describing a circle with his leg, searching for the lost rope. It must
be there, of course; why, of course it must! He had certainly not gone
more than fifty or sixty feet, and they had said something about three
hundred feet? Where could the rope be? It must have got caught somehow
on his coat! Or perhaps his right leg was getting numb and he could not
feel anything with it. But no! His leg was all right. He felt out with
his left leg. It did not even touch the wall of the shaft. There seemed
to be nothing there, nothing at all! Nothing there? Nothing in all the
universe, but this bit of rope he was clutching, and himself, a
miserable little lump of quivering, straining nerves.
Mr. Fetherbee told himself that this would never do. He loosed the grip
of his left hand, and it felt its way slowly down the rope gathering it
up inch by inch. He knew by the lightness of the rope that the end was
there, yet when he touched it a shiver went through him. A second later
the left hand was clutching the rope beside the right, and he had taken
a long breath of,--was it relief? Relief from uncertainty, at least. He
knew with a positive knowledge that there was but one outcome for the
situation. It would be an hour at the very least before his friends
reached the tunnel, for Discombe had business to attend to on the way.
Even then they might not conclude immediately that anything was amiss.
The break in the rope must be recent. It was possible that no one in the
mine had discovered it. The old shaft was never used now-a-days, except
for just such chance excursions as his. One thing was sure,--he could
never hold out an hour. Already his wrists were weakening; he was
getting chilled too, now that motion had ceased. He gave himself twenty
minutes at the most, and then?--Hm! He wondered what it would be like!
He had heard that people falling from a great height had the breath
knocked out of them before they--arrived! He was afraid three hundred
feet was not high enough for that! What a pity the shaft was not a
thousand feet deep! What a pity it had any bottom at all!
"I should have liked a chance to tell Louisa," he said aloud, with a
short, nervous laugh, and then,--he was himself again.
To say that Mr. Fetherbee was himself again is to say that he was a
self-possessed and plucky little gentleman,--the same gallant little
gentleman, dangling here at the end of a rope, with the steady,
irresistible force of gravitation pulling him to his doom, as he had
ever been in his gay, debonair progress through a safe and friendly
world. He forced his thoughts away from the horror to come. His
imagination could be kept out of that yawning horror, though his body
must be inevitably drawn down into it as by a thousand clutching hands.
He forced his thoughts back to the pleasant, prosperous life he had led;
to the agreeable people he had known; and most tenderly, most warmly, he
thought of Louisa,--Louisa, so kind, so sympathetic, so companionable.
"Louisa," he had said to her one day, "I not only love you, but I like
you." Well, so it had been with his life, that pleasant life of his. He
not only loved it but he liked it! As he looked back over its course, in
a spirit of calm contemplation, the achievement of which he did not
consider in the least heroic, he came to the deliberate conclusion that
he had had his share. After a little more consideration his mind, with
but a quickly suppressed recoil, adopted the conviction that it was
perhaps better to go suddenly like this, than to have been subjected to
a long, lingering illness.
His wrists were becoming more and more weak and shaky, and there was a
sense of emptiness within him, natural perhaps, considering the quality
of his noon-day meal. His thoughts began to hover, with a curious
bitterness over the memory of that apricot pie. It was the one thing
that interfered with the even tenor of his philosophical reflections.
The most singular resentment toward it had taken possession of his mind.
"Look here," he said to himself; "I'll get my mind clear of that
confounded pie, and then I'll drop and have done with it." He knew very
well that he could not keep his hold two minutes longer, and he was
determined to "die game."
For a few seconds Mr. Fetherbee very nearly lost his mental grip. It
seemed to be loosening, loosening, just as his fingers were doing. Then,
as in a sort of trance, there rose before him a visible picture of the
pleasant, kindly face he had so warmly loved, so heartily liked. Still
in a trance-like condition, he became aware that that was the impression
he would like to carry with him into eternity. He let it sink quietly
into his soul, a soothing, fortifying draught; then, unconscious of
philosophy, of heroism, of whatever we may choose to call the calm
acceptance of the inevitable, he loosed his hold.
He fell of course only three inches. Anybody might have foreseen it,
anybody, that is, who had not been suspended at the end of a rope in a
pitch black hole. There is, however, something more convincing in
experience than in anything else, and, as we have seen, Mr. Fetherbee
had not once thought of the possibility of a friendly platform close
beneath his feet. The discovery of it was none the less exhilarating. He
did not in the least understand it, but he was entirely ready to believe
in it.
He promptly pulled out his match-box and the bit of candle he was
provided with. The dim, uncertain light cheered and warmed his very
soul.
He found himself standing on a broad stout plank, built securely across
the shaft. From the under side of this plank hung a rope like the one
gently swaying before his eyes. He was saved; and as he breathed
something very like a prayer of thanksgiving, it suddenly struck him
that he had escaped not only an untimely, but an undignified end. "I'm
glad I haven't done anything to mortify Louisa," he said to himself, and
he felt that he had not until that moment appreciated his good fortune!
He looked at his watch. It was nearly half-an-hour since he had entered
the mine. He stamped his feet on the plank and rubbed his hands together
to get up the circulation, and then he pulled out a cigar and lighted
it. The first whiff permeated his being with a sense as of food and
drink, sunshine and sweet air.
The rest of the descent was accomplished by means of a succession of
ropes suspended from a succession of platforms.
An hour later, when the wagon drove up to the mouth of the tunnel, Mr.
Fetherbee was found standing serenely there, with a half finished cigar
between his lips, gazing abstractedly at the landscape.
"Hullo, Fetherbee!" Dayton sung out, as they approached. "How was it?"
"First rate!" came the answer, in a voice of suppressed elation, which
Allery Jones noted and was at something of a loss to interpret.
"Was it all your fancy pictured?" he asked, in rather a sceptical tone.
"All and more!" Mr. Fetherbee declared.
He mounted into the wagon, and the horses started on the home-stretch,
not more joyful in the near prospect of their well-earned orgie of oats
and hay than Mr. Fetherbee in the feast of narration which was spread
for him. Finding it impossible to contain himself another moment, he
cried, with an exultant ring in his voice: "But I say, you fellows!
_I've had an adventure!_"
Then, as they bowled along through a winding valley in which the early
September twilight was fast deepening, Mr. Fetherbee gave his initial
version of what has since become a classic, known among the
ever-increasing circle of Mr. Fetherbee's friends as--"An adventure I
once had!"
IX.
AN AMATEUR GAMBLE.
The mining boom was on, and Springtown, that famous Colorado
health-resort and paradise of idlers, was wide awake to the situation.
The few rods of sidewalk which might fairly be called "the street," was
thronged all day with eager speculators. Everybody was "in it," from the
pillars of society down to the slenderest reed of an errand boy who
could scrape together ten dollars for a ten-cent stock. As a natural
consequence real estate was, for the moment, as flat as a poor joke, and
people who had put their money into town "additions" were beginning to
think seriously of planting potatoes where they had once dreamed of
rearing marketable dwelling-houses.
Hillerton, the oldest real-estate man in town, was one of the few among
the fraternity who had not branched out into stock brokerage. For that
reason an air of leisure pervaded his office, and men liked to gather
there and discuss the prospects of Lame Gulch. Lame Gulch, as everybody
knows, is the new Colorado mining-camp, which is destined eventually to
make gold a drug in the market. The camp is just on the other side of
the Peak, easily accessible to any Springtown man who is not afraid of
roughing it. And to do them justice, there proved to be scarcely an
invalid or a college-graduate among them all who did not make his way up
there, and take his first taste of hardship like a man.
Hillerton used to sit behind the balustrade which divided his sanctum
from the main office, and listen with an astute expression, and just the
glimmer of a smile, to the talk of the incipient millionaires, who
bragged with such ease and fluency of this or that Bonanza. When all
declared with one accord that "if Lame Gulch panned out as it was dead
sure to do, Springtown would be the biggest _little_ town in all
creation," Hillerton's smile became slightly accentuated, but a wintry
chill of incredulity had a neutralizing effect upon it. As the
excitement increased, and his fellow-townsmen manifested a willingness
to mortgage every inch of wood and plaster in their possession,
Hillerton merely became, if possible, more stringent in the matter of
securities.
"We might as well take a mortgage on the town, and done with it," he
remarked to his confidential clerk one Saturday evening. "We shall own
it all in six months, anyhow!"
Peckham, the confidential clerk, shrugged his shoulders, and said he
"guessed it was about so."
Hillerton's confidential clerk usually assented to the dictum of his
principal. It saved trouble and hurt nobody. Not that Lewis Peckham was
without opinions of his own; but he took no special interest in them,
and rarely put himself to the trouble of defending them.
The young man's countenance had never been an expressive one, and during
the three years he had spent in Hillerton's employ, his face had lost
what little mobility it had ever possessed. He was a pale,
hollow-chested individual, with a bulging forehead, curiously marked
eyebrows, and a prominent and sensitive nose. A gentleman, too, as
anybody could see, but a gentleman of a singularly unsocial disposition.
He looked ten years older than he was--an advantage which Hillerton
recognized. His grave, unencouraging manner had a restraining effect
upon too exacting tenants; while his actual youthfulness gave Hillerton
the advantage over him of thirty years' seniority. Altogether Hillerton
placed a high value upon his confidential clerk, and it was with a very
genuine good-will that he followed up the last recorded observation, by
saying, carelessly:
"I hope you've kept out of the thing yourself, Peckham."
"Oh, yes!" Peckham answered, in a tone of indifference, copied after
Hillerton's own.
Peckham spoke the truth, as it happened, but he would probably have made
the same answer whether it had been true or not. He was of the opinion
that he was not accountable to Hillerton nor to any one else in the
disposition he might make of his legitimate earnings. In fact, it was
largely owing to Hillerton's inquiry and the hint of resentment it
excited, that Peckham put a hundred dollars into the Yankee Doodle
Mining and Milling Co. that very day. To be sure, he acted on a
"straight tip," but straight tips were as thick as huckleberries in
Springtown, and this was the first time he had availed himself of one.
It would be difficult to imagine why Peckham should not have thoroughly
liked Hillerton; difficult, that is, to any one not aware of the
unusual criterion by which he measured his fellow men. He was himself
conscious that he had ceased to "take any stock" in his employer, since
the day on which he had discovered that that excellent man of business
did not know the Ninth Symphony from Hail Columbia.
Against Fate, on the other hand, Peckham had several grudges. He was
inconveniently poor, he was ill, and he was in exile. With so many hard
feelings to cherish against his two immediate superiors--namely,
Hillerton and Fate--it is no wonder that Peckham had the reputation of
being of a morose disposition.
He was perhaps the most solitary man in Springtown. Not only did he live
in lodgings, and pick up his meals at cheap restaurants; he had wilfully
denied himself the compensations which club life offers. Living, too, in
a singularly hospitable community, he never put himself in the way of
receiving invitations, and he consequently was allowed to do without
them. He did not keep a horse; he thought a lodging-house no place for
dogs, and he entertained serious thoughts of shooting his landlady's
cat. He had always refrained from burdening himself with correspondents,
and would have thought it a nuisance to write to his own brother, if so
be he had had such a relative to bless himself with.
Lewis Peckham did not complain of his lot in detail, and he never made
the least effort to better it. There was only one thing he really
wanted, and that thing he could not have. He wanted to be "something
big" in the way of a musician. Not merely to be master of this or that
instrument; certainly not to teach reluctant young people their scales
and arpeggios. What he had intended to become was a great composer--a
composer of symphonies and operas--the First Great American Composer,
spelled, be it observed, with capital letters. He was not destined to
the disillusionment of direct failure, which in all human probability
would have been his. Fate spared him that by visiting him in the
beginning of his career with an attack of pneumonia which sent him
fleeing for his life to the sunshine and high air of the Rocky Mountain
region. Peckham was always rather ashamed of having fled for his life,
which, as he repeatedly assured himself, was by no means worth the
purchase. Yet with him as with most men, even when thwarted in what they
believe to be a great ambition, the instinct of life is as imperative
as that of hunger. And Lewis Peckham found himself wooing health at the
cost of music, and earning his living as prosaically as any mere
bread-winner of them all.
The "straight tip" on the Yankee Doodle proved to be an exception among
its kind. The Y. D. which he had bought at ten cents, ran up in a week
to twenty-five cents. Peckham sold out just before it dropped back, and
then he put his profits into the "Libby Carew."
It happened that about that time he read in the local paper that the
great Leitmann Orchestra would close its season with a concert in
Chicago on May 16th. This concert Peckham was determined to hear, cost
what it would. Hence the prudence which led him to reserve his original
hundred dollars; a prudence which would otherwise have deprived the
speculation of half its savor. The Libby Carew was as yet a mere "hole
in the ground," but if he did not have the excitement of making money,
it might prove equally stirring to lose it. Besides that, Hillerton's
tone was getting more and more lofty on the subject of stock gambling,
and the idea of acting contrary to such unquestioned sagacity had more
relish than most ideas possessed.
Meanwhile the excitement grew. Lame Gulch was "panning out" with
startling results. One after another the Springtown men went up to
investigate matters for themselves, and the most sceptical came back a
convert. The railroad folks began to talk of building a branch "in."
Eastern capitalists pricked up their ears and sent out experts.
One morning the last of February, half-a-dozen men, among them a couple
who had just come down from the camp, stood about Hillerton's office or
sat on the railing of the sanctum, giving rough but graphic accounts of
the sights to be seen at Lame Gulch. The company was not a typical
Western crowd. The men were nearly all well dressed and exhibited
evidences of good breeding. The refinement of the "tenderfoot" was still
discernible, and excepting for the riding boots which they wore and the
silk hats and derbys which they did not wear, and for an air of cheerful
alertness which prevailed among them, one might have taken them for a
group of Eastern club men. The reason of this was not far to seek. Most
of them were, in fact, Eastern club men, who had sought Springtown as a
health-resort, and had discovered, to their surprise, that it was about
the pleasantest place they had yet "struck."
Peckham sat somewhat apart from the others on his high revolving stool,
sometimes listening, without a sign of interest in his face, sometimes
twirling his stool around and sitting with his back to the company,
apparently immersed in figures.
Allery Jones, the Springtown wag, had once remarked that Peckham's back
was more expressive than his face. On this occasion he nudged Dicky
Simmons, with a view to reminding him of the fact; but Dicky, a handsome
youth with a sanguine light in his blue eyes, was intent on what Harry
de Luce was saying.
"Tell you what!" cried de Luce, who had only recently discovered that
there were other interests in life besides the three P's, polo, poker,
and pigeon-shooting. "Tell you what, those fellows up there are a
rustling lot. Take the Cosmopolitan Hotel now! They're getting things
down to a fine point in that tavern. There was a man put up there night
before last, one of those rich-as-thunder New York capitalists. You
could see it by the hang of his coat-tails. He came sniffing round on
his own hook, as those cautious cusses do. Well, Rumsey gave him one of
his crack rooms--panes of glass in the window, imitation mahogany
chamber-set, pitcher of water on the washstand, all complete. Do you
suppose that was good enough for old Money-Bags? Not by a jug-full. He
owned the earth, he'd have you to know, and he wasn't going to put up
with anything short of the Murray Hill! Nothing suited. There wasn't any
paper on the walls, there wasn't any carpet on the floor, there wasn't
any window-shade, and I'll be blowed if the old chap didn't object to
finding the water frozen solid in the pitcher. He came down to the bar
roaring-mad, and said he wouldn't stand it; he'd rather camp out and
done with it; if they couldn't give him a better room than that, he'd be
out of this quicker 'n he came in! Well, fellers! You never saw anything
half so sweet as that old halibut Rumsey. If the gentleman would just
step in to supper and have a little patience, he thought he'd find
everything to his satisfaction. And by the living Jingo, boys! when old
Money-Bags went up to his room in the middle of the evening, I'm blessed
if there wasn't a paper on the wall, an ingrain carpet on the floor, and
a red-hot stove over in the corner! Same room, too! Like to have seen
the old boy when the grand transformation scene burst upon his
astonished optics! Guess he thought Lame Gulch could give New York City
points!"
"Did the old cove seem likely to put any money in?" asked a man with
high cheekbones, who had the worried look of a person who has given a
mortgage on his peace of mind.
"Yes, he bought up some claims dirt cheap, and they say he's going to
form a company."
"That's the talk!" cried the sanguine Dicky.
"Speaking of picking up claims dirt cheap," began a new orator, an
ex-ranchman, who was soon to make the discovery that there was as much
money to be lost in mines as in cattle, if a fellow only had the knack;
"I saw a tidy little deal when I was up at the camp last week. We were
sitting round in the barroom of the Cosmopolitan, trying to keep warm.
I guess it was the only place in Lame Gulch that night where the
thermometer was above zero. There was a lot of drinking going on, and
the men that were playing were playing high. I wasn't in it myself. I
was pleasantly occupied with feeling warm after having fooled round the
Libby Carew all day. I got interested in a man standing outside, who
kept looking in at the window and going off again. The light struck the
face in a queer sort of way, and I guess there was something wrong about
the window-pane. They don't do much business in the way of plate-glass
at Lame Gulch. Anyhow, I couldn't seem to get a fair sight of anything
but the man's eyes, and they looked like the eyes of a hungry wolf."
"Ever meet a hungry wolf, Phil?"
"Scores of 'em. You're one yourself, Jim, when you look at the
stock-boards. Well! The fellow came and went like an angel visitant, and
after awhile I got tired of watching for him, and found myself admiring
the vocabulary of the boys as they got excited. Gad! It's a liberal
education to listen to that sort of a crowd. The worst you can do
yourself sounds like a Sunday-school address by comparison. Suddenly the
door opened and in walked the man with the eyes. He hadn't any overcoat
on and his feet and legs were tied up in gunny sacks. His teeth were
chattering and his face looked like a blue print! He shuffled up to
Rumsey, who was sipping a cocktail behind the bar, and says he:
"'Evenin', pard; I want a drink.'
"'All right, stranger. Just show us the color of your money.'
"'Ain't got any money,' says he, 'but I've got a claim over 'long side
of the Yankee Doodle, and I'm ready to swap a half interest in it for
all the liquor I can drink between now and morning.' There was a kind of
a desperate look about the man that meant business. Rumsey stepped out
among the boys and got a pointer or two on that claim, and they made the
deal."
There was a pause in the narrative, to allow the listeners to take in
the situation, and then the speaker went on: "It was a sight to see that
chap pour the stuff down his throat. He was drinking, off and on, pretty
much all night. Didn't come to till late the next afternoon. Rumsey was
so pleased with the deal next morning, that he let the fellow lie behind
the stove all day and sleep it off. Not sure but that he gave him a
drink of water when he woke up, and water's high at Lame Gulch."
"Kind of a shame, I call it, to let him do it. Wasn't there anybody to
stand treat?" It was Dicky, the lad of the sanguine countenance that
spoke.
"Wonder what the claim was worth?" said the man with a mortgage on him.
"Wonder how he felt next morning?" queried another.
"Felt like an infernal donkey!" Hillerton declared, flinging away a
cigar-stump and taking his legs down from the desk.
Then Peckham turned himself round to face the crowd, and said, in a tone
of quiet conviction:
"The man was all right. If you only want anything bad enough, no price
is too high to pay for it."
This was a sentiment which every one was bound to respect--every one, at
least, excepting Hillerton.
"Sounds very well, Peckham," he said, "but it won't hold water."
The most surprising thing about Peckham's little speculations was that
they all succeeded. It made the other men rather mad because he did not
care more.
"But that's always the way," Freddy Dillingham remarked, with an air of
profound philosophy. "It's the fellers that don't care a darn that have
all the luck."
When Peckham sold out of the Libby Carew, he doubled his money, and the
moment he touched the "Trailing Arbutus," up she went. By the first of
May he found himself the possessor of nearly three thousand dollars'
worth of "stuff" distributed among several ventures. Of course, he was
credited with five times as much, and the other men began to think that
if he did not set up a dogcart pretty soon, or at least a yellow
buckboard, they should have their opinion of him. If the truth must be
known, Peckham would not have given a nickle for a dozen dog-carts. It
was all very well to make a little money; it was the first time he had
discovered a taste for anything in the nature of a game, and the higher
the stakes came to be, the more worth while it seemed. Nevertheless, his
mind, in those days of early May, when he was steadily rising in the
esteem of his associates, was very little occupied with the calculation
of his profits.