"THOUGH LOVE SAY NAY"
"Of one thing I am sure," said Dick on the following day, when they
began to readjust themselves for a decision, "and that is that if we
can find work for them, there isn't a man on the works that I don't
want to keep. They are too true and loyal to lose."
"We could drive into the blacksmith's tunnel," Bill said; "and I've an
idea we might strike something when we pass under that hard cone just
above--well, just about under where Bells is. I saw it yesterday when
we were up there for the first time. That would give the millman and
his gang something to do. Some of 'em can take out the rest of the
green lead, and after that drift see if it comes in again. And the
others that can't do anything underground, can turn to and build up
the dam, with a few masons to help, and, when a new wheel comes, the
millman will know how to set that all right again. So, you see, we
don't have to lose any of them that has stood by us, so long as Sloan
is ready to take his gamble and the hundred thousand lasts. Before
that's gone, we'll just have to make good. And somehow I feel we
will."
As if to add to the mental trials of the half-owner of the Croix d'Or,
but another day elapsed after this decision and adjustment before he
received a letter from a Seattle broker offering him a price for his
interest in the mine. Thus wrote the agent:
"My client has the timber and water rights of your property in view
more than anything underground, which, on the advice of experts who
have visited the property in previous years, he seems to regard as
worthless. He informs me that you are, to all intents, representing
not only your own interest, but that of the other partner, who places
implicit confidence in you. I presume that you will therefore be
amenable to doing all you can to save from the wreckage of the dead
property all that is possible in behalf of that partner as well as
yourself, and am authorized to make you the extremely liberal offer of
sixty thousand dollars for the full title to the property."
The price was ridiculously low, and Dick knew it; yet if the mine
produced nothing more, and was, as the experts were supposed to have
reported, worthless, the amount was extremely liberal. But for Bill he
would have hesitated to decline such an offer. That worthy, however,
threw his head back and roared derisively.
"Sixty thousand? Sixty thousand! What does that idiot think men who
have dropped a quarter of a million in a property would quit for? Does
he think that sixty thousand is any saving from a wreck like this has
been? Tell him to chase himself--that the tail goes with the hide, and
you'll quit clean whipped, or not at all."
But Dick was loath to refuse any offer without consulting his superior
in New York, and accordingly wandered off into the hills to think. It
was late in the afternoon, and he mechanically tramped over the trail
to the pipe line, where, when hope ran higher, he had dared to dream.
The whole situation had become a nerve-racking tragedy of mind and
action. His desperate desire for success after his self-acknowledgment
that he loved Miss Presby, and then the blows that had been rained on
him and the mine, the failure of the green lead to hold out when it
had at least promised and justified operation--all cumulated into a
disheartening climax which was testing his fortitude as it had never
been tried before. He was not of those who lack either persistence,
determination, or moral bravery; and it was this last characteristic,
coupled with a certain maturing caution, which made him question the
honesty of proceeding to lay out, perhaps, the entire hundred thousand
volunteered by Sloan, with such little certainty of returns. Had the
money been his own, he would have taken the chances uncomplainingly;
but his judgment told him that, had he been sent to the Croix d'Or as
an expert to pass an opinion on the justification of putting a hundred
thousand into the ground, under present conditions, he would have
advised against it.
He went as far as the reservoir. Its wreckage seemed to mock his
efforts. To rebuild it alone meant big expense in a country where
every barrel of cement had to be brought in on the backs of pack
mules, and where stone masons received unduly high wages. The repairs
to the plant would not prove so heavy; but after that? None knew
better than he the trials of expensive prospecting underground, the
long drives to end in nothing, the drifts that tapped no ore, the
ledges that promised to come in strongly, and led the worker on with
hope deferred until his purse was exhausted. The cruelty of nature
itself flaunting the golden will-o'-the-wisp in the blackness of the
earth.
He stood on a timber thrown carelessly on the brink of the gorge, and
suddenly thought how it happened to be there, and for what tragic
purpose it had served--a gallows. He shuddered, thinking of the
mentally distorted wretch who had died at its end, cursing as the men
of the Cross pushed him over to gasp and wrench his life away fifty
feet above the ruin he had wrought. He wondered where the man had been
buried, and hurried back along the pipe line to try and forget that
episode.
A little flutter of white from a clump of brush attracted his eyes,
and he extracted from the brambles a dainty handkerchief still
fragrant with the personality of the girl he loved. He lifted it to
his lips tightly, and, with a heart that was almost in pain, dropped
to the line, and sat on the pipe, bent, and utterly dejected. He sat
there for some minutes, and then a sound caused him to straighten
himself with a jerk. The black horse was thundering down the hill as
he had seen it on those other mornings when, looking backward, the
"world was young."
"I saw you, Mr. Townsend," Miss Presby said as he assisted her to
alight, and her voice was sympathetic and grave. "You are unhappy. I
don't blame you. I have heard all about it, and--well, I have had to
fight an hourly impulse to come to you ever since I heard the news.
Oh, my friend, believe me, I am so sorry! So sorry!"
He could not reply, lest his voice betray the emotions aroused by her
kindly sympathy. All his yearnings were fanned to flame by the cadence
of her voice and the softness of her eyes. Mechanically he resumed his
place on the pipe, and she seated herself by his side, half-facing
him. Her slender foot, booted, braced against the ground, and almost
touching his heavy miner's boot, tapped its toe on the sward as if she
were impatient to find words.
"It has been a little tough," he said; "but it seems less hard to me
now that I know you care."
He had blundered in his first words to the beginning of dangerous
heights, and his pulses gave a wild throb when he glanced up at her
and saw a light in her face, in her eyes, in her whole attitude, that
he had never surprised there before. Words, unuttered, leaped hotly
from his heart; a mad desire to tell of his love, of the visions he
had seen in the air, on the blue of the peaks, in the cool shadows of
the forests, in the black depths hundreds of feet under the ground. Of
how the Croix d'Or had come to represent, not financial success, but a
battle for her, and his love.
His face went white, and he bit his dry, twisting lips, and clenched
his hands until they hurt.
"Not now!" he savagely commanded himself. "Not now!"
She appeared to be thinking of something she had to say, and her first
words rendered him thankful that he had held his tongue, otherwise he
might never have known the depths of the girl seated there by his
side.
"I don't want you to think me forward," she said quietly; "but I have
wanted for the last two days to ask you something. It makes it easier
now that I know you know, that--that I care for it. What are
your--your--how are your finances?"
She had stammered it out at last, and, now that the conversation had
been led in that direction, he could speak. He sat there quietly, as
if by a comrade, and told her all. Told her of his boyhood, his
father's death, and that he, in his own right, had nothing in the
world but youth and a half-ownership in the Croix d'Or, which
threatened to prove worthless. He voiced that dread of wasting his
backer's money when he had none of his own to put with it, meeting
dollar for dollar as it was thrown into the crucibles of fate. He
stopped at last, a little ashamed of having so completely unbosomed
himself, for he was by habit and nature reticent.
"You have made it a great deal easier for me," she said, with an
assumption of gayety. "I can say what I've been thinking of for two
days without spludging all over my words."
She laughed as if in recollection of her previous embarrassment, and
again became seriously grave, and went on:
"They say my father is a hard man. At times I have been led to believe
it; but he has been a good father to me, and I appreciate it and his
worries more, after a four years' absence in an Eastern school,
and--well, perhaps because I am so much older now, and better able to
judge leniently. I have never known much of his business from his
lips. It is one subject on which he is not exactly loquacious, as
probably you know."
Again she laughed a little, grim laugh. Dick had opened his lips to
say that he had never met her father, when she continued:
"On the day I met you first, up here by your pipe line, the day you
almost ended my bright young career by starting a half-ton bowlder
down the hill--don't interrupt with repeated apologies, please--I had
my birth anniversary. I was twenty-one, and--my own boss."
"Congratulations, belated, but fervent."
"Thank you; but you again interrupt. On that day when I went home, my
father, in his customary gruff way, turned back just as he was going
to the office where he lives at least eighteen hours out of every
twenty-four, and threw in my lap a bank-book. 'Joan,' he said, 'you're
of age now. That's for you. It's all yours, to do just what you dam'
please with. I have nothing to do with it. If you make a fool use of
it, it'll be your fault, not mine. I'm giving it to you so that if
anything happened to me, or the Rattler, you'd not be helplessly
busted.'"
He jumped to his feet with an exclamation.
"The Rattler! The Rattler! And--and your name is Joan and not Dorothy,
and you are Bully Presby's daughter?"
He was bewildered by surprise.
"Why, yes. Certainly! Didn't you know that--all this time?"
"No!" he blurted. "There is a Dorothy Presby, and a----"
"Dorothy Presby!" She doubled over in a gust of mirth. "The daughter
of the lumberman over on the other side. Oh, this is too good to keep!
I must tell her the next time I see her. After all these months, you
still thought----"
Again her laughter overwhelmed her; but it was not shared by Dick, who
stood above her on the slope, frowning in perplexity, thinking of the
strange blunder into which he had been led by the words of poor old
Bells, his acceptance of her identity, his ignorance that Bully Presby
had kith or kin, and of the mine owner's sarcastic references and
veiled antagonism throughout all those troubled months preceding.
If she were Bully Presby's daughter, he might never gain her father's
consent, though the Croix d'Or were in the list of producers. He
thought of that harsh encounter on the trail, and his assertion that
he was capable of attending to his own business and asked neither
friendship nor favor from any man under the skies; of Bully Presby's
gruff reply, and of their passing each other a second time, in the
streets of Goldpan, without recognition. The girl in front of him, so
unlike her father save for the firm chin and capable brow, did not
appear to sense his perturbation.
"Well," she said, "it doesn't matter. I am not jeal---- I'm not any
different--just the same. Come back here and sit down, please, while I
go ahead with what I wish to say."
The interlude appeared to have rendered her more self-possessed.
"So, on that day I met you, I became quite rich. That money has rested
in a bank, doing neither me nor any one else any benefit. I think I
have drawn one check, for twenty-five dollars, just to convince myself
that it was all reality. And I am, in some ways, the daughter of my
father. I want my money to work. I'm quite a greedy young person, you
see. I want to lend you as much of that money as you need."
"Impossible!"
"Not at all. I have as much faith in you, perhaps more, than this
Mister Sloan, of whom I'm a trifle jealous. I want to have a share in
your success. I want to make you feel that, even if I'm not the
daughter of a lumberman, I am, and shall have a right to be,
interested in--in--the Croix d'Or."
"Impossible!"
"It isn't any such thing. I mean it!"
"Then it's because I haven't made it plain to you--haven't made you
understand that even now I am thinking, to preserve my honor, of
telling Mr. Sloan that it is too much of a venture. If I should
decline to venture his money, why should I----?"
"Refuse mine? That's just it. His money you could decline. He isn't on
the ground. He doesn't know mines, mining, or miners. I know them all.
I am here. I know the history of the Cross from the day it made its
first mill run. I went five hundred feet under ground in a California
mine when I was a month old. I've run from the lowest level to the top
of the hoist, and from the grizzlies to the tables, for at least ten
years of my life. I've absorbed it. I've lived in it. Had I the
strength, there isn't a place in this, or any mine, that I couldn't
fill. I'm backing my judgment. The Croix d'Or will prove good with
depth. It may never pay until you get it. The blowing of your dam, the
loss of your green lead, and all of those troubles, don't amount to
that."
She snapped a thumb and forefinger derisively, and went on before he
could interject a word, so intent was she on assisting him and
encouraging him, and proving to him that her judgment, through
knowledge, was better than his.
"Borrow my money, Dick, and sink."
The name came so easily to her lips! It was the first time he had ever
heard her utter it. It swept away his flying restraint even as the
flame of powder snaps through a fuse to explosion; and he made a
sudden, swinging step toward her, and caught her in his arms savagely,
greedily, tenderly fierce. All his love was bursting, molten, to
speech; but she lifted both hands and thrust herself away from him.
"Oh, not that!" she said. "Not that! I wish you had not. It robs me of
my wish. I wanted you to take my money as a comrade, not as my---- Oh,
Dick! Dick! Don't say anything to me now, or do anything now! Please
let me have my way. You will win. I know it! The Cross must pay. It
shall pay! And when it does, then--then----"
She stood, trembling, and abashed by her own words, before him. Slowly
the delicacy of her mind, the romanticism of her dreams, the great,
unselfish love within her, fluttering yet valiant, overwhelmed him
with a sense of infinite unworthiness and weakness. He took his hat
from his head, leaned over, and caught one of the palpitant hands in
both his own, and raised it reverently to his lips. It was as if he
were paying homage to heaven devoutly.
"I understand," he said softly, still clinging to the fingers, every
throb of which struck appealingly on his heartstrings. "Forgive me,
and--yet--don't. Joan, little Joan, I can't take your money. It would
make me a weakling. But I can make the Cross win. If it never had a
chance before, it will have now. It must! God wouldn't let it be
otherwise!"
"Help me to my horse," she said faintly. "We mustn't talk any more.
Let us keep our hopes as they are."
He lifted her lightly to the saddle, and the big black, with
comprehending eyes, seemed to stand as a statue after she was in her
seat. The purple shadows of the mountain twilight were, with a soft
and tender haze, tinting the splendid peak above them. Everything was
still and hushed, as if attuned to their parting. She leaned low over
her saddle to where, as before something sacred, he stood with parted
lips, and upturned face, bareheaded, in adoration. Quite slowly she
bent down and kissed him full on the lips, and whispered: "God bless
you, dear, and keep you--for me!"
The abrupt crashing of a horse's hoofs awoke the echoes and the world
again. She was gone; and, for a full minute after the gray old rocks
and the shadows had encompassed her, there stood in the purple
twilight a man too overcome with happiness to move, to think, to
comprehend, to breathe!