AN UGLY WATCHMAN
By easy stages indicating competent engineering and a lavish
expenditure of money, the road led them downward to a barricade of
logs, in an opening of which swung a gate barely wide enough to pass
the tired burros and their packs.
"You'll find Presby over there," said their unwilling guide, pointing
at a group of red-painted mining structures nestled in a flat lap in
the ragged mountains.
They surmised that this must be the Rattler camp, and inspected its
display of tall smokestacks, high hoists, skeleton tramways, and bleak
dumps. Before they could make any reply, the gate behind them slammed
shut with a vicious bang that attracted their attention. They turned
to see the watchman hurrying back up the road. Fixed to the barricade
was a sign, crudely lettered, but insistently distinct:
No one allowed on these premises, by order of the owners. For any
business to be transacted with the Croix d'Or, apply to Thomas W.
Presby.
"Curt enough, at least, isn't he?" commented Townsend, half-smiling.
"Curt!" growled his companion, frowning, with his recent anger but
half-dissipated. "Curt as a bulldog takin' a bite out of your leg.
Don't waste no time at all on words. Just says: 'It's you I'm lookin'
after.' Where do you reckon we'll find this here Thomas Presby
person?"
"I suppose he must have an office up there somewhere," answered
Townsend, waving his arm in the direction of the scattered buildings
spread in that profligacy of space which comes where space is free.
"These mules is tired. It's a shame we couldn't have left them up
there," Mathews answered, looking at them and fondling the ears of the
nearest one. "You go on up and get an order letting us into your mine,
and I'll wait here. No use in makin' these poor devils do any more'n
they have to."
Townsend assented, and followed a path which zigzaged around bowlders
and stumps up to the red cluster on the hillside above him. He was
impatient and annoyed at the useless delays imposed upon them in this
new venture, and wondered why his father's partner had not informed
him of the fact that he would find the mine guarded by the owner of
the adjoining property.
A camp "washwoman," with clothespins in her mouth, and a soggy gray
shirt in her hands, paused to stare at him from beneath a row of other
gray and blue shirts and coarse underwear, dripping from the lines
above her head.
Two little boys, fantastically garbed in faded blue denim which had
evidently been refashioned from cast-off wearing apparel of their
sires, followed after him, hand in hand, as if the advent of a
stranger on the Rattler grounds was an event of interest, and he found
himself facing a squat, red, white-bordered, one-storied building,
over whose door a white-and-black sign told the stranger, or applicant
for work, that he was at the "office."
A man came to a window in a picketed wicket as he entered, and said
briskly: "Well?"
"I want to see Mr. Presby," Dick answered, wasting no more words than
had the other.
"Oh, well, if nobody else will do, go in through that door."
Before he had finished his speech, the bookkeeper had turned again
toward the ledgers spread out on an unpainted, standing desk against
the wall behind his palings, and Dick walked to the only door in
sight. He opened it, and stepped inside. A white-headed, scowling man,
clean shaven, and with close-shut, thin, hard lips, looked up over a
pile of letters and accounts laid before him on a cheap, flat-topped
desk.
Dick's eyes opened a trifle wider. He was looking at the man who had
defied the mob at the road house, and at this close range studied his
appearance more keenly.
There was hard, insolent mastery in his every line. His face had the
sternness of granite. His hands, poised when interrupted in their
task, were firm and wrinkled as if by years of reaching; and his heavy
body, short neck, and muscle-bent shoulders, all suggested the man who
had relentlessly fought his way to whatever position of dominancy he
might then occupy. He wore the same faded black hat planted squarely
on his head, and was in his shirt-sleeves. The only sign of
self-indulgence betrayed in him or his surroundings was an old
crucible, serving as an ash tray, which was half-filled with cigar
stumps, and Dick observed, in that instant's swift appraisement, that
even these were chewed as if between the teeth of a mentally restless
man.
"You want to see me?" the man questioned, and then, as if the thin
partition had not muffled the words of the outer office, went on:
"You asked for Presby. I'm Presby. What do you want?"
For an instant, self-reliant and cool as he was, Dick was confused by
the directness of his greeting.
"I should like to have you tell that watchman over at the Croix d'Or
that we are to be admitted there," he replied, forgetting that he had
not introduced himself.
"You should, eh? And who are you, may I ask?" came the dry, satirical
response.
Dick flushed a trifle, feeling that he had begun lamely in this
reception and request.
"I am Richard Townsend," he answered, recovering himself. "A son of
Charles Townsend, and a half-owner in the property. I've come to look
the Croix d'Or over."
He was not conscious of it then, but remembered afterward, that Presby
was momentarily startled by the announcement. The man's eyes seemed
intent on penetrating and appraising him, as he stood there without a
seat having been proffered, or any courtesy shown. Then, as if
thinking, Presby stared at the inkwell before him, and frowned.
"How am I to know that?" he asked. "The Cross has had enough men
wanting to look it over to make an army. Maybe you're one of them. Got
any letters telling me that I'm to turn it over to you?"
For an instant Dick was staggered by this obstacle.
"No," he said reluctantly, "I have not; that is, nothing directed to
you. I did not know that you were in charge of the property."
He was surprised to notice that Presby's heavy brows adjusted
themselves to a scowl. He wondered why the mine owner should be
antagonistic to him, when there was nothing at stake.
"Well, I am," asserted Presby. "I hired the watchman up there, and I
see to it that all the stuff lying around loose isn't stolen."
"On whose authority, may I ask?" questioned Dick, without thought of
giving offense, but rather as a means of explaining his position.
"Sloan's. Why, you don't think I'm watching it because I want it, do
you, young man? The old watchman threw up his job. I had Sloan's
address, and wrote him about it. Sloan wrote and asked me to get a man
to look after it, and I did. Now, you show me that you've got a right
to go on the grounds of the Cross Mine, and I'll give an order to the
watchman."
There was absolute antagonism in his tone, although not in his words.
Dick thought of nothing at the moment but that he had one sole proof
of his ownership, the letter from Sloan himself. He unbuttoned the
flap of his shirt pocket, and, taking out a bundle of letters,
selected the one bearing on the situation.
"That should be sufficient," he said, throwing it, opened, before
Presby.
The latter, without moving his solid body in the least, and as if his
arms and hands were entirely independent of it, stolidly picked up the
letter and read it. Dick could infer nothing of its reception. He
could not tell whether Presby was inclined to accept it as sufficient
authority, or to question it. Outside were the sounds of the Rattler's
activity and production, the heavy, thunderous roar of the stamp mill,
the clash of cars of ore dumped into the maws of the grizzly to be
hammered into smaller fragments in their journey to the crusher, and
thence downward to end their journeys over the thumping stamps, and
out, disintegrated, across the wet and shaking tables.
It seemed, as he stood waiting, that the dust of the pulverized
mountains had settled over everything in the office save the
granite-like figure that sat at the desk, rereading the letter which
had changed all his life. For the first time he thought that perhaps
he should not have so easily displayed that link with his past. It
seemed a useless sacrilege. If the mine-owner was not reading the
letter, he was pondering, unmoved, over a course of action, and took
his time.
Dick thought bitterly, in a flash, of all that it represented. The
quarrel with his father on that day he had returned from Columbia
University with a mining course proudly finished, when each, stubborn
by nature, had insisted that his plan was the better; of his
rebellious refusal to enter the brokerage office in Wall Street, and
declaration that he intended to go into the far West and follow his
profession, and of the stern old man's dismissal when he asserted,
with heat:
"You've always taken the road you wanted to go since your mother died.
I objected to your taking up mining engineering, but you went ahead in
spite of me. I tried to get you to take an interest in the business
that has been my life work, but you scorned it. You wouldn't be a
broker, or a banker. You had to be a mining engineer! All right,
you've had your way, so far. Now, you can keep on in the way you have
selected. I'll give you five thousand dollars, but you'll never get
another cent from me until you've learned what a fool you're making of
yourself, and return to do what I want you to do. It won't be long!
There's a vast difference between dawdling around a university
learning something that is going to be useless while your father pays
the bills, and turning that foolish education into dollars to stave
off an empty belly. You can go now."
In those days the house of Phillip Townsend had been a great name in
New York. Now this was all that was left of it. Dissolution, death,
and dust, and a half-interest in an abandoned mine! The harsh voice of
Bully Presby aroused him from his thoughts.
"All right," it said. "This seems sufficient, but if you've got the
sense and judgment Sloan seems to think you have, you'll come to the
conclusion that there's not much use in wasting any of his good, hard
dollars on the Croix d'Or. It never has paid. It never will pay. I
offered to buy it once, but I wouldn't give a dollar for it now,
beyond what the timber above ground is worth. It owns a full section
of timberland, and that's about all."
He reached for a pen and wrote a note to the watchman, telling him
that the bearer, Richard Townsend, had come to look over the property
and that his orders must be accepted, and signed it with his
hard-driven scrawl. He handed it up to Dick without rising from his
seat, and said: "That'll fix you up, I think."
As if by an afterthought, he asked: "Have you any idea of the
condition of the mine?"
"No," Dick answered, as he folded the letter and put it into his
pocket, together with the one from his late father's partner.
"Well, then, I can tell you, it's bad," said Presby, fixing him with
his cool, hard stare. "The Cross is spotted. Once in a while they had
pay chutes. They never had a true ledge. There isn't one there, as far
as anybody that ever worked it knows. They wasted five hundred
thousand dollars trying to find it, and drove ten thousand feet of
drifts and tunnels. They went down more than six hundred feet. She's
under water, no one knows how deep. It might take twenty thousand to
un-water the sinking shaft again, and at the bottom you'd find
nothing. Take my advice. Let it alone. Good-day."
Dick walked out, scarcely knowing whether to feel grateful for the
churlish advice or to resume his wonted attitude of self-reliance and
hold himself unprejudiced by Presby's condemnation of the Croix d'Or.
He wondered if Bully Presby suspected him of having been friendly with
the mob of drunken ruffians at the road house, but he had been given
no chance to explain.
At the bottom of the gulch he found Bill sprawled at length on his
elbows almost under the forefeet of one of the burros which was nosing
him over in a friendly caress. He called out as he approached, and the
big prospector sat up, deftly snapped the cigarette he had been
smoking into the creek with his thumb and forefinger, and got to his
feet.
"Do we get permission to go on the claim?" he grinned, as Townsend
reached him.
"Yes, I've got an order to the watchman. The old man doesn't seem to
think much of it. Says it's spotted. Had rich pay chutes, but they
pinched. No regular formation. Always been a loser. Thinks we'd be
foolish to do anything with it."
"Good of him, wasn't it?"
Dick looked quickly at the hard, lined face of his companion.
"That's the first thing I've heard that made me feel better," declared
the prospector, as he swung one of the burro's heads back into the
trail and hit the beast a friendly slap on the haunches to start it
forward. "Whenever a man, like this old feller seems to be, gives me
that kind of advice, I sit up and take notice."
"Why--why, what do you know about him?" Dick asked, falling into the
trail behind the pack animals, which had started forward with their
slow jog trot, and ears swaying backward and forward as they went.
"While you was gone," Mathews answered, "I had a long talk with a boy
that came along and got friendly. You can believe boys, most of 'em.
They know a heap more than men. They think out things that men don't.
Kids are always friends with me; you know that. I reckon, from what I
gathered, that this Presby man is about as hard and grasping an old
cuss as ever worked the last ounce of gold out of a waste dump. He
makes the men save the fags of the candles and the drips, so's he can
melt 'em over again. He runs a company store, and if they don't buy
boots and grub from him, they have to tear out mighty quick. He fired
a fireman because the safety-valve in the boiler-house let go one day
twenty minutes before the noon shift went back to work. If he says,
'Let the Cross alone,' I think it's because he wants it."
"You couldn't guess who he is," Dick said, preparing to move.
"Why? Do I know him?"
"In a way. He's the man we saw the mob tackle, back there at the road
house."
Bill gave a long whistle.
"So that's the chap, eh? Bully Presby! Well, if we ever run foul of
him, we've got our work cut out for us. Things are beginnin' to get
interestin'. 'I like the place,' as Daniel said when he went to sleep
in the lion's den."
They opened the gate through the barricade without any formality, and
were well started up the inclined road of the Croix d'Or before they
encountered the watchman who had given them so much trouble. As he
came toward them, frowning, they observed that he had buckled a pistol
round him as if to resist any intrusion in case it should be attempted
without instructions. Dick handed him Presby's order, and the man read
it through in surly silence; then his entire attitude underwent a
swift change. He became almost obsequiously respectful.
"I'll have to go down and have a talk with Mr. Presby," he said, and
would have ventured a further remark, but was cut short by the
mine-owner.
"Yes, you'd better go and see him," Dick said concisely. "And when you
go, take all of your dunnage you can carry, then come back and get the
rest. I shall not want you on the claim an hour longer than necessary
for you to get your stuff away. You're too good a man to have around
here."
The fellow gave a shrug of his shoulders, an evil grin, and
turned back up the road to vanish in what had evidently been the
superintendent's cabin, and noisily began to whistle as he gathered
his stuff together. The partners halted before the door, and Dick
looked inside.
"I suppose you have the keys for everything, haven't you?" he called.
The man impudently tossed a bundle at him without a word. Apparently
his belongings were but few, which led the newcomers to believe that
he had taken his meals at the Rattler, and perhaps slept there on many
nights. They watched him as he rolled his blankets, and prepared to
start down the trail.
"The rest of that plunder in there, the pots and the lamp, belong to
the mine," he said. And then, without other words, turned away.
"That may be the last of him, and maybe it won't!" growled Bill, as he
began throwing the hitches off the tired burros that stood panting
outside the door. "Anyway, it's the fag end of him to-night."
They were amazed at the lavish expenditure of money that had been made
in the superintendent's quarters. There were a porcelain bathtub
brought up into the heart of the wilderness, a mahogany desk whose
edges had been burned by careless smokers, and a safe whose door swung
open, exposing a litter of papers, mine drawings, and plans. The four
rooms evidently included office and living quarters, and they
betokened a reckless financial outlay for the purpose.
"Poor Dad!" said Dick, looking around him. "No wonder the Cross lost
money if this is a sample of the way the management spent it."
He stepped outside to where the canyon was beginning to sink into the
dusk. The early moon, still behind the silhouette of the eastern
fringe of peaks and forests, lighted up the yellow cross mark high
above, and for some reason, in the stillness of the evening, he
accepted it as a sign of promise.