CHAPTER VIIITHE AROUSED LION
Black Dan, as he walked to the office that Friday morning, had been giving serious thought to the situation of his son-in-law. Mercedes had not spent the summer in Virginia as her father had hoped and expected. When he saw her in San Francisco, as he did every few weeks, she talked of her delicate throat and expressed a fear of the climate. It was evident that she could not or would not live there.
That his daughter loved her husband Black Dan had no doubt. And as he walked to the mine that morning he was pondering a scheme he had lately been considering of sending Jerry to San Francisco, to be placed in charge of his large property interests. Though he regarded his son-in-law with contemptuous dislike, he could not deny that the young man had worked hard and faithfully all summer. Moreover, the stealthy watch kept upon him had revealed no irregularities in his conduct. In a place and at a time when men led wild lives with wilder associates, Jerry’s behavior had been exemplary. His life had been given to work and business; women had no place in it.
With these thoughts in his mind Black Dan entered the office and paused by his son-in-law’s desk. As he stood there a boy walked in and handed the young man a small gray envelope that bore a superscription in a delicate feminine hand. Black Dan also saw that Jerry, under his unshakablesang-froid, was disconcerted. That the receipt of the letter was disturbing to its recipient was as plain to the older man as that the letter was from a woman.
He passed on to his own office with his mind in an entirely different condition from what it had been when he entered the building. After all their watchfulness, was Jerry playing at his old game? The thought made Black Dan breathe curses into his beard. He saw Rion, himself and the Colonel out-witted, and Jerry laughing at them in his sleeve. And deeper than this went the enraging thought of Mercedes supplanted by one of the women that flourish in mining camps, birds of prey that batten on the passions of men.
He had work to do, however, and, for to-day, at least, would have to put the matter out of his mind. Time enough when the Easterners were gone. Black Dan, like many men of his day and kind, was particularly anxious to impress the Easterners, and to make their three days’ stay in the town a revel of barbaric luxury. The dinner he was to give them that evening was to be a feast of unrivaled splendor, every course ordered from San Francisco, the wine as choice as any to be bought in the country, the china, glass, and silver imported at extravagant cost from the greatest factories of Europe, the cigars of acostly rarity, a brand especially sent from Havana for the bonanza king and his associates.
Now from among the specimens of ore that stood along the top of his desk he selected one of unusual form and value to give to the most distinguished of the strangers. It was a small square of blackish mineral on which a fine, wire-like formation of native silver had coiled itself into a shape that resembled a rose. It had the appearance of a cunning piece of the silversmith’s art, a flower of silver wire delicately poised on a tiny fragment of quartz rock. Thrusting it into his coat pocket, he left the office, on his way out passing Jerry, who was bending studiously over his desk.
He walked rapidly up through the town, to the same livery stable to which his son-in-law had already paid a visit. One of the diversions to which the visitors were treated was the drive along the mountain road to Washoe Lake. This, Black Dan had arranged, would be the entertainment for the following morning. He with his own Kentucky thoroughbreds, would drive the men, while the women of the party would follow in a hired trap, drawn by the horses Jerry had ordered, and driven by the expert whip of the stable, known as Spanish George. Such a division of the party suited Black Dan admirably, for he disliked women, shunning their society, and when forced into it, becoming more somber and taciturn than ever.
His plan, however, received an unexpected check. He was told that the horses were engaged by Mr.Barclay for that evening. Frowning and annoyed, he demanded why that should prevent him from having them the next morning, and received the information that Mr. Barclay was to drive into Reno that night with them, sending them back in the morning, when they would be too tired by the twenty-one miles over the grade, to go out again immediately.
Black Dan stood in the doorway of the stable looking with attentive eyes at his informant. As the man amplified his explanation with excuses, the bonanza king said nothing. For the moment his own thoughts were too engrossing to permit of words. A puppy that was playing near by in the sunlight trotted toward him and bit playfully at his toe. He turned it over with his foot, following its charmingly awkward gambols with a pondering gaze.
“Then I suppose I can’t have Spanish George either?” he said. “Mr. Barclay’ll take him in to drive the horses back, and he’ll take his time about it.”
“Oh, you can have Spanish George all right,” said the stable-man, relieved that he could give his powerful patron something he wanted. “Mr. Barclay’s driving some one in with him. He’ll have one of the Reno men bring the horses back.”
Black Dan looked up, his broad, dark eyes charged with almost fierce attention.
“Who’s he driving in?” he asked.
“Don’t know, sir. He didn’t say. All he said was that he couldn’t take a driver, as he had some one with him and he’d send the team back in the morning with a man from Reno.”
The other looked down at the puppy, rolling it gently back and forth with his large foot.
“When did you say he was going?” he asked.
“Six-thirty. His valises have come up already. They’re in the office now.”
He pointed backward with his thumb toward the small, partitioned-off box called the office. But Black Dan did not seem particularly interested in the valises.
“Well,” he said, taking his foot off the puppy and pushing it carefully aside, “send along the best you have with Spanish George to drive. Be at the International at eleven sharp. I don’t want to start later than that.”
He left the stable and walked slowly down the street toward the Cresta Plata. His eyes were downcast, his face set in lines of absorbed thought. Whom was Jerry driving into Reno that night?
As he walked he pieced together what he had just heard with what he knew already. One hour before the dinner to the Easterners—at which he was expected—Jerry had arranged to leave the town, driving into Reno with some companion. The companion and the gray note instantly connected themselves in Black Dan’s mind. He felt as certain as a man could be without absolute confirmation that Jerry was driving in with a woman. The daring insolence of it made the blood, which moved slowly in the morose and powerful man, rise to his head. Could it be possible that Jerry, on the way to see his wife, was going to stop over in Reno with some woman of the Virginia streets?
Black Dan’s swarthy skin was slightly flushed when he reached the office. He said nothing to Jerry as he passed his desk. In his own private office he sat still, staring in front of him at the geological map hanging on the wall. He was slow to wrath, but his wrath, like his love, once roused was of a primitive intensity. As he sat staring at the map his anger gathered and grew.
At four o’clock the eastern party and their guides were due to meet in the hoisting works for their excursion down the mine. It was nearly a half-hour later, however, when the two ladies, who made up the feminine portion of the party, slunk out of the spacious dressing-rooms, giggling and blushing in their male attire. Jerry, Marsden the foreman, and one of the shift bosses, were lounging about the mouth of the shaft waiting for them. There were greetings and laughter, the women hugging themselves close in the long overcoats they wore against the chill of the downward passage, and pulling over their hair the shapeless cloth caps they had been given for head-gear.
Through the wide opening that led to the dumps the figure of Black Dan, dark against the brilliance of the afternoon, could be seen walking on the car tracks with the rest of the party. In the muddy overalls, long boots and soft felt hat which was the regulation underground dress of the men, he presented the appearance of some black-browed, heavily bearded pirate in the garb of a tramp. As the cage slid up to the shaft mouth, he entered the building, gave the embarrassed women an encouraging nod, and selecteda lantern from a collection of them standing in a corner.
With little cries of apprehension the women stepped on the flat square of flooring, their three escorts ranged closely round them, the signal to descend, was given, and the cage dropped quickly out of sight into the steaming depths. Black Dan, Barney Sullivan and the strangers were to descend on the cage in the next compartment, and while they waited for it to come up, stood talking of the formations of the mineral, how it had been found and of the varying richness of the ore-bodies. Suddenly Black Dan thought of his specimen, which had come from a part of the mine they were to visit first, and turning went into the men’s dressing-room, where he had left it in his coat pocket.
His clothes had been hung on the last of a line of pegs along the wall. To this he went, and, ignorant of the fact that Jerry had undressed after him, thrust his hand into the pocket of what he thought was his own coat. Instead of the stone his fingers encountered a letter. He drew it out and saw that it was the one he had seen handed to his son-in-law a few hours before.
At once he drew the paper from the envelope. No qualm of conscience deterred him; instead he experienced a sense of satisfaction that his uncertainty should be thus simply brought to an end. His eye traveled over the few lines, instantly grasping their meaning. He knew the signature. Jerry was not intriguing with a common woman of the town; hewas deserting his wife with a girl, hitherto of unspotted reputation, and for years beloved by Rion. It meant ruin and misery for the two human beings nearest to the bonanza king’s heart.
For a moment he stood motionless, the letter in his hand, and before his eyes he saw red. Then it cleared away. He put the paper back in its envelope and thrust it in his pocket. When he came out into the shaft house Barney Sullivan noticed that his face was reddened and that the whites of his eyes were slightly bloodshot. One of the strangers rallied him on his absence, which had been of some minutes’ duration, and he made no answer, simply motioning them to get on the cage with an imperious movement of his head.
The shaft of the Cresta Plata was over two thousand feet in depth, and the heat of the lower levels was terrific. Here the miners, naked, save for a cap, breechclout, and canvas shoes, worked twenty-minute shifts, unable to stand the fiery atmosphere for longer. Cold air was pumped down to them from the surface, the pipes that carried it following the roofs of the long, dark tunnels, their mouths blowing life-giving coolness into stopes where the men could not touch their metal candlesticks, and the iron of the picks grew hot. There were places where the drops that fell from the roof raised blisters on the backs they touched. On most of these lower levels there was much water, its temperature sometimes boiling. The miners of the Cresta Plata had a saying that no man had ever fallen into water that reached to his hipsand lived. At the bottom of the shaft—the “sump” in mining parlance—was a well of varying depths which perpetually exhaled a scalding steam.
Black Dan took his guests to the fifteen-hundred-foot level, whence the greatest riches of the mine had been taken. He was more than usually silent as they walked from tunnel to tunnel and drift to drift. Barney Sullivan was the cicerone of the party, explaining the formation, talking learnedly of the dip of the vein, holding up his lantern to let its gleam fall on the dark bluish “breast” into which the miners drove their picks with a gasp of expelled breath. Nearly an hour had passed when Black Dan, suddenly drawing him back, whispered to him that he was going up to the eight-hundred-foot level to see Jerry, to whom he wished to give some instructions about the dinner that evening. Barney, nodding his comprehension, moved on with the guests, and Black Dan walked back to the station.
As he went up in the cage he passed level after level, like the floors of a great underground building. Yellow lights gleamed through the darkness on the circular forms of west timbers, hollowed caves trickling with moisture, car tracks running into blackness. Each floor was peopled with wild, naked shapes, delving ferociously in this torrid inferno. At the eight-hundred-foot level he got off, the bell rang, and the empty cage went sliding up. The landing on to which he stepped was deserted, and he walked up one of the tunnels that branched from it, called to a pick-boy, whom he saw in the distance, that he wanted Mr. Barclay found and sent to him at once. Thefigure of the boy scudded away into the darkness, and Black Dan went back to the landing.
It was an open space, a small, subterranean room, the lanterns fastened on its walls gilding with their luster the pools of water on the muddy floor. There were boxes used for seats standing about, and on pegs in the timbers the miners’ coats hung. Where the shaft passed down there were several square openings—larger than ordinary doorways, iron-framed and with plates of iron set into the moist ground—which gave egress to the cages. Now there was only a black void there, the long shaft stretching hundreds of feet upward and downward.
Black Dan sat on a box, waiting. Afar off from some unseen tunnel he could hear the faint sound of voices. Near by, sharply clear in the stifling quiet, came the drip of water from the roof. It was still very hot, a moist, suffocating heat, regarded by the miners as cool after the fiery depths below. He pushed back his hat and wiped the sweat from his face. His eyes, as he waited, kept watch on the openings of the three tunnels that diverged from this central point.
One of them was an inky arch in a frame of timbers. In the distance of the others lights gleamed. Now and then a bare body, streaming with perspiration, came into view pushing an ore car. With an increasing rattle it was rolled to the shaft opening and on to a waiting cage which slid up. The miner slouched back into the gloom, the noise of the empty car he propelled before him gradually dying away. Black Dan could hear again the voices and then, muffled by earth and timbers, the thud of the picks.Sitting on an upturned box—the king of this world of subterranean labor—he sat waiting, motionless, save for his moving eyes.
Suddenly from the undefined noises, the beat of an advancing footfall detached itself. He gave a low, inarticulate sound, and drew himself upright, a hand falling on either knee, his dark face full of a grim fixity of attention. Down one of the tunnels the figure of Jerry came into view, walking rapidly.
He was smiling, for this summons made his escape from the mine easier than it would otherwise have been. A word or two from Black Dan and then up on the cage, and then—away into the night where love and a woman were waiting. The culminating excitement of the day made his eye brilliant and deepened the color of his face. Full of the joys and juices of life, triumphantly handsome even in his rough clothes, he was a man made for the seduction of women. Black Dan felt it and it deepened his hate.
“Did you want me?” he called as he drew near. “One of the pick-boys said you sent for me.”
“Yes, I want to see you for a moment. I want to ask you about something.”
The elder man rose slowly from his box. His eyes were burning under the shadow of his hat brim.
“Come over here near the light,” he said. “I’ve something I want to show you.”
Near the entrance to the shaft there was a large lantern, backed by a tin reflector. It cast a powerful light on the muddy ground and the plates of iron that made a smooth flooring round the landing. Black Dan walked to it and stood there waiting. AsJerry approached he drew June’s letter from his pocket and handed it to him.
Jerry was taken completely off his guard, and for a moment was speechless. He took the letter and turned it over.
“What’s this? Where—where’d you get it?” he faltered, his tongue suddenly dry.
For answer a terrible burst of profanity broke from the older man. He fell on Jerry like a lion. In the grip of his mighty muscles the other was borne back toward the opening of the shaft, helpless and struggling. He clutched at the iron supports, for a moment caught one and clung, while the cry of his agony rang out shrill as a woman’s. In the next his hands were torn away and the slippery iron plates slid beneath his feet. For one instant of horror he reeled on the edge of the abyss, then went backward and down. A cry rose that passed like a note of death through the upper levels of the mine.
Black Dan ran back toward the nearest tunnel mouth. The thud of the picks had stopped. The miners, men who work with death at their elbow, came pouring down and out, scrambling from stopes, running from the ends of drifts, swarming up ladders from places of remote, steaming darkness. White-faced, wild-eyed, not knowing what horror of sudden death awaited them, they came rushing toward the place where their chief stood, a grim-visaged figure at the mouth of the tunnel.
He checked them with a raised hand, even at such a moment able to assert his command over them.
“Keep cool, boys. You’re all right. There’s beenan accident. It’s Barclay. For God’s sake, tell Marsden to keep those women back.”
In the shaft house above, Rion, tired of waiting, was lounging up and down when the bell of one of the compartments gave an imperious summons for the cage to descend.
“They’re coming up at last,” said Rion, moving to the edge of the shaft and stretching himself in yawning relief. “I never knew Easterners to stand the heat so long.”