MY LADY OF THE HORSE
"It serves you right for bein' so anxious to help one of them
dance-hall women; not but what I'd probably 'a' done it myself," was
the croaking, querulous consolation offered by Bells Park as he sat
beside the plainly suffering and heavily bandaged Bill that night, or
rather in the early hours of the morning, in the cabin on the Cross.
"They ain't no good except for young fools to gallop around with over
a floor."
He poured some more olive oil over the bandages, and relented enough
to add: "All but The Lily, and she don't dance with none of 'em. She's
all right, she is. Mighty peart looker, too. None purtier than Dorothy
Presby, though."
Dick, looking up from where he sat with his tired chin resting on his
tired hands and elbows, thought of the gruff Bully Presby with some
interest.
"Oh, so the old Rattler owner has a daughter, eh?"
"I don't mean old skinflint Presby!" sharply corrected the engineer.
"He ain't the only Presby in this whole United States, is he? He don't
own the whole world and the name, even if he thinks he does. This
Presby I'm talkin' about ain't no kin of his. He's too white. He owns
all them sawmills on the other side of the Cross peak, about four
miles from here. Got a railroad of his own. Worth about a billion, I
reckon."
Dick's momentary interest subsided, but he heard the old man babbling
on:
"I worked for him once, when Dorothy was a little bit of a kid. Him
and me fought, but he's a white man. She's been away to some of those
fool colleges for women back East, they say, for the last four or five
years. It don't do women no good to know too much. My wife couldn't
read or write, and she was the best woman that ever lived, bar none."
He looked around as if delivering a challenge, and, finding that no
one was paying any attention to him, subsided, fidgeted for a minute,
and then said he guessed he'd "turn in so's the water wouldn't gain on
the pumps in the mornin'."
On the insistent demand of his partner, Dick also retired shortly, and
the cabin on the hillside was dark save for the dim light that glowed
in the sufferer's room.
They began to straggle in, the men wanted, before the partners had
finished their breakfast on the following morning. Some of them were
real miners, and others were nondescripts, bearing out The Lily's
statement that good men were scarce, but all were hired as they came,
and the Croix d'Or began to thrill with activity.
A fat cook--and no miner can explain why a camp cook is always
fat--beamed from the mess-house door. A blacksmith, accepting the
ready name of "Smuts," oiled the rusted wheels of his blower, and
swore patiently and softly at a new helper as he selected the drills
for sharpening. Three Burley drill runners tinkered with their
machines, and scraped off the verdigris and accumulated dust of
storage; millmen began to reset the tables, strip the damaged plates,
and lay in new water pipes to drip ceaselessly over the powered ore.
Over all these watched Bill with his bandaged face, rumbling orders
here and there, and tirelessly active. Out on the pipe line, winding
by cut and trestle from the reservoir in the high hills, Dick
superintended repairs and laid plans.
Leaving his gang replacing sections near the power-house, he climbed
up the length of the line to discover, if possible, how far the labors
of the vandal had extended. Foot by foot he had traversed it, almost
to the reservoir itself, when he paused to breathe and look off at the
mountains spread below and around.
The Cross, in the distance, was softened again to a miracle of dim
yellow laid against a field of purple, and, like a speck, a huge eagle
swept in circles round its point to come to rest on its extreme
summit. He turned from admiring its flight to inspect a bowlder that
had tumbled down from the slope above and come to rest in a big dent;
it had smashed in the top of the pipe. He picked up a piece of a
storm-broken limb, used it as a lever, and sent the rock crashing
across the pipe to go bounding down the hillside as it gained momentum
with every leap.
There was a startled snort, a sudden threshing of the brush, and it
parted to disclose a girl astride a horse that was terrified and
endeavoring his best to dismount his rider. Dick, surmising that horse
and rider had suffered a narrow escape from the bowlder, ran toward
them remorsefully, but the girl already had the animal in control
after a display of splendid horsemanship.
"Thank you," she said, as he hastened toward the horse's head, intent
on seizing the snaffle. "Please don't touch him. I can quiet him
down."
"I am so sorry," he pleaded, with his hat in his hand. "I had no idea
that any one ever rode up this way."
"Don't apologize," she answered, with a careless laugh. "No one ever
does, save me. It's an old and favorite view of mine. I used to ride
here, to see the Cross, many years ago, before I went away to school.
So I came back to see my old friend, and--well--your bowlder would
have struck us if my horse hadn't jumped."
She laughed again, and reached a yellow-gauntleted hand down to pat
her mount's shoulder with a soothing caress. The horse stopped
trembling, and looked at Dick with large, intelligent eyes.
"Ah," said Dick, remembering the garrulity of the engineer. "I believe
you must be Miss Presby."
Even as she said simply: "I am, but how did you know? I don't remember
ever seeing you," he took note of her modish blue riding-dress with
divided skirts and patent-leather boots. There was a clean freshness
about her person, a smiling candor in her eyes, and a fine, frank
girlishness in her face that attracted him beyond measure. She
appeared to be about twenty years of age, and was such a girl as those
he had known and danced with, in those distant university days when
his future seemed assured, and life a joyous conquest with all the
odds in his favor. Now she was of another world, for he was, after
all, but a workingman, while she, the daughter of a millionaire
lumberman, would dance and associate with those other university men
whose financial incomes enabled them to dawdle as they pleased through
life. He had no bitterness in this summary, but he sustained an
instant's longing for a taste of that old existence, and the
camaraderie of such girls as the one who sat before him on her horse.
"No," he said, looking up at her, "you never saw me before. I have
been in the Blue Mountains but six weeks. I am Richard Townsend."
Her face took on a look of aroused interest, different from the casual
look she had been giving him in the brief minute of their meeting.
"Oh," she said, "then you must be the Mr. Townsend of the Croix d'Or.
I learned of your arrival last night after I came home. You are
rehabilitating the old mine?"
"Yes," he answered, smiling. "At least we are trying to. As to the
outcome--I don't know."
"You mustn't say that!" she protested. "Faith in anything is the first
requisite for success. That's what it says in the copybooks, doesn't
it?"
She laughed again in her clear, mezzo voice, and then with a
resumption of gravity gathered her reins into a firmer grip, and, as
her horse lifted his head in response to the summons, said: "Anyway, I
thank you for volunteering to rescue me, Mr. Townsend, and wish you
lots of good luck, but please don't start any more bowlders down the
hill, because if you do I shall be robbed of my most enjoyable trip
each day. Good-by."
"Don't be afraid," he called to her, as she started away. "There are
no more bowlders to roll."
He stood and watched her as she rode, masterfully seated on the black
horse, around a crag that stuck out into the trail.
"'Faith in anything is the first requisite for success,'" he repeated
to himself, striving to recall whether or not it was, as she had
intimated, a hackneyed proverb for the young; yet there was something
bracing in it, coming from her calm, young, womanly lips. "That's it;
she has it," he again said to himself. "'Faith.' That's what I need."
And he resumed his tramp up the mountainside with a better courage and
more hope for the Croix d'Or. He was still vaguely troubled when he
made his way back past the power-house, in a sliding, scrambling
descent, his boots starting tiny avalanches of shale and loose rock to
go clattering down the mountainside.
The new men were proving competent under the direction of a boss
pipeman who had been made foreman, and Dick trudged away toward the
mine, feeling that one part of the work, at least, would be speedily
accomplished.
Bill was still striding backward and forward, but devoting most of his
attention to cleaning up the mill, and declared, with a wry smile,
that he never felt better in his life, but never liked talking less.
When the noon whistle shrieked its high, staccato note from the
engine-house, they went up to the mess, and seated themselves at the
head of the table. As a whole, the men were fairly satisfactory. Bill
stared coldly down the table, and appeared to be mentally tabulating
those who would draw but one pay-check, and that when their "time" was
given them, but Dick's mind persisted in wandering afield to the
chance encounter of the morning.
The men had finished their hasty meal, in hasty miner's fashion,
silently, and tramped, with clumping feet, out of the mess-house to
the shade of its northern side before Bill had ended his painful
repast. Whiffs of tobacco smoke and voices came through the open
windows, where the miners lounged and rested on a long bench while
waiting for the whistle.
"Don't you fool yourself about Bully Presby," one of them was saying.
"It's true he's a hard man, and out for the dust every minute of his
life, but he's got nerve, all right. He'll bulldoze and fight and
growl and gouge, but he's there in other ways. I don't like him, and
we quit pretty sudden, yet I saw him do somethin' once that beat me."
"Did you work on the Rattler?" another voice queried.
"No," the other went on, "I worked for him down on the Placer Belle in
California. It was under the old system and was a small mine. Kept all
the dynamite on the hundred-foot level in an old chamber. Every man
went there to get it when it was time to load his holes. I was
startin' for mine one evenin', whistlin' along, when I smelled smoke.
Stopped and sniffed, and about weakened. Knowed it was comin' from the
powder room down there. It wan't more'n twenty feet from the shaft,
and there was two or three tons of it in that hole. Ran back and gave
the alarm bell to the engineer, then ducked my head and went toward
the smoke to see if anything could be done before she blew up the
whole works. On his hands and knees, with all that was left of his
coat, was Bully. He'd got the fire nearly smothered out, and we
coughed and spit, and drowned the rest of the sparks from the water
barrel. He'd fought it to a finish all alone, and I had to drag him
out to the cage that was slidin' up and down as if the engineer was on
a drunk, and every time it went up I could see the boys' faces, kind
of white, and worried, and hear the alarms bangin' away like mad. But
he'd put the fire out there with all that stuff around him. That took
some nerve, I tell you!"
"What did he do for you?" asked another voice.
The narrator gave a heavy laugh, and chuckled.
"Do for me? When he got fresh air in him again, up in the hoist, he
sat up and opened his hand. In it was a candlestick and a snipe,
burned on the side till the wick looked about a foot long. 'Who owns
this candlestick?' says he. No one spoke, but some of us knowed it
belonged to old Deacon Wells, an absent-minded old cuss, but the
deacon had a family of nigh on to ten kids. So nobody answered. 'Some
fool left this here,' Bully bellowed, tearing around. 'And that's what
started the fire. I'll kick the man off the works that owns the
stick.' Still nobody said anything. He caught me grinnin'. 'You know
who it was,' says he. 'Sure I do,' says I, 'but I'm a little
tongue-tied.' Then he told me he'd fire me if I didn't say who it was.
'Give me my time-check,' says I, and he gave it. He found out
afterward I was the man that dragged him out, and sent a letter up to
Colusa askin' me to come back, but I didn't go. Don't s'pose he'd
remember me now, and don't know as I'd want him to. Any man that works
for Bully comes about as near givin' away his heart's blood as any one
could, and live."
The voices went rumbling on, and Dick sat thinking of the strange,
powerful man of the Rattler.
"Three of the millmen know their business," mumbled Bill, as if all
the time he had been mentally appraising his force. "Two are rumdums.
The chips isn't bad. He could carpenter anywhere, and if he's as
smart a timberman as he is millwright, will make good. The engineer
that's to relieve Bells ain't so much, but I'll leave it to Bells to
cuss him into line. That goes. Two of the Burley men are all right,
and I fired the third in the first hour because he didn't know what
was the nut and which the wrench. Smuts is a gem. He put the
pigeon-blue temper on a bunch of drills as fast as any man could have
done it."
Dick did not answer, but concentrated his mind on the work ahead. The
whistle blew, and he compelled Bill to submit to new bandages,
following the doctor's instructions, and smiled at his steady swearing
as the wrappings were removed and the blisters redressed. They walked
across to the hoist, entered the cage, and felt the sinking sensation
as they were dropped, rather than lowered, to the six-hundred-foot
level. The celerity of the descent almost robbed him of breath, but he
thought of sturdy old Bells' boast, that he had "never run a cage into
the sheaves, nor dropped it to the sump, in forty years of steam."
Lights glowed ahead of them, and they heard hammering. The suck of
fresh air under pressure, vapored like steam, whirled around them in
gusts, and the water oozed and rippled beside their feet as they went
forward. The carpenter was putting in a new set of timbers, and his
task was nearly finished, while beside him waited a drill man and a
swamper with the cumbersome, spiderlike mechanism ready to set. The
carpenter gave a few more blows to a key block, and methodically flung
his hammer into his box and hurried back out through the tunnel toward
the cage, intent on resuming his work at the mill.
Bill tentatively inspected the timbers, tapped the roof with a pick
taken from the swamper's hands, heard the true ring of live rock, and
backed away. The drill was drawn up to the green face of ore.
"About there, I should say," Dick directed, pointing an indicatory
finger, and the drill runner nodded.
The swamper, who appeared to know his business, came forward with the
coupling which fed compressed air to the machine, the runner gave a
last inspection of his drill, turned his chuck screw, setting it
against the rocky face, and signaled for the air. With a clatter like
the discharge of a rapid-fire gun, the steel bit into the rock, and
the Cross was really a mine again. Spattered with mud, and satisfied
that the new drift was working in pay, the partner trudged back out.
They signaled for the cage, shot upward, and emerged to the yard near
the blacksmith's tunnel in time to see a huge bay horse, with a woman
rider, come toiling up the slope. There was something familiar about
the white hat, and as she neared them they recognized The Lily. Before
they could assist her to dismount, she leaped from the saddle, landing
lightly on her toes, and dropped the horse's reins over his head.
"Good-day--never mind--he'll stand," she said, all in a breath,
striding toward them with an extended hand.
Dick accepted it with a firm grip, and lifted his hat, while Bill
merely shook hands and tried to smile. It was to him that she turned
solicitously.
"I'm glad you are out," she remarked, without lowering her eyes which
swept over the bandages on his face. "You're all right, are you?"
"Sure. But how's that girl? It don't matter much about an old cuss
like me. Girls are a heap scarcer."
The owner of the High Light looked troubled for a moment, and removed
her gloves before answering.
"Doctor Mills says she will live," she said quietly, "but she is
terribly burned. She will be so disfigured that she can never work in
a dance hall any more. It's pretty rough luck."
Dick recoiled and felt a chill at this hard, cold statement. The girl
could never work in a dance hall any more! And this was accepted as a
calamity! Accustomed as he was to the frontier, this matter-of-fact
acceptance of a dance-hall occupation as something desirable impressed
him with its cynicism. Not that he doubted the virtue of many of those
forlorn ones who gayly tripped their feet over rough boards, and drank
tea or ginger ale and filled their pockets with bar checks to make a
living as best they might, but because the whole garish, rough,
drink-laden, curse-begrimed atmosphere of a camp dance hall revolted
him.
Mrs. Meredith had intuition, and read men as she read books,
understandingly. She arose to the defense of her sex.
"Well," she said, facing him, as if he had voiced his sentiment, "what
would you have? Women are what men make them, no better, no worse."
"I have made no criticism," he retorted.
"No, but you thought one," she asserted. "But, pshaw! I didn't come
here to argue. I came up to tell you that the dance-hall girl will
recover and has friends who will see that she doesn't starve, even if
she no longer works in my place. Also, I came to see how Mister--what
is your name, anyway?--is."
"Mathews, ma'am. William Mathews. My friends call me Bill. I don't
allow the others to call me anything."
The temporary and threatening cloud was dissipated by the miner's
rumbling laugh, and they sauntered across the yard, the bay horse
looking after them, but standing as firmly as if the loosened reins
were tied to a post instead of resting on the ground. A swamper,
carrying a bundle of drills, trudged across the yard to the blacksmith
shop, as they stood in its doorway.
"I sent you the best men I could pick up," The Lily said. "You did me
a good turn, and I did my best to pay it back. That blacksmith is all
right. Some of the others I know, but I don't know him. Never saw him
before. You'd better watch him."
She pointed at the swamper as coolly as if he were an inanimate
object, and he glared at her in return, then dropped his eyes.
"I told you I didn't run an employment agency," she went on, "but if
any of these fellows get fresh, let me know, and I'll try to get you
others. How does the Cross look, anyway?"
They turned away and accompanied her over the plant above ground, and
heard her greet man after man on a level of comradeship, as if she
were but a man among men. Her hard self-possession and competence
impressed the younger man as a peculiar study. It seemed to him, as he
walked beside her thoughtfully, that every womanly trait had been
ground from her in the stern mills of circumstance. He had a vague
desire to probe into her mind and learn whether or not there still
dwelt within it the softness of her sex, but he dared not venture. He
stood beside the bandaged veteran as she rode away, a graceful,
independent figure.
"Is she all tiger, or part woman?" he said, turning to Mathews, whose
eyes had a singularly thoughtful look.
The latter turned to him with a quick gesture, and threw up his
unbandaged hand.
"My boy," he said, "she's not a half of anything. She's all tiger, or
all woman! God only knows!"