42
There was absolute antagonism in his tone, although not in his words. Dick thought of nothing at the moment but that he had one sole proof of his ownership, the letter from Sloan himself. He unbuttoned the flap of his shirt pocket, and, taking out a bundle of letters, selected the one bearing on the situation.
“That should be sufficient,” he said, throwing it, opened, before Presby.
The latter, without moving his solid body in the least, and as if his arms and hands were entirely independent of it, stolidly picked up the letter and read it. Dick could infer nothing of its reception. He could not tell whether Presby was inclined to accept it as sufficient authority, or to question it. Outside were the sounds of the Rattler’s activity and production, the heavy, thunderous roar of the stamp mill, the clash of cars of ore dumped into the maws of the grizzly to be hammered into smaller fragments in their journey to the crusher, and thence downward to end their journeys over the thumping stamps, and out, disintegrated, across the wet and shaking tables.
It seemed, as he stood waiting, that the dust of the pulverized mountains had settled over everything in the office save the granite-like43figure that sat at the desk, rereading the letter which had changed all his life. For the first time he thought that perhaps he should not have so easily displayed that link with his past. It seemed a useless sacrilege. If the mine-owner was not reading the letter, he was pondering, unmoved, over a course of action, and took his time.
Dick thought bitterly, in a flash, of all that it represented. The quarrel with his father on that day he had returned from Columbia University with a mining course proudly finished, when each, stubborn by nature, had insisted that his plan was the better; of his rebellious refusal to enter the brokerage office in Wall Street, and declaration that he intended to go into the far West and follow his profession, and of the stern old man’s dismissal when he asserted, with heat:
“You’ve always taken the road you wanted to go since your mother died. I objected to your taking up mining engineering, but you went ahead in spite of me. I tried to get you to take an interest in the business that has been my life work, but you scorned it. You wouldn’t be a broker, or a banker. You had to be a mining engineer! All right, you’ve had your way, so far. Now, you can keep on in the way you have selected. I’ll give you five thousand dollars, but you’ll never44get another cent from me until you’ve learned what a fool you’re making of yourself, and return to do what I want you to do. It won’t be long! There’s a vast difference between dawdling around a university learning something that is going to be useless while your father pays the bills, and turning that foolish education into dollars to stave off an empty belly. You can go now.”
In those days the house of Phillip Townsend had been a great name in New York. Now this was all that was left of it. Dissolution, death, and dust, and a half-interest in an abandoned mine! The harsh voice of Bully Presby aroused him from his thoughts.
“All right,” it said. “This seems sufficient, but if you’ve got the sense and judgment Sloan seems to think you have, you’ll come to the conclusion that there’s not much use in wasting any of his good, hard dollars on the Croix d’Or. It never has paid. It never will pay. I offered to buy it once, but I wouldn’t give a dollar for it now, beyond what the timber above ground is worth. It owns a full section of timberland, and that’s about all.”
He reached for a pen and wrote a note to the watchman, telling him that the bearer, Richard45Townsend, had come to look over the property and that his orders must be accepted, and signed it with his hard-driven scrawl. He handed it up to Dick without rising from his seat, and said: “That’ll fix you up, I think.”
As if by an afterthought, he asked: “Have you any idea of the condition of the mine?”
“No,” Dick answered, as he folded the letter and put it into his pocket, together with the one from his late father’s partner.
“Well, then, I can tell you, it’s bad,” said Presby, fixing him with his cool, hard stare. “The Cross is spotted. Once in a while they had pay chutes. They never had a true ledge. There isn’t one there, as far as anybody that ever worked it knows. They wasted five hundred thousand dollars trying to find it, and drove ten thousand feet of drifts and tunnels. They went down more than six hundred feet. She’s under water, no one knows how deep. It might take twenty thousand to un-water the sinking shaft again, and at the bottom you’d find nothing. Take my advice. Let it alone. Good-day.”
Dick walked out, scarcely knowing whether to feel grateful for the churlish advice or to resume his wonted attitude of self-reliance and hold himself unprejudiced by Presby’s condemnation46of the Croix d’Or. He wondered if Bully Presby suspected him of having been friendly with the mob of drunken ruffians at the road house, but he had been given no chance to explain.
At the bottom of the gulch he found Bill sprawled at length on his elbows almost under the forefeet of one of the burros which was nosing him over in a friendly caress. He called out as he approached, and the big prospector sat up, deftly snapped the cigarette he had been smoking into the creek with his thumb and forefinger, and got to his feet.
“Do we get permission to go on the claim?” he grinned, as Townsend reached him.
“Yes, I’ve got an order to the watchman. The old man doesn’t seem to think much of it. Says it’s spotted. Had rich pay chutes, but they pinched. No regular formation. Always been a loser. Thinks we’d be foolish to do anything with it.”
“Good of him, wasn’t it?”
Dick looked quickly at the hard, lined face of his companion.
“That’s the first thing I’ve heard that made me feel better,” declared the prospector, as he swung one of the burro’s heads back into the trail47and hit the beast a friendly slap on the haunches to start it forward. “Whenever a man, like this old feller seems to be, gives me that kind of advice, I sit up and take notice.”
“Why––why, what do you know about him?” Dick asked, falling into the trail behind the pack animals, which had started forward with their slow jog trot, and ears swaying backward and forward as they went.
“While you was gone,” Mathews answered, “I had a long talk with a boy that came along and got friendly. You can believe boys, most of ’em. They know a heap more than men. They think out things that men don’t. Kids are always friends with me; you know that. I reckon, from what I gathered, that this Presby man is about as hard and grasping an old cuss as ever worked the last ounce of gold out of a waste dump. He makes the men save the fags of the candles and the drips, so’s he can melt ’em over again. He runs a company store, and if they don’t buy boots and grub from him, they have to tear out mighty quick. He fired a fireman because the safety-valve in the boiler-house let go one day twenty minutes before the noon shift went back to work. If he says, ‘Let the Cross alone,’ I think it’s because he wants it.”
48
“You couldn’t guess who he is,” Dick said, preparing to move.
“Why? Do I know him?”
“In a way. He’s the man we saw the mob tackle, back there at the road house.”
Bill gave a long whistle.
“So that’s the chap, eh? Bully Presby! Well, if we ever run foul of him, we’ve got our work cut out for us. Things are beginnin’ to get interestin’. ‘I like the place,’ as Daniel said when he went to sleep in the lion’s den.”
They opened the gate through the barricade without any formality, and were well started up the inclined road of the Croix d’Or before they encountered the watchman who had given them so much trouble. As he came toward them, frowning, they observed that he had buckled a pistol round him as if to resist any intrusion in case it should be attempted without instructions. Dick handed him Presby’s order, and the man read it through in surly silence; then his entire attitude underwent a swift change. He became almost obsequiously respectful.
“I’ll have to go down and have a talk with Mr. Presby,” he said, and would have ventured a further remark, but was cut short by the mine-owner.
49
“Yes, you’d better go and see him,” Dick said concisely. “And when you go, take all of your dunnage you can carry, then come back and get the rest. I shall not want you on the claim an hour longer than necessary for you to get your stuff away. You’re too good a man to have around here.”
The fellow gave a shrug of his shoulders, an evil grin, and turned back up the road to vanish in what had evidently been the superintendent’s cabin, and noisily began to whistle as he gathered his stuff together. The partners halted before the door, and Dick looked inside.
“I suppose you have the keys for everything, haven’t you?” he called.
The man impudently tossed a bundle at him without a word. Apparently his belongings were but few, which led the newcomers to believe that he had taken his meals at the Rattler, and perhaps slept there on many nights. They watched him as he rolled his blankets, and prepared to start down the trail.
“The rest of that plunder in there, the pots and the lamp, belong to the mine,” he said. And then, without other words, turned away.
“That may be the last of him, and maybe it won’t!” growled Bill, as he began throwing the50hitches off the tired burros that stood panting outside the door. “Anyway, it’s the fag end of him to-night.”
They were amazed at the lavish expenditure of money that had been made in the superintendent’s quarters. There were a porcelain bathtub brought up into the heart of the wilderness, a mahogany desk whose edges had been burned by careless smokers, and a safe whose door swung open, exposing a litter of papers, mine drawings, and plans. The four rooms evidently included office and living quarters, and they betokened a reckless financial outlay for the purpose.
“Poor Dad!” said Dick, looking around him. “No wonder the Cross lost money if this is a sample of the way the management spent it.”
He stepped outside to where the cañon was beginning to sink into the dusk. The early moon, still behind the silhouette of the eastern fringe of peaks and forests, lighted up the yellow cross mark high above, and for some reason, in the stillness of the evening, he accepted it as a sign of promise.
51CHAPTER IVTHE BLACK DEATH
It took seven days of exploration to reveal the condition of the Cross of Gold, and each night the task appeared more hopeless. The steel pipe line, leading down for three miles of sinuous, black length, from a reservoir high up in the hills, had been broken here and there maliciously by some one who had traversed its length and with a heavy pick driven holes into it that inflicted thousands of dollars of expense.
The Pelton wheels in the power house, neglected, were rusted in their bearings, and without them and the pipe line there could be no electric power on which the mill depended. The mill had been stripped of all smaller stuff, and its dynamos had been chipped with an ax until the copper windings showed frayed and useless. The shoes of the huge stamps were worn down to a thin, uneven rim, battering on broken surfaces. The Venners rattled on their foundations, and52the plates had been scarred as if by a chisel in the hands of a maniac.
The blacksmith’s tunnel––the tunnel leading off from the level––was blocked by fallen timbers where a belt of lime formation cut across; and fragments of wood, splintered into toothpick size, had been thrown out when the mountain settled to its place. But a short distance from the main shaft, which was a double compartment, carrying two cages up and down, in every level the air was foul down to the five-hundred foot, and below that the mine was filled with water.
Patiently Dick and the veteran explored these windings as far as they might until the guttering of their candles warned them that the air was loaded with poison, and often they retreated none too soon to scale the slippery, yielding rungs of the ladder with dizzy heads. Expert and experienced, they were puzzled by what was disclosed. Either the mine had yielded exceedingly rich streaks and had been, in mining parlance, “gophered,” or else the management had been as foolish as ever handled a property.
In the assay-house, where the furnaces were dust-covered, the scale case black with grime, and the floor littered with refuse crucibles, cupels, mufflers, and worn buckboards, they discovered a53bundle of old tablets. Almost invariably these showed that the assays had been made from samples that would have paid to work, but this alone gave them no hope.
But this was not all. A mysterious enmity seemed to pursue all their efforts. Yet its displays were unaccountable for by natural causes. On their arrival at the mine they found water, fresh and clear, piped into every cabin, the mess-house, and the superintendent’s quarters. They traced it back and discovered a small lake formed and fed by a large spring on what was evidently land of the mine. It suddenly failed them, and proved unwholesome. An investigation of the tiny reservoir disclosed masses of poisonous weeds in the water. They decided that they must have been blown there after their arrival, cleared the supply and yet, but two days later, when there had been no wind of more than noticeable violence, the weeds were there again. They abandoned their water supply for the time being and resorted to the stream at the bottom of the cañon.
A day later one of their burros died mysteriously, and Bill, puzzled, said he believed that it had lost its sense of smell and eaten something poisonous. On the day following the other died,54apparently from the same complaint. The veteran miner grieved over them as for friends.
“I’ve been acquainted with a good many of ’em,” he said, sorrowfully, “but I never knew two that had finer characters than these two did. They were regular burros! No cheaters––just the square, open and above-board kind, that never kicked without layin’ back their ears to give you warnin’ and never laid down on the trail unless they wanted to rest. The meanest thing a burro or a man can do is to die voluntarily when you’re dependin’ on him, or when he owes you work or money. So it does seem as if I must have been mistaken in these two, after all, because we may need ’em.”
Dick did not smile at his homily, for he caught the significance of it, that the Croix d’Or would have to make a better showing than they had so far discovered to warrant them in opening it. They had come almost to the end of the investigations possible. They scanned plans and scales in the office to familiarize themselves with the property, and there was but one portion of it they had not visited. That was a shaft which had been the “discovery hole,” where the first find of ore had been made. And it was this they entered on the day when Fate seemed most particularly55unkind. Yet even Fate appeared to relent, in the end, through one of those trifling afterthoughts which lead men to do the insignificant act. They had prepared everything for the venture. They had an extra supply of candles, chalk for making a course mark, sample bags for such pieces of ore as might interest them, and the prospectors’ picks and hammers when they started out. They were a hundred yards from the office when the younger man hesitated, stopped and turned back.
“I’ve an idea we might need those old maps,” he said. “We haven’t gone over them very much and they might come in handy.”
Bill protested, but despite this Dick went back to the quarters and got them. They were crude, apparently, compared with the later work when competent engineers had opened the mine in earnest; but doubtless had served their purpose. The men came to the mouth of the old shaft which had been loosely covered over with poles, and around which a thicket of wild blackberry bushes had sprung up in stunted growth. An hour’s work disclosed the black opening and a ladder in a fair state of preservation. They lowered a candle into the depths and saw that it burned undimmed, indicating that the air was pure, and then descended cautiously, testing each56rung as they went. The shaft was not more than fifty feet deep, and they found themselves standing on the bottom and peering off into a drift which had been crudely timbered and had fallen in here and there as the unworked ground had settled.
“There doesn’t seem to be much of anything here except some starved quartz,” Bill said, staring at the wall after they had gone in some thirty or forty feet, and they had come to a place where the lagging had dropped away. He caught another piece of the half-rotted timbering and jerked it loose for a better inspection. It gave with a dull crack, then, immediately after, and seeming almost an echo, there was a terrific rumble, and a report like the explosion of a huge gun back in the direction of the shaft. Their candles flickered in the air impact, and for an instant they feared that the roof was coming down on them to crush them out of all resemblance to human beings.
They turned and ran toward the shaft. A few loose pebbles and pieces of rock were dripping from above like a shower of porphyry. For an instant they dared not step out, but stood inside the drift, waiting for what might happen and staring at each other with set faces exposed in57the still flickering light. They had said nothing up to this time, being under too great stress to offer other than sharp exclamations.
“Sounds like that shaft had given way!” the veteran exclaimed. “If it has–––”
He leaned forward and looked into Dick’s face.
“If it has,” the latter took up, “we are in a bad predicament.”
They stood tensed and anxious until the pebbles stopped falling and a silence like that of a tomb, so profound as to seem thick and dense, invaded the hollows; then Dick started out into the shaft. He felt a restraining hand on his arm.
“Wait a minute, boy,” the elder man said. “You’re the owner here. It’s dangerous. I ought to be the one to go first and find out what’s happened. You wait inside the drift.”
But Dick shook his hand off and stepped out to look upward. A dense blackness filled what should have been a space of light. This he had partially expected from the fact that when they came out toward the shaft there had been no sign of day; but he had not anticipated such a complete closing of the opening.
“Lord! We’re buried in!” came an exclamation58from behind him, and he felt a sudden sinking of the heart.
“I’ll go easily till I come to it,” he said, his voice sounding strained and loud although he had spoken scarcely above a whisper. “You stand clear so that if anything gives, Bill, you won’t be caught.”
The elder miner would have protested, but already he was slowly and cautiously climbing the ladder. Step by step he ascended, holding the light above his head to discover the place where the shaft had given way, and then Bill, standing anxiously below, heard a harsh shout.
“I think the ladder will bear your weight as well as mine. Come up here.”
The big man climbed steadily upward until he stood directly beneath the younger man’s feet. He ventured an exclamation that was almost an oath.
“Not the shaft at all,” he said, an instant later. “It’s just a bowlder so big that it filled the whole opening. We’re plugged and penned in here like rats in a trap!”
Dick took his little prospecting hammer and tapped the bowlder, at first gently, then with firmer strokes, and looked down at his partner with a distressed face.
59
“Hear that?” he exclaimed, rather than questioned. “It’s a big one, and solid. It sounds bad to me.”
For a minute they waved their candles round the edge, inspecting the resting place of the rock that had imprisoned them. Everywhere it was set firmly. A fitted door could have been no more secure. They consulted, and at last Bill descended and stepped back into the entrance to the drift to avoid falling stone, while the younger man attacked the edge beneath the bowlder, inch by inch, trying to find some place where he could pick through to daylight. At last, his arm wearied and the point of his prospecting hammer dulled, he rested.
“Come down, Dick, and I’ll take a spell,” Bill called up from below, and he obeyed.
The big miner, without comment, climbed up, and again the vault-like space was filled with the persistent picking of steel on stone. For a half-hour it continued, and then, slowly, Bill descended. He sat down at the foot of the shaft, wiped the sweat from his face, thrust his candlestick in a crevice and rolled a cigarette before he said anything, and then only as Dick started to the foot of the ladder.
“It’s no use,” he said. “We’re holed up all60right. I picked clear around the lower edge and there isn’t a place where she isn’t resting on solid rock. Nothing but dynamite could ever move that stone. Unless we can find some other way out we’re–––”
He paused and Dick added the finishing word, “Gone!”
“Exactly! No one knows we’re here. No one comes to the mine. We’re in the old works which I don’t suppose a man has been inside of in five or ten years, and the map shows that it doesn’t connect with the other ones. Answer––the finish!”
Dick pulled the worn and badly drawn plans from his pocket and then lighted his own candle, indulging in the extravagance of two that he might study the faint and smudged penciled lines.
“Here, Bill,” he said, pointing at the drawing. “These two side drifts each end in what are now sump holes. We’ve got to watch out for them. That makes it safe for us to take the main drift and see where it leads. The two end drifts evidently ran but a few feet and were then abandoned. So, if these plans are any good, they, too, are safe, if we can get into them.”
The elder miner peered at the plans and studied61them. He stood up and blew out his candle. He thrust his hands into his pockets.
“I’ve got three candles left,” he said, “and I cain’t just exactly say why I put that many in unless the Lord gave me a hunch we’d need ’em. How many you got!”
“One in my pocket, and this.”
“Then we’d better move fast, eh?”
They took a desperate chance on foul air and plunged down the drift, pausing only now and then when they came to the first side drifts to make sure of their course. They were informed by the plans that they had barely three hundred feet to explore, yet they had gone even farther than that before they came to a halt, a threatening one, for directly ahead of them the timbering had given way, the shaft caved, and there seemed at first no opening through the débris.
“Well, this looks pretty tough!” exclaimed Bill, stooping down and examining the face of the barrier.
His companion lighted his own candle and together they went over the face of the obstruction.
“It looks to me as if we could open her up a little if we can shift this timber here and use it as a lever,” he said, pointing to one projecting near the roof.
62
“May bring the whole mountain down, but it’s our only chance,” agreed Bill. “Here she goes. Stand back. No use in both of us getting it.”
He caught the end of the timber in his heavy hands, planted his feet firmly on the floor and heaved. The big timber creaked, but did not give. Again he planted himself and this time his great shoulders seemed to twist and writhe until the muscles cracked and then, with a crash, the barrier gave way. He sprang back with amazing quickness and they ran back up the drift for twenty or thirty feet while the mass again readjusted itself and settled slowly into position. A cloud of dust bellowed toward them, half-choking them with its gritty fineness, and then, in a minute, the air had cleared. They went cautiously forward.
“Well, we got some farther, anyhow, unless she comes down while we’re working through. We’ve got a hole to crawl into, and that’s something,” the big miner asserted.
Before he could say anything more Dick had crowded him to one side and was entering the aperture. He had prevented his partner from taking the first perilous chance. Painfully he made his way, while the man behind listened with63terrified apprehension; for none knew better than he the risk of that progress.
“All right, but be careful,” a voice came to him faintly from the distance. “She’s bad, but the air over here seems good. It’s a close shave.”
The big miner dropped down and began crawling through beneath the tons of balanced rock, which might give at any instant. Larger than his younger companion, he found it more difficult for his great shoulders persisted in brushing at all times, and now and then he was compelled to squeeze himself through a narrow place that for a moment threatened to be impossible. Once a timber above him gave a little and a rock crowded down until only by exerting his whole force could he sustain it while he scraped his hips through from under it. Then as it descended between his legs he found one of them pinioned. He shut his teeth desperately to avoid shouting, and twisted sidewise, and back, to and fro, at the imminent danger of dislodging everything above him. He heard an anxious voice calling outside and replied that he was coming and was all right. He rested for an instant to regain breath, then made a desperate forward effort to find that his foot alone caught him.64Again he rolled from side to side, and again he rested.
“Bill! Bill! For God’s sake, what has happened?” he heard an agonized call from ahead.
“I’m all right, boy,” he called back patiently. “Just keep away from the hole so I can get air. I’m––I’m just findin’ some places a little tight.”
His reply did not seem to allay the solicitude of his companion, who called again, “Can I help you in any way?”
“Only by keeping clear. I’ll make another try. Stand clear so if she comes down you won’t be caught. If she does come––well––good-bye, Dick!”
As he spoke the final word he made another fiercely desperate effort from his new position. There was a ripping, searing pain along the length of his foot which he disregarded in that supreme attempt and suddenly he seemed to slide forward while back of him came a crunching, grinding noise as the disturbed rock which had pinioned him settled down into place. He crawled desperately forward. A light flared in his eyes and he felt strong hands thrust under his arm pits and was jerked bodily out to the floor of the drift. They fell together and the candle, falling with them, was extinguished. They were65overwhelmed, as they lay there in the darkness, gasping, by a terrific crashing impact as if the whole mountain had given way and at their very feet huge rocks thundered down. They crawled farther along on hands and knees and the falling rock seemed to pursue them malignantly. For an age it seemed as if the whole drift would give way as each set of timbers came to the strain and failed to hold. Then again all was still.
Strangling, sweating, spent, they got to the side wall and raised themselves up, gasping for fresh air. Their senses wavered and swooned in that half-suffocation and slowly they comprehended that they were still alive and that the dust was settling. “Are you all right?” they called to each other in acute unison, their voices betraying a great apprehension, and then, reassured for the instant, they sagged weakly against the walls and each reached out to find the other. Their hands met and clasped fervently and, again in unison, they said, “Thank God!”
A match spluttered dimly through the dark and dust-clogged air, a candle slowly took flame and they looked at each other. Bill was leaning against the wall, weakly, and trying to recover his strength. A tattered trousers leg clung above his bared leg and foot where he had wrenched66himself loose from the rock, and torn his boot away in so doing. Along the length of the white flesh was a flaring line of red, where the point of rock had cut deeply when he made that last desperate struggle to escape. He dropped to the floor and clutched his wound with his hands while Dick, almost with a moan, thrust his candlestick into a timber and savagely tore his shirt off and rent it into strips. He stooped over and with hasty skill bandaged the wound.
“It’s not bad, I hope,” he said, “but it does hurt, doesn’t it, old partner?”
“That’s nothin’,” bravely drawled the giant, striving to force a grin to his pain-drawn lips. “Don’t worry now, boy! Think what might have happened if I’d been there a minute or two longer, or if I couldn’t have got loose at all!”
In their thankfulness for the last escape they had almost forgotten the fact that their situation was still almost hopeless, and that perhaps the speedy end would have been preferable to one more agonizing, more slow, to come. They got to their feet at last and hobbled forward, the big man resting half his weight on his friend’s shoulder and making slow progress. Again they were centered on the faint hope that beyond was some sort of opening, because now they knew but67too well that their retreat was effectually cut off. If there was no opening ahead they were doomed. They consulted the plan again and went forward. Abruptly they came to a halt, shutting their jaws hard. They had come to the end of the main drift and it was a blank wall of solid stone where the prospectors had finished!
“Well, old man, there’s still the two side drifts to examine,” said Bill with a plain attempt to appear hopeful that did not in the least deceive the other.
“Yes. That’s back there about fifty feet,” Dick assented, finding that it required an effort to steady his voice. “The other one is behind that barrier.”
They looked at each other, reading the same thought. They had but one more chance and that was almost futile; for the plans indicated that the side drift extended but a score or so of yards and had then been abandoned. They felt their feet faltering when they turned into it, dreading the end, dreading the revelation that must tell them they were to die in this limited burrow in the hills. But courageously they tried to assume an air of confidence. They did not speak as they progressed, each dreading that instant when he would again face an inexorable barrier. They68counted their steps as they went, to themselves. They came to the twentieth, twenty-first, twenty-second, and were peering fixedly ahead. Together they stopped and turned toward each other. Dimly in the faintly thrown light of the candle beams, they could see it, the dusky gray mass where hope had pictured a continuing blackness. The wall leered at them as they stood there panting, despairing, desperate as trapped animals. Their imaginations told them the end.
“Well, old man”––Bill’s voice sounded with exceptional softness––“they didn’t extend this drift any farther. All we can do now is to go up and sit down at the foot of it, and––wait!”
“But it won’t take long, Bill,” Dick replied. “The air, you know. It can’t last forever.”
They trudged forward for the few remaining yards and then, abruptly, the candle they were carrying gave a little flicker. This time they stopped in their tracks and shouted. Bill suddenly loosened his hold on the younger man’s shoulder and began hopping forward, and the light threw huge, grotesque, strangely moving shadows on the wall ahead of them. Dick ran after him, crowding on his heels and shouting meaningless hopes. Abruptly they came to a right-angle drift, and then, but a few yards down69it, they discovered an upraise, crude and uncared-for, but climbing into the higher darkness, and down this there streamed fresh air.
It was such a one as prospectors make, having here and there a pole with cleats to serve as a ladder, then ascending at an incline which, though difficult, was not impossible, and again reverting to rocky footholds at the sides. Up this Dick boosted his partner, thrusting a shoulder beneath his haunches and straining upward with the exultation of reaction. They were saved! He knew it! The fresh air told that story to their experienced nostrils. Up, up, up they clambered for a long slanting distance and then fell out on the floor of another drift, at whose end was a shadowy light. Again they hobbled down a long length, ever approaching their goal. Bill stopped and leaned against the side wall and voiced his exultation.
“I know where we are,” he exclaimed. “This is the blacksmiths’ tunnel. They made that upraise following the ore, and that’s why the mine was opened for the second time here. They didn’t complete the plans because they knew the old work was useless. Dick, we’ve been through some pretty hard times together and had some narrow shaves; but I don’t care for many more70like that! Come on. Help me out. I want you to take a look and see if my head is any whiter than it was at nine o’clock this mornin’ when we went into that other hole.”
71CHAPTER VTHE AGED ENGINEER
The sunlight was good to see again––good as only sunlight can be when men have not expected ever again to be enlivened by its glory. They were astonished at the shortness of the time of their imprisonment. They had lived years in dread thought, and but a few hours in reality. They had suffered for the spans of lives to find that the clock had imperturbably registered brief intervals. They had played the gamut of dread, terror, and anguish, to learn how trivial, after all, was the completed score.
“I think that will do,” said Dick, with a sigh of relief, as he straightened up from bandaging Bill’s leg. “The stitches probably hurt some, but aside from a day’s stiffness I don’t think you will ever know it happened.”
“Won’t eh?” rumbled the patient. “Sure, the leg’s all right; but it ain’t bruised limbs a man remembers. They heal. You can see the scars72on a man’s legs, but only the Lord Almighty can see those on his mind, and they’re the only ones that last. Dick, now that it’s all over, I ain’t ashamed to tell you that there was quite a long spell down there underground when I thought over a heap of things I might have done different if I’d had a chance to do ’em over again. And, boy, I thought quite a little bit about you! It didn’t seem right that a young fellow like you, with so much to live for, should be snuffed out down there in that black place, where the whole mountain acted as if it was chasin’ us, step by step, to wipe us off the slate.”
He stood on his feet and limped across the room to his coat in an effort to recover himself, and Dick, more stirred than he cared to admit by the affection in his voice, tramped out to the little porch in front and pretended to whistle a tune, that proved tuneless. He looked at the little valley around the shoulder of the mountain at the head of the ravine, which they had so carelessly invaded that morning, and shuddered. Inside he heard Bill moving around, and then after a time his steps advancing stiffly, and turned to see him coming out.
“I think,” he said smiling, “that we’re entitled to a rest for to-day. By to-morrow you’ll73be all right again, unless I’m mistaken. Let’s put in the day looking over these old records.”
Bill grinned whimsically and assented. He could keep quiet when he had to; but the day following found him again restlessly investigating anything that seemed worth the trouble and the afternoon saw him standing looking upward toward the same valley of dread.
“I’ve got over it a little,” he said to the younger man, “and do you know I’m right curious to go over there and see how big that rock was that tumbled into the mouth of the old shaft. Want to come along?”
Dick had sustained that same curiosity, so together they made their way to the beginning of the previous day’s disaster. They chilled when they saw how effectually they had been caught; for the bowlder completely filled the entrance to the shaft and would have proved a hopeless trap had they tried to escape by burrowing around its edge. It rested, as they had discovered, on solid rock, and its course down the hillside was clearly marked.
“What gets me,” said the veteran miner, “is what could have started it. I noticed it up there when we went in. It was sort of poised on74that little ledge you see, and it didn’t have to roll more than thirty feet.”
He began to climb up the bowlder’s well-defined path, and suddenly called to his partner with a hoarse shout, needlessly loud.
“Come up here,” he said. “That bowlder never started itself! Some one helped it. What do you think of that?”
Dick hastily climbed up to his side and looked. The rock around was bare of growth or covering, so that no footprints could be discerned; but a rock rested there that had plainly been used as a fulcrum. The surface beneath it was weather beaten and devoid of moisture, which indicated that it had lain there but a short time, probably only from the time of its mission on the preceding day. They found themselves standing up and staring around at the surrounding hills as if seeking sight of the man who had attempted to murder them.
“We’ll find out about this!” Bill exclaimed. “Good thing we know enough to look.”
He limped to the edge of the barren spot and began to circle around its edge, while Dick did likewise, following his example. They found a footprint at last and took the trail. It did not lead them far before they came to a path on top75of the hill that was so well used that any attempt to follow it was useless; but, intent on seeing where it led, they walked along it as it led straight away toward the timber. Scarcely inside the cool shadows of the tamaracks they paused and looked at each other understandingly; for thrown carelessly into a clump of laurel was a long, freshly cut sapling, that had been used as a lever. They recovered it from its resting place and inspected it. There was no doubt whatever that it had been the instrument of motion. Its scarred end, its length, and all, told that the man who had used it had carried it this far to discard it, believing his murderous work done.
“I noticed that rock, as I said before,” declared Bill. “You noticed how round it was on one side? Well, a man could take this lever, and by teetering on it until he got it in motion, finally upset it. The chances were a hundred to one it would land in the mouth of the shaft. And it’s a cinch, it seems to me, he wouldn’t do that for fun.”
Dick shook his head gravely.
“But who could it be?” he insisted. “Who is there that could want us out of the way badly enough to murder us? No one here knows or cares a continental about us! It seems incredible.76It must have been sheer carelessness of some restless loafer who wanted to see the rock roll.”
Yet they knew that the theory was scarcely tenable. They walked farther along the path and found that it was one used by workmen, evidently, leading at last down the steep mountain side and across to the Rattler. They surmised that it must be one made by the timber cutters for the mine, and learned, in later months, that the surmise was correct.
“It makes one thing certain,” Bill declared that evening when, candidly discouraged, they sat on the little porch in front of the office they had made their home and discussed the day’s findings. “And that is that until we get a force to work here, if we ever do, it ain’t a right healthy place for us. Of course with a gang of men around there wouldn’t be a ghost of a chance for any enemy to get us; but until then we’d better watch out all the time. I begin to believe that about everything that’s happened to us here has been the work of somebody who ain’t right fond of us. Wish we could catch him at it once!”
There was a grim undercurrent in his wish that left nothing to words. They remembered that in all the time since their arrival they had seen no other human being, the Rattler men having77left them as severely alone as if they had been under quarantine.
In the stillness of twilight they heard the slow, soft padding of a man’s feet laboriously climbing the hill, and listened intently at the unusual sound.
“Wonder who that is,” speculated Bill, leaning forward and staring at the dim trail. “Looks like a dwarf from here. Some old man of the mountain coming up to drive us off!”
“Hello,” hailed a shrill, quavering voice. “Be you the bosses?”
“We are,” Dick shouted, in reply, “Come on up.”
The visitor came halting up the slope, and they discerned that he was lame and carrying a roll of blankets. He paused before them, panting, and then dropped the roll from his back, and sat down on the edge of the porch with his head turned to face them. He was white headed and old, and seemed to have exhausted his surplus strength in his haste to reach them before darkness.
“I’m Bells Park,” he said. “Bells Park, the engineer. Maybe you’ve heard of me? Eh? What? No? Well, I used to have the engines here at the Cross eight or ten years ago, and I’ve come to take ’em again. When do I go to78work? They hates me around here. They drove me out once. I said I’d come back. I’m here. I’m a union man, but I tell ’em what I think of ’em, and it don’t set well. When did you say I go to work?”
“I’m afraid you don’t go,” Dick answered regretfully.
The Cross, so far as he could conjecture, would never again ring with the sounds of throbbing engines. Already he was more than half-convinced that he should write to Sloan and reject his kindly offer of support. “We’ve been here but a week, but it doesn’t look promising to us.”
“Well, then you’re a pair of fools!” came the disrespectful and irascible retort. “They told me down in Goldpan that some miners had come to open the Cross up again. You’re not miners. I’ve hoofed it all the way up here for nothin’.”
The partners looked at each other, and grinned at the old man’s tirade. He went on without noticing them, speaking of himself in the third person:
“I can stay here to-night somewhere, can’t I? Bells Park is askin’ it. Bells Park that used to be chief in the Con and Virginia, and once had his own cabin here––cabin that was a home till79his wife went away on the long trip. She’s asleep up there under the cross mark on the hill. Bells Park as came back because he wanted to be near where she was put away! She was the best woman that ever lived. I’m looking for my old job back. I can sleep here, can’t I?”
His querulous question was more of a challenge than a request, and Dick hastened to assure him that he could unroll his blankets in a bunk in the rambling old structure that loomed dim, silent, and ghostly, on the hill beyond where they were seated. His pity and hospitality led him farther.
“Had your supper?” he asked.
Bells Park shook his head in negation.
“Then you can share with us,” Dick said, getting to his feet and entering the cabin from which in a few moments came a rattle of fire being replenished, a coffee-pot being refilled, and the crisp, frying note of sizzling bacon and eggs.
“Who might that young feller be?” asked the engineer, glowering with sudden curiosity, after his long silence, into the face of the grizzled old prospector, who, in the interim, had sat quietly.
“Him? That’s Dick Townsend, half-owner in the mine,” Bill replied.