on his way acrost the range, and then where'll you be? You don't even know that he didn't locate that claim before you came out. Git down to business and tell us where that valley is, if you ever knowed. You said it was on a creek"—
Jeffard rose and went softly across the room to sit on the edge of the bed. The unfathomable light was still in his eyes, and his thought wrought itself into words.
"It's done; they'll wring it out of him, and then fling him aside like so much offal. I wonder if it is worth while to try to save it—for him. What good would it do him?—or, rather, what evil thing is there that it wouldn't make possible for him? What devil of curiosity led me to open this Pandora-box of responsibility? For I am responsible, first for the finding, and now for the keeping, and hereafter for what shall come of it. That is, if I save it—for him." He got upon his feet and tiptoed back to the door of communication, listening once more. The clamor had quieted down, and the scratching of a pen gnawed the silence. Then came the voice of the hawk-faced one.
"There she is; you sign your name right there and it'll be all right. It's the only way; you're too drunk to pull strings with that pardner o' yours, and we're goin' to stand by you, see? All we want is the authority."
Jeffard started back and made as if he would fling himself against the locked door. Then he thought better of it.
"That simplifies it," he mused, pacing up and down with noiseless steps. "He has signed away whatever right he had, and now it's my turn. If I pay the price I can checkmate them. But can I pay the price? Surely, if any man can; I, whohave deliberately turned my back upon the world's approval for a much less thing. And in the end the money will atone."
A stir in the adjoining room admonished him that the time for action had come. He wheeled quickly and let himself into the corridor. A key was rattling in the lock of Number Eighteen as he passed, but he found the stair before the bolt was shot. In the lobby he stopped to ask a hurried question of a man who was opening his mail at the public writing-table. The question was answered curtly, but the man left his letters and went to the door to point the reply.
"I see it; thank you," said Jeffard; and went his way rapidly, with now and then a glance behind him as if to make sure that he was not followed.
In a few minutes he came back, walking slowly, with his head down and his hands in the pockets of the brown duck miner's coat. There was a knot of loungers in front of the hotel, gathered about the door and peering in; a group of curious ones, which grew by accretions from the by-passers. A disturbance of some sort was afoot in the lobby—two persuasive ones struggling peaceably with a drunken man, while the bystanders looked on with smiles pitying or cynical, each after his kind.
Jeffard pushed into the circle, and those who remarked him said that he seemed to see nothing but the struggling trio. Some of the onlookers were near enough to hear what he said to the two who were not drunk.
"The game is closed, gentlemen, and you are out of it. When you get on the ground you will find the claim located—in my name."
Two right hands made simultaneous backward dips, and two potential murderers apparently realized the folly of it at the same instant. But the drunken one spun around with his face ablaze, a fiercer madness than that of drink burning in his bloodshot eyes.
"You? You played the sneak an' located hit behind my back? In your name, d' ye say?—your name? Well, by God, you hain't got a name!"
A pistol cracked with the oath, and Jeffard put his hands to his head and pitched forward. The crowd fell back aghast, to surge inward again with a rush when the reaction came. Then a shout was raised at the door, and the haggard manslayer, cured now of all madness save that of fear, burst through the inpressing throng and disappeared.
Evenin a Colorado mining town a shooting affray at midday in the lobby of the principal hotel creates more or less of a sensation, and it was fully fifteen minutes before the buzz of public comment subsided sufficiently to suffer Mr. Mark Denby to go back to his letters and telegrams. He had made one in the circle of onlookers; had seen and heard, and, now that the wounded man had been carried to his room and cared for, and the hunt was up and afield for the would-be murderer, was willing to forget. But a traveling salesman at the opposite blotting-pad must needs keep the pool astir.
"Say, wasn't that the most cold-blooded thing you ever saw? 'Y gad! I've heard that these Western towns were fearfully tough, but I had no idea a man wouldn't be safe to sit down and write his house in the lobby of a decent hotel. 'Pon my word, I actually heard the 'zip' of that bullet!"
Denby looked across at the hinderer of oblivion, and remembered that the salesman had been well to the rear of the battery in action. Wherefore he said, with a touch of the gravest irony: "You'll get used to it, after a bit. Suppose you take a spin around the block in the open air; that will doubtless steady your nerves so you can write the house without a quiver."
"Think it would? I believe I'll try it; I can't hold a pen still to save my life. But say, I might happen to run up against that fellow, and he might recognize me and think I was after him."
"In which case he would in all probability draw and quarter you and take your scalp for a memento. On second thought, I don't know but you're safer where you are."
The mere suggestion was perspiratory, and the traveling man mopped his face. But there are occasions when one must talk or burst, and presently he began again.
"Say, I suppose they'll lynch that fellow if they catch him, won't they?"
The badgered one came to attention with a fine-lined frown of annoyance radiating fan-like above his eyes. He was of the stuff of which man-masters are made; a well-knit figure of a man, rather under than over the average of height and breadth, but so fairly proportioned as to give the impression of unmeasured strength in reserve,—the strength of steel under silk. His face was bronzed with the sun-stain of the altitudes, but it was as smooth as a child's, and beardless, with thin lips and masterful eyes of the sort that can look unmoved upon things unnamable.
"Lynch him? Oh, no; you do us an injustice," he said, and the tone was quite as level as the eye-volley. "We don't lynch people out here for shooting,—only for talking too much."
Whereat one may picture unacclimated loquacitygasping and silenced, with the owner of the "Chincapin" and other listed properties going on to read his letters and telegrams in peace. The process furthered itself in the sequence of well-ordered dispatch until a message, damp from the copying-press and dated at Leadville, came to the surface. It covered two of the yellow sheets in the spacious handwriting of the receiving operator, and Denby read it twice, and yet once again, before laying it aside. Whatever it was, it was not suffered to interrupt the orderly sequence of things; and Denby had read the last of the letters before he held up a summoning finger for a bell-boy.
"Go and ask the clerk the name of the man who was shot, will you?"
The information came in two words, and the querist gathered up his papers and sent the boy for his room key. At the stairhead he met the surgeon and stopped him to ask about the wounded man.
"How are you, Doctor? What is the verdict? Is there a fighting chance for him?"
"Oh, yes; much more than that. It isn't as bad as it might have been; the skull isn't fractured. But it was enough to knock him out under the circumstances. He had skipped two or three meals, he tells me, and was under a pretty tense strain of excitement."
"Then he is conscious?"
The physician laughed. "Very much so. He is sitting up to take my prescription,—which was a square meal. Whatever the strain was, it isn't offyet. He insists that he must mount and ride this afternoon if he has to be lashed in the saddle; has already ordered a horse, in fact. He is plucky."
"Then he is able to talk business, I suppose."
"Able, yes; but if you can get anything out of him, you'll do better than I could. He won't talk,—won't even tell what the row was about."
"Won't he?" The man of affairs crossed the corridor and tapped on the door of Number Nineteen. There was no response, and he turned the knob and entered. The shades were drawn and there was a cleanly odor of aseptics in the air of the darkened room. The wounded man was propped among pillows on the bed, with a well-furnished tea-tray on his knees. He gave prompt evidence of his ability to talk.
"Back again, are you? I told you I had nothing to say for publication, and I meant it." This wrathfully; then he discovered his mistake, but the tone of the careless apology was scarcely more conciliatory. "Oh—excuse me. I thought it was the reporter."
Bartrow's correspondent found a chair and introduced himself with charitable directness. "My name is Denby. I am here because Mr. Richard Bartrow wires me to look you up."
Jeffard delayed the knife and fork play long enough to say: "Denby?—oh, yes; I remember. Thank you," and there the interview bade fair to die of inanition. Jeffard went on with his dinner as one who eats to live; and Denby tilted his chairgently and studied his man as well as he might in the twilight of the drawn shades. After a time, he said:—
"Bartrow bespeaks my help for you. He says your affair may need expediting: does it?"
Jeffard's rejoinder was almost antagonistic. "How much do you know of the affair?"
"What the whole town knows by this time—added to what little Bartrow tells me in his wire. You or your partner have stumbled upon an abandoned claim which promises to be a bonanza. One of you—public rumor is a little uncertain as to which one—tried to euchre the other; and it seems that you have won in the race to the Recorder's office, and have come out of it alive. Is that the summary?"
He called it public rumor, but it was rather a shrewd guess. Jeffard did not hasten to confirm it. On the contrary, his reply was evasive.
"You may call it an hypothesis—a working hypothesis, if you choose. What then?"
The promoter was not of those who swerve from conclusions. "It follows that you are a stout fighter, and a man to be helped, or a very great rascal," he said coolly.
Again the knife and fork paused, and the wounded man's gaze was at least as steady as that of his conditional accuser. "It may simplify matters, Mr. Denby, if I say that I expect nothing from public rumor."
The mine-owner shrugged his shoulders as an unwillingarbiter who would fain wash his hands of the ethical entanglement if he could.
"It's your own affair, of course,—the public opinion part of it. But it may prove to be worth your while not to ignore the suffrages of those who make and unmake reputations."
"Why?"
"Because you will need capital,—honest capital,—and"—
He left the sentence in the air, and Jeffard brought it down with a cynical stonecast.
"And, under the circumstances, an honest capitalist might hesitate, you would say. Possibly; but capital, as I know it, is not so discriminating when the legal requirements are satisfied. There will be no question of ownership involved in the development of the 'Midas.'"
"Legal ownership, you mean?"
"Legal or otherwise. When the time for investment comes, I shall be abundantly able to assure the capitalist."
"To guarantee the investment: doubtless. But capital is not always as unscrupulous as you seem to think."
"No?"—the tilt of the negative was almost aggressive. "There are borrowers and borrowers, Mr. Denby. It's the man without collateral who is constrained to make a confidant of his banker."
The blue-gray eyes of the master of men looked their levelest, and the clean-shaven face was shrewdly inscrutable. "Pardon me, Mr. Jeffard,but there are men who couldn't borrow with the Orizaba behind them."
Jeffard parried the eye-thrust, and brushed the generalities aside in a sentence.
"All of which is beside the mark, and I have neither the strength nor the inclination to flail it out with you. As you say, I shall need capital—yours or another's. State the case—yours, or mine,—in so many words, if you please."
"Briefly, then: the equity in this affair lies between you and the man who tried to kill you. I mean by this that the bonanza is either yours or his. If it were a partnership discovery there would have been no chance for one of you to overreach the other. You'll hardly deny that there was a sharp fight for possession: you both advertised that fact pretty liberally."
Jeffard was listening with indifference, real or feigned, and he neither denied nor affirmed. "Go on."
"From the point of view of an unprejudiced observer the evidence is against your partner. He comes here drunk and abusive, in company with two men whose faces would condemn them anywhere, and squanders his lead in the race in a supplementary carouse. And a little later, when he finds that you have outclassed him, he shoots you down like a dog in a fit of drunken fury. To an impartial onlooker the inference is fairly obvious."
"And that is?"—
"That your partner is the scoundrel; that thediscovery is yours, and that he and his accomplices were trying to rob you. I don't mind saying that this is my own inference, but I shall be glad to have it confirmed."
Jeffard looked up quickly. "Then Bartrow hasn't told you"—
"Bartrow's message was merely introductory; two pages of eulogy, in fact, as any friendly office of Dick's is bound to be. He doesn't go into details."
Jeffard put the tea-tray aside and with it the air of abstraction, and in a better light his interlocutor would not have failed to remark the swift change from dubiety to assurance.
"Will you bear with me, Mr. Denby, if I say that your methods are a little indirect? You say that the evidence is against James Garvin, and yet you give me to understand that it will be well if I can clear myself."
"Exactly; a word of assurance is sometimes worth many deductions."
"But if, for reasons of my own, I refuse to say the word?"
The promoter's shrug was barely perceptible. "I don't see why you should refuse."
Jeffard went silent at that, lying back with closed eyes and no more than a twitching of the lips to show that he was not asleep. After what seemed an interminable interval to the mine-owner, he said:—
"I do refuse, for the present. A few days later, when I have done what I have to do, there will betime enough to discuss ways and means—and ethics, if you still feel inclined that way. May I trouble you to run that window-shade up?" He was sitting on the edge of the bed and groping beneath it for his shoes.
The promoter admitted the light and ventured a question.
"What are you going to do?"
"Get on the ground with the least possible delay."
The shoes were found, but when the wounded one bent to lace them the room spun around and he would have fallen if Denby had not caught him.
"You're not fit," said the master of men, not unsympathetically. "You couldn't sit a horse if your life depended upon it."
"I must; therefore I can and will," Jeffard asserted, with fine determination. "Be good enough to ask the bell-boy to come in and lace my shoes."
The man with a mission to compel other men smiled. His fetish was indomitable resolution, for himself first, and afterward for those who deserved; and here was a man who, whatever his lacks and havings in the ethical field, was at least courageous. Having admitted so much, the promoter went down on one knee to lace the courageous one's shoes, dissuading him, meanwhile.
"You can't go to-day; the wound-fever will come on presently, and you'll be a sick man. Let it rest a while. Having put himself on the criminal side of the fence by trying to kill you, your partner willhardly dare to jump the claim in person; he will have to find a proxy, and that will ask for time,—more time than the sheriff-dodging will permit."
"His proxies are here, and they will act without instructions from him," said Jeffard, with his hands to his head and his teeth set to keep the words from shaping themselves into a groan.
"You mean the two who were with him?"
"Yes. So far as the present fight is concerned, the three are one; and two of them are still free to act."
"So?—that's different." Denby finished tying the second shoe and rose to begin measuring a sentinel's beat between the window and the door, pacing evenly with his brows knitted and his hands clasped behind him. "You know what to expect, then?"
"I know that I have been twice shot at within the past two hours, and that the moments are golden."
"But you are in no condition to go in and hold it alone! You'll have to meet force with force. You ought to have at least three or four good men with you."
"What I have to do presupposes a clear field," said Jeffard guardedly. "If it should come to blows, the discussion of—of ethics will be indefinitely postponed, I'm afraid."
"Humph! I suppose your reasons are as strong as your obstinacy. How far is it to your claim?"
"I don't know the exact distance; about twenty miles, I believe. But there is a mountain range intervening."
"You can't ride it in your present condition; it's a sheer physical impossibility."
"I shall ride it."
"What is the use of being an ass?" demanded the master of men, losing patience for once in a way. "Don't you see you can't stand alone?"
Jeffard struggled to his feet and wavered across the room to a chair. Denby laughed,—a quiet little chuckle of appreciation.
"I didn't mean literally; I meant in the business affair. You'll have to have help from the start. That means that you will have to trust some one. From what you say it is evident that there will be an immediate attempt made to jump the claim; an attempt which will be afoot and on the ground long before you can get there. Let us be reasonable and take hold of the live facts. I have a man here who is both capable and trustworthy. Let me send him in with a sufficient force to stand off the jumpers until you are able to hold your own."
Jeffard shook his head. "I can't do it, unreasonable as it may seem. I must go first and alone. That is another mystery, you will say, but I can't help it. If I win through it alive I shall be here again in a day or two, ready to talk business. More than that I can't say now."
Denby's thin lips came together in a straight line, with a click of the white teeth behind them. "As you please. I am not going about to prove to you that you would lose nothing by trusting me from the start. Can I do anything toward helping you off?"
"Yes; you can give me your shoulder down the stair and a lift into the saddle."
The little journey to the ground floor was made in silence. When they were passing the desk the clerk said: "Your horse is at the door, Mr. Jeffard. I was just about to send up word. Are you feeling better?"
"I am all right." He leaned heavily on the counter and paid his bill. "Did the liveryman leave any message?"
"No, only to say that he has stocked the saddle-bags as you directed."
The personally conducted journey went on to the sidewalk, and Denby heaved the wounded one into the saddle, steadying him therein till the vertigo loosed its hold.
"Anything else you can delegate?"
"No, thank you; nothing that I think of."
"You are still determined to go?"
"Quite determined."
"Well, you are a stubborn madman, and I rather like you for it; that's all I have to say. Good luck to you."
Jeffard gathered the reins and sat reflective what time the broncho sniffed the cool breeze pouring down from the higher slopes of the western range. When the horse would have set out, Jeffard restrained him yet another moment.
"You intimated a few minutes ago that I was afraid to trust you, Mr. Denby," he said, picking and choosing among the words as one who has adifficult course to steer. "I do trust you as far as I can trust any one at the present crisis, and I'll prove it." He drew a crumpled bit of paper from his pocket, and smoothed it upon the pommel of the saddle. "Here is a rough map of the claim and the trails by which it may be reached. If I'm not back in Aspen in three days, fit out your expedition and go in prepared to take and hold the property. The men you will find in possession will be robbers,—and murderers,—and you may have to fight for it; but that won't matter. In the right-hand tunnel wall, a few feet from the entrance, you will see a crevice where the dynamite was kept. In the bottom of that crevice you'll find my last will and testament, and I'm going to believe that you will carry out its provisions to the letter."
The promoter's smile was of grimness, with quarterings of approval.
"Which is to say that you'll be safely dead and buried. Barring your idiotic stubbornness, you are a man after my own heart, Mr. Jeffard, and I'll willingly be your executor. Are you armed?"
"No; I told you it would depend upon speed. I have no weapons."
"What! And you are going on a forlorn hope with an even chance of having to fight for your life? Wait a minute."
He ran back into the hotel, coming out again presently with a repeating rifle and a well-filled cartridge belt. "There is such a thing as cold nerve carried to the vanishing point in foolhardiness,Mr. Jeffard," he said. "Put this belt on while I sling the rifle under the saddle-flap. Can you shoot straight?"
"It is extremely doubtful. A little target practice as a boy"—
"Target practice!—and you may have to stand off a gang of desperadoes who can clip coins at a hundred yards! You'd better reconsider and give me time to organize a posse."
"No; thank you—for that and everything else. Good-by."
Denby stood on the curb and watched his man ride slowly up the street and take the turn toward the southern mountains. After which he went back to his place at the public writing-table in the lobby, picking up the hotel stenographer on the way. For a preoccupied half-hour he dictated steadily, and when the last letter was answered got up to pace out the transcribing interval. In the midst of it he drifted out to the sidewalk and stood staring absently up the street, as, an hour earlier, he had gazed after the lessening figure of the obstinate one. But this time there were two horsemen in the field of vision wending their way leisurely to the street-end. Denby, thinking pointedly of other things, saw them and saw them not; but when they, too, took the turn to the southward, he came alive to the probabilities in the heart of an instant.
"By all that's good!—they're after him, as sure as fate!" he muttered; and a little later he was quizzing the proprietor of a livery stable around the corner.
"Do you know those two fellows who have just left, Thompson?"
"You bet I don't; and I made 'em put up the collateral for the whole outfit before they got away."
"Where did you say they were going?"
"Didn't say, did I? But somewheres up Jackfoot Gulch was what they told me."
"H'm; that is east. And just now they are riding in another direction. You sold them the horses, you say?"
The man grinned. "Temp'rarily. I'll take 'em back at the same price, less the tariff, if I ever see 'em again. I ain't takin' no chances on stray strangers with any such lookin'-glass-bustin' faces as they've got. Not much, Mary Ann."
"It is well to be careful. Have you seen my man Donald since dinner?"
"Yes; he was here just now and said he'd be back again. Want him?"
Denby looked at his watch. "Yes. If he doesn't come back within five minutes, send some of the boys out to hunt him up. Tell him to outfit for himself and me for two days, and to be at the hotel at three, sharp. Give him the best horses you can lay your hands on."
"Always yours to command, Mr. Denby. Anything else?"
"That's all."
The promoter left the stable and walked quickly to the hotel. At the entrance he met an acquaintance and stopped to pass the time of day.
"How are you, Roberts?—By the way, you are just the man I wanted to see; saves me a trip to the Court House. Did a fellow named Jeffard, J-e-f-f-a-r-d, file a notice and affidavit on a claim called the 'Midas' just after dinner?"
"No. He came over to ask me if there was any way in which he could secure himself. It seems that he neglected to post a notice on the claim before coming out with his samples,—why, he didn't explain."
Denby nodded and went on, talking to himself. "So!—that's his little mystery, is it? The 'Midas' isn't located yet, and until he gets that notice posted and recorded, it's anybody's bonanza. I hope Donald can pick up the trail and follow it. If he can't, there'll be one plucky fellow less in the world, and two more thugs to be hanged, later on."
A topographicalmap of that portion of the Saguache known as the Elk Mountain Range—the spur which forms the watershed between the Gunnison and the Grand—will include a primeval valley gashing the range southeastward from Tourtelotte on the Ashcroft trail, and heading fifteen miles farther wildernessward in a windswept pass across the summit of the watershed. Its watercourse, a tumbling torrent fed by the melting snows in the higher gulches, is a tributary of the Roaring Fork; and a disused pack-trail, which once served a scattered pioneer corps of prospectors, climbs by tortuous stages to the windswept pass, now swerving from bank to bank of the stream, and now heading a lateral gulch or crossing the point of a barrier spur.
It is a crystalline afternoon in mid-autumn. Indian summer on the high plateaus of the continent's crest there is none, but instead, a breathing space of life-giving days, with the bouquet of fine old wine in the keen-edged air, and of frosty nights when the stars swing clear in illimitable space. Positive coloring, other than the sombre greens of pine and fir, is lacking. The season of bursting buds and quickening leaf tints is over, and what little deciduous vegetation the altitude permits is present onlyin twig traceries and sun-cured range grass. In the heart of the valley the heights are heavily wooded, and the sombre greens wall out the world to the sky-line; but farther on bald slopes and ridges stretch away above the pines and firs, and the blue arch of the firmament springs clear from snow-capped abutments of fallow dun and weathered gray.
In the upper levels of the valley the disused trail leaves the stream and begins to climb by loops and zigzags to the pass. On the reverse curve of one of the loops—the last but one in the upward path—a solitary horseman sends his mount recklessly onward, heedless alike of stones of stumbling and the breath-cutting steepness of the way. His head is bandaged, and he rides loose in the saddle like a drunken man, swaying and reeling, but evermore urging the horse by word and blow and the drumming of unspurred heels. His feet are thrust far into the stirrups, and at every fresh vantage point he steadies himself by pommel and cantle to scan the backward windings of the trail. A man riding desperately for his life and against time, with a handicap of physical unfitness, one would say; but there would seem to be fierce determination in the unrelenting onpush, as if wounds and weariness were as yet no more than spurs to goad and whips to drive.
The reverse curve of the loop ends on the crest of the last of the barrier spurs, and at the crown of the ascent the forest thins to right and left, opening a longer backward vista. On the bare summit therider turns once more in his saddle, and the rearward glance becomes a steady eye-sweep. In the bight of the loop which he has just traversed the trail swings clear of the gulch timber, and while he gazes two dark objects advancing abreast and alternately rising and falling to a distance-softened staccato of pounding hoofs cross the open space and double the loop. The wounded one measures his lead. For all his spurrings the distance is decreasing; and a hasty survey of the trail ahead is not reassuring. From the bald summit of the spur the bridle path winds around the head of another gulch, and the approach to the pass on the farther side is a snow-banked incline, above timber line, uncovered, and within easy rifle-shot of the hill of reconnaissance. What will befall is measurably certain. If he attempts to head the traversing ravine on the trail, his pursuers will reach the bald summit, wait, and pick him off at their leisure while he is scaling the opposite snowbank.
At the second glance a dubious alternative offers. The gorge in the direct line may not prove impassable; there is a slender chance that one may push straight across and up the opposing slope to the pass before the guns of the enemy can be brought into position. Wherefore he sends the horse at a reckless gallop down the descent to the gorge, making shift to cling with knee and heel while he disengages a rifle from its sling under the saddle-flap, and fills its magazine with cartridges from a belt at his waist.
At the bottom of the ravine the alternative vanishes; becomes a thing inexistent, in fact. The gorge in its lower length is a canyoned slit, a barrier to be passed only by creatures with wings. To return is to meet his pursuers on the bald summit of the spur; to hesitate is equally hazardous. The horse obeys the sudden wrenching of the rein, spins as on a pivot, and darts away up the canyon brink. Fortunately, the timber is sparse, and, luckily again, a practicable crossing is found well within the longer detour traced by the trail. For the second time that day it is a race to the swift; and, as before, an accident comes between. Horse and man are across the ravine, are clear of the stunted firs, are mounting the final snow-banked incline to the pass with no more than a trooper's dash between them and safety, when the sure-footed beast slips on the packed snow of the trail, and horse and man roll together to the bottom of the declivity.
A few hours earlier this man had been the football of circumstances, tossed hither and yon as the buffetings of chance might impel him. But the pregnant hours have wrought a curious change in him, for better or worse, and before the breath-cutting plunge is checked he is free of the struggling horse and is kicking it to its feet to mount and ride again, charging the steep uprising with plying lash and digging heels and shouts of encouragement. Ten seconds later the trail is regained and the summit of the pass cuts the sky-line above him. Ten other flying leaps and a resolute man may hold anarmy at bay. But in the midst of them comes a clatter of hoofs on the rocky headland across the gulch, and a nerve-melting instant wherein the hoof-beats cease and the bleak heights give back a muffled echo in the rarefied air. The hunted one bends to the saddle-horn at the crack of the rifle, and the bullet sings high. A second is better aimed, and at the shrill hiss of it the snorting horse flattens its ears and lunges at the ascent with flagging powers fear-revived. A scrambling bound or two and the final height is gained, but in the pivoting instant between danger and safety a third bullet scores the horse's back and embeds itself in the cantle of the saddle with a benumbing shock to the rider.
But by this the fugitive is fair Berserk-mad, and those who would stay him must shoot to kill. Once out of range beyond the crest of the pass, he drags the trembling horse to its haunches and whips down from the saddle, the wine of battle singing in his veins and red wrath answering for physical fitness. A hasty glance to make sure that the broncho's wound is not disabling, and he is back at the summit of the pass, sheltering himself behind a rock and sending shot after shot across the ravine at his assailants. The fusillade is harmless; wounds, mad gallops, and red wrath being easily subversive of accuracy in target practice; but it has the effect of sending the enemy to the rear in discreet haste, with the dropping shots beating quick time for the double quartette of trampling hoofs as the twain gallop out of range behind the bald headland.
For a resolute half-hour, while the undertow of the ebbing minutes steadily undermines the props and shores set up by Berserk wrath, the solitary rifleman lies watchful and vigilant. Thrice in that interval have the attackers rallied; once in a desperate charge to gain the cover of the timber on the canyon's brink, and twice in equally desperate efforts to turn the rifleman's position by following the looping of the trail. Notwithstanding the bad marksmanship of the garrison the position has proved—still proves—impregnable; and the end of the half-hour leaguer finds the intrenched one secure in his position, with the enemy in permanent check, and only his own waning strength to warn him that the pass cannot be held indefinitely.
But this warning is imperative, as is that other of the fast westering sun; and when a movement on the opposite height gives him one more chance to announce volley-wise that the pass is still manned, he retreats swiftly, remounts after more than one exhaustive effort, and canters down the farther windings of the trail into a valley shut in on all sides by snow-coifed sentinel mountains, and with a brawling stream plunging through its midst; into this valley and down the length of it to a narrowing of the stream path, where a rude cabin, with its door hanging awry, looks across from the heel of the western cliff to the gray dump of a tunnel-opening in the opposite mountain side.
The sun has already set for the lower slopes of the shut-in valley, and the frosty breath of the snow-cappedsentinel peaks is in the air. At the door of the cabin the winner in the desperate race slides from the saddle. His knees are quaking, and because of them he stumbles and falls over the log doorstone, cursing his helplessness in the jolt of it. But there remains much to be done, and the sunset glories are changing from crimson and dusky gold on the snow-caps to royal purple in the shadow of the western cliff.
With many slippings and stumblings he crosses the foot-log and climbs to the level of the tunnel-opening opposite, constraining the unwilling horse to follow. With a stone for a hammer he tacks a square of paper on one of the struts of the timbered entrance; and after another struggle feebly fierce the horse is dragged into the low-browed cavern and tethered out of harm's way. By the leaden-footed step of the man one would say that the last reserves of determination have been called in and are far spent; but he will not desist. With four stakes taken from the heap of wooden treenails used in the tunnel timbering he drags himself from corner to corner of the claim, pacing its boundaries and marking the points of intersection with dogged exactness. When the final stake is driven he can no longer stand upright, and is fain to win back to the tunnel on hands and knees with groans and futile tooth-gnashings.
But the aftermath of the task still waits; shall wait until he has barricaded the tunnel's mouth with an up-piling of timbers, fragments of rock, odds andends movable, with a counterscarp of loose earth to make it bullet-proof—the last scraped up with bleeding hands from the débris at the head of the dump.
This done, he drags himself over the barricade, finds the saddle-bags again, and strikes a light. The candle flame is but a yellow puncture in the thick gloom of the tunnel, but it serves his purpose, which is to scrawl a few words on a blank page of an engineer's note-book,—sole reminder of the thrifty forecast of saner days beyond the descent into the nether depths. An imprecation bubbles up to punctuate the signature; a pointless cursing, which is no more than a verbal mask for a groan extorted by the agony of the effort to guide the pencil point. The malison strings itself out into broken sentences of justification; mere ravings, as pointless as the curse. "Finders are keepers,—that's the law of the strong. 'He that hath clean hands shall be stronger and stronger.' I found it and gave it back, and he drowned it in a bottle.... Now it is mine; and to-morrow I'll be dead. But she'll know that I haven't—that I haven't—quite—forgotten."
To pain-blurred eyes the candle flame has faded to a nebulous point in the darkness, but still the light suffices. He has neither envelope nor sealing-wax, but he makes shift to seal the book with a wrapping of twine and a bit of pitch scraped from the nearest strut in the timbering. After which he seeks and finds the crevice in which Garvin kept hisexplosives; and when the note-book is safely hidden, drops exhausted behind the breastwork, with the rifle at his shoulder, beginning his vigil what time the first silvery flight of moon-arrows is pouring upon cliff-face and cabin opposite.
Itis a fact no less deprecable than true that events in orderly sequence do not always lend themselves to the purposes of a chronicler who would be glad to prick in his climaxes with a pen borrowed of the dramatist. With some little labor, and the help of not a few coincidences which may fairly be called fortuitous, the march of events in the life of Henry Jeffard has led up to a point at which the fictional unities pause, confidently anticipative of a climax which shall reëcho the heroic struggle of the Spartan few at Thermopylæ, or the daring-do of the Pontine Horatius. But the facts are inexorable and altogether disappointing. With prologue and stage-setting for a Sophoclean tragedy, the piece halts; hangs in the wind at the critical conjuncture like a misstaying ship; becomes, in point of fact, a mere modern comedy-drama with a touch of travesty in it; and the unities, fictional and dramatic, shriek and expire.
This humiliating failure of the dramatic possibilities turns upon an inconsequent pivot-pin in the human mechanism, namely, the lack of courage in the last resort in men of low degree. To kidnap a drunken man or to pistol an unarmed one is one thing; to force a sky-pitched Gibraltar defended bya resolute fellow-being with a modern high-power repeating rifle and an itching trigger-finger is quite another. This was the conservative point of view of the aliased ones; and after the final futile attempt to gain the trail and the cover of the timber, the twain held a council of war, vilified their luck, and sounded a retreat.
Thus it came about that Denby and his man, riding tantivy to the rescue, met the raiders two miles down the trail Aspenward; and having this eye-assurance that the foray had failed, the promoter was minded to go back to town to await Jeffard's return. But, having the eye-assurance, he was not unwilling to add another. Bartrow's telegram had named the figure of the assay; the incredible number of dollars and cents to the ton to be sweated out of the bonanza drift. Now assays are assays, but investment is shy of them, demanding mill-runs, and conservative estimates based on averages; and pondering these things the rescuer reverted to his normal character of capitalist in ordinary to moneyless bonanzists, and determined to go on and see for himself. Accordingly, Jeffard's unexpected reinforcements pressed forward while the enemy was in full tide of retreat; and a short half-hour later the squadron of retrieval came near to paying the penalty of an unheralded approach, since it was upon the promoter and his henchman that Jeffard poured his final volley.
So much for the tragi-comedy of the sky-pitched Gibraltar, which made a travesty of Jeffard's heart-breakingefforts to fortify himself in the old tunnel. And as for the apparent determination to die open-eyed and militant behind the barricade, the unromantic truth again steps in to give thecoup de graceto the disappointed unities. There is a limit to human endurance, and the hardiest soldier may find it on a field as yet no more than half won. Fastings and fierce hurryings, wounds, physical and spiritual, and ruthless determination may ride roughshod over Nature's turnpike; but Nature will demand her toll. For this cause Jeffard saw no more than the first flight of moon-arrows glancing from the face of the western cliff. Long before the Selenean archers were fairly warmed to their work he had fallen asleep, with his cheek on the carved grip of the borrowed rifle; a lost man to all intents and purposes, if the fictional unities had not been put to flight by the commonplace fact.
Behold him, then, awakening what time the volleying sun has changed places with the moon-archers. The barricaded tunnel has a dim twilight of its own, but out and abroad the day is come, and the keen air is tinnient with the fine treble of the mountain morning. The slanting sun-fire spatters the gray cliff opposite, and a spiral of blue smoke is curling peacefully above the chimney of the cabin. And in the shallows of the stream a man, who is neither desperado black or red, is bathing the legs of a horse. Under such conditions one may imagine a recreant sentry rubbing his eyes to make sure, and presently climbing the barricade to slide down the dump into parley range, question-charged.
Denby unbent, smiling. "Didn't I say that you were an inconsiderate madman? You had to sleep or die."
"But when did you get here?"
"About the time the proxies would have arrived, if you hadn't succeeded in discouraging them. It was late; much later than it would have been if you hadn't given us such an emphatic stand-off at the summit. Come across and have some breakfast with us."
Jeffard found the foot-log and made shift to walk it.
"Did I fire at you? I thought it was another charge coming. They had been trying to rush me."
"So I inferred. We camped down out of range and gave you plenty of time. You may be no marksman, but"—He finished the sentence in dumb show by taking off his hat and pointing to a bullet score in the crown of it. "A few inches lower and you would have spoiled your first chance of capitalizing the Midas. How do you feel this morning?"
"A bit unresponsive, but better than I have a right to expect. What became of the two raiders?"
"We met them riding a steeplechase toward town. You discouraged them, as I said. From Donald's count of the bullet-splashes on that bald summit you must have gotten in your work pretty lively."
Jeffard lowered the hammer of the rifle and emptied the magazine. "It's a good weapon," hesaid. "I believe I could learn to shoot with it, after a while. Will you sell it?"
"Not to any one. But I'll make you a present of it. Let's go in and see what Donald has found in his saddle-bags. It's a fine breakfast morning."
So they went into the cabin and sat at meat on either side of a rough table of Garvin's contriving, and were served by a solemn-faced Scot, whose skill as a camp cook was commensurate with his ability to hold his tongue. Notwithstanding the presumable urgencies the breakfast talk was not of business. Jeffard would have had it so, but Denby forbade.
"Not yet," he objected. "Not until you have caught up with yourself. After breakfast Donald will sling you a blanket hammock under the trees, and you shall sleep the clock around. Then you'll feel fit, and we can talk futures if you please."
If there were a prompting of suspicion in the glance with which Jeffard met this proposal it remained in abeyance. With every embrasure gunned and manned the fortress of this life must always be pregnable on the human side; in the last resort one must trust something to the chance of loyalty in the garrison. Wherefore Jeffard accepted the promoter's pipe and the blanket hammock, and fell asleep while Donald was pulling down the barricade at the tunnel's mouth preparatory to liberating the neighing horse stabled in the heading.
It was evening, just such another as that one three months agone, in the heart of which two men had sat at the cabin door looking a little into eachother's past, when Jeffard opened his eyes. The three horses, saddled, but with loose cinches, were cropping the sun-cured grass on the level which served as a dooryard for the cabin; and an appetizing smell of frying bacon was abroad in the air. Jeffard sat up yawning, and the promoter rose from the doorstep and rapped the ashes from his pipe.
"Feel better?" he queried.
"I feel like a new man. I hadn't realized that I was so nearly spent."
"That is why I prescribed the blanket. Another day would have finished you."
Jeffard slid out of the hammock and went to plunge his face and hands in the stream; after which they ate again as men who postpone the lesser to the greater; with Donald the taciturn serving them, and hunger waiving speech and ceremony.
It was yet no more than twilight when the meal was finished; and Denby found a candle and matches in the henchman's saddlebags.
"If you are ready, we'll go up to the tunnel and have another look at the lead before we go," he said. "I have been examining it to-day, and I'll make you a proposition on the ground, if you like."
Jeffard pieced out the inference with the recollection of the saddled horses.
"Do we go back to-night?"
"Yes; if you are good for it. It has been a pretty warm day for the season, and we are like to have more of them. There is a good bit of snow on the trail, and if it softens we shall be shut in.That's one reason, and another is this: if we make a deal and mean to get any machinery in here before snow flies and the range is blocked, we've got to be about it."
Jeffard nodded acquiescence, and they fared forth to cross the foot-log and toil up the shelving slope of the gray dump. It was a stiff climb for a whole man, and at the summit Jeffard sat down with his hands to his head and his teeth agrind.
"By Jove! but that sets it in motion again in good shape!" he groaned. "Sit down here and let's talk it out in the open. I don't care to burrow."
Denby pocketed his candle, and they sat together on the brink of the dump, with their backs to the opening; and thus it chanced that neither of them saw a shadowy figure skulking among the firs beside the tunnel's mouth. When they began to talk the figure edged nearer, flitting ghostlike from tree to tree, and finally crouching under the penthouse of the tunnel timbering.
The crimson and mauve had faded out of the western sky when the two at the dump-head rose, and Jeffard said: "Your alternative is fair enough. It's accepted, without conditions other than this—that you will advance me a few hundred dollars for my own purposes some time within thirty days."
"You needn't make that a condition; I should be glad to tide you over in any event. But I am sorry you won't let me buy in. As I have said, there is enough here for both of us."
The aftermath of the getting up was a sharp agony, and Jeffard had his hands to his head again. When he answered it was to say:—
"I sha'n't sell. There are reasons, and you may take this for the lack of a better. A while back, when a single meal in the day was sometimes beyond me, I used to say that if the tide should ever turn I'd let the money go on piling up and up until there was no possibility of hunger in an eternity of futures. You say the tide has turned."
"It has, for a fact; and I don't know that I blame you. If it were mine I should probably try to keep it whole."
Jeffard went on as one who follows out his own train of thought regardless of answers relevant or impertinent. "I said that, and I don't know that I have changed my mind. But before we strike hands on the bargain it may be as well to go back to the question which you were good enough to leave in abeyance yesterday."
"The question of ethics?"
"Yes."
"I am going to take something for granted, if you don't choose to be frank with me."
"It will be safer to take nothing for granted."
"But the claim is yours?"
"Legally, yes; there will be no litigation."
"But honestly, as man to man." Denby put his hands on the wounded man's shoulders, and turned him about so that the fading light in the west fell upon his face. "My dear fellow, I've known youbut a day, but your face isn't the face of a scoundrel. I can't believe that the man who made the magnificent fight that you did would make it to overreach his partner."
Jeffard turned aside, with a backward step that freed him from the friendly hands. Twice he tried to speak, and at the third attempt the words came but haltingly.
"It will be better in the end—better for all concerned—if you—if you do believe it. Believe it, and cause it to be believed, if you choose. I have counted the cost, and am ready to take the consequences."
Denby thrust his hands into his pockets and began to tramp, three paces and a turn, across and across the narrow embankment. A little light was beginning to sift in between the man and his mystery, but it was not of the sun.
"Mr. Jeffard, I'd like to ask a question. You needn't answer it if you don't want to. Do you know who drove this tunnel?"
"I do."
"Was it the man who raced you from Leadville to Aspen, and who shot you when you tried to bluff him by making him believe that you had already located the claim in your own name?"