Archibald Mudge, alias Frosty, dressed in a clean white apron, stood behind the bar and surveyed his handiwork with satisfaction. It had gone well, and for this one day his master had been in an unwontedly good humor.
Directly opposite, a wide door opened into the new dance hall. From where Frosty stood one could see that it was a long low room, flag-draped, with few windows, and furnished only by an unbroken line of benches against the wall. One standing in the doorway, however, could have perceived that at one end were placed for the musicians a number of tall "look-out" stools—tall in order that the performers might at once overlook the performance of the square-dance "figures," and early prepare to avoid possible hostilities. A number of large lamps with reflectors illuminated the apartment with crossed shafts of light.
Frosty polished glasses in anticipation of the evening's business, which would be lively, glancing complacently from the fresh-scrubbed floor to the lately renewed sheets, imitating plaster. As the outer door was now closed, he was relieved from the necessity of ejecting Peter. It did no good to tie Peter up: either the animal was ingenious at escapes, or the men were mischievous in their desire to bother Frosty. This was one of Frosty's many troubles. He led a life of care.
After a little, the door opened, and three men came in. They steered to the bar at once, as a sort of familiar haven in strange surroundings. From its anchorage they took their initial view of the hall. After subsequent arrivals had braced them to the point of confidence, they made a first awful tour of that apartment, but soon returned to more familiar surroundings. The saloon filled with a heterogeneous gathering. All types were there in their best clothes, from the spotlessly immaculate faro dealer, dressed in a black broadcloth frock coat, to Dave Kelly, with his new red handkerchief and his high-heeled boots. The main gathering remained crowded in the saloon, whence small groups occasionally ventured into the hall, but only for the purposes of temporary inspection. A hum of low-voiced talk went up, which fell to expectant silence every time the door was opened. The musicians from Spanish Gulch arrived and began to tune up. They were closely followed by the first woman, a red-cheeked awkward country lass, who took her position on the bench near one corner and began at once to dispense smiles and loud small talk to the men who followed her there. The assistants' spirits rose. They had known this girl as Sal Jenks, of rather drab-colored disposition and appearance. To-night, in the glamour of a light-colored dress and the illumination of a ball room, she had suddenly become transformed into something quite different and infinitely more attractive. The musicians played a tune. The other women came in, gayly dressed and accompanied always by a red-faced swain. Black Mike took his stand at the side of Frosty, and began to assist that individual in dispensing drinks. Black Mike's democracy was no small element of his popularity. At about half-past eight those near the door saw him talking with Cheyenne Harry. A buzz swept over the room. Copper Creek had been waiting in suppressed excitement to see whom Cheyenne Harry would accompany—Molly Lafond or the newcomer—and lo! he had come alone.
Then, before the astonishment had subsided, the outer door opened again and Molly entered, looking very pale and sweet and serious.
She walked directly by the bar into the dance hall, where she seated herself near the door and looked calmly about her. She was dressed entirely in white. Cheyenne Harry was leaning over the bar talking attentively, so that he was perhaps the only person in the room who did not see her come in. A dozen men at once surrounded her and began to chat. She answered them good-humoredly enough, but indifferently.
The door once more flew open and Bismarck Anne, standing on the sill, cried out in her clear, high voice, "Well, boys!" She paused a moment. Cheyenne Harry, turning at the sound of her voice, remembered how, about a year ago, Molly Lafond had stood there in just that attitude. But he felt a great difference.
Cheyenne Harry had for some time, as we have said, been growing a little tired of his affair with Molly. The mental ingredients of satiety were all present, but he had as yet received no conscious notice of their existence. He imagined himself as much fascinated as ever. If something lately had seemed to lack, he had laid it to circumstances and not at all to the state of his relations with the girl. But for all that, the satiety had been real. He only needed to be told of it to realize it himself very plainly. Bismarck Anne had told him.
He saw now absolutely no attraction for himself in Molly Lafond, and that without attempting to deny her intrinsic attraction for others. He simply did not care for her any more. It seemed perhaps like a sudden revulsion, but it was not so really; it had been inevitable from the very first, and from the very first it had been slowly maturing. Not even the results were sudden: only Cheyenne Harry's knowledge of them.
He had always felt his relations with Molly Lafond as more or less restrictive, because the good is always so. He had dimly caught the truth that, without a deep moral incentive, restriction is always irksome; that although pure love is the most ideal condition in the world, its simulation is the most wearisome after the novelty has worn off; and all the rest of the long psychological train of emotion and reasoning common to the trifler. But now for the first time he knew it. He knew it because, standing in the doorway, looking at him with bold black eyes, was the exact opposite of all this, and he recognized a mighty relief.
Bismarck Anne knew enough to dress all in black. She had the taste to appreciate the effect of one red flower in her hair as her only ornament. She had the sense to wear her dress cut neither too low above nor too high below. And so she was exceedingly handsome as she stood there, the devil of excitement in her eyes.
Cheyenne Harry abruptly ceased his conversation with Lafond to shake hands with her. They turned in company. Harry linked his arm through hers, and they entered the dance hall close together, and took their seats in a corner far removed from the musicians, where they continued engaged in such earnest conversation that none of the men ventured to approach them. After a time, when the music struck up for the first dance, she seemed to be commanding something to which Cheyenne Harry seemed to be objecting. Then the latter arose slowly and asked Molly Lafond to dance the first dance with him. She accepted with a sharp pang at her heart. The newcomer had scored.
Owing to the scarcity of the gentler sex, it had been decided that no one "set" was to be blessed with more than one girl. Thus they would go around better. Molly, glancing across at her rival, saw that she was surrounded by a laughing group of men. The woman was joking broadly at each, wriggling her white shoulders, darting side glances, half promising, half denying. In a moment the group broke, and the members of it rushed in her own direction. They were already quarrelling for places in her set. The matter was arranged somehow after much wrangling. Then, too late, Molly saw that the other woman had scored again. Bismarck Anne had not only selected her partner, but also the other six members of the set. Thus she had made seven men happy and none jealous.
A Western dance is a sight worth seeing. The musicians call off the figures. The head fiddler does it until his voice gives out. Then the second fiddler and the accordion take a try at it, after which further calling is unnecessary owing to the fact that most of the dancers are very drunk. This comes to pass because, at the end of each dance, all are supposed to visit the bar. The most heinous crime, next to horse stealing or sluice robbing, is "shying drinks" at such times. As some men can hold more than others this enforced equality of quantity consumed brings about unexpected variation in the hilarity of the consumers, all of which adds to the variety of the occasion.
The interims between drinks are occupied by square dances. The men go through some set of monkey shines which they call figures, the principal object of which seems to be at once the tripping up of such male and the prolonged squeezing of such female dancers as they may come into intimate personal relations with on their grand rounds, which is conducive to hilarity of the loud-mouthed variety. The exercise itself is rather violent, and as the room is low, lit by lamps, and comparatively windowless, the air soon becomes heavy with the reek of perspiration and the fumes of tobacco. The floor acquires a heaving motion and the lights sway back and forth. The homeliest of the dance-hall girls somehow looks like a fairy through the haze—a rather elusive fairy, with a rather heavy unfairylike gait. At this period there is usually a good deal of noise. Then all at once it is morning, and somehow the scene has changed to the ravine, and there is a tomato can poking itself into the small of the back.
Molly tripped gracefully and easily through the figures of the opening dance, seeming scarcely to touch the floor. Bismarck Anne leaned heavily on each man in the swing, and pressed her bosom against his arm. Twice she half slipped and caught by the shoulder of her partner of the moment, and her breath was hot against his throat. She said not one word the whole dance through.
With the last quaver of the fiddle came the harsh command—
"S'lute yore pardners! All promenade to th' bar!"
They obeyed. The sets went in two by two, the men treating their masculine partners with humorous politeness in the matter of assistance in crossing the sill of the door. The non-dancers crowded after them in a confused mob.
At the bar Frosty had the drinks all ready on the back shelf. Black Mike assisted him, and together the two, their sleeves rolled back and their faces glistening with the sweat of honest toil, passed over brimming little glasses of "forty rod" and jingled two-bit pieces into the drawer. Bismarck Anne drank with the best of them, leaning familiarly against the men nearest her, bandying jokes that were more than doubtful. Molly sat on her corner of the bar but did not drink.
At the beginning of the next dance the aspect of things was a trifle changed. A bigger crowd gathered about Bismarck Anne soliciting places in her set, and it was more familiar. Some one snatched a kiss of her. She merely laughed and pushed him away. There seemed to have suddenly sprung up between them and her acamaraderiein which Molly had no part, as though they and the newcomer had some secret to keep to themselves which thrust the younger girl without the circle.
Cheyenne Harry did not come near her again. He seemed wholly fascinated by the stranger. The sight of his attentions to the other aroused Molly. A bright red spot burned in either cheek. She was all animation. Her laughter rang true, her eyes flashed with merriment. For every one she had a joke, a half-tender, half-sympathetic aside. She saw that as long as they were in her actual presence the men were wholly hers. And yet she felt too the subtle growth of this other woman's influence, and realized that eventually it would beat her down. In spite of her brave appearance her throat choked her. Only by a great concentration of the will could she prevent herself from lapsing into silence, and then into tears. As the strain began to tell on her nerves, the old feeling of unknowable guilt came to oppress her heart, and with it a growing longing to get away, to hide somewhere; to begin all over again humbly, below the lowest; to claim nothing, to attempt nothing, to do nothing in opposition to that accusing Thought which seemed greater than herself. All at once she was tired of struggling. She was ready to give up this life, if only they would let her feel like something besides a breathless naughty child, fearfully expecting every moment the grave reproving voice of the Master.
She chided herself for this. It was not game. Pluck she admired above everything; and yet here she was, ready to run away at the first taste of defeat. She smiled ravishingly on Dave Kelly, until he began to speculate on the possibility of repeating that delicious experience which Peter had so inopportunely cut short.
"ARE YOU STILL MAD?""ARE YOU STILL MAD?"
"ARE YOU STILL MAD?""ARE YOU STILL MAD?"
As the evening progressed, the "forty rod" began to show its effects. Williams had to have the full width of the floor whenever he tried to walk, and his enthusiastic imitations of an angry catamount were most creditable. Some one was always disgustedly repressing him. Several others were in like condition with different symptoms. The soberest manifested increased vigor of limb and fertility of imagination. A happy combination of these two effects brought about the proposal of a turkey walk. A ring was formed on the instant.
Into the ring two men, chosenvivâ voce, were pushed. They began at once to strut back and forth like turkey cocks in the spring. They hollowed their backs in, stuck their chests and rumps out, slapped their thighs, toed in, puffed their cheeks, ducked their heads, uttered sundry gurgling whoops, and hopped about, first on one foot, then on the other in a charmingly, impartial imitation of a Southern cake walk and a Sioux Indian war dance. These performances tickled the crowd immensely. When it came to noisy vote on the relative merits of the performers, it vociferously shouted unanimous approval of all. Therefore the contest was pronounced a tie. At this moment Dave Williams staggered forward. His muddled brain had room for only the most evident facts. He saw the ring and his drunken shrewdness had retained cognizance of the evening's rivalry. He mixed the two ideas up to effect a proposal.
"Hyar," he shouted, "lesh do this ri'! I secon' Bismarck Anne!" He let out a wild-cat yell—"Whe-ee!! Two t' one on Anne!"
Some one hit him on the chest and sent him staggering backward. He gyrated unevenly toward the corner, stumbled over his own feet, and sat down heavily on the floor, where after feeling vainly for his gun he relapsed into good humor. But his suggestion hit the popular fancy.
The idea ran like fire. In a second the ring was formed again. Those in front knelt; those behind looked over their shoulders. Even Frosty and Black Mike deserted the bar and stood leaning in the doorway. The girls were urged forward into the ring, which closed after them, and the music was ordered to proceed.
Bismarck Anne walked calmly into the circle and stood looking about her. Molly had an instant of doubt. Then a revulsion against her easy surrender got her to her feet and into the ring. The gauntlet was down. She would accept the challenge. It was a duel.
There was a moment's squabble between two self-appointed officials in regard to precedence. It was settled, and Molly was beckoned to begin. The fiddles started up a squeaky, lively air to which the men kept time with hands and feet. The young girl, her cheeks burning, stepped into the centre of the ring and struck the first graceful pose of thecachucha, learned years before at the Agency from a little Mexican serving-maid. The men recognized it in a swift quickly silenced burst. The fiddles changed their measure to suit the dance.
Thecachuchais a beautiful dance when rightly done. It is a combination of airy half-steps, sinuous body movements, and slow languorous and graceful weavings of the arms. It has in it all the enchantment of the lazy South. There is not an abrupt movement in it, but one pose melts into another as imperceptibly as night into day. Molly did it well. Her supple figure was suited to it, and the very refinement of her actions enhanced the charm of the dance. The men applauded vehemently when she stopped. The other woman laughed aloud in scorn.
With a final sweeping curtsy the dancer turned to go. The flush of triumph and excitement burned on her cheeks and in her eyes. Finding the ring solidly closed so that exit was impossible, she accepted a seat on the knee of one of those in the front rank. The man put his arms around her and drew her close in a drunken embrace, which the girl only half noticed.
Bismarck Anne sprang to the centre of the ring at one bound, the sneer still on her lips. She turned abruptly to the musicians.
"Quit that damn stuff!" she snarled. "Play somethin'!"
The musicians hurriedly swung into a lively air.
Bismarck Anne's dance was not especially graceful. It consisted mainly of high kicks and a certain athletic feat known as the split. But it was magnificent in its abandon, and fierce in the crude animal energy of it. Besides its mere suggestiveness and appeal to the passions, it had too a swing, a fire, a brute-like force which could not but hit to the hearts of men at bottom strong, crude, and savage. They went crazy. They shouted encouraging things at her with open straining throats. They stamped and cheered until the lights wavered. They clapped each other delightedly on the back. And Bismarck Anne danced ever the more furiously. She kicked with enthusiasm, with abandon, holding her short skirts still higher to gain the greater freedom. The tiger-lily fell from her head and was snatched up almost before it touched the floor. Her heavy black hair came down, and hung in strands across her face, and fell in vivid contrast upon her white shoulders and her heaving bosom. She shook it back with a savage movement.
And she in the corner, who was nothing but a woman, with little of the savage in her to appeal to savage men, and, for all her independence, little of this bold reckless spirit of the frontier in her to appeal to pioneers, felt herself growing sick and faint as she saw these greater forces slipping beyond her control roaringly, as would a mountain torrent. Her rule was over, and this woman's had begun. The room swayed before her eyes. Some one behind her handed a brimming glass of whisky over her shoulder, and she seized it eagerly and gulped it down.
The unaccustomed stimulant cleared her vision. The room stood still, the different objects in it became distinct. She looked on the whirling figure of the woman in the centre, the open-mouth turmoil-stirred crowd in the background, with dispassionate eyes. She was deadly cool. To her memory came Graham's words of that same afternoon. "Because you are too good for them!" She remembered the very emphasis of his tone. Well, he was right, and yet not right. She had been too good for them, but she world show them now! With the sudden flash of resolve, the first unnatural hardening effect of the whisky passed, and in a whirl the exhilaration came. She laughed and responded convulsively to the man's embrace.
Bismarck Anne gave a final kick, and fell in some one's open arms. The men, shouting frantically, began to stir preparatory to regaining their feet. Then they sank back again with a fresh cheer. Into the centre of the ring Molly tripped unsteadily, and stood for a moment looking about her with uncertain foolishly smiling eyes. Her cheeks were a glow of red. She glanced toward the musicians, and, with the tip of her fingers, raised her dress to her knees, waiting for the music to begin.
The room was deadly still. She could see, looking at her excitedly, all the men she had met and come to know in the last year. She saw them dimly, as through a haze. Would the music never begin? What were they waiting for? A draught blew cold along the floor. She felt it on her legs. Why was it? Oh, yes, she was holding her skirts up to dance, to show them that she was no better than this woman, Bismarck Anne.
And then the black cloud that had been gathering so long, the undefined guilty feeling at nothing, broke over her. She wanted to go on—the music had begun now—but she could not. Twice she tried. Something held her, something real, something stronger than herself. She did not recognize them, these ancestral voices, but they laid upon her their commands. She dropped her skirts, and covered her eyes with her two hands, and burst through the ring of men, and ran out through the night to her own cabin, where she threw herself on her bed weeping bitterly. She was ashamed.
Lafond, in the meantime, had left the dispensation of drinks almost entirely to Frosty. He darted here and there in the crowd, a light of unwonted excitement in his eye.
"That thar Mike's shore waked up," commented Old Mizzou. "Never see him so plumb animated. He shore looks nutty. Dance halls is mostly too rich fer his blood, I reckon."
But Tony Houston and Jack Snowie and a dozen others by now knew better than to attribute this excitement to dance halls. Lafond possessed in his pocket a copy of Knapp's dismissal, and he had told them of it.
He told them of it mysteriously, in half-limits, pointing out tendencies and solutions to what they already knew, leaving them to draw deductions, sowing anxieties that there might spring up a harvest of distrust.
Through the woof of gayety he rapidly ran a dull thread of angry suspicion. Men made merry, and forgot all the past and all the future. Other men talked low-voiced in corners, and tried, from the distraction of drink and gayety, to draw clear plan and reflection. And always Lafond took other men aside and whispered eager little half-confidences, and went on quickly to the next.
His spirit was upheld by a great excitement, such as it had never experienced before, not even in his early and adventurous days. He seemed to himself to be mounting higher and higher on the summit of a great wave of luck, as a swimmer is lifted by the sea. And yet, behind it all, again for the first time in his life, he felt a portent in the air. It was as though the wave were rearing itself, only to curl over and break upon the shore. He laid this to nervousness, and yet it affected him with a certain superstitious awe.
So occupied was he, that he quite missed the girl's sudden exit, and was drawn from his brown study only by the sudden hush that succeeded it. In the silence a drunken voice uplifted itself loudly.
"M' work 'sh done," it vociferated. "I wan' m' pay!"
Everybody turned, prepared to laugh at this "comic relief!" Jack Snowie was addressing Billy Knapp. Billy at once became conscious of an audience, and the usual desire to appear well seized him. He smiled with the good-humored tolerance of a drunken man.
"I suppose you want me to take it right out of my pants pocket, eh, Jack?" he inquired paternally. "Of co'se you wants yo' pay! Come around in th' mornin' an' get it." He smiled again at the group that surrounded him. It appeared to be listening to this colloquy with unusual interest.
"I wan' m' pay!" reiterated Snowie sullenly, but then apparently lost the thread of his ideas and lurched away. Billy considered the incident closed. He was mistaken. The group did not dissolve; it came closer. The men had a strangely unfriendly look about the eyes. Billy did not understand it. He stepped toward one side of the circle about him. It closed the tighter to keep him in.
"What's the joke, boys?" he asked, still smiling.
The room was breathlessly still. Many of those within it did not understand the trouble, but trouble was in the air. Across a wavering line of heat could be dimly discerned the musicians, poised to start the next dance, but uncertain whether or not to begin. They did not begin. The silence was startled even by Peter's doggy yawn from the far corner of the saloon proper.
"Ain't no joke!" "That's what we want to know!" "Damned poor joke!" "You'll find out soon enough!" cried the men angrily, and then paused and looked at each other because of the jostle of words that meant nothing.
Billy flushed slowly, and his jaw settled into place.
"I'm jest as willin' to play 'horse' as anybody," he said, trying to find calm utterance; "and if this is a joke, I wishes some fellow-citizen to let me in. But, damn it!" he cried in a burst, "don't you get too funny! What the hell does you-all want me to do to carry out this yere witticism, anyway?"
The coolest and most determined looking man in the group made two steps across the floor, and confronted Billy squarely. At this evidence of earnestness, Billy lost his excitement and became deadly cool.
"Oh, it's you, Tony Houston, is it! Do you want your pay too?"
"Yes, I do," replied the man, "and I'm going to have it."
"Well," said Billy, "here's a pretty-lookin' outfit! Snowie was drunk, but this gang 's sober enough to know better, anyway. You come around to my office in the mornin', and I pays the bunch, every damn skunk, and don't you ever any of you show your faces there again. That's all I got to say."
"It ain't allIgot to say," retorted Houston, standing his ground doggedly, "not by a long shot! You-all talks well, but has you got th' money?"
"What the——" cried Billy, choking.
"Hol' on thar! I repeats it"—and Houston thrust his face at Billy evilly—"has you got th' money? That's a fa'r question in business, I reckons. Has you got th' money? No, you hasn't. You got just an hundred and fifty-two dollars, and that's every red cent you has got."
Billy's immediate act of homicide was checked by this astounding knowledge of the total of his bank account. "Damn you, Tony Houston," he said slowly, at last, "I believe you're drunk too. You come in the mornin' and get paid, an' you'll find yore money comes along all right. This is a hell of a gang," he went on with contempt, "a hell of a gang! I gets you a job that lasts you all winter, and you wants your damn money in a dance hall and raises a row because I ain't carryin' a few thousan' dollars in each pants pocket. Don' think you makes anythin' by it. I lays myself out from now on to see that yore little two by four prospect holes ain't worth th' powder to blow 'em up, and I reckon I has a little influence as superintendent of this game."
"Superintendent?" cried Houston, and the men about laughed loudly.
Billy was plainly even more bewildered than angry. He considered the crowd all, as he expressed it, "plum' locoed"; but his passions, never of the most peaceful, were rising. In another moment he would have knocked Houston down and drawn his gun on the crowd which surrounded him, but that Michaïl Lafond shoved his way through the press. Billy caught sight of him with relief. Besides the plain bare fact of a row, the situation was complicated by the presence of so great an audience, before whom Billy naturally wished to conduct the affair correctly.
"What is the trouble? Here, this won't do!" cried Black Mike, as though in the capacity of proprietor preserving the respectability of his establishment.
"That's what I wants to know," cried Billy. "This (sulphurous) outfit of ranikaboo ijits has gone plum' locoed, and they stan's around yere howlin' for tha'r money as though I carries th' Philadelphy mint in my clothes!"
Lafond did not reply. He motioned the men aside, and, with the utmost gentleness, led the wondering Billy to a far corner of the room.
"I'm sorry that I have this to do, Billy," said Lafond. "I don't want to. It's none of my lay-out. But these men of yours sent them to me because I am notary public and I must do it."
Billy did not understand, but he caught the apology in Lafond's tone.
"That's all right, old man," he assured the latter, moistening his lips.
Without further preamble, the half-breed drew some papers from his breast pocket, and handed them to Billy.
The first was a review of the work done on the Great Snake group of claims, and a detailed analysis of it, carried out with astounding minuteness of technical knowledge for one so ignorant of mining as Stevens. It outlined also the work that should have been done; and it ended with a general conclusion of incompetence. The second contained his formal dismissal as superintendent. The third returned Billy's shares as his portion in the Company's dissolution, said Company having dissolved without assets.
Billy sat very quietly and read the papers over three times, while his fellow townsmen stood silent and watched him. The first perusal bewildered him, and turned him sick at heart with disappointment and recognition of the estimate in which men held him. The second brought to his consciousness that his companions were regarding him; and that, in turn, caused him to realize that his prestige was crumbled, his integrity dishonored, his abilities belittled. The third impressed on him the desperate straits in which he found himself—without money, holding a doubtful interest in claims whose bad name was by this established so firmly that no Eastern capital would ever take hold of them again, the moral if not legal debtor to these men who had worked all winter for him. The iron turned in his soul. Michaïl Lafond, sitting there in the rôle of sympathizer, was well satisfied with his handiwork. For the moment, Billy Knapp was a broken man.
He arose slowly, and passed out of the door in the dead silence of those about him.
After his exit, the dance was forgotten and an earnest discussion raged. It was no light matter. Eleven men had invested heavily in powder, fuse, drills, and windlasses for the purpose of fulfilling their contract with Knapp; and they, and twenty-two others, had put in their time for a number of months. Many of them owed for board or materials. Others, though out of debt, had spent nearly all their ready cash. They all seemed desperately close to bankruptcy, for Lafond said nothing whatever respecting his agreement to pay the contracts himself. And then again, as has been pointed out, the well-being of the whole camp had depended intimately on the success of its big mine, for the success of one enterprise like the Great Snake draws other capital to the district, rendering possible the sale of claims; while its failure always gives a bad name to a whole section.
So the ensuing discussion had plenty of interest for everybody. Lafond, as the bearer of the tidings, was besieged with questions. He was reluctant, but he answered. Besides, the facts were plain, ready for interpretation. Nobody could help seeing that it was all Billy's fault. After a time, poor Billy loomed large as a symbol of all the camp's misfortune. After a little time more, when the bar had more thoroughly done its work, a number became possessed of a desire to abate Billy.
They seized torches and a rope, ran up the gulch, and beat in the door of the office, only to encounter Billy enraged to the point of frenzy. That individual rushed them out at the muzzle of a pistol, with such a whirl of impetuous anger that it quite carried them off their feet, after which he planted his back against the building and stood there in the full light of the torches, reviling them. Why he was not shot I cannot tell. Billy was something of a dominant spirit when roused. That was the reason why, in the old days, he had made such a good scout. After he had called them all the names he could think of, he slammed the door on them. They went away without knowing why they did so.
When they got back to town, they gathered again in the Little Nugget saloon, drinking, swearing, shouting. The morale of the camp was broken. It was a debauch. They cried out against Billy, and they feared him for the moment. They made a stable-boy hide in the brush with a bottle of whisky, to watch the works, to spy on they knew not what. Lafond drank with them. He had never done so before. As they became more noisy, he fell into a sullen fit, and went to sit over behind the stove where he crooned away to himself an oldchanson. He stopped drinking, but the effects remained. It seemed to his befogged mind that the wave had broken and that he was falling through the air. Shortly he would be cast up against the beach. "A fool for luck!" he muttered to himself, trying to rehabilitate his denuded confidence. He took out the Company's letter to him, saying that the deeds were at Rapid awaiting his action, and read it. Then he put a stick of wood on the fire. He shivered and rubbed his eyes. Finally he went over to the hotel, where he washed his head again and again in cold water. After a time, he returned to the Little Nugget, feeling somewhat better.
It was now daylight, although the sun was not up. The stable-boy came in from the upper gulch to say that Billy Knapp was hitching his horses to the buckboard. The news sobered them somewhat. Ten minutes later, the stable-boy again returned with the news that Knapp had loaded his buckboard, and was on the point of driving through town. A dozen men at once ran out into the street and concealed themselves behind the corners of buildings.
Billy sat in a chair and boiled. He did not calm down until after daylight, and then he found that his depression had vanished. He was full of vigor. He went out and looked over the property very carefully. The entire lay-out, he found, had weighed on his spirits, and this last ungrateful episode had made him sick of the whole miserable business. He ought never to be tied down. He could see his mistake clearly enough now. If he was going to stick to gold hunting, it ought to be as a prospector, not as a miner. A prospector enjoyed the delight of new country, of wilderness life, of the chase, and then, when civilization came too near, he could sell his claims to the miner and move on to a virgin country. A miner, on the other hand, had to settle down in one place and attend to all manner of vexatious details. Billy felt a great impatience to shake himself free. With the thought came a wave of anger against the men of the town. After all, what had he to gain by staying? This outfit was a fizzle; nothing could be done with it in the future. He might save something of the wreck by grubbing about in the débris, but grubbing was exactly what he wanted to get away from.
He looked over the works again. He was astonished to find how little of it he cared for personally. There remained not much more than the Westerner's outfit, when it was winnowed—four good horses, the buckboard, his saddle, clothes, his weapons, and the beautiful trotting horse. Billy could not let that go. The camp outfit they could have and welcome. He kicked the rubber stamper into space, scattering potential literature about the landscape. Many things he hesitated over, but finally discarded. The heap was not very large when all was told.
He began to experiment with the buckboard. Billy was a master of the celebrated diamond hitch. After an hour's earnest work, he drew back triumphantly to observe to himself that all he wished to take with him was securely packed on the vehicle. Then he coupled in his grays, and led out the beautiful trotting horse. He was glad that he had lately paid the English groom his wages; which individual he remembered seeing, the night before, dead drunk in a corner. Billy made himself some coffee in the empty cookee's shack, and was ready to start.
He did not know exactly where he would go; that was a matter of detail, but somewhere West in all probability—somewhere in Wyoming, where Jim Buckley was hidden up in the mountains, living a sane sort of a life, removed from the corroding influences of civilization. He did not realize that in this impatient shaking off of responsibility, he was little better than a moral coward. Even Billy's worst enemies would have denied the justice of that epithet.
He climbed in, deliberately unwound the reins from the long brake handle, clucked to the horses, and took his way, whistling, down the narrow trail. The beautiful trotting horse followed gingerly, tossing his head. At the entrance to town, Billy's whistling suddenly ceased. The street was quite bare and silent. Not even from the Little Nugget saloon or the new dance hall came the faintest sound of human occupancy. A tenderfoot might have argued that this was indicative of deep sleep after last night's festivities, but Billy knew better. At seven o'clock in the morning, after excitement such as that of a few hours before, the normal ensuing pow-wow would still be raging unabated. He reached under the seat for his Winchester, the new 40-82 model of his prosperous days, and laid it softly across his lap, and caught the end of the long lash in his whip hand. Then he resumed his tune exactly where it had been broken off, looking neither to right nor left, and jogging along without the slightest appearance of haste or uneasiness. No one could have called Billy Knapp a coward at that moment.
Near the first cabin the whistling broke off again. A little figure stumbled out into the deserted street, weeping and afraid. Billy pulled up. It was the Kid.
"They're goin' to shoot you," he sobbed, "from behind the Little Nugget, without givin' you a chanst! I had to tell you, an' they'll most kill me!" he wailed. Billy's eyes began to sparkle. The Kid tried to hold within the other's reach his little 22 calibre rifle, his most precious possession. "Here, take this!" he begged.
Billy laughed outright, a generous, hearty laugh with just a shade of something serious in it. "Thank ye," said he, "I got one. And let me tell ye right yere, you Kid. Yore a white man, you are, and yore jest about the only white man in the place." He cast his eyes about him in the buckboard at his feet. "Yere ye be," he said, tugging at a pair of huge silver-ornamented Mexican spurs and leaning over to give them to the boy; "jest remember me by them thar; they has my name in 'em; and, look yere," he went on with a sudden inspiration, "you-all gets up gulch to my camp and takes what grub you finds and lies low until yo' paw an' th' rest gits over bein' mad. I don't know but what theydoeskill you, if you shows up afore that." And he laughed again to see the boy's face brighten at this prospect of escaping the immediate wrath to follow.
The little scene had been enacted in the middle of the silent street, so silent and so empty that the principal actors in it experienced an uncomfortable emotion of publicity, perhaps a little like that of an inexperienced speaker before the glare of footlights. The Kid, followed friskily by Peter, scuttled up the gulch, Billy stood up in his buckboard and faced the inscrutable row of houses.
"Yo' damn coyotes!" he yelled, "thar goes the onlymanin the whole outfit. Shoot! yo' Siwashes, shoot!" and he brought his long whip like a figure 8 across the flanks of all four horses at once.
Bang!reverberated a shot between the hills, and a bullet splashed white against the brake bar.
Billy dropped the reins to the floor of the buckboard, and planted his foot on them. He steadied his knee against the seat, and threw down and back the lever of his Winchester for a shot. The beautiful trotting horse was pulling back in an ecstasy of terror at the end of his long lariat, shaking his head and planting his forefeet. Billy cursed savagely, but jerked loose the knot, and the beautiful trotting horse, with a final snort of terror, turned tail and disappeared in the direction of the mine.
Bang! Bang! Bang!went other shots from behind puffs of white smoke. The hills caught up the sound and rolled it back, and then back again, until it was quite impossible to count the discharges.
There were perhaps a half-dozen men with rifles and a dozen or so with six-shooters, all pumping away at it as fast as they could. The buckboard was struck many times. One horse was hit, but only slightly—not enough to interfere with, but rather to encourage his speed. Billy fastened his eyes on the spot whence the first bullet had sped. Suddenly he threw his rifle to his shoulder.
Crack!it spoke, strangely flat out there in the open against the fuller reports of the other pieces.
The bullets which undershot kicked up little puffs of dust, like grasshoppers jumping, while those that passed above, ricochetted finally from rocks and went singing away into the distance. It was a wonder, with so large a mark, that neither the man nor the horses were hit. It must be remembered, however, that the marksmen were more or less drunk, and that Billy's speed was by now something tremendous.
Crack!went his Winchester again.
At the end of the straight road was, as has perhaps been mentioned, a turn of considerable sharpness, flanked by bold cliff-like rocks. In the best of circumstances, this bit of road requires careful driving. With a runaway four and a light buckboard, a smash up was inevitable. The hidden assailants and spectators of the strange duel realized this suddenly. In the interest of the approaching catastrophe, the fusillade ceased as abruptly as it had begun. Billy maintained his first attitude, one knee on the seat, the other foot braced against the floor, keenly expectant. The silence became breathless, and one or two men leaned forward the better to see.
"Crack!" spoke Billy's rifle for the third time. The man who had fired the first shot pitched suddenly forward from behind his sheltering corner, and lay still.
With one swift motion the scout dropped his Winchester in the seat, grasped the four reins, and threw his enormous weight against the bits. The grays had been ranch-bred. They bunched their feet, hunched their backs, and in three heavy buck jumps had slowed down from a breakneck run to a lumbering gallop. Billy Knapp gave vent to the wild shrill war cry of his foster parents, the Oglallah Sioux, and jogged calmly out of sight around the bend of the road.
A great crowd pressed about Tony Houston, prone on the ground. They discovered that the ball had passed through the point of the shoulder, not a dangerous place in itself, but resulting in a serious wound because of the smashing power of the express rifle.
"Damn fine shooting!" they said, looking at each other with admiration. "Damnfine."
They began to feel a little more kindly toward Billy on account of this evidence of his skill. They set about bandaging the wounded man.
And around that lower bend, half a mile beyond Durand's cabin, Billy encountered in the person of Jim Buckley the very man he intended to search for, and that by not so very strange a chance when all is considered.
After the scouting days were quite over, not long ago, by the way, Jim Buckley had struck out for Wyoming, where he looked about him and finally settled in the Crooked Horn district all alone. He was prospecting. And as he was a great big leisurely sort of fellow, never in a hurry, and quite unconvinced of the necessity for being so, it took him a great many years to complete the prospecting to his satisfaction. In fact it was only recently that he had fully convinced himself and others of the value of what he had found. At first he had worked the surface over inch by inch Then he had staked out his more experimental claims. Then he had burrowed and grubbed and delved, single-handed, through a network of shafts, tunnels, and drifts. It is slow work—single-handed. In the morning you make little holes with a hand drill, and fill them with powder. At noon you blast. In the afternoon you cart away débris by means of an inadequate little bucket. This takes time and patience, both of which Jim Buckley possessed. Once a month he went to town, riding one horse and leading another, for the purpose of buying supplies. The rest of the time he lived alone.
That is, he lived alone except that directly opposite the window, where the light always struck it fair, he had carefully fastened a small colored portrait on ivory. It was the picture of a woman, delicately tinted, young with laughing blue eyes and a mouth whose corners turned upward in so droll a manner that you would have sworn its owner had never known a care in her fresh young life. It was the picture of another man's wife. She had known care, of the bitterest, blackest kind, and in her darkest days she had been murdered, mercifully perhaps. After he had hauled the last little bucket of broken rock up to the surface of the ground, and had ranged all sorts of utensils in the open fireplace for the evening meal, Jim Buckley used to light his pipe and sit looking at this little portrait for a long time. For, you see, he was simply made, with no complexities—a few simple purposes, a few simple ideas, a few simple friendships, a few simple passions—but they were the stronger and deeper and more soul-satisfying for that. He did not need incident or sorrow or regret to round out his life. It was well poised and sufficient.
So he used to look upon the face of this other man's wife from under sombre brows, but through clear eyes. No one could have guessed what his slow deep thoughts were at such times, nor what he found, whether of peace or unrest, in his contemplation of a portrait of the past. He said it made him better. Perhaps it did.
But there came a time when the windlasses over the rabbit-burrow prospector's shafts had made their last necessary revolution. Jim Buckley knew the cross section of that country as well as you or I know the cross section of an apple we have just cut in two. Then, having satisfied his purposes, he looked to his friendships. He had never had many. Alfred, Billy Knapp, Hal Townsend, Charley Fanchild—why you could count them on the fingers of one hand—and two of these were dead, and another was so far away in the cattle country of Arizona that he might as well have been so. Jim would have liked well to have gathered this old band of comrades about him and said, "Here, boys, is what I have. It is more than enough for me: it is more than enough for all of us. Let us share it, just as we used to share our bacon or our coffee in the old days, and so we can grow old together in the way that suits us best, the way of the pioneer." As he sat in the cabin now, or stalked the hills with his rifle, this old comradeship took more and more shape from the mists of the past, and there grew up in his breast a sharp craving for old times, old faces, old friends. It was a peculiarity of his nature that his ideas possessed a sort of cumulative force. They gathered added reasons for their carrying out as a rolling snowball gathers snow. Toward the end of that month, he packed a strange old valise with clothes for the journey, strapped on his best six-shooter, put his cabin in order, and rode his horse down to Crooked Horn. There he left the animal with Billy Powers and took the train for Edgemont and thence to Rapid.
He knew that Billy was somewhere in the Hills. At Rapid he learned of that individual's new importance. His heart sank a little at the thought that this prosperity might forfend his own scheme of comradeship, but nevertheless he took Blair's stage for Copper Creek and Custer.
Near Rockerville the axle gave way. The brake was repaired at a miner's forge with some difficulty, but the job carried on so late into the afternoon that Blair refused to go farther that night, and the party slept at Rockerville. The next morning they pushed on again about daylight, in order that Blair might start back from Custer before noon, thus reducing his delay by a few hours. A half mile below Durand's shack the axle again gave way, this time with a sudden violence that sent flying the baggage which had been piled on top. Jim found his valise in the bushes. The catch had snapped when the bag hit the ground, so that it lay half open; but fortunately its contents had not emptied. Jim closed it with the two end-clasps, and set it by the side of the road. He did not notice that the ivory miniature had dropped out, and now lay face downward at the roots of amesquite.
Blair looked up from his inspection.
"Bad break!" he said, with a string of oaths. "Copper Creek's under a mile ahead. You'll save time by pushin' on afoot. I'll be in as soon as I can get this sulphurated axle tied together with a strap."
"No hurry," replied Jim; "I'll help you."
He began to unhitch the horses while Blair went to borrow an axe of Durand. The driver's intention was to splice the broken axle with a bit of green wood. In a little time, he and the old man returned together.
So Billy found them, straining away with an impromptu crowbar. When he and Jim saw each other, they agreed that they'd be tee-totally chawed up! After a time the stage moved doubtfully on toward Copper Creek. Billy and Jim went the other way in the buckboard.
Billy explained that he was going to see Jim; and Jim explained that he had come to get Billy. Billy elaborated on the tale of his doings since their last meeting, and easily persuaded Jim, as well as himself, that he was a most wronged individual. To restore his self-respect it only needed a sympathetic listener, so that he could hear the sound of his own voice. For the moment he had doubted himself. Now he saw plainly that he had been misled by false pretences. If he had understood clearly from the beginning the picayune policy expected of him by these stingy Easterners, he would have graduated his scale of expenditures to suit it; but certainly they had implied at least that they intended to get up a good big mine. Served a man right for going in with such sharpers!
Jim merely said that he had a first-rate thing to share with Billy.
It was a pleasant sight, the bearded solemn miner, fairly glowing with pleasure over finding Billy unfortunate and therefore open to his own kind offices; the eager-faced enthusiastic promoter, elated and high-spirited because of the relief of putting quite behind him a colossal failure; because of the privilege of starting again with a clean slate; because of a hundred new and promising schemes for the future. Michaïl Lafond's long planning had availed little, after all. With all his shrewdness he did not see that in the personality of Billy Knapp he was attempting to quench the essence of enthusiasm and hope and faith—inextinguishable fires. That is the American frontiersman.
At Rapid they took the train to Crooked Horn. At Crooked Horn they reclaimed the horse from Billy Powers. Then they inaugurated the boom. At this very day, December 24th, 1899, they are still living together in the new town of Knapp City, Wyoming, wealthy and respected citizens. And Billy recounts his Copper Creek experiences, generally with tolerance, as an example of the deceit of his fellow-creatures. They were the fruit of eighteen years of planning and waiting and working by a man who thought he could shape greater destinies than his own.