271CHAPTER XVIIWHEN REASON SWINGS
Dick suddenly crumpled the sheet of paper, and put it in his pocket. He lifted himself, as a man distracted, from the chair in which he had been sitting, gripping the arms with hands that were tensely responding to an agony of spirit. He almost lurched forward as he stepped to the little steps leading down from the porch, and into the worn trail, hesitated at the forks leading to mess-house or assay office, and then mechanically turned in the latter direction, it being where the greater number of his working hours were passed.
“Where you goin’?” the voice of his partner called, as he plunged forward.
He had to make a determined attempt to speak, then his voice broke, harsh and strained, through dry lips:
“Assay office.”
He did not look back, but went forward, with272limp hands and tottering knees, turning neither to right nor left. The whole world was a haze. The steadfast mountain above him was a cynical monster, and dimly, in the shadow of the high landmark, he discerned a change, sinister, gloating, and leering on him and his misery. The soft voices of the men of the day shift returning from their voluntary task, the staccato exhaust of the hoisting engine bringing up a load of ore from the refound lead, the clash of a car dumping its load of waste, and the roar of the Rattler’s stamps, softened by distance, blended into discordance.
He entered the assay-house like a whipped dog seeking the refuge of its kennel, threw himself on a stool before the bench, leaned his head into his hollowed arms, and groaned as would a stricken warrior of olden days when surrendering to his wounds.
This, then, explained it all––that sequence of events, frustrating, harrying, baffling him, since the first hour he had come to the mine of the Croix d’Or. The rough suggestion of Bully Presby on the first day, discouraging him; the harsh attitude; the persistent attempts to dishearten him and buy him out; the endeavor to buy half the property from, and remove the backing, of Sloan, without which he could not go on;273the words of the watchman, who doubtless had discovered Bully Presby’s secret theft, blackmailed him as much as he could, and, dying, cursed him; but, hating the men of the mine more, had withheld the vital meaning of his accusation. Perhaps Presby had been instrumental in Thompson’s strike. But no, that could scarcely be, although, in the light of other events in that iniquitous chain, it might be possible. That he had any part in the dynamiting of the dam or power-house, Dick cast aside as unworthy of such a man. The strong, hard, masterful, and domineering face of Bully Presby arose before him as from the darkening shadows of the room, and it seemed triumphant.
He lifted his head suddenly, thinking, in his superacute state of mind, that he had heard a noise. He must have air! The assay office, with its smell of nitric acid, its burned fumes, its clutter of broken cupels and slag, was unbearable. He arose from the stool so suddenly that it went toppling over to fall against the stacked crucibles beneath the bench which lent their clatter to the upset. He stepped out into the night. It was dark, only the stars above him dimly betraying the familiar shapes of mountains, forests, and buildings around. Up in the bunk-house some274man was wailing a verse of “Ella Re,” accompanied by a guitar, and the doleful drone of the hackneyed chorus was caught up by the other men “off shift.” But, nauseating as it was to him, this piebald ballad of the hills, it contained one shrieking sentence: “Lost forevermore!” That was it! Joan was lost!
He looked up at the superintendent’s quarters, which had been his home, and saw that its lights were out. Bill, he conjectured, always hard working and early rising, had tumbled into his bed, unconscious of this tragedy. He struck off across the gulch, and took the trail he had so frequently trodden with a beating heart, and high and tender hope. It led him to the black barrier of the pipe line, the place where first he had met her, the sacred clump of bushes that had held and surrendered to him the handkerchief enshrined in his pocket, the slope where she had leaned down from her horse and kissed him in the only caress he had ever received from her lips, and told him that he should be with her in her prayers.
Reverently he caressed with his hands the spot where she had so often sat on a gray old bowlder, flat-topped. His heart cried for one more sight of her, one more caress, one more opportunity275to listen to her voice before he dealt her the irrevocable wound that would end it all.
Not for an instant did he waver. The tempter, whispering in his ear, told him that he could conceal his knowledge, advise Sloan to sell, take his chance with Joan, and let the sleeping dog lie, forever undiscovered. It told him that Sloan was admittedly rich beyond his needs, and that with him the Croix d’Or was merely a matter of sentiment, and an opportunity of bestowing on the son of his old-time friend a chance to get ahead in the world.
But back of it all came the inexorable voice of truth, telling Dick that there was but one course open, and that was reparation; that to his benefactor he owed faith and loyalty; that Presby must pay, though his––Richard Townsend’s––castles crumbled to dust in the wreckage of exposure. He must break the heart and faith of the girl who loved him, and whom, with every fiber of his being, he loved in return.
She would stand in the world as the daughter of a colossal thief! Not a thief of the marts, where crookedness was confused with shrewdness far removed from the theft of the hands; but a thief who had burrowed beneath another man’s property, and carried away, to coinage, his276gold. Between Bully Presby and the man who tunneled under a bank to loot the safe, there was no moral difference save in the romance of that mystic underground world where men bored like microbes for their spoil.
“Joan! Joan! Joan!” he muttered aloud, as if she were there to hear his hurt appeal.
It was for her that he felt the wound, and not for Bully Presby, her father. For the latter he spared scant sympathy; but it was Joan who would be stricken by any action he might take, and the action must be taken, and would necessarily be taken publicly.
Under criminal procedure men had served long terms behind bars for less offenses than Presby’s. Others had made reparation through payment of money, and slunk away into the shadows of disgrace to avoid handcuffs. And the fall of Presby of the Rattler, as a plunderer, was one that would echo widely in the mining world where he had moved, a stalwart, unbending king. Not until then had Dick realized how high that figure towered. Presby, the irresistible, a thief, and fighting to keep out of the penitentiary, while Joan, the brave, the loving, the true, cowered in her room, dreading to look the world in the face.
And he, the man who loved her, almost accepted277as her betrothed, with the ring even then burning in his pocket, was the one who must deal her this blow!
He got up and staggered through the darkness along the length of the line, almost envying the miserable dynamiter, who had died above the remnant of wall, for the quiet into which he had been thrust. If the train bringing him homeward had been wrecked, and his life extinguished, he could have saved her this. The Cross would have been sold. She might have grieved for him, for a time, but wounds will heal, unless too deep. He stood above the abyss where daylight showed ruins, and knew that the destruction of the dam, heavy a blow as it had seemed when inflicted, was nothing as compared to this ruin of dreams, of love, and hope.
“Dick! Dick! What is it, boy?” came a soft voice from the night, scarcely above a whisper. “Can’t you tell me, old man? Ain’t we still pardners? Just as we uster be?”
He peered through the darkness, roused from his misery in the stillness of the hour, and the night, by the appeal. Dimly he discerned, seated above him on the abutment, a shape outlined against the stars. It threw itself down with hard-striking feet, and came toward him, and he knew278it was not a phantom of misery. It came closer to where he stood on the brink of the blackness, and laid a hand on his shoulder, put it farther across and held him, as tenderly as father might have held, in this hour of distress.
“I’ve been follerin’ you, boy,” the kindly voice went on. “I saw that somethin’ had got you. That you were hard hit! I’ve been near you for the last two or three hours. I don’t know as I’d have bothered you now, if I hadn’t been afraid you’d fall over. Let’s go back, Dick––back to the mine.”
It seemed as if there had come to him in the night a strong support. Numbed and despairing, but with a strange relief, he permitted Bill to lead him back over the trail, and at last, when they were standing above the dim buildings below, found speech.
“It’s her,” he said. “It’s for her sake that I hate to do it. It’s Joan!”
“Sit down here by me,” the big voice, commiserating, said. “Here on this timber. I’ve kept it to myself, boy, but I know all about her. I stood on the bank, where I’d just gone to hunt you, on that day she reached down from the saddle. I knew the rest, and slipped away. You love her. She’s done somethin’ to you.”
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“No!” the denial was emphatic. “She hasn’t! She’s as true as the hills. It’s her father. Look here!”
He fumbled in his pocket, pulled out the crumpled sheet, and struck a match. Bill took the letter in his hands and read, while the night itself seemed pausing to shield the flickering flame. With hurried fingers he struck another match, and the light flared up, exposing his frowning eyebrows, the lights in his keen eyes, the tight pressure of his firm lips.
He handed the letter back, and for a long time sat silently staring before him, his big, square shoulders bent forward, and his hat outlined against the light of the night, which was steadily increasing.
“I see how it is,” he said at last. “And it’s hard on you, isn’t it, boy? A man can stand anything himself, but it’s hell to hurt those we care for.”
The sympathy of his voice cut like a knife, with its merciful hurt. Dick broke into words, telling of his misery, but stammering as strong men stammer, when laying bare emotions which, without pressure, they always conceal. His partner listened, motionless, absorbing it all, and his face280was concealed by the darkness, otherwise a great sympathy would have flared from his eyes.
“We’ve got to find a way out of this, Dick,” he said at last, with a sigh. And the word “we” betrayed more fully than long sentences his compassion. “We must go slow. Somehow, I reckon, I’m cooler than you in this kind of a try-out. Maybe because it don’t hit me so close to home. Let’s go back, boy, back to the cabin, and try to rest. The daylight is like the Lord’s own drink. It clears the head, and makes us see things better than we can in the night––when all is dark. Let’s try to find a way out, and try to forget it for a while. Did you ever think how good it all is to us? Just the night, coming along every once in a while, to make us appreciate how good the sun is, and how bright the mornings are. It ain’t an easy old world, no matter how hard we try to make it that; because it takes the black times to make our eyes glad to watch the sunrise. Let me help you, old pardner. We’ve been through some pretty tight places together, and somehow, when He got good and ready, the Lord always showed us a way out.”
He arose on his feet, stretched his long muscular arms, and started down the hill, and Dick followed. There was not another word exchanged,281other than the sympathetic “good-night” in which they had not failed for more than seven years, and outside the stars waned slowly, the stamp mill of the Rattler roared on, and the Croix d’Or was unmoved.
The daylight came, and with it the boom of the night shift setting off its morning blasts, and clearing the way for the day shift that would follow in sinking the hole that must inevitably betray the dishonesty of the stern mine master at the foot of the hill. Dick had not slept, and turned to see a shadow in the door.
“Don’t you get up, Dick,” Bill said. “Just try to rest. I heard you tumblin’ around all the night. You don’t get anywhere by doin’ that. A man has to take himself in hand more than ever when there’s big things at stake. Then’s when he needs his head. You just try to get some rest. I’ll keep things goin’ ahead all right, and there ain’t no call to do nothin’ for a week or ten days––till we get our feet on the ground. After that we’ll find a trail. Don’t worry.”
Through the kindly tones there ran confidence, and, entirely exhausted, Dick turned over and tried to sleep. It came to him at last, heavy and dreamless, the sleep that comes beneficently to those who suffer. The sun, creeping westward,282threw a beam across his face, and he turned restlessly, like a fever-stricken convalescent, and rolled farther over in the bed.
The beam pursued him, until at last there was no further refuge, and he sat up, dazed and bewildered, and hoping that all had been a nightmare, and that he should hear the cheery note of the whistle telling him that it was day again, and calling the men of the Croix d’Or to work.
It was monstrous, impossible, that all should have changed. It was but yesterday that he had returned to the mine with finances assured, confidence restored, and the certainty that Joan Presby loved him, and could come to his side when his work was accomplished.
He looked at his watch and the bar of sunlight. It was four o’clock, and the day was gone. Everything was real. Everything was horrible. He crawled stiffly from his bed, thrust his head into the cold water of the basin, and, unshaven, stepped out to the porch and down the trail.
The plumes of smoke still wreathed upward from two stacks. Bill was still driving downward unceasingly. The mellow clang of the smith’s hammer, sharpening drills, smote his ears, and the rumble of the cars. The cook, in a high, thin tenor, sang the songs with which he habitually283whiled away his work. Everything was the same, save him! And his air castles had been blown away as by the wind.
In a fever of uncertainty, he stood on the hillside and thought of what he should do. He believed that it was his duty to be the one to break the harsh news to Joan, and wondered whether or not she might be found at the tryst. He remembered that, once before when he had not appeared, she had ridden over there in the afternoon. Perhaps, expecting him, and being disappointed, she might be there again.
He hurried down the slope, and back up across the divide and along the trail, his hopes and uncertainties alone rendering him certain that she must be there, and paused when the long, black line shone dully outlined in its course around the swelling boss of the hill. He experienced a thrill of disappointment when he saw that she was not waiting, and, again consulting his watch feverishly, tramped backward and forward along the confines of the hallowed place.
At last, certain from the fresh hoof marks on the yielding slope, that she had come and gone, he turned, and went slowly back to the mine. He had a longing to see his partner, and learn whether or not Mathews, with that strange, resourceful284logic of his, had evolved some way out of the predicament. But Bill was nowhere in sight. He was not in the office, and the mill door was locked. The cook had not seen him; and the blacksmith, busy, stopped only long enough to say that he thought he had seen the superintendent going toward the hoisting-house.
“Have you seen Bill?” Dick asked of the engineer, who stood at his levers, and waited for a signal.
“He’s below,” the engineer answered, throwing over an arm, and watching the cage ascend with a car of ore.
It trundled away, and Dick stepped into the cage. The man appeared irresolute, and embarrassed.
“He’ll be up pretty soon, I think,” he ventured.
“Well, I’ll not wait for him,” Dick said. “Lower away.”
The man still stood, irresolute.
“Let her go, I said,” Dick called sharply, his usual patience of temper having gone.
“But––but–––” halted the engineer. “Bill said to me, when he went down, says he: ‘You don’t let any one come below. Understand? I don’t care if it’s Townsend himself. Nobody285comes down. You hold the cage, because I’ll send the shift up, and ‘tend to the firing myself.’”
For an instant Dick was enraged by this stubbornness, and turned with a threat, and said: “Who’s running this mine? I don’t care what he said. You haven’t understood him. Lower away there, I say, and be quick about it!”
The rails and engine room slid away from him. The cage slipped downward on its oiled bearings, as if reluctant, and the light above faded away to a small pin-point below, and then died in obscurity, as if the world had been blotted out. Only the sense of falling told him that he was going down, down, to the seven-hundred-foot level, and then he remembered that he had no candle. The cage came to a halt, and he fumbled for the guard bar, lifted it, and stepped out.
Straight ahead of him he saw a dim glow of light. With one hand on the wall he started toward it, approached it, and then, in the hollow of illumination saw something that struck him like a blow in the face. The hard, resounding clash of his heels on the rock underfoot stopped. His hands fell to his sides, as if fixed in an attitude of astonishment. Standing in the light beyond him stood Joan, with her hands raised, palms outward.
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“Stop!” she commanded. “Stop! Stay where you are a moment!”
Amazed and bewildered, he obeyed mechanically, and comprehended rather than saw that, crouched on the floor of the drift beyond, his partner knelt with a watch in his hand, and in a listening attitude. Suddenly, as if all had been waiting for this moment, a dull tremor ran through the depths of the Croix d’Or. A muffled, beating, rending sound seemed to tear its way, vibrant, through the solid ledge. He leaped forward, understanding all at once, as if in a flash of illumination, what the woman he loved and his partner had been waiting for. It was the sound of the five-o’clock blasts from the Rattler, as it stole the ore from beneath their feet. It was the audible proof of Bully Presby’s theft.
“Joan! My Joan!” he said, leaping forward. “I should have spared you this!”
But she did not answer. She was leaning back against the wall of the tunnel, her hands outstretched in semblance of that cross whose name was the name of the mine–––as if crucified on its cross of gold. The flaring lights of the candles in the sticks, thrust into the crevices around, lighted her pale, haggard face, and her white287hands that clenched themselves in distress. She looked down at the giant who was slowly lifting himself from his knees, with his clear-cut face upturned; and the hollows, vibrant with silence, caught her whispered words and multiplied the sound to a sibilant wail.
“It’s true!” she said. “It’s true! You didn’t lie! You told the truth! My father––my father is a thief, and may God help him and me!”
288CHAPTER XVIIITHE BULLY MEETS HIS MASTER
The ache and pain in her whole being was no greater than the colossal desire Dick had to comfort and shield her. He rushed toward her with his arms reached out to infold, but she pushed him back, and said hoarsely: “No! No! I sha’n’t let you! It would be an insult now!”
Her eyes were filled with a light he had never seen in them before, a commanding flame that held him in check and stupefied him, as he tried to reason why his love at that moment would be an insult. It did not dawn on him that he was putting himself in the position of one who was proffering silence for affection. All he knew was that everything in the world seemed against him, and, overstrained to the breaking point, he was a mere madman.
“You brought her here?” he hoarsely questioned Bill.
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“I did.”
“And told her that her father was under us?”
“Yes.”
“And that I was to be kept above ground?”
“Of course, and I had a reason, because––”
He did not finish the sentence. The younger man shouted a furious curse, and lunged forward and struck at the same time. His feet, turning under a fragment of rock, twisted the directness of his blow so that it lost force; but its heavy spat on the patient face before him was like the crack of a pistol in that underground chamber.
Bill’s hands lifted impulsively, and then dropped back to his sides, hanging widely open. The flickering candlelight showed a slow red stream emerging slowly from one of his nostrils, and running down across the firm chin, and the pain-distorted lips. In his eyes was a hurt agony of reproach, as if the knife of a friend had been unexpectedly thrust into his heart. Dick’s arm, tensed by the insane anger of his mind, was drawn back to deal another blow, and seemed to stop half-way, impotent to strike that defenseless face before him.
“Why don’t you hit again, boy? I’ll not strike back! I have loved you too much for that!”
There was a world of misery and reproach in290the quiet voice of the giant, whose tremendous physical power was such that he could have caught the younger man’s arm, and with one wrench twisted it to splintered bone. Before its echoes had died away another voice broke in, suffused with anguish, the shadows waving on the walls of gray rock twisted, and Joan’s hands were on his arm.
“Dick! Dick! Are you mad? Do you know what you are doing?”
He shook her hands from his arm, reeled against the wall, and raised his forearm across his eyes, and brushed it across, as if dazed and blinded by a rush of blood which he would sweep away. He had not noticed that in that staggering progress he had fallen full against a candlestick, and that it fell to the floor and lay there between them, with its flame slowly increasing as it formed a pool of grease. For the first time since he had spoken, the huge miner moved. He stepped forward, and ground the flame underfoot.
“There might be a stray cap around here somewhere,” he said.
His voice appeared to rouse the younger man, and bring him to himself. He stepped forward, with his hands behind him and his face still set,291wild and drawn, and said brokenly: “Bill! Bill! Strike back! Do something! Old friend!”
“I cain’t,” came the reply, in a helpless monotone. “You know if it were any other man I’d kill him! But you don’t understand yet, and––”
“I made him bring me here,” Joan said, coming closer, until the shadows of the three were almost together. Her voice had a strange hopelessness in it, and yet a calm firmness. “He came to talk it over with me, on your account. Pleading your cause––begging me that, no matter what happened, I should not change my attitude toward you. Toward you, I say! He said your sense of honesty and loyalty to Sloan would drive you to demanding restitution even though it broke your heart. He said he loved you more than anything on earth, and begged me to help him find some way to spare––not me, or my father––but you!”
Dick tried to speak, but his throat restricted until he clutched it with his fingers, and his lips were white and hard.
“I did not believe that what he said was true,” the voice went on, coming as from depths of desolation and misery, and with dead levels dulled by grief beyond emotion. “I have believed in my father! I thought there must be some mistake.292I demanded of your partner that he lay off his own shift, and bring me here where we might listen. Oh, it was true––it was true!”
She suddenly turned and caught the steel handle of a candlestick in her hand, and tore its long steel point from the crevice.
“But I’ve found the way,” she said. “I’ve found the way. You must come with me––now! Right now, I say. We shall have this over with, and then––and then––I shall go away from here; for always!”
“Not that,” Dick said, holding his hands toward her. “Not that, Joan! What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to my father. He, too, must be spared. He must give it back. It must never be known. I must save him disgrace. It must be done to-night––now!”
She started down the drift toward the cage, walking determinedly, and Dick’s lips opened again to beg her to come back; but Bill’s hand was on his shoulder, and his grave and kindly voice in his ear.
“Go with her, boy. She’s right. It’s the only way. Have it over with to-night. If you don’t you’ll break her heart, as well as your own.”
They followed her to the cage, and the big293miner gave the hoisting bell. The cage floated upward, and into the pale twilight. Heedless of anything around, they walked across the yard, and turned into the roadway leading down the gulch.
“Will you come?” she asked, turning toward Bill.
“No,” he said slowly. “I’m not needed. Besides, I couldn’t stand another blow to-day!”
It was the only reference he ever made to it, but it went through Dick with more pain than he had administered. Almost sullenly he followed her down the road, wordless, bewildered, and despairing. Unable to spare her, unable to shield her, unable to comfort her, and unable to be other than true to his benefactor, he plodded after her into the deeper shadows of the lower gulch, across the log bridge spanning the brawling mountain stream, and up into the Rattler camp. Her steps never faltered as she advanced straight to the office door, and stepped inside.
The bookkeepers were gone, and the inner door ajar. She threw it open, walked in, and closed it after Dick, who sustained a deadly anger against the man who sat at his desk, and as they entered looked up with a sharp stare of surprise.
Something in the attitude of the two appeared294to render him more alert, more hard, more uncompromising and he frowned, as Dick had seen him frown before when angry men made way for him and his dominant mastery. His daughter had stopped in front of the closed door, and eyed him with eyes no less determined than his own.
“Your men are working under the Croix d’Or,” she said coldly, without wasting words in preliminary.
His face hardened instantly, and his eyes flamed, dull and defiant. The lines of his heavy jaw appeared to deepen, his shoulders lifted a trifle, as if the muscles of him had suddenly tensed for combat, and his lips had a trace of the imperious sneer.
“Oh, you’re certain of that, are you, my girl?”
“I am,” she retorted. “I was in their lower level when the Rattler’s shots were fired. I heard them.”
For an instant he seemed about to leap from his chair, and then, recovering himself, said with sarcastic emphasis, and a deadly calmness: “And pray what were you doing there? Was the young mine owner, Townsend, there with you? Was he so kind–––?”
“Is there any need for an exchange of insults?” Dick demanded, taking a step toward295him, and prevented from going farther only by recollection of his previous loss of temper.
For an instant the mine owner defiantly met his look, and then half-rose from his chair, and stared more coldly across the litter of papers, plans, and impedimenta on his desk.
“Then why are you here together?” he demanded. “Weren’t you man enough to come yourself, instead of taking my daughter underground? Did you want to compel her to be the chief witness in your claim? What right had you to––?”
“Father!” admonished Joan’s voice.
It served a double purpose, for had she not interrupted Dick might have answered with a heat that he would have regretted, and Bully Presby dropped back into his chair, and drummed with his fingers on the desk.
“You took the ore. You must pay. You must!” went on the dull voice of his daughter.
“But how should I know how much it amounts to, even if I do find out that some of my men drove into the Cross pay?” he answered, fixing her with his flaming eyes.
“But you must know,” she insisted dully. “I know you know. I know you knew where the ore was coming from. It must be paid back.”
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For an instant they eyed each other defiantly, and her brave attitude, uncompromising, seemed to lower the flood-gates of his anger. His cheeks flushed, and he lowered his head still farther, and stared more coldly from under the brim of his square-set hat. There were not many men who would have faced Bully Presby when he was in that mood; but before him stood his daughter, as brave and uncompromising as he, and fortified by something that he had allowed to run dwarf in his soul––a white conscience, burning undimmed, a true knowledge of what was right and what was wrong. Her inheritance of brain and blood had all the strength of his, and her fearlessness was his own. She did not waver, or bend.
“It must be paid back,” she reiterated, a little more firmly.
He suddenly jerked himself to his feet, his tremendous shoulders thrust forward across the desk, and raised his hand with a commanding finger.
“Joan,” he ordered harshly, “you get out of here. Go to your room! Leave this affair to this man and me. This is none of your business. Go!”
“I shall not!” she defied him.
“I think it is best,” Dick said, taking a step297toward her. “I can take care of my own and Mr. Sloan’s interests. Please go.”
The word “Joan” almost slipped from his lips. She faced him, and backed against the door. “Yours and Mr. Sloan’s interests? What of mine? What of my conscience? What of my own father? What of me?”
She stepped hastily to the desk, and tapped on it with her firm fingers, and faced the mine master.
“I said you must pay!” she declared, her voice rising and trembling in her stress. “And you must! You shall!”
He was in a fury of temper by now, and brought the flat of his heavy, strong hand down on its top, sending the inkwell and the electric stand lamp dancing upward with a bound.
“And I shall do as I please!” he roared. “And it doesn’t please me to pay until these men”––and between the words he brought his hand down in heavy emphasis––“until––these––men––of the Cross mine prove it! I’ll make them get experts and put men in my mine, and put you yourself on the stand before I’ll give them one damned dollar! I’ll fight every step of the road before I’ll lay my hand down. I’ll pay nothing!”
She stood there above him, fixing him with her clear, honest, accusing eyes, and never faltered.298Neither his words nor his rage had altered her determination. She was like a statue of justice, fixed and demanding the right. Dick had rushed forward to try and dissuade her from further speech, and stood at the end of the desk in the halo of light from the lamp, and there was a tense stillness in the room which rendered every outward sound more distinct. The voice of a boy driving mules to their stable and singing as he went, the clank and jingle of the chain tugs across the animals’ backs, and the ceaseless monotone of the mill, all came through the open windows, and assailed their ears in that pent moment.
“Please let me have my way,” Joan said, turning to Dick, and in her voice was infinite sorrow and tragedy. “It is more my affair than yours now. Father, I shall not permit you to go any farther. It is useless. I know! I can’t do it! I can’t keep the money you gave me. It isn’t mine! It is theirs! You say you will not pay. Well, then, I shall, to the last dollar!”
“But I shall accept nothing––not a cent––from you, if we never get a penny from the Cross!” declared Dick, half-turning, as if to end the interview.
She did not seem to hear him. She was still facing the hard, twisting face of Bully Presby,299who had suddenly drawn back, as if confronted by a greater spirit than his own. She went on speaking to him as if Dick was not in the room.
“You stole their ore. You know you stole it. Somehow, it all hurts so that I cannot put it in words; for, Dad, I have loved you so much––so much! Oh, Dad! Dad! Dad!”
She dropped to her knees, as if collapsed, to the outer edge of the desk, and her head fell forward on her hands. The unutterable wail of her voice as she broke, betrayed the desperate grief of her heart, the destruction of an idol. It was as if she told the man across the desk that he had been her ideal, and that his actions had brought this ruin about them; as if all the sorrows of the world had cumulated in that ruin of faith.
Dick looked down at her, and his nails bit into his palms as he fought off his desire to reach down and lift her to his arms. Bully Presby’s chair went clashing back against the wall, where he kicked it as he leaped to his feet. He ran around the end of the desk, throwing Dick aside as he did so with one fierce sweep of his arm.
“Joan!” he said brokenly, laying his hand on her head. “Joan! My little Joan! Get up, girl, and come here to your Dad!”
She did not move. The excess of her grief300was betrayed by her bent head and quivering shoulders. The light, gleaming above her, threw stray shadows into the depths of her hair, and softened the white, strained tips of her fingers.
Bully Presby, the arrogant and forceful, still resting his hand on her head, turned toward the twisted, youthful face of the man at his side, whose fingers were now clenched together, and held at arm’s length in front of him. The mine owner seemed suddenly old and worn. The invincible fire of his eyes was dulled to a smoldering glow, as if, reluctantly, he were making way for age. His broad shoulders appeared suddenly to have relinquished force and might. He stooped above her, as if about to gather her into his arms, and spoke with the slow voice of pathos.
“She’s right,” he said. “She’s right! I should pay; and I will! But I did it for her. She was all I had. I’ve starved for her, and worked for her, and stolen for her! Ever since her mother died and left her in my arms, I’ve been one of those carried away by ambition. God is damning me for it, in this!” He abruptly straightened himself to his old form, and gestured toward the sobbing girl at his feet. “I am paying more to her than as if I’d given you the Rattler and all––all––everything!––for the paltry ore I301pulled from under your feet. You shall have your money. Bully Presby’s word is as good as his gold. You know that! I don’t know anything about you. I don’t hate you, because you are fighting for your own! Somehow I feel as if the bottom had been knocked out of everything, all at once! I wish you’d go now. I want to have her alone––I want to talk to her––just the way I used to, before––before––”
He had gone to the limit. His strong hands knotted themselves as they clenched, then unclenched as he stepped to the farther side of the door and looked at Dick, who had not moved; but now, as if his limitations also had been reached, the younger man leaned forward, stooped, and his arms caught Joan and lifted her bodily to his breast. In slow resignation, and with a sigh as if coming to shelter at last, her arms lifted up, her hands swept round his shoulders, and came to rest, clasped behind his head, and held him tightly, as if without capitulation.
There was a gasp of astonishment, and the rough pine floor creaked as Bully Presby, dumbfounded, comprehending, conquered, turned toward the door. He opened it blindly, fumbling for the knob with twitching hands––hands unused to faltering. He looked back and hesitated, as302if all his directness of life, all his fierce decision of character had become undermined, irresolute. He opened his lips as if to protest, to demand, to dominate, to plead for a hearing; but no sound came. His face, unobserved by either the man he had robbed, or the daughter who had arraigned him, betrayed all these struggling, conflicting emotions. He was whipped! He was beaten more certainly than by fists. He was spiritually and physically powerless. Dazed, bewildered, he stood for an instant, then his heavy hands, which for the first time in his life had been held out in mute appeal, dropped to his sides. Habit only asserted when he slammed the door behind him as he walked out into the lonely darkness of the accusing night.
303CHAPTER XIXTHE QUEST SUPREME
It was twilight again, and such a twilight as only the Blue Mountains of that far divide may know. It barred the west with golden bands, painted lavish purples and mauves in the hollows, and reddened the everlasting snows on the summits. It deepened the greens of the tamaracks, and made iridescent the foams of the streams tearing downward joyously to the wide rivers below. It painted the reddish-yellow bars of the cross on the peak above the Croix d’Or, and rendered its outlines a glorified symbol. It lent stateliness to the finger of granite beneath the base that told those who paused that beneath the shaft rested one who had a loyal heart. It swooped down and lingered caressingly on the strong, tender face of the girl who sat on the wall surrounding the graves of Bells Park and “the best woman that ever lived.”
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“For some reason,” Joan said, speaking to the two men beside her, “the ugliness of some of it has gone. There is nothing left but the good and the beautiful. Ah, how I love it––all! All!”
Dick’s arm slipped round her, and drew her close, and unresisting, to his side.
“And but for you and Bill,” he said softly, “it might never have ended this way.”
“Humph!” drawled the deep voice of the grizzled old miner. “Things is just the way they have to be. Nobody can change ’em. The Lord Almighty fixes ’em, and I expect they have to work out about as He wants ’em to. Somehow, up here in the tops of the hills, where it’s close to the sky, He seems a heap friendlier and nearer than He does down on the plains. ’Most always I feel sorry for them poor fellers that live down there. They seem like such lonesome, forgotten cusses.”
The youthful couple by him did not answer. Their happiness was too new, too sacred, to admit of speech.
“Now,” Bill went on argumentatively, “me and Bully Presby are friends. He likes me for standin’ up for my own, and told me so to-day. He ain’t got over that feller Wolff yet. Says he could have killed him when he found out Wolff305had poisoned the water and rolled the bowlder into the shaft to pen us in. I reckon Wolff tried to blackmail him about what he knew, but the Bully didn’t approve none of the other things. That ain’t his way of fightin’. You can bet on that! He drifted over and got the green lead in the Cross, when others had given it up and squandered money. That shows he was a real miner. We come along, and––well––all he’s done is just to help us find it, and then hand over the proceeds, all in the family, as I take it. Nobody’s loser. The families gets tangled up, and instead of there bein’ two there’s just one. The Rattler and the Croix d’Or threatens to be made into one mine, and the two plants consolidated to make it more economical. The green lead’s the best ledge in the Blue’s, and ’most everybody seems to be gettin’ along pretty well. That ain’t luck. It’s God Almighty arrangin’ things for the best.”
He sat for a moment, and gave a long sigh, as if there were something else in his mind that had not been uttered. Dick lifted his eyes, and looked at him affectionately, and then whispered into the ear close by his shoulder: “Shall I tell him now?”
“Do!” Joan said, drawing away from him, and looking expectantly at the giant.
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Dick fumbled in his pocket with a look of sober enjoyment.
“Oh, by the way, Bill,” he said, “I got a letter from Sloan a few days ago. Here it is. Read it.”
The latter took it, and frowning as he opened it, held it up to catch the light.
“Great Scott!” he exclaimed. “Gives the Croix d’Or to you. Says he wants you to have it, because you’re the one that made good on it, and he don’t need the money! That the deeds are on the way by registered mail, and all he asks is a small bar from the first clean-up!”
He folded the letter, and held it in his hands, looking thoughtfully off into the distance for a time while he absorbed the news.
“Why, Dick,” he said, “you’re a rich man! Richer’n I ever expected you’d be; but I’m a selfish old feller, after all! It seems to me as if we ain’t never goin’ to be the same again, as we uster be when all we had was a sack of flour and a side of bacon, and the whole North-west to prospect. It seems as if somethin’ mighty dear has gone.”
Dick got up and stood before him, with his hands in his pockets, and smiling downward into his eyes.
“I’ve thought of that, too, Bill,” he said, “and I can’t afford to lose you. I’d rather lose the307Cross. So I’ll tell you something that I told Joan, long ago––that if ever the mine made good, and I could give you something beside a debt, you were to have half of what I made. A few days ago it would have been a quarter interest you owned. Now it is a half. We’re partners still, Bill, just as we were when there was nothing but a sack of flour and a side of bacon to divide.”
They looked at him, expecting him to show some sign of excitement, but he did not. Instead, he reached over, and painstakingly pulled a weed from the foot of the wall, and threw it away. He cleared his throat once or twice, but did not look at them, and then got to his feet and started as if to go down to the camp. Then, as if his feelings were under control again, came back, and took one of Joan’s and one of Dick’s hands into his own toil-worn palms, and said:
“Thanks, Dick! It’s more’n I deserve, this knowin’ both of you, and havin’ you give me a share in the Cross! And I accept it; but conditionally.”
He dropped their hands, and turned to look around, as if seeing a very broad world.
“What is the condition?” Joan asked, laying her hand on his arm, and looking up at him. “Can we change it?”