Produced by Roger Frank and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
THE PLUNDERER
[Illustration: He leaned over her saddle, to where, as before something
sacred, he stood with parted lips, and upturned face, bareheaded, in
adoration.--The Plunderer]
THE PLUNDERER
By ROY NORTON
With Frontispiece in Colors
By DOUGLAS DUER
A. L. BURT COMPANY
Publishers--New York
Copyright, 1912, by
W. J. WATT & COMPANY
TO
REX BEACH
WITH ALL THE AFFECTION THAT ONE GIVES TO A PARTNER WITH WHOM HE HAS
TRAILED, AND MINED, AND ADVENTURED FOR MANY YEARS, AND NEVER FOUND
WANTING WHEN BACKS WERE AGAINST THE WALL
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. Bully Presby 9
II. The Croix d'Or 22
III. An Ugly Watchman 36
IV. The Black Death 51
V. The Aged Engineer 71
VI. My Lady of the Horse 97
VII. The Woman Unafraid 114
VIII. The Inconsistent Bully 129
IX. Where a Girl Advises 151
X. Trouble Stalks Abroad 167
XI. Bells' Valiant Fight 182
XII. A Disastrous Blow 195
XIII. The Dynamiter 208
XIV. "Though Love Say Nay" 225
XV. "Mr. Sloan Speaks" 240
XVI. Benefits Returned 258
XVII. When Reason Swings 271
XVIII. The Bully Meets His Master 288
XIX. The Quest Supreme 303
THE PLUNDERER
CHAPTER I
BULLY PRESBY
Plainly the rambling log structure was a road house and the stopping
place for a mountain stage. It had the watering trough in front, the
bundle of iron pails cluttered around the rusted iron pump, and the
trampled muddy hollow created by many tired hoofs striking vigorously
to drive away the flies. It was in a tiny flat beside the road, and
mountains were everywhere; hard-cut, relentless giants, whose stern
faces portrayed a perpetual constancy. At the trough two burros, with
their packs deftly lashed, thrust soft gray muzzles deep into the
water, and held rigid their long gray ears, casting now and then a
wise look at the young man in worn mining clothes who stood patiently
beside them.
Another man, almost a giant in size, but with a litheness of movement
that told of marvelous physical strength, emerged from the door of the
road house, and the babel of sound that had been stilled when he
entered, but a few minutes before, rose again. He crossed to the well,
and smiled from half-humorous eyes at the younger man standing beside
the animals, and said: "Bumped into a hornet's nest. Butted into an
indignation meetin'. A Blackfoot war powwow when the trader had
furnished free booze would have been a peace party put up against
it."
The younger man, who had turned to pump more water, following the
polite mountain custom of replenishing for what you have used, stopped
with a hand on the handle, and looked at him inquiringly.
"It seems it's a bunch of fellers that's been workin' some placer
ground off back here somewheres"--and he waved a tanned hand
indefinitely in a wide arc--"and some man got the double hitch on 'em
with the law, provin' that the ground was his'n, and the sheriff run
'em off! Now they're sore. But it seems they cain't help 'emselves, so
they're movin' over to some other place across the divide."
"But what has that to do with us?"
"Nothin', except that it took me five minutes to get the barkeep' to
tell me about the road. He says we've come all right this far, and
this is the place where we hit the trail over the hills. Says we save
a day and a half, with pack burros, by takin' the cut-off. Says it's
seven or eight hours good ridin' by the road if we were on horses and
in a hurry."
He paused and scanned the hills with an observant eye, while his
companion resumed the pumping process. The trough again filled, the
latter walked around the pails and joined him.
"Well, where does this trail start in?" he asked.
"He's goin' to show us as soon as he can get a minute's rest from that
bunch in there. Said we'd have to be shown. Said unless he could get
away long enough we'd have to wait till somebody he named came in, and
he'd head us into it."
They led the burros across the road and into the shadow of a cliff
where the morning sun, searching and fervid, did not reach, and threw
themselves to the ground, resting their backs against the foot wall,
and trying patiently to await the appearance of their guides. The
steady, hurried clink of glass and bottle on bar, the ribald shouts
and threats of the crowd that filled the road house, the occasional
burst of a maudlin song, all told the condition of the ejected placer
men who had stopped here on their journey.
"I don't know nothin' about the case, of course," drawled the big man
lazily, "and it's none of my funeral; but it does seem as if this
feller they call 'Bully' is quite some for havin' him own way."
He laughed softly as if remembering scraps of conversation he had
segregated from the murmur inside, and rolled his long body over until
he rested on his belly with the upper part of his torso raised on his
elbows.
"It appears that the courts down at the county seat gave a decision in
his favor, and that he lost about as much time gettin' action as a
hornet does when he's come to a conclusion. He just shows up with the
sheriff, and about twenty deputies, good and true, and says: 'Hike!
The courts say it's mine. These is the sheriffs. Off you go, and don't
waste no time doin' it, either!' And so they hikes and have got this
far, where they lay over for the night to comfort their insides with
somethin' that smelled like a cross between nitric acid, a corn farm,
and sump water. And it don't seem to cheer 'em up much, either,
because their talk's right ugly."
"But I thought you said they were heading for some other ground?"
"So they are, but they're takin' their time on the road. I used to be
that way till the day Arizona Bill plugged me because I was slow, all
through havin' stopped at a place too long. Then, says I, when I woke
up a month later in the Widder Haskins' back room: 'Bill, this comes
from corn and rye. Never have nothin' to do with a farmer, or anything
that comes from a farmer, after this; or some day, when your hand
ain't quick enough, and things look kind of hazy, some quarrelsome
man's goin' to shoot first and you'll cash in.' And from that day to
this, when I want to go on a bust, I drink a gallon of soda pop to
have a rip-roarin' time."
A man lurched out of the door of the road house as if striving to find
clean air, and stood leaning against one of the pole posts supporting
a pole porch. Another one joined him, coarsely accusing him of being a
"quitter" because he had left his drink on the bar. They were
stubbornly passing words when, from down the road, there came the
gritting of wheels over the pulverized stone, and the clacking of
horses' hoofs, slow moving, as if being rested by a cautious driver
along the ascent.
The man by the post suddenly frowned in the direction of the sound,
and then whirled back to the open door.
"It's Bully!" he bellowed so loudly that his words were plainly
audible to the partners lying in the shadow. "Bully's a-comin' up the
road right now! Let's get him!"
There was a fierce, bawling chorus of shouts that outdid anything
preceding, and the door seemed to vomit men in all stages of
intoxication, who came heavily out with their boots stamping across
the boards of the porch. They cursed, imprecated, shook their fists,
and threatened, as they surged into the road and looked down it toward
the approaching driver. The men in the shade got quickly to their
feet, interested spectators, and the burros awoke from their drowsy
somnolence, and turned inquiring, soft eyes on their owners.
Calmly driven up toward the mob in the road came a mountain buckboard
drawn by two sweating horses. In the seat was a man who drove as if
the reins were completely in control. He appeared to be stockily
built, and his shoulders--broad, heavy, and high--had, even in that
posture, the unmistakable stamp of one who is accustomed to stooping
his way through drifts and tunnels. He wore a black slouch hat, which
had been shaped by habitual handling to shade his eyes. His hair was
white; his neck short and thick, with a suggestion of bull-like power
and force. His face, as he approached to closer range, showed firm and
masterful. His nose was dominant--the nose of a conqueror who
overrides all obstacles. He came steadily forward, without in the
least changing his attitude, or betraying anxiety, or haste. The men
in the road waited, squarely across his path, and their hoarse
fulminations had died away to a far more terrifying silence; yet he
did not seem to heed them as his horses advanced.
"Gad! Doesn't he know who they are?" the bigger man by the rock
mumbled to his partner.
"If he doesn't he has a supreme nerve," the younger man replied. "They
look to me as if they mean trouble. They're in a pretty nasty
temper--what with all the poison they've poured in, and all the
injustice they believe they have met. Wonder who's right?"
A shout from the crowd in the roadway interrupted any further
speculation. The man who had first appeared on the road-house porch
threw up his hand, and roared, "Here he is! We've got him! It's the
Bully!"
The shout was taken up by others until a miniature forest of raised
fists shook themselves threateningly at the man in the buckboard who
was now within a few feet of them.
"Get a rope, somebody! Hang him!" yelled an excited voice.
"Yes, that's the goods," screamed another, heard above the turmoil.
"Up with the Bully!"
Two men sprang forward, and caught the horses by their bits, and
brought them to an excited, nervous stop, and the others began to
surround the wagon. The man in the seat made no movement, but sat
there with a hard smile on his firm lips. The partners stepped to the
top of a convenient rock, where they could overlook the meeting, and
watched, perturbed.
"I don't know about this," the elder said doubtfully. "Looks to me
like there's too many against one, and I ain't sure whether he
deserves hangin'. What do you think?"
"Let's wait and see. Then, if they get too ugly, we'll give them a
talk and try to find out," the younger man answered.
Even as he spoke, a man came running from the door of the road house
with a coil in his hand, and began to assert drunkenly: "Here it is!
I've got it! A rope!"
The partners were preparing to jump forward and protest, when a most
astonishing change took place. The man in the wagon suddenly stood up,
stretched his hand commandingly to the men holding the horses' heads,
and ordered: "Let go of my horses there, you drunken idiots! Let go of
them, I say, or I'll come down there and make you! Understand?"
The men at the horses' heads wavered under that harsh, firm command,
but did not release their hold. Without any further pause, the man
jumped from his buckboard squarely into the road, struck the man
holding the rope a sweeping side blow that toppled him over like a
sprawling dummy, jerked the coil from his hands, and tore toward his
horses' heads. As if each feared to bar his advance, the men of the
mob made way for him, taken by surprise. He brought the coil of rope
with a stinging, whistling impact into the face of the nearest man,
who, blinded, threw his hands upward across his eyes and reeled back.
The man at the other horse's head suddenly turned and dove out of
reach, but the whistling coils again fell, lashing him across his head
and shoulders.
Without any appearance of haste, and as if scornful of the mob that
had so recently been threatening to hang him, the man walked back to
his buckboard, climbed in, and stood there on his feet with the reins
in one hand, and the rope in the other. "You get away from in front of
me there," he said, in his harsh, incisive voice; "I'm tired of
child's play. If you don't let me alone, I'll kill a few of you. Now,
clear out!"
The men around him were already backing farther away, and at this
threat they opened the road in such haste that one or two of them
nearly ran over others.
"Say," admiringly commented the big observer on the rock, "we'd play
hob helpin' him out. He don't need help, that feller don't. If I ever
saw a man that could take care of himself----"
"He certainly is the one!" his companion finished the sentence.
"Who does this rope belong to?" demanded the hard-faced victor in the
buckboard, looking around him.
No one appeared eager to claim proprietorship. He gave a loud,
contemptuous snort, and threw the rope far over toward the road
house.
"Keep it!" he called, in his cold, unemotional voice. "Some of you
might want to cheat the sheriff by hanging yourselves. After this, any
or all of you had better keep away from me. I might lose my temper."
He sat down in the seat with a deliberate effort to show his scorn,
picked the reins up more firmly, glanced around at the rear of his
buckboard to see that his parcels were safe, ignored the cowed men,
and without ever looking at them started his horses forward. As they
began a steady trot and passed the partners, he swept over them one
keen, searching look, as if wondering whether they had been of the
mob, turned back to observe their loaded burros, apparently decided
they had taken no part in the affair, and bestowed on them a faint,
dry smile as he settled himself into his seat. At the bend of the road
he had not deigned another look on the men who had been ravening to
lynch him. He drove away as carelessly as if he alone were the only
human being within miles, and the partners gave a gasp of enjoyment.
"Good Lord! What a man!" exclaimed the elder, and his companion
answered in an equally admiring tone: "Isn't he, though! Just look at
these desperadoes, will you!"
With shuffling feet some of them were turning back toward the inviting
door in which the bartender stood with his dirty apron knotted into a
string before him. Some of the more voluble were accusing the others
of not having supported them, and loudly expounding the method of
attack that would have been successful. The man with red welts across
his face was swearing that if he ever got a chance he would "put a
rifle ball through Bully." The young man by the rock grinned and said:
"That's just about as close as he would ever dare come to that fellow.
Shoot him through the back at a half-mile range!"
The bartender suddenly appeared to remember the travelers, and ran
across the road.
"I'm sorry, gents," he said, "that I can't do more to show you the
way, but you see how it is. Go up there to that big rock that looks
like a bear's head, then angle off south-east, and you'll find a
trail. When you come to any crossin's, don't take 'em, but keep
straight on, and bimeby, about to-morrer, if you don't camp too long
to-night, you'll see a peak--high it is--with a yellow mark on it,
like a cross. Can't miss it. Right under it's the Croix Mine. You
leave the trail to cross a draw, look down, and there you are. So
long!"
He turned and ran back across the road in response to brawling shouts
from the men whose thirst seemed to have been renewed by their
encounter with the masterful man they called "Bully," and the
partners, glad to escape from such a place, headed their animals
upward into the hills.