A DISASTROUS BLOW
In after years it all came back to Dick as a horrible nightmare of
unreality, that tragic night's events and those which followed. The
grim setting of the coroner's jury, where men with bestial, bruised,
and discolored faces sat awkwardly or anxiously, with their hats on
their knees, in a hard stillness; the grave questions of the coroner,
coupled with the harsh, decisive interrogations of the prosecuting
attorney, who had been hastily summoned from the county seat across
the hills; and there in the other room, quiet, and at rest, the
faithful old man who had given his life in defense of his friends.
Dick gave his testimony in a dulled voice that sounded strange and
unfamiliar, telling all that the engineer had said of the assault. He
had one rage of vindictiveness, when the three men from Denver were
identified as the ones who had attacked the engineer, and regretted
that they were alive to meet the charge against them. He but vaguely
understood the technical phraseology of Doctor Mills when he stated
that Bells Park died from the shock of the blows and kicks rained on
him in that last valorous chapter of his life. He heard the decision
placing the responsibility on the men from Denver, saw the sheriff and
his deputies step forward and lay firm hands on their arms and lead
them away; and then was aroused by the heavy entrance of the camp
undertaker to make ready, for the quiet sleep, the body of Bells Park,
the engineer.
"He belongs to us," said Dick numbly; "to Bill and me. He died for the
Croix d'Or. The Croix d'Or will keep him forever, as it would if he
had lived and we had made good."
He saw, as they trudged past the High Light, that its door was shut,
and remembered, afterward, a tiny white notice pasted on the glass.
The trail across the divide was of interminable length, as was that
other climb up to the foot of the yellow cross on the peak, and to the
grave he had caused to be dug beside that other one which Bells had
guarded with jealous care, planted with flowers, weeded, and where a
faded, rough little cross bore the rudely carved inscription:
A DISASTEROUS BLOW
MEHITABLE PARK.
THE BEST WOMAN THAT EVER LIVED.
Those who had come to pay the last honor to the little engineer filed
back down the hill, and the Croix d'Or was left alone, silent and
idle. The smoke of the banked fires still wove little heat spirals
above the stacks as if waiting for the man of the engines. The men
were shamefacedly standing around the works and arguing, and one or
two had rolled their blankets and dumped them on the bench beside the
mess-house.
Two or three of them halted Dick and his partner as they started up
the little path to the office building where they made their home.
"Well?" Bill asked, facing them with his penetrating eyes.
"We don't want you boys to think we had any hand in any of this," the
old drill runner said, taking the lead. "They jobbed us. There were
but three or four of the Cross men there when they voted a strike, and
before that there wasn't a man that hadn't taken the floor and fought
for your scale. The meeting dragged for some reason, because old Bells
kept bringing up arguments--long-winded ones--as if holding it off."
He appeared to choke up a little, and gave a swift glance over his
shoulder at the yellow landmark above.
"If any of us had been there, they'd never have gotten him. We all
liked Bells. But they tell me that meeting was packed by that"--and he
suddenly flamed wrathful and used a foul epithet--"from Denver, and
the three thugs he brought with him. Mr. Townsend, there ain't a man
on the Cross that don't belong to the union. You know what that means.
You know how hard it is for us to scab ourselves. But there ain't a
man on the Cross that hasn't decided to stick by the mine if you want
us. We're making a protest to the head officers, and if that don't
go--well, we stick!"
Dick impulsively put out his hand. He could not speak. He was
choking.
"Want you, boys? Want you?" Bill rumbled. "We want all of you. Every
man jack on the works. You know how she's goin' as well as we do; but
I'm here to tell you that if the Cross makes good, there'll be one set
of men that'll always have the inside edge."
The men with the blankets grinned, and furtively flung them through an
open bunk-house window. They all turned away, tongue-tied in emotion,
as are nearly all men of the high hills, and tried to appear
unconcerned; while Dick, still choking, led the way up the trail. The
unwritten law of the mines had decreed there should be no work that
day; and he saw the men of the Cross pass down the road, arguing with
stolid emphasis against the injustice of the ordered strike. He knew
they would return to the camp and continue that argument, with more or
less heat, and wondered what the outcome would be.
He tried to forget his sorrow and bodily pains by checking over his
old assay slips, while Bill wandered, like a bruised and melancholy
survivor of a battle, from the mill to the hoist, from cabin to cabin,
and mess-house to bunk-house, stopping now and then to stare upward at
the peak, as if still thinking of that fresh and fragrant earth piled
in a mound above Bells Park.
Once, in the night, they were awakened by the sounds of the men
returning, as they discussed their situation and interjected copious
curses for the instruments of the tragedy. Once again, later, Dick was
awakened by a series of blasts, and turned restlessly in his bed,
struck a match, and looked at his watch, wondering if it had all been
a dream, and the morning shots of the Rattler had aroused him. It was
but three o'clock, and he returned to his troubled sleep thinking that
he must have been mistaken. Barely half-awake, he heard Bill climb out
of his bed and don his clothing, the whistle pulled by the new hands,
and the clang of hammer on steel in the blacksmith's shop. Then with a
start, he was aroused from the dreamless slumber of the utterly
exhausted by a heavy hand laid on his shoulder and a heavy voice:
"Wake up, Dick! Wake up, boy! They've got us."
He sat up, rubbing his eyes and fumbling with the cordings of his
pajamas. Bill was sitting on the edge of his bed, scowling and angry.
"Got us? Got us?" Dick repeated vaguely.
"Yes. Dynamited the Peltons, and I'm afraid that ain't all. We'll have
to go up the pipe line to find out."
Dick rolled out and jumped for his clothing. He did not take time to
follow his partner's kindly suggestion that he had better go to the
mess-house and get the "cookie" to give him a cup of hot coffee. He
was too much upset by the disaster, and walked rapidly over the trail.
Not a man was in sight around the works; and as he passed the smith's
door, he saw that Smuts, too, had gone, without taking time to don his
cap or doff his apron. The whole force appeared to have collected
around the power-house at the foot of the hill, which was around a
bend and shut off from view of the Cross. A jagged rent, scattered
stone and mortar, and a tangle of twisted steel told the story; but
that was not the most alarming damage he had to fear, for the heavy
steel pipe, where it entered the plant, was twisted loose, gaping and
dry.
He scrambled up the hill, seizing the manzanita brush here and there
to drag himself up faster, and gained the brow where the pipe made its
last abrupt descent. Far ahead, and walking sturdily, he recognized
the stalwart figure of his partner, and knew that Bill was suffering
the same anxiety. He ran when the ascent was less steep, and shouted
to the grizzled miner ahead, who turned and waited for him.
"I'm afraid of it," Bill called as he approached; and Dick,
breathless, made no reply, but hurried ahead with him to the
reservoir. In all the journey, which seemed unduly long and hot that
morning, they said nothing. Once, as they passed the familiar scene of
his tryst with Miss Presby, now ages past, Dick bit his lips, and
suppressed a moan like that of a hurt animal. Bitterly he thought that
now she was more unattainable, and his dreams more idle than ever
they had been. And the first sight of the reservoir confirmed it.
To a large extent, the reservoir of the Cross was artificial. It had
been constructed by throwing a deep stone and concrete dam across a
narrow canyon through which there percolated, in summer, a small
stream. Its cubic capacity was such, however, that when this reservoir
was filled by spring freshets it contained water enough to run the
full season round if sparingly used; and it was on this alone that the
mill depended for its power, and the mine for its lights and train
service, from hoist to breakers.
Where had stood the dam, gray with age and moss-covered, holding in
check its tiny lake, was now nothing but ruins. The shots had been
placed in the lower point, which was fifty feet down and conical as it
struck and rested on the mother rock. Whoever had placed the charges
knew well the explosive directions of his powder, and his work had
been disastrously effective.
The whole lower part of the dam was out, and through it, in the night,
had rushed the deluge of water so vital to the Croix d'Or. Small trees
that had grown up since the dam had been built were uprooted in the
bed of the canyon, and great bowlders pulled from their sockets and
sent resistlessly downward. Where, the day before, had been grassy
beds and heavy growths of ferns, was now but a naked bed, stripped to
the rock, down which flowed a small stream oozing from what had been
the reservoir.
The partners stood, as if paralyzed, on the edge of the gulch, and
looked down. The catastrophe, coming on top of all that had gone
before, was a death blow, stupefying, stupendous, and hopelessly
irremediable.
"Well, you were right," Dick said despairingly. "They've got us at
last!"
Bill nodded, without shifting his eyes from the ruin below. They stood
for another minute before scrambling down the canyon's steep side to
inspect more closely the way the vandalism had been effected. Slipping
down the muddy bank, heedless of their clothing or bruised hands, they
clambered over the broken pieces of wall, and looked upward through
the great hole and into the daylight beyond. The blow was too great to
permit of mere anger. It was disaster supreme, and they could find no
words in that time of despondency.
"I'll give a hundred dollars toward a reward for the man who did
that," shouted a voice, hoarse with indignation, above them; and they
looked up to see the smith on the bank, shaking his smudged and
clenched fist in the air.
"And I'll take a hundred more," growled one of the drill runners in
the augmenting group behind him.
And then, as if the blow had fallen equally on all, the men of
the Cross stormed and raved, and clambered over the ruins and
anathematized their unknown enemy; all but one known as Jack
Rogers, the boss millman, who silently, as if his business had
rendered him mute as well as deaf, stood looking up and down the
gulch. While the others continued their inspection of the damage,
he drifted farther and farther away, intent on the ground about him,
and the edge of the stream. Suddenly he stooped over and picked up
something water-stained and white. He came back toward them.
"Whoever did the one job," he said tersely, "did both. Probably one
man. Set the fuses at the power-house, then came on here and set
these. Then he must have got away by going to the eastward."
"For heaven's sake, how do you figure that out?" Dick asked eagerly,
while the others gathered closer around, with grim, inquiring faces,
and leaned corded necks forward to catch the millman's words.
"I found a piece of fuse down at the power plant," he said. "See, here
it is. It's a good long one. The fellow that did the job knew just how
long it would take him to walk here; and he knew fuse, and he knew
dynamite. The proof that he did it that way is shown by this short
piece of fuse I found down there at the edge of the wash. He cut the
fuse short when he shot the dam. He wanted the whole thing, both
places, to go up at once. Now it's plain as a Digger Indian's trail
that he didn't intend to go back the way he came, so he must have gone
eastward. And if he went that way, it shows he didn't intend to hit it
back toward Goldpan, but to keep on goin' over the ridge cut-off till
he hit the railroad."
Dick was astonished at the persistent reasoning of the man whom
hitherto he had regarded as a singularly taciturn old worker, wise in
milling and nothing more.
"Now, if there's any of you boys here that know trails," he said,
"come along with me, and we'll section the hillside up there and pick
it up. If you don't, stay here, because I can get it in time, and
don't want no one tramplin' over the ground. I was--a scout for five
years, and--well, I worked in the Geronimo raid."
Dick and Bill looked at him with a new admiration, marveling that the
man had never before betrayed that much of his variegated and hard
career.
"You're right! I believe you're right," the superintendent exclaimed.
"I can help you. So can Dick. We've lived where it came in handy
sometimes."
But two other men joined them, one a white-headed old miner called
Chloride and the other a stoker named Sinclair who had been at the
Cross for but a few weeks, and admitted that he had been a packer in
Arizona.
Slowly the men formed into a long line, and began working toward one
another, examining the ground in a belt twenty feet wide and covering
the upper eastward edge of the canyon. Each had his own method of
trailing. The white-headed man stooped over and passed slowly from
side to side. Bill walked with slow deliberation, stopping every three
or four feet and scanning the ground around him with his brilliant,
keen eyes. The stoker worked like a pointer dog, methodically, and
examining each bush clump for broken twigs.
But it was Rogers the millman, whose method was more like Bill's, who
gave the gathering call. On a patch of earth, close by the side of the
rampart and where the moisture had percolated sufficiently to soften
the ground, was the plain imprint of a man's foot, shod in miner's
brogans, and half-soled. Nor was that all. The half-soling had
evidently been home work, and the supply of pegs had been exhausted.
In lieu of them, three square-headed hobnails had been driven into the
center of the seam holding the patch of leather to the under part of
the instep, or palm of the foot. They were off like a pack of
bloodhounds, with the old millman in the lead.
Dick started to follow, and then paused. He saw that Bill was standing
aside, as if hesitating what to do.
"Bill, old partner," he said wearily, "if anything can be found they
can find it. I think you and I had better go back and try to think
some way out of this--try to see some opening. It looks pretty
black."
The big fellow took four or five of his long, swinging steps, and
threw an arm over the younger man's shoulder.
"Boy," he said, "they're a-givin' us a right fast run for our money;
but we ain't whipped yet--not by a long way! And if they do, well,
it's a mighty big world, with mighty big mountains, and we'll strike
it yet; but they haven't cleaned us out of the Cross, and can't as
long as you and me are both kickin.' They've got poor old Bells.
They've tried to hand us a strike. They've blown our reservoir so's we
can't work the mill until another spring passes over; and yet we're
still here, and the Croix d'Or is still there, off under the peak
that's holdin' it down."
He waved his arm above in a broad gesture, and Dick took heart as they
turned back toward the mine, calculating whether they could find a
means of opening it underground to pay; whether they would need as
many men as they had, and other troublesome details.