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“Half owner? Cookin’ for me? Why don’t you do it? What right have you got sittin’ here on your long haunches and lettin’ a boss do the work? Hey? Who are you?”
“I’m his superintendent,” grinned Bill, appreciating the joke of being superintendent of a mine where no one worked.
“Oh!” said the engineer. And then, after a pause, as if readjusting all these conditions to meet his approval: “Say, he’s all right, ain’t he!”
“You bet your life!” came the emphatic response.
The applicant said no more until after he had gone into the cabin and eaten his fill, after which he insisted on clearing away the dishes, and then rejoined them in a less-tired mood. He squatted down on the edge of the porch, where they sat staring at the shadows of the glorious night, and appeared to be thoughtful for a time, while they were silently amused.
“You’re thinkin’ it’s no good, are you?” he suddenly asked, brandishing his pipe at Dick. “Well, I said you were a fool. Take it kindly, young feller. I’m an old man, but I know. You’ve been good to me. I didn’t come here to butt my nose in, but I know her better than you81do. Say!” He pivoted on his hips, and tapped an emphatic forefinger on the warped planks beneath in punctuation. “There never was a set of owners shell-gamed like them that had the Croix d’Or! There never was a good property so badly handled. Two superintendents are retired and livin’ on the money they stole from her. One millman’s bought himself a hotel in Seattle with what he got away with. There was enough ore packed off in dinner-pails from the Bonanza Chute to heel half the men who tapped it. They were always lookin’ for more of ’em. They passed through a lead of ore that would have paid expenses, on the six-hundred-foot level, and lagged it rather than hoist it out. I know! I’ve seen the cars come up out of the shaft with a man standin’ on the hundred foot to slush ’em over with muddy sump water so the gold wouldn’t show until the car men could swipe the stuff and dump it out of the tram to be picked up at night. It ain’t the rich streaks that pays. It’s the four-foot ledge that runs profit from two bits to a couple of dollars a ton. That’s what showed on the six-hundred level. Get it?”
The partners by this time were leaning eagerly forward, half-inclined to believe all that had been told them, yet willing to discount the gabbling82of the old man and find content. Until bedtime he went on, and they listened to him the next morning, when the slow dawn crept up, and decided to take the plunge. And so it was that Dick wrote a long statement of the findings to his backer in New York and told him that he was going to chance it and open the Croix d’Or again until he was satisfied, either that it would not pay to work, or would merit larger expenditure.
Once again the smoke belched from the hoisting house of the Cross, and the throb of the pumps came, hollow and clanking, from the shaft below. A stream of discolored water swirled into the creek from the waste pipes, and the rainbow trout, affrighted and disgusted, forsook its reaches and sought the pools of the river into which it emptied.
Slowly they gained on its depths, and each day the murk swam lower, and the newly oiled cage waited for its freshly stretched cable, one which had happened to be coiled in the store-house. The compressor shivered and vibrated as the pistons drove clean, sweet air through the long-disused pipes, and at last the partners knew they could reach the anticipated six-hundred-foot level and form their own conclusions.
“Well, here goes,” said Bill, grinning from83under his sou’wester as they entered the cage with lamps in hand. “We’ll see how she looks if the air pipes aren’t broken.”
They saw the slimy black sides of the shaft slip past them as Bells Park dropped them into the depths, and felt the cage slow down as he saw his pointer above the drum indicate the approach of the six-hundred-foot level. They stepped out cautiously, whiffed the air, and knew that the pipes, which had been protected by the water, were intact, and that they had no need to fear foul air. The rusted rails, slime-covered, beneath their rubber boots, glowed a vivid red as they inspected the timbering above, and saw that the sparse stulls, caps, and columns were still holding their own, and that the heavy porphyritic formation would scarcely have given had the timbers rotted away. Dank, glistening walls and a tremulous waving blackness were ahead of them as they cautiously invaded the long-deserted precincts, scraping and striking here and there with their prospector’s picks in search of the lost lead.
“About two hundred feet from the shaft, Bells said,” Dick commented. “And this must be about the place where they cut through pay ore84in search of another lobe of the Bonanza Chute. What thieves they were!”
He suddenly became aware that his companion was not with him, and whirled round. Back of him shone a tiny spark of flaring light, striving to illumine the solid blackness. He paused expectantly, and a voice came bellowing through the dark:
“Here it is. The old man’s right, I think. This looks like ore to me.”
Dick hastened back, and assisted while they broke away the looser pieces of green rock, glowing dully, and filled their sample sacks.
Three hours later they stood over the scales in the log assay-house above, and congratulated each other.
“It’ll pay!” Dick declared gleefully. “Not much, but enough to justify going on with the work. I am glad I wrote Sloan that I should draw on him, and now we’ll go ahead and hire a small gang to set the mill and the Cross in shape.”
They were like boys when they crossed to the engine house and told the news to the hard-worked engineer, who chuckeled softly and asserted that he had “told them so.”
“Now, the best way for you to get a gang85around here,” he said, “is to go down to Goldpan and tell ‘The Lily’ you want her to pass the word, or stick a sign up in her place saying what men, and how many, you want.”
“Sounds like a nice name,” Mathews commented.
“The Lily?” questioned Dick, anxious as to who this camp character could be.
“Sure,” the engineer rasped, as if annoyed by their ignorance. “Ain’t you never heard of her? Well, her right name, so they tell, is Lily Meredith. She owns the place called the High Light. Everybody knows her. She’s square, even if she does run a dance hall and rents a gamblin’ joint. She don’t stand for nothin’ crooked, Lily don’t. She pays her way, and asks no favors. Go down and tell her you want men. They all go there, some time or another.”
He stooped over to inspect the fire under the small boiler he was working, and straightened up before he went on. Through the black coating on his face, he appeared thoughtful.
“Best time to see The Lily and get action is at night. All the day-shift men hang around the camp then, and, besides that, they’ve got a new batch of placer ground about a mile and a half86over the other side, and lots of them fellers come over. Want to go to-day?”
The partners looked at each other, as if consulting, and then Dick said: “Yes. I think the sooner the better.”
Bells Park pulled the visor of his greasy little cap lower over his eyes, and stepped to the door.
“Come out here onto the yard,” he said, and they followed. “Go down to the Rattler, then bear off to the right. The trail starts in back of the last shanty on the right-hand side. You see that gap up yonder? Not the big one, but the narrow one.” He pointed with a grimy hand. “Well, you go right through that and drop down, and you’ll see the camp below you. It’s a stiff climb, but the trail’s good, and it’s just about two miles over there. It’s so plain you can make it home by moonlight.”
Without further ceremony or advice, he returned into the boiler-room, and the partners, after but slight preparations, began their journey.
It was a stiff climb! The sun had set, and the long twilight was giving way to darkness when they came down the trail into the upper end of the camp. Some embryo artist was painfully overworking an accordion, while a dog rendered melancholy by the unmusical noise, occasionally87accompanied him with prolonged howls. A belated ore trailer, with the front wagon creaking under the whine of the brakes and the chains of the six horses clanking, lurched down from a road on the far side of the long, straggling street, and passed them, the horses’ heads hanging as if overwork had robbed them of all stable-going spirit of eagerness.
The steady, booming “clumpety-clump! clumpety-clump!” of a stamp-mill on a shoulder of a hill high above the camp, drowned the whir and chirp of night insects, and from the second story of a house they passed they heard the crude banging of a piano, and a woman’s strident voice wailing, “She may have seen better da-a-ys,” with a mighty effort to be pathetic.
“Seems right homelike! Don’t it?” Bill grinned and chuckled. “That’s one right nice thing about minin’. You can go from Dawson to Chiapas, and a camp’s a camp! Always the same. I reckon if you went up the street far enough you’d find a Miner’s Home Saloon, maybe a Northern Light or two, and you can bet on there bein’ a First Class.”
The High Light proved to be the most pretentious resort in Goldpan. For one thing it had plate-glass windows and a gorgeous sign painted88thereon. Its double doors were wide, and at the front was a bar with a brass rail that, by its very brightness, told only too plainly that the evening’s trade had not commenced. Two bartenders, one with a huge crest of hair waved back, and the other with his parted in the middle, plastered low and curled at the ends, betokened diverse taste in barbering. A Chinese was giving the last polish to a huge pile of glasses, thick and heavy.
On the other side of the room, behind a roulette wheel, a man who looked more like a country parson than a gambler sat reading a thumbed copy of Taine’s “English Literature.” Three faro layouts stretched themselves in line as if watching for newcomers, and in the rear a man was lighting the coal-oil lamps of the dance hall. It was separated from the front part of the house by an iron rail, and had boxes completely around an upper tier and supported by log pillars beneath, and a tiny stage with a badly worn drop curtain.
“Is the boss here?” Bill asked, pausing in front of the man with a wave.
“Who do you mean––Lily?” was the familiar reply.
“Yes.”
89
“I think she’s over helpin’ nurse the Widder Flannery’s sick kids this afternoon. They’ve got chicken pox. Might go over there and see her if you’re in a rush.”
“We didn’t say we wanted to borrow money,” Bill retorted to the jocular latter part of the bartender’s speech. “What time will she be here?”
“About ten, I guess,” was the more courteous reply.
The partners walked out and past the row of buildings until they came to a general store, where they occupied themselves in making out an order for supplies and arranging for their delivery on the following day. The trader was a loquacious individual with the unmistakable “Yankee” twang and nasal whine of the man from that important speck of the United States called New England.
When they again turned into the street, the long twilight had been replaced by night, and on the tops of the high peaks to the westward the light of the full moon was beginning to paint the chill white with a shining glow. The street was filled with men, most of them scorning the narrow board walks and traversing the roadway. A pandemonium of sound was robbing the night of peace through music, of assorted character,90which boiled forth from open doors in discordant business rivalry, but underneath it all was the steady, dull monotone of the stamp-mill, remorselessly beating the ore as if in eternal industry.
“Hardly know the place now, eh?” Bill said, as they entered the open doors of the High Light. “It certainly keeps gettin’ more homelike. Camp must be makin’ money, eh?”
Dick did not answer. He was staring at a woman who stood at the lower end of the bar outside, and talking to a man with a medicine case in his hand. He surmised that she must be The Lily, and was astonished. He had expected the customary brazen appearance of other camp women he had known in his years of wandering; the hard-faced, combatative type produced by greed. Instead, he saw a woman of perhaps thirty years of age, or in that vague boundary between thirty and thirty-five.
She was dressed in a short skirt, wore a spotless shirt waist over an exceptionally graceful pair of shoulders, and her hair, neatly coiled in heavy bronze folds, was surmounted by a white hat of the frontier type, dented in regulation form with four hollows.
From the hat to the high tan boots, she was91neat and womanly; yet it was not this that attracted him so much as her profile. From the straight brow, down over the high, fine nose and the firm lips to the firmer chin, the face was perfect.
As if sensing his inspection, she turned toward him, and met his wondering eyes. Her appraisement was calm, repressed, and cold. Her face gave him the impression that she had forgotten how to smile. Townsend advanced toward her, certain that she must be the proprietress of the High Light.
“You are Miss Meredith?” he interrogated, as he halted in front of her.
“Mrs. Meredith,” she corrected, still unbending, and looking at him a question as to his business.
A forgotten courtesy impelled him to remove his hat as he introduced himself, but Mathews did not follow it when he was introduced, and reached out and caught her competent hand with a hard grip. Dick explained his errand, feeling, all the time under that steady look, that he was being measured.
“Oh, yes, they’ll be all right by to-morrow, Lily,” the doctor interrupted. “Excuse me for92being so abrupt, but I must go now. Good-night.”
“Good-night,” she answered, and then: “I’ll be up there at three o’clock to-morrow afternoon. Ah, you were saying you wanted–––”
She had turned to the partners again with her unfinished question leading them on to state their mission.
“Men. Here’s a list,” Dick answered, handing her a memorandum calling for go many millmen, so many drill runners, swampers, car handlers, and so forth; in all, a list of twenty odd.
“Who told you to come here?” She exploded the question as if it were vital.
“Park. Bells Park.”
She laughed mirthlessly between lips that did not smile and regular, white teeth. But her laugh belied her lack of sympathy.
“Poor old Bells!” she said, with a touch of sadness in her voice. “Poor old fool! I tried to keep him from gambling when he had money, and he went broke, like all the other fools. But he loved his wife. He made her happy. Some one in this world must be happy. So he came back, did he? And is up there at the Cross? Well, he’s a faithful man. I’m not an employment agency, but maybe I can help you. I would93do it for Bells. I like him. Good men are scarce. The bums and loafers are always easy to get. There isn’t a mine around here that isn’t looking for good men, since they made that discovery over in the flat. Most of them broke to the placer ground. Wages are nothing when there’s a chance for better.”
She had not looked at Dick as she talked, but had her eyes fixed on the paper, though not seeming to scan its contents. The room was crowded with men and filled with a confused volume of sound as she spoke, the click and whir of the wheel, the monotonous voice of the student––turned gambler––calling “Single O and the house wins. All down?” the sharp snap of the case-keeper’s buttons before the faro layouts, the screech of the orchestra in the dance hall, and the heavy shuffling of feet; yet her words and intonations were distinct.
“We would like to get them as soon as we can,” Dick answered. “We have unwatered the main shaft and–––”
From the dance hall in the rear there came a shrill, high shriek, oaths, shouts, and the orchestra stopped playing. Men jumped to their feet from the faro layouts, and then, mob-like, began to surge toward the door, while in the lead,94uttering scream on scream, ran one of the dance-hall girls with her gaudy dress bursting into enveloping flame. She had the terror of a panic-stricken animal flying into the danger of the open air to die.
As if springing forward from live ground, Mathews leaped into her path, and caught her in his arms. He jammed her forward ahead of him, taking no pains to shield her body save with his bent arm, and seized the cover of the roulette wheel, which lay neatly folded on the end of the bar.
“Give me room!” he bellowed, in his heavy, thunderous voice. “Stop ’em, Dick! For God’s sake, stop ’em!”
Dick leaped in among the crowd that was madly stampeding––women with faces whose terror showed through masks of rouge, shrieking, men who cursed, trampled, and elbowed their way to the outer air, and the wild-eyed musicians seeking to escape from a fire-trap. Dick struck right and left, and in the little space created Bill swathed the girl in the cover, smothering the flames. And all the time he shouted:
“Don’t run. What’s the matter with you? Go back and put the fire out! Don’t be idiots!”
As suddenly as it had commenced the panic95subsided, and the tide turned the other way. Sobbing women hovered round the door, and men began to form a bucket line. In a long age of five or ten minutes the excitement was over, and the fire extinguished. The dance-hall floor was littered with pieces of scorched wood torn bodily from the boxes, and the remnants of the lamp which had exploded and caused the havoc were being swept into the sodden, steaming heap in the center of the room.
Through the press at the sides came The Lily, who, in the turmoil, had sought refuge behind the bar. The partners, stooping over the unconscious, swaddled figure on the floor, looked up at her, and Dick saw that her face was as calm and unemotional as ever.
“Bring her to my room,” she said; “I’ll show you where it is. You, Tim,” she called to one of the bartenders, “go as quickly as you can and get Doctor Mills.”
The partners meekly followed her lead, pausing but once, when she turned to hold up an authoritative hand and tell the curious ones who formed a wake that they must go back, or at least not come ahead to make the case more difficult. Mathews carried his senseless burden as easily as if it were of no weight, and even as they96turned up a hallway leading to a flight of stairs ascending to The Lily’s apartments, the doctor and bartender came running to join them.
Not until they had swathed the girl in cooling bandages did any one speak. Then, as they drew the sheet tenderly over her, they became conscious of one another. As Bill looked up through blistered eyelids, exposing a cruelly scorched face, his lips broke into a painful smile.
“Doctor,” The Lily said, “now you had better care for this patient.”
She put her firm, white fingers out, brushed the miner’s singed hair back from his brow, and said: “I’ve forgotten your name, but––I want to say––you’re a man!”
97CHAPTER VIMY LADY OF THE HORSE
“It serves you right for bein’ so anxious to help one of them dance-hall women; not but what I’d probably ’a’ done it myself,” was the croaking, querulous consolation offered by Bells Park as he sat beside the plainly suffering and heavily bandaged Bill that night, or rather in the early hours of the morning, in the cabin on the Cross. “They ain’t no good except for young fools to gallop around with over a floor.”
He poured some more olive oil over the bandages, and relented enough to add: “All but The Lily, and she don’t dance with none of ’em. She’s all right, she is. Mighty peart looker, too. None purtier than Dorothy Presby, though.”
Dick, looking up from where he sat with his tired chin resting on his tired hands and elbows, thought of the gruff Bully Presby with some interest.
“Oh, so the old Rattler owner has a daughter, eh?”
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“I don’t mean old skinflint Presby!” sharply corrected the engineer. “He ain’t the only Presby in this whole United States, is he? He don’t own the whole world and the name, even if he thinks he does. This Presby I’m talkin’ about ain’t no kin of his. He’s too white. He owns all them sawmills on the other side of the Cross peak, about four miles from here. Got a railroad of his own. Worth about a billion, I reckon.”
Dick’s momentary interest subsided, but he heard the old man babbling on:
“I worked for him once, when Dorothy was a little bit of a kid. Him and me fought, but he’s a white man. She’s been away to some of those fool colleges for women back East, they say, for the last four or five years. It don’t do women no good to know too much. My wife couldn’t read or write, and she was the best woman that ever lived, bar none.”
He looked around as if delivering a challenge, and, finding that no one was paying any attention to him, subsided, fidgeted for a minute, and then said he guessed he’d “turn in so’s the water wouldn’t gain on the pumps in the mornin’.”
On the insistent demand of his partner, Dick also retired shortly, and the cabin on the hillside99was dark save for the dim light that glowed in the sufferer’s room.
They began to straggle in, the men wanted, before the partners had finished their breakfast on the following morning. Some of them were real miners, and others were nondescripts, bearing out The Lily’s statement that good men were scarce, but all were hired as they came, and the Croix d’Or began to thrill with activity.
A fat cook––and no miner can explain why a camp cook is always fat––beamed from the mess-house door. A blacksmith, accepting the ready name of “Smuts,” oiled the rusted wheels of his blower, and swore patiently and softly at a new helper as he selected the drills for sharpening. Three Burley drill runners tinkered with their machines, and scraped off the verdigris and accumulated dust of storage; millmen began to reset the tables, strip the damaged plates, and lay in new water pipes to drip ceaselessly over the powered ore. Over all these watched Bill with his bandaged face, rumbling orders here and there, and tirelessly active. Out on the pipe line, winding by cut and trestle from the reservoir in the high hills, Dick superintended repairs and laid plans.
Leaving his gang replacing sections near the100power-house, he climbed up the length of the line to discover, if possible, how far the labors of the vandal had extended. Foot by foot he had traversed it, almost to the reservoir itself, when he paused to breathe and look off at the mountains spread below and around.
The Cross, in the distance, was softened again to a miracle of dim yellow laid against a field of purple, and, like a speck, a huge eagle swept in circles round its point to come to rest on its extreme summit. He turned from admiring its flight to inspect a bowlder that had tumbled down from the slope above and come to rest in a big dent; it had smashed in the top of the pipe. He picked up a piece of a storm-broken limb, used it as a lever, and sent the rock crashing across the pipe to go bounding down the hillside as it gained momentum with every leap.
There was a startled snort, a sudden threshing of the brush, and it parted to disclose a girl astride a horse that was terrified and endeavoring his best to dismount his rider. Dick, surmising that horse and rider had suffered a narrow escape from the bowlder, ran toward them remorsefully, but the girl already had the animal in control after a display of splendid horsemanship.
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“Thank you,” she said, as he hastened toward the horse’s head, intent on seizing the snaffle. “Please don’t touch him. I can quiet him down.”
“I am so sorry,” he pleaded, with his hat in his hand. “I had no idea that any one ever rode up this way.”
“Don’t apologize,” she answered, with a careless laugh. “No one ever does, save me. It’s an old and favorite view of mine. I used to ride here, to see the Cross, many years ago, before I went away to school. So I came back to see my old friend, and––well––your bowlder would have struck us if my horse hadn’t jumped.”
She laughed again, and reached a yellow-gauntleted hand down to pat her mount’s shoulder with a soothing caress. The horse stopped trembling, and looked at Dick with large, intelligent eyes.
“Ah,” said Dick, remembering the garrulity of the engineer. “I believe you must be Miss Presby.”
Even as she said simply: “I am, but how did you know? I don’t remember ever seeing you,” he took note of her modish blue riding-dress with divided skirts and patent-leather boots. There was a clean freshness about her person, a smiling102candor in her eyes, and a fine, frank girlishness in her face that attracted him beyond measure. She appeared to be about twenty years of age, and was such a girl as those he had known and danced with, in those distant university days when his future seemed assured, and life a joyous conquest with all the odds in his favor. Now she was of another world, for he was, after all, but a workingman, while she, the daughter of a millionaire lumberman, would dance and associate with those other university men whose financial incomes enabled them to dawdle as they pleased through life. He had no bitterness in this summary, but he sustained an instant’s longing for a taste of that old existence, and the camaraderie of such girls as the one who sat before him on her horse.
“No,” he said, looking up at her, “you never saw me before. I have been in the Blue Mountains but six weeks. I am Richard Townsend.”
Her face took on a look of aroused interest, different from the casual look she had been giving him in the brief minute of their meeting.
“Oh,” she said, “then you must be the Mr. Townsend of the Croix d’Or. I learned of your arrival last night after I came home. You are rehabilitating the old mine?”
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“Yes,” he answered, smiling. “At least we are trying to. As to the outcome––I don’t know.”
“You mustn’t say that!” she protested. “Faith in anything is the first requisite for success. That’s what it says in the copybooks, doesn’t it?”
She laughed again in her clear, mezzo voice, and then with a resumption of gravity gathered her reins into a firmer grip, and, as her horse lifted his head in response to the summons, said: “Anyway, I thank you for volunteering to rescue me, Mr. Townsend, and wish you lots of good luck, but please don’t start any more bowlders down the hill, because if you do I shall be robbed of my most enjoyable trip each day. Good-by.”
“Don’t be afraid,” he called to her, as she started away. “There are no more bowlders to roll.”
He stood and watched her as she rode, masterfully seated on the black horse, around a crag that stuck out into the trail.
“‘Faith in anything is the first requisite for success,’” he repeated to himself, striving to recall whether or not it was, as she had intimated, a hackneyed proverb for the young; yet there was something bracing in it, coming from her calm, young, womanly lips. “That’s it; she has it,”104he again said to himself. “‘Faith.’ That’s what I need.” And he resumed his tramp up the mountainside with a better courage and more hope for the Croix d’Or. He was still vaguely troubled when he made his way back past the power-house, in a sliding, scrambling descent, his boots starting tiny avalanches of shale and loose rock to go clattering down the mountainside.
The new men were proving competent under the direction of a boss pipeman who had been made foreman, and Dick trudged away toward the mine, feeling that one part of the work, at least, would be speedily accomplished.
Bill was still striding backward and forward, but devoting most of his attention to cleaning up the mill, and declared, with a wry smile, that he never felt better in his life, but never liked talking less.
When the noon whistle shrieked its high, staccato note from the engine-house, they went up to the mess, and seated themselves at the head of the table. As a whole, the men were fairly satisfactory. Bill stared coldly down the table, and appeared to be mentally tabulating those who would draw but one pay-check, and that when their “time” was given them, but Dick’s mind105persisted in wandering afield to the chance encounter of the morning.
The men had finished their hasty meal, in hasty miner’s fashion, silently, and tramped, with clumping feet, out of the mess-house to the shade of its northern side before Bill had ended his painful repast. Whiffs of tobacco smoke and voices came through the open windows, where the miners lounged and rested on a long bench while waiting for the whistle.
“Don’t you fool yourself about Bully Presby,” one of them was saying. “It’s true he’s a hard man, and out for the dust every minute of his life, but he’s got nerve, all right. He’ll bulldoze and fight and growl and gouge, but he’s there in other ways. I don’t like him, and we quit pretty sudden, yet I saw him do somethin’ once that beat me.”
“Did you work on the Rattler?” another voice queried.
“No,” the other went on, “I worked for him down on the Placer Belle in California. It was under the old system and was a small mine. Kept all the dynamite on the hundred-foot level in an old chamber. Every man went there to get it when it was time to load his holes. I was startin’ for mine one evenin’, whistlin’ along, when I106smelled smoke. Stopped and sniffed, and about weakened. Knowed it was comin’ from the powder room down there. It wan’t more’n twenty feet from the shaft, and there was two or three tons of it in that hole. Ran back and gave the alarm bell to the engineer, then ducked my head and went toward the smoke to see if anything could be done before she blew up the whole works. On his hands and knees, with all that was left of his coat, was Bully. He’d got the fire nearly smothered out, and we coughed and spit, and drowned the rest of the sparks from the water barrel. He’d fought it to a finish all alone, and I had to drag him out to the cage that was slidin’ up and down as if the engineer was on a drunk, and every time it went up I could see the boys’ faces, kind of white, and worried, and hear the alarms bangin’ away like mad. But he’d put the fire out there with all that stuff around him. That took some nerve, I tell you!”
“What did he do for you?” asked another voice.
The narrator gave a heavy laugh, and chuckled.
“Do for me? When he got fresh air in him again, up in the hoist, he sat up and opened his hand. In it was a candlestick and a snipe, burned on the side till the wick looked about a foot long.107‘Who owns this candlestick?’ says he. No one spoke, but some of us knowed it belonged to old Deacon Wells, an absent-minded old cuss, but the deacon had a family of nigh on to ten kids. So nobody answered. ‘Some fool left this here,’ Bully bellowed, tearing around. ‘And that’s what started the fire. I’ll kick the man off the works that owns the stick.’ Still nobody said anything. He caught me grinnin’. ‘You know who it was,’ says he. ‘Sure I do,’ says I, ‘but I’m a little tongue-tied.’ Then he told me he’d fire me if I didn’t say who it was. ‘Give me my time-check,’ says I, and he gave it. He found out afterward I was the man that dragged him out, and sent a letter up to Colusa askin’ me to come back, but I didn’t go. Don’t s’pose he’d remember me now, and don’t know as I’d want him to. Any man that works for Bully comes about as near givin’ away his heart’s blood as any one could, and live.”
The voices went rumbling on, and Dick sat thinking of the strange, powerful man of the Rattler.
“Three of the millmen know their business,” mumbled Bill, as if all the time he had been mentally appraising his force. “Two are rumdums. The chips isn’t bad. He could carpenter anywhere,108and if he’s as smart a timberman as he is millwright, will make good. The engineer that’s to relieve Bells ain’t so much, but I’ll leave it to Bells to cuss him into line. That goes. Two of the Burley men are all right, and I fired the third in the first hour because he didn’t know what was the nut and which the wrench. Smuts is a gem. He put the pigeon-blue temper on a bunch of drills as fast as any man could have done it.”
Dick did not answer, but concentrated his mind on the work ahead. The whistle blew, and he compelled Bill to submit to new bandages, following the doctor’s instructions, and smiled at his steady swearing as the wrappings were removed and the blisters redressed. They walked across to the hoist, entered the cage, and felt the sinking sensation as they were dropped, rather than lowered, to the six-hundred-foot level. The celerity of the descent almost robbed him of breath, but he thought of sturdy old Bells’ boast, that he had “never run a cage into the sheaves, nor dropped it to the sump, in forty years of steam.”
Lights glowed ahead of them, and they heard hammering. The suck of fresh air under pressure, vapored like steam, whirled around them in gusts, and the water oozed and rippled beside109their feet as they went forward. The carpenter was putting in a new set of timbers, and his task was nearly finished, while beside him waited a drill man and a swamper with the cumbersome, spiderlike mechanism ready to set. The carpenter gave a few more blows to a key block, and methodically flung his hammer into his box and hurried back out through the tunnel toward the cage, intent on resuming his work at the mill.
Bill tentatively inspected the timbers, tapped the roof with a pick taken from the swamper’s hands, heard the true ring of live rock, and backed away. The drill was drawn up to the green face of ore.
“About there, I should say,” Dick directed, pointing an indicatory finger, and the drill runner nodded.
The swamper, who appeared to know his business, came forward with the coupling which fed compressed air to the machine, the runner gave a last inspection of his drill, turned his chuck screw, setting it against the rocky face, and signaled for the air. With a clatter like the discharge of a rapid-fire gun, the steel bit into the rock, and the Cross was really a mine again. Spattered with mud, and satisfied that the new110drift was working in pay, the partner trudged back out.
They signaled for the cage, shot upward, and emerged to the yard near the blacksmith’s tunnel in time to see a huge bay horse, with a woman rider, come toiling up the slope. There was something familiar about the white hat, and as she neared them they recognized The Lily. Before they could assist her to dismount, she leaped from the saddle, landing lightly on her toes, and dropped the horse’s reins over his head.
“Good-day––never mind––he’ll stand,” she said, all in a breath, striding toward them with an extended hand.
Dick accepted it with a firm grip, and lifted his hat, while Bill merely shook hands and tried to smile. It was to him that she turned solicitously.
“I’m glad you are out,” she remarked, without lowering her eyes which swept over the bandages on his face. “You’re all right, are you?”
“Sure. But how’s that girl? It don’t matter much about an old cuss like me. Girls are a heap scarcer.”
The owner of the High Light looked troubled for a moment, and removed her gloves before answering.
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“Doctor Mills says she will live,” she said quietly, “but she is terribly burned. She will be so disfigured that she can never work in a dance hall any more. It’s pretty rough luck.”
Dick recoiled and felt a chill at this hard, cold statement. The girl could never work in a dance hall any more! And this was accepted as a calamity! Accustomed as he was to the frontier, this matter-of-fact acceptance of a dance-hall occupation as something desirable impressed him with its cynicism. Not that he doubted the virtue of many of those forlorn ones who gayly tripped their feet over rough boards, and drank tea or ginger ale and filled their pockets with bar checks to make a living as best they might, but because the whole garish, rough, drink-laden, curse-begrimed atmosphere of a camp dance hall revolted him.
Mrs. Meredith had intuition, and read men as she read books, understandingly. She arose to the defense of her sex.
“Well,” she said, facing him, as if he had voiced his sentiment, “what would you have? Women are what men make them, no better, no worse.”
“I have made no criticism,” he retorted.
“No, but you thought one,” she asserted. “But, pshaw! I didn’t come here to argue. I112came up to tell you that the dance-hall girl will recover and has friends who will see that she doesn’t starve, even if she no longer works in my place. Also, I came to see how Mister––what is your name, anyway?––is.”
“Mathews, ma’am. William Mathews. My friends call me Bill. I don’t allow the others to call me anything.”
The temporary and threatening cloud was dissipated by the miner’s rumbling laugh, and they sauntered across the yard, the bay horse looking after them, but standing as firmly as if the loosened reins were tied to a post instead of resting on the ground. A swamper, carrying a bundle of drills, trudged across the yard to the blacksmith shop, as they stood in its doorway.
“I sent you the best men I could pick up,” The Lily said. “You did me a good turn, and I did my best to pay it back. That blacksmith is all right. Some of the others I know, but I don’t know him. Never saw him before. You’d better watch him.”
She pointed at the swamper as coolly as if he were an inanimate object, and he glared at her in return, then dropped his eyes.
“I told you I didn’t run an employment agency,” she went on, “but if any of these fellows113get fresh, let me know, and I’ll try to get you others. How does the Cross look, anyway?”
They turned away and accompanied her over the plant above ground, and heard her greet man after man on a level of comradeship, as if she were but a man among men. Her hard self-possession and competence impressed the younger man as a peculiar study. It seemed to him, as he walked beside her thoughtfully, that every womanly trait had been ground from her in the stern mills of circumstance. He had a vague desire to probe into her mind and learn whether or not there still dwelt within it the softness of her sex, but he dared not venture. He stood beside the bandaged veteran as she rode away, a graceful, independent figure.
“Is she all tiger, or part woman?” he said, turning to Mathews, whose eyes had a singularly thoughtful look.
The latter turned to him with a quick gesture, and threw up his unbandaged hand.
“My boy,” he said, “she’s not a half of anything. She’s all tiger, or all woman! God only knows!”
114CHAPTER VIITHE WOMAN UNAFRAID
They were to have another opportunity to puzzle over the character of The Lily before a week passed, when, wishing to make out a new bill of supplies, they went down to the camp. The night was fragrant with the spring of the mountains, summer elsewhere––down in the levels where other occupations than mining held rule. The camp had the same dead level of squalor in appearance, the same twisting, wriggling, reckless life in its streets.
“Fine new lot of stuff in,” the trader said, pushing his goods in a brisk way. “Never been a finer lot of stuff brought into any camp than I’ve got here now. Canned tomatoes, canned corn, canned beans, canned meat, canned tripe, canned salmon. That’s a pretty big layout, eh? And I reckon there never was no better dried prunes and dried apricots ever thrown across a mule’s back than I got. Why, they taste as if you115was eatin’ ’em right off the bushes! And Mexican beans! Hey, look at these! Talk about beans and sowbelly, how would these do?”
He plunged his grimy hand into a sack, and lifted a handful of beans aloft to let them sift through his fingers, clattering, on those below. The partners agreed that he had everything in the world that any one could crave in the way of delicacies, and gave him their orders; then, that hour’s task completed, sauntered out into the street.
Dick started toward the trail leading homeward, but Bill checked him, with a slow: “Hold on a minute.”
The younger man turned back, and waited for him to speak.
“I’d kind of like to go down to the High Light for a while,” the big man said awkwardly. “We ought to go round there and see Mrs. Meredith, and patronize her as far as a few soda pops, and such go, hadn’t we? Seein’ as how she’s been right good to us.”
Dick, nothing loath to a visit to The Lily, assented, although the High Light, with its camp garishness, was an old and familiar sight to any one who had passed seven years in outlying mining regions.
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The proprietress was not in sight when they entered, but the bartenders greeted them in a more friendly way, and the Chinese, who seemed forever cleaning glasses, grinned them a welcome. They nodded to those they recognized, and walked back to the little railing.
“Lookin’ for Lily?” the man with the bangs asked, trying to show his friendliness. “She ain’t here now, but she’ll be here soon. She’s about due. Go on up and grab a box for yourselves. The house owes you fellers a drink, it seems to me. Can I send you up a bottle of Pumbry? The fizzy stuff’s none too good for you, I guess.”
He appeared disappointed when Dick told him to send up two lemonades, and turned back to lean across the bar and hail some new arrival. The partners went up and seated themselves in one of the cardboard stalls dignified by the name of boxes, and, leaning over the railing in front between the gilt-embroidered, red-denim curtains, looked down on the dancers. Two or three of their own men were there, grimly waltzing with girls who tried to appear cheerful and joyous.
Shrill laughter echoed now and then, and when the music changed a man with a voice like a megaphone shouted: “Gents! Git pardners for the square sets!” and the scene shifted into one of117more regular pattern, where different individuals were more conspicuous. Some of the more hilarious cavorted, and tried clumsy shuffles on the corners when the raucous-voiced man howled: “Bala-a-ance all!” and others merely jigged up and down with stiff jerks and muscle-bound limbs, gravely, and with a desperate, earnest endeavor to enjoy themselves.
A glowering, pockmarked man, evidently seeking some one with no good intent, pulled open the curtains at the back of the box, and stared at them in half-drunken gravity; then discovering his mistake, with a clumsy “Beg pardon, gents,” let the draperies drop, and passed on down the row.
Across from them, in the opposite box, some man from the placers, with his face tanned to a copper color, was hilariously surrounding himself with all the girls he could induce to become his guests, holding a box party of his own. He was leaning over the rail and bellowing so loudly that his voice could be heard above the din: “Hey, down there! You, Tim! Bring me up a bottle of the bubbly water––two bottles––five––no, send up a case. Whoop-ee! Pay on seventeen! This is where little Hank Jones celebrates! Come on up, girls. Here’s where no men is wanted. It’s me all by my little lonely!”