An abandoned tunnel--an irregular orifice in the mountain flank which
looked like a dried-up sewer that had disgorged through its opening the
refuse of the mountain in red slime, gravel, and a peculiar clay known
as “cement,” in a foul streak down its side; a narrow ledge on either
side, broken up by heaps of quartz, tailings, and rock, and half
hidden in scrub, oak, and myrtle; a decaying cabin of logs, bark, and
cobblestones--these made up the exterior of the Marshall claim. To this
defacement of the mountain, the rude clearing of thicket and underbrush
by fire or blasting, the lopping of tree-boughs and the decapitation
of saplings, might be added the debris and ruins of half-civilized
occupancy. The ground before the cabin was covered with broken boxes,
tin cans, the staves and broken hoops of casks, and the cast-off rags
of blankets and clothing. The whole claim in its unsavory, unpicturesque
details, and its vulgar story of sordid, reckless, and selfish occupancy
and abandonment, was a foul blot on the landscape, which the first rosy
dawn only made the more offending. Surely the last spot in the world
that men should quarrel and fight for!
So thought George Barker, as with his companions they moved in single
file slowly towards it. The little party consisted only of himself,
Demorest, and Stacy; Marshall and Hamlin--according to a prearranged
plan--were still in ambush to join them at the first appearance of
Steptoe and his gang. The claim was yet unoccupied; they had secured
their first success. Steptoe's followers, unaware that his design had
been discovered, and confident that they could easily reach the claim
before Marshall and the surveyor, had lingered. Some of them had held
a drunken carouse at their rendezvous at Heavy Tree. Others were still
engaged in procuring shovels and picks and pans for their mock equipment
as miners, and this, again, gave Marshall's adherents the advantage.
THEY knew that their opponents would probably first approach the
empty claim encumbered only with their peaceful implements, while they
themselves had brought their rifles with them.
Stacy, who by tacit consent led the party, on reaching the claim at
once posted Demorest and Barker each behind a separate heap of quartz
tailings on the ledge, which afforded them a capital breastwork, and
stationed himself at the mouth of the tunnel which was nearest the
trail. It had already been arranged what each man was to do. They were
in possession. For the rest they must wait. What they thought at
that moment no one knew. Their characteristic appearance had slightly
changed. The melancholy and philosophic Demorest was alert and bitter.
Barker's changeful face had become fixed and steadfast. Stacy alone wore
his “fighting look,” which the others had remembered.
They had not long to wait. The sounds of rude laughter, coarse
skylarking, and voices more or less still confused with half-spent
liquor came from the rocky trail. And then Steptoe appeared with part
of his straggling followers, who were celebrating their easy invasion
by clattering their picks and shovels and beating loudly upon their tins
and prospecting-pans. The three partners quickly recognized the stamp
of the strangers, in spite of their peaceful implements. They were
the waifs and strays of San Francisco wharves, of Sacramento dens, of
dissolute mountain towns; and there was not, probably, a single actual
miner among them. A raging scorn and contempt took possession of Barker
and Demorest, but Stacy knew their exact value. As Steptoe passed before
the opening of the tunnel he heard the cry of “Halt!”
He looked up. He saw Stacy not thirty yards before him with his rifle
at half-cock. He saw Barker and Demorest, fully armed, rise from behind
their breastworks of rock along the ledge and thus fully occupy the
claim. But he saw more. He saw that his plot was known. Outlaw and
desperado as he was, he saw that he had lost his moral power in this
actual possession, and that from that moment he must be the aggressor.
He saw he was fighting no irresponsible hirelings like his own, but men
of position and importance, whose loss would make a stir. Against their
rifles the few revolvers that his men chanced to have slung to them
were of little avail. But he was not cowed, although his few followers
stumbled together at this momentary check, half angrily, half timorously
like wolves without a leader. “Bring up the other men and their guns,”
he whispered fiercely to the nearest. Then he faced Stacy.
“Who are YOU to stop peaceful miners going to work on their own claim?”
he said coarsely. “I'll tell you WHO, boys,” he added, suddenly turning
to his men with a hoarse laugh. “It ain't even the bank! It's only Jim
Stacy, that the bank kicked out yesterday to save itself,--Jim Stacy
and his broken-down pals. And what's the thief doing here--in Marshall's
tunnel--the only spot that Marshall can claim? We ain't no particular
friends o' Marshall's, though we're neighbors on the same claim; but we
ain't going to see Marshall ousted by tramps. Are we, boys?”
“No, by G-d!” said his followers, dropping the pans and seizing their
picks and revolvers. They understood the appeal to arms if not to their
reason. For an instant the fight seemed imminent. Then a voice from
behind them said:--
“You needn't trouble yourselves about that! I'M Marshall! I sent these
gentlemen to occupy the claim until I came here with the surveyor,” and
two men stepped from a thicket of myrtle in the rear of Steptoe and
his followers. The speaker, Marshall, was a thin, slight, overworked,
over-aged man; his companion, the surveyor, was equally slight,
but red-bearded, spectacled, and professional-looking, with a long
traveling-duster that made him appear even clerical. They were scarcely
a physical addition to Stacy's party, whatever might have been their
moral and legal support.
But it was just this support that Steptoe strangely clung to in his
designs for the future, and a wild idea seized him. The surveyor was
really the only disinterested witness between the two parties. If
Steptoe could confuse his mind before the actual fighting--from which he
would, of course, escape as a non-combatant--it would go far afterwards
to rehabilitate Steptoe's party. “Very well, then,” he said to Marshall,
“I shall call this gentleman to witness that we have been attacked
here in peaceable possession of our part of the claim by these armed
strangers, and whether they are acting on your order or not, their blood
will be on your head.”
“Then I reckon,” said the surveyor, as he tore away his beard, wig,
spectacles, and mustache, and revealed the figure of Jack Hamlin, “that
I'm about the last witness that Mr. Steptoe-Horncastle ought to call,
and about the last witness that he ever WILL call!”
But he had not calculated upon the desperation of Steptoe over the
failure of this last hope. For there sprang up in the outlaw's brain the
same hideous idea that he voiced to his companions at the Divide. With
a hoarse cry to his followers, he crashed his pickaxe into the brain of
Marshall, who stood near him, and sprang forward. Three or four shots
were exchanged. Two of his men fell, a bullet from Stacy's rifle pierced
Steptoe's leg, and he dropped forward on one knee. He heard the steps
of his reinforcements with their weapons coming close behind him, and
rolled aside on the sloping ledge to let them pass. But he rolled too
far. He felt himself slipping down the mountain-side in the slimy shoot
of the tunnel. He made a desperate attempt to recover himself, but the
treacherous drift of the loose debris rolled with him, as if he were
part of its refuse, and, carrying him down, left him unconscious, but
otherwise uninjured, in the bushes of the second ledge five hundred feet
below.
When he recovered his senses the shouts and outcries above him had
ceased. He knew he was safe. The ledge could only be reached by a
circuitous route three miles away. He knew, too, that if he could only
reach a point of outcrop a hundred yards away he could easily descend to
the stage road, down the gentle slope of the mountain hidden in a growth
of hazel-brush. He bound up his wounded leg, and dragged himself on his
hands and knees laboriously to the outcrop. He did not look up; since
his pick had crashed into Marshall's brain he had but one blind thought
before him--to escape at once! That his revenge and compensation would
come later he never doubted. He limped and crept, rolled and fell, from
bush to bush through the sloping thickets, until he saw the red road a
few feet below him.
If he only had a horse he could put miles between him and any present
pursuit! Why should he not have one? The road was frequented by solitary
horsemen--miners and Mexicans. He had his revolver with him; what
mattered the life of another man if he escaped from the consequences of
the one he had just taken? He heard the clatter of hoofs; two priests on
mules rode slowly by; he ground his teeth with disappointment. But they
had scarcely passed before another and more rapid clatter came from
their rear. It was a lad on horseback. He started. It was his own son!
He remembered in a flash how the boy had said he was coming to meet the
padre at the station on that day. His first impulse was to hide himself,
his wound, and his defeat from the lad, but the blind idea of escape
was still paramount. He leaned over the bank and called to him. The
astonished lad cantered eagerly to his side.
“Give me your horse, Eddy,” said the father; “I'm in bad luck, and must
get.”
The boy glanced at his father's face, at his tattered garments and
bandaged leg, and read the whole story. It was a familiar page to him.
He paled first and then flushed, and then, with an odd glitter in his
eyes, said, “Take me with you, father. Do! You always did before. I'll
bring you luck.”
Desperation is superstitious. Why not take him? They had been lucky
before, and the two together might confound any description of their
identity to the pursuers. “Help me up, Eddy, and then get up before me.”
“BEHIND, you mean,” said the boy, with a laugh, as he helped his father
into the saddle.
“No,” said Steptoe harshly. “BEFORE me,--do you hear? And if anything
happens BEHIND you, don't look! If I drop off, don't stop! Don't get
down, but go on and leave me. Do you understand?” he repeated almost
savagely.
“Yes,” said the boy tremulously.
“All right,” said the father, with a softer voice, as he passed his one
arm round the boy's body and lifted the reins. “Hold tight when we come
to the cross-roads, for we'll take the first turn, for old luck's sake,
to the Mission.”
They were the last words exchanged between them, for as they wheeled
rapidly to the left at the cross-roads, Jack Hamlin and Demorest swung
as quickly out of another road to the right immediately behind them.
Jack's challenge to “Halt!” was only answered by Steptoe's horse
springing forward under the sharp lash of the riata.
“Hold up!” said Jack suddenly, laying his hand upon the rifle which
Demorest had lifted to his shoulder. “He's carrying some one,--a wounded
comrade, I reckon. We don't want HIM. Swing out and go for the horse;
well forward, in the neck or shoulder.”
Demorest swung far out to the right of the road and raised his rifle. As
it cracked Steptoe's horse seemed to have suddenly struck some obstacle
ahead of him rather than to have been hit himself, for his head went
down with his fore feet under him, and he turned a half-somersault on
the road, flinging his two riders a dozen feet away.
Steptoe scrambled to his knees, revolver in hand, but the other figure
never moved. “Hands up!” said Jack, sighting his own weapon. The reports
seemed simultaneous, but Jack's bullet had pierced Steptoe's brain even
before the outlaw's pistol exploded harmlessly in the air.
The two men dismounted, but by a common instinct they both ran to the
prostrate figure that had never moved.
“By God! it's a boy!” said Jack, leaning over the body and lifting the
shoulders from which the head hung loosely. “Neck broken and dead as
his pal.” Suddenly he started, and, to Demorest's astonishment, began
hurriedly pulling off the glove from the boy's limp right hand.
“What are you doing?” demanded Demorest in creeping horror.
“Look!” said Jack, as he laid bare the small white hand. The first two
fingers were merely unsightly stumps that had been hidden in the padded
glove.
“Good God! Van Loo's brother!” said Demorest, recoiling.
“No!” said Jack, with a grim face, “it's what I have long
suspected,--it's Steptoe's son!”
“His son?” repeated Demorest.
“Yes,” said Jack; and he added, after looking at the two bodies with
a long-drawn whistle of concern, “and I wouldn't, if I were you, say
anything of this to Barker.”
“Why?” said Demorest.
“Well,” returned Jack, “when our scrimmage was over down there, and they
brought the news to Barker that his wife and her diamonds were burnt up
at the hotel, you remember that they said that Mrs. Horncastle had saved
his boy.”
“Yes,” said Demorest; “but what has that to do with it?”
“Nothing, I reckon,” said Jack, with a slight shrug of his shoulders,
“only Mrs. Horncastle was the mother of the boy that's lying there.”
*****
Two years later as Demorest and Stacy sat before the fire in the old
cabin on Marshall's claim--now legally their own--they looked from the
door beyond the great bulk of Black Spur to the pallid snow-line of the
Sierras, still as remote and unchanged to them as when they had
gazed upon it from Heavy Tree Hill. And, for the matter of that, they
themselves seemed to have been left so unchanged that even now, as
in the old days, it was Barker's voice as he greeted them from the
darkening trail that alone broke their reverie.
“Well,” said Demorest cheerfully, “your usual luck, Barker boy!” for
they already saw in his face the happy light they had once seen there on
an eventful night seven years ago.
“I'm to be married to Mrs. Horncastle next month,” he said breathlessly,
“and little Sta loves her already as if she was his own mother. Wish me
joy.”
A slight shadow passed over Stacy's face; but his hand was the first to
grasp Barker's, and his voice the first to say “Amen!”