rejoicing in the hope that he had found one vulnerable link in the
president's coat of mail. "But if I go, the entire department will go.
Every man in it is my friend, as well as my subordinate; and they know
very well that if they shouldn't go, your new chief would fire them and
put in his own men."
"Ha!" said the president, straightening up again. "Am I to understand
that you are threatening me, Mr. Ford."
"No, indeed; I am only stating a fact. But it is a pretty serious fact.
Let us suppose, for the sake of the argument, that my prediction comes
true; that within thirty-six or forty-eight hours Saint's Rest is packed
with people trying to get to Copah. Your new chief, if you shall have
found him, will hardly be in the saddle. When he comes he will have to
reorganize the department, break in new men, learn by hard knocks what I
have been learning in detail--"
Mr. Colbrith thrust out a thin lip of obstinate determination.
"And if he does, your hypothetical rush will simply have to wait, Mr.
Ford. We have the key to the Copah door."
"Don't you fool yourself!" snapped Ford, forgetting his rôle of the
humble one for the moment. "The Transcontinental is only forty miles
away at Jack's Canyon, with a pretty decent stage road. Long before you
can get the extension in shape to carry passengers, or even freight, the
other line will be known from Maine to California as the keyholder to
this district!"
That shot told. The president was not yet convinced that the Copah boom
was real; but there was the chance that it might be--always the chance.
And to the over-cautious the taking of chances, however remote, is like
the handling of a snake: a thing to inspire creeping horrors.
"If you could convince me, Mr. Ford, that your interest in that mine did
not influence you in changing the route of the extension," he began; but
Ford took him up sharply. "I can't; and I can say no more than I have
said."
Mr. Colbrith got up and went to the window to look down upon the excited
throng in the street. It did look real.
"Perhaps we might leave matters as they are, pending a future
investigation, Mr. Ford," he said, turning back to his victim, who was
methodically clipping the end from a cigar.
"No," was the brittle rejoinder.
Again the president took time to look down into the crowded street. His
next attack was from the rear.
"But I have understood that you do not wish to resign. Let us be
magnanimous, Mr. Ford, and agree to hang this matter up until this
supposed crisis is past."
"No," was the curt reply. "I have changed my mind. I don't think I want
to work for you any longer, Mr. Colbrith."
"Not if I withdrew my--ah--objections?"
"No."
Silence again. The packed lobby of the hotel had overflowed upon the
plank sidewalk, and the din of the buyers and sellers rose like the
noise of a frantic street fight. Ford's half jesting remark about the
possibility of the microbe finding its way into the blood of the
president was not so pointless as the old man's retort sought to make it
appear. It was the wheat pit which had given Mr. Colbrith his first
half-million; and as he listened to the hoarse cries, the thing which he
hoped was safely caution-killed began to stir within him. Suddenly he
picked a word of two out of the sidewalk clamor that made him turn
swiftly upon the silent young man.
"They are selling 'Little Alicia'--your stock--down there!" he gasped.
"Have you--have you--"
"No; I haven't put mine on the market. It's some of my partner's,
Grigsby's, stock. I suppose he couldn't stand the push."
Once more the president listened. Only an ex-wrestler in the wheat pit
could have picked intelligence out of the Babel of puts and calls.
"It's up to a hundred and fifty!" he exploded. "What did you pay for
your shares, Mr. Ford?"
"Twenty," said Ford coolly.
"Good Heavens! I--I hope you hold a safe majority?"
"No; we broke even, Grigsby and I. I have fifty per cent."
The president groaned.
"I--I'll excuse you, Mr. Ford. Get down there at once and buy that other
necessary share!"
Ford shook his head with predetermined gloom. "No, Mr. Colbrith, I'm not
buying any more mining stock. What I did buy seems to have cost me my
job."
"But, my dear young man! This is a crisis. You are likely to lose
control of your property! Or, at least, it is soaring to a point at
which you will never be able to secure the control."
Ford came up smiling. "You forget that this is mere mad excitement, Mr.
Colbrith," he said, handing back the President's own phrase. "To-morrow,
I dare say, I shall be able to buy at twenty again."
The president came away from the window and sat down. His face was
twitching and the thin white hands were tremulous.
"There may be more in this gold discovery than I have been willing to
admit," he said abstractedly, "and in that case ... Mr. Ford, upon what
terms will you consent to go on and whip this line of ours into shape?"
Ford came out of the fog of discouragement with a bound.
"A complete change in the management of the Pacific Southwestern, Mr.
Colbrith. North and his grafters must go."
The President did not fly into wrathful shards, as Ford fully expected.
On the contrary, he was fingering the white goat's-beard with one
nervous hand, and apparently listening half-absently to the clamor in
the street.
"Don't be unreasonable, Mr. Ford," he said quite mildly. "You know we
can't consider anything like that at the present moment."
"It must be considered," Ford persisted. "Ever since I quit being a
division superintendent, North has obstructed, lied about me, fought me.
The time has come when, if I stay, I must have a free hand. I can't have
it while he is out of jail."
"That is strong language to apply to our first vice-president, Mr. Ford.
And I can only believe that you are prejudiced--unduly prejudiced. But
all this may be taken up later. As you suggest, we may be losing very
precious time."
Ford got to his feet.
"Promise me that you will give the Denver management as thorough an
investigation as you have given me, Mr. Colbrith; do that, and give me
absolute authority over the MacMorroghs and their men for one week; and
before the week's end we'll be hauling passengers and freight into Copah
over our own rails."
For a moment the president seemed to be on the point of yielding. Then
his habitual caution thrust out its foot and tripped him.
"I can't be pushed, Mr. Ford," he complained, with a return of the
irritated tone. "Let the matter rest for the present. And--and you may
consider yourself relieved from duty until I have gone a little deeper
into these charges against you. Mr. North accuses you, and you accuse
Mr. North. I must have time to approach those matters deliberately. I
don't know which of you to trust."
It was a deadlock. Ford bowed and laid his hand on the door.
"You are still the president of the Pacific Southwestern, Mr. Colbrith,
and while you remain president--"
The old man's pride of office took fire like tow in a furnace.
"What do you mean by that, Mr. Ford? Make yourself clear, sir!" he
quavered.
"I mean just this: if your niece, Miss Alicia Adair, hadn't been good
enough to say that she will be my wife, I'd carry this thing up to the
board of directors and do my level best to have you put where you could
do the least harm."
"You? Alicia?" the old man shrilled. And then, in an access of senile
rage that shook him like a leaf in the wind: "I said you were
suspended--you are discharged, sir--here and now! If you give another
order as an official of the Pacific Southwestern company, I'll--I'll put
you through the courts for it!"
Ford opened the door and went out, leaving the president clutching his
chair with one hand and balling the other into a shaking fist. The die
was cast, and he had thrown a blank at the very moment when the game
seemed to be turning his way. What would Alicia say?
As if the unspoken query had evoked her, the door of her room opened
silently and she stood before him in the corridor.
"Tell me," she commanded.
"We have fought it out, and I've had my beating," he said soberly. "When
I thought I had him fairly down,--he was actually begging me to stay on
with the company,--we got tangled up again over North, and he fired me
bodily."
"Did you--did you tell him about our--"
"Yes; and that was what set off the final fireworks."
She put her hands on his shoulders and made him face her squarely.
"Stuart, did you lose your temper?"
"I--I'm afraid I did--just at the last, you know. It's simply an
unspeakable state of affairs, Alicia, dear! At a moment when we should
be setting the whole world afire in a superhuman effort to flog this
piece of construction track into shape, your uncle paralyzes
everything!"
The constraining touch of her hands became almost a caress. "What shall
you do, Stuart? Is there nothing to be done?"
He took his resolution on the spur of the moment.
"Yes, thank heaven! Your uncle has got to find a printing press, or at
least a telegraph wire, before he can make my discharge effective.
Before he can do that, or until he does it, I'm going to pull the
throttle wide open and race that discharge circular, if I go to jail for
it, afterward! Who knows but I shall have time to save the day for the
company after all? Good-by, dearest. In twenty minutes I shall be riding
for the MacMorroghs' camp, and when I get there--"
"You are going to ride back?--alone? Oh, no, no!" she protested; and the
clinging arms held him.
"Why, Alicia, girl--see here: what do you imagine could happen to me?
Why, bless your loving heart, I've been tramping and riding this desert
more or less for two years! What has come over you?"
"I don't know; but--but--oh, me! you will think I am miserably weak and
foolish: but just as you said that, I seemed to see you lying in the
road with your horse standing over you--and you were--dead!"
"Nonsense!" he comforted. "I'll be back here to-morrow, alive and well;
but I mustn't lose a minute now. It's up to me to reach Horse Creek
before the news of the gold strike gets there. There'll be a stampede,
with every laborer on the line hoofing it for Copah. Good-by,
sweetheart, and--may I?" He took her face between his hands and did it
anyhow.
Five minutes later he was bargaining for a saddle horse at the one
livery stable in the camp, offering and paying the selling price of the
animal for the two days' hire. It was a rather sorry mount at that, and
when he was dragging it out into the street, Jack Benson, the youngest
member of his staff, rode up, that moment in from the tie-camp above Cow
Mountain.
"Don't dismount, Jack," he ordered curtly. "You're just in time to save
me eight or ten miles, when the inches are worth dollars. Ride for the
end-of-track and Frisbie on a dead run. Tell Dick to hold his men, if he
has to do it at the muzzle of a gun, and to come on with the track,
night and day. He'll have to raise the pay, and keep on raising it--but
that's all right. It's an order. Rush it!"
Benson nodded, set his horse at the path leading up to the railroad
grade, and spurred up the hill. Ford gave a final tug at his saddle
cinches, put up a leg and began to pick his way down the thronged
street in the opposite direction.
Thirty seconds afterward a man wearing the laced trousers and broad
bullion-corded sombrero of a Mexican dandy came out of his hiding-place
behind the door of the livery stable office, thoughtfully twirling the
cylinder of a drawn revolver.
"I take-a da mustang," he said to the boy who had held Ford's horse
during the short interview with Benson. And when the bronco was brought
out, the Mexican, like Ford, looked to the cinches, mounted, and rode
down the street leading to the lower mesa and the river.
XXIV
RUIZ GREGORIO
He rode easily, as one born to the saddle, the leathers creaking
musically under him to keep time to the shuffling fox-trot of the wiry
little range pony. Once free of the mining-camp and out upon the mesa,
he found a corn-husk wrapper and his bag of dry tobacco and deftly
rolled a cigarette, doing it with one hand, cow-boy fashion. When the
cigarette was lighted, the horseman ahead was a mere khaki-colored dot,
rising and falling in the mellowing distance.
With the eye of a plainsman he measured the trail's length to the broken
hill range where the Pannikin emerges from its final wrestle with the
gorges. Then he glanced up at the dull crimson spot in the murky sky
that marked the sun's altitude. There was time sufficient--and the trail
was long enough. He did not push his horse out of the shuffling trot. At
the portal hills the horseman now disappearing over the rim of the high
mesa would slacken speed. In the canyon itself a dog could not go faster
than a walk.
On the lower mesa the Mexican picked up the galloping dot again,
holding it in view until it halted on the river bank a hundred yards
below the entrance to the canyon. Since the water was low in the ford,
the river bank hid the crossing, and the Mexican drew rein and waited
for the dot to reappear on the opposite shore.
A slow minute was lost; then a second and a third. The man in the corded
sombrero and laced buckskins touched his horse's flank with a spur and
crept forward at a walk, keeping his eyes fixed upon the point where the
quarry ought to come in sight again. When three more minutes passed and
the farther shore was still a deserted blank, the Mexican dug both
rowels into his mustang and galloped down to the river, muttering curses
in the _patois_ of his native Sonora.
Apparently the closing in had been delayed too long. There were fresh
hoof-prints in the marl of the hither approach to the shallow ford, but
none to match them on the farther side. The Mexican crossed hastily and
searched for the outcoming hoof-marks. The rocky bar which formed the
northern bank of the stream told him nothing.
Now it is only in the imagination of the word-smith that the villain in
the play is gifted with supernatural powers of discernment. Ruiz
Gregorio Maria y Alvarez Mattacheco, familiarly and less cumbrously
known as "Mexican George," was a mere murderer, with a quick eye for
gun-sights and a ready and itching trigger finger. But he was no Vidoeq,
to know by instinct which of the two trails, the canyon passage or the
longer route over the hills, Ford had chosen.
Having two guesses he made the wrong one first, urging his mustang
toward the canyon trail. A stumbling half-mile up the narrow cleft of
the river's path revealing nothing, he began to reconsider. Drawing a
second blank of the same dimensions, he turned back to the ford and
tried the hill trail. At the end of the first hundred yards on the new
scent he came again upon the fresh hoof-prints, and took off the
brow-cramping hat to swear the easier.
Two courses were now open to him; to press hard upon the roundabout hill
trail in the hope of overtaking the engineer before he could reach the
Horse Creek camp, or to pass by the shorter route to the upper ford to
head him off at the river crossing. The Mexican gave another glance at
the dull red spot in the western sky and played for safety. The
waylaying alternative commended itself on several counts. The canyon
trail was the shorter and it could be traversed leisurely and in
daylight. Pressing his livery hack as he could, Ford would scarcely
reach the crossing at the mouth of Horse Creek before dusk. Moreover, it
would be easier to wait and to smoke than to chase the quarry over the
hills, wearing one's pinto to the bone.
Ruiz Gregorio Maria set his horse once more at the task of picking a
path among the canyon boulders, riding loosely in the saddle, first in
one stirrup and then in the other, and smoking an unbroken succession of
the corn-husk cigarettes.
One small cloud flecked the sky of satisfaction. His instructions had
been explicit. If Ford should resign, quit, wash his hands of the
Pacific Southwestern, he might be suffered to escape. If not--there was
only one condition attached to the alternative: what was done must be
done neatly, with despatch, and at a sufficient distance from any of the
MacMorrogh camps to avert even the shadow of suspicion.
Now the upper crossing of waylayings was within a stone's throw of the
end-of-track yards; nay, within an amateur's pistol-shot of the
commissary buildings. But Ruiz Gregorio, weighing all the possibilities,
found them elastic enough to serve the purpose. A well-calculated shot
from behind a sheltering boulder, the heaving of the body into the swift
torrent of the Pannikin, and the thing was done. What damning evidence
might afterward come to the light of day, if, indeed, it should ever
come to light, would be fished out of the stream far enough from any of
the MacMorrogh camps.
Thus Ruiz Gregorio Maria y Alvarez, lolling lazily in his saddle while
the hard-breathing mustang picked a toilsome path among the strewn
boulders and through the sliding shale beds. He went even further: an
alibi might not be needful, but it would be easy to provide one. Young
Jack Benson, if no other, would know that Ford had taken one of the
shorter trails from Copah to the camp at Horse Creek. _Bueno!_ He, Ruiz
Gregorio, could slip across the river in the dusk when the thing was
done, skirt the headquarters camp unseen, and present himself a little
later at Señor Frisbie's camp of the track-layers, coming, as it were,
direct from Copah, almost upon the heels of Señor Benson. After that,
who could connect him with the dead body of a man fished out of a river
twenty, fifty, a hundred miles away?
There was a weak link in the chain. Ruiz Gregorio's child-like plot
turned upon one pivot of hazard--hazard most likely to be ignored by so
good a marksman as the "man-killer." One shot he might permit himself,
with little danger of drawing a crowd from the mess tent and the
sleeping shanties in the Horse Creek camp. Two would bring the men to
their doors. Any greater number would be taken as the signal of a free
fight needing spectators. Hence the first shot must suffice.
The Mexican bore this in mind when, arriving at his post opposite the
camp in the early dusk, he chose his ambushing boulder so near the
descending hill trail that a stout club might have been substituted for
the pistol. The weather promise was for a starless night, but the
electric arc-lights were already scintillating at their mastheads in
the headquarters railroad yard across the Pannikin. Later, when the
daylight was quite gone and the electrics were hollowing out a bowl of
stark whiteness in the night, Ruiz Gregorio wished he had chosen
otherwise. The camp lights shone full upon him and on the mustang
standing with drooped head at his elbow, and the trail on the other side
of the boulder was in shadow.
He was about to take the risk of moving farther up the hill-path to a
less exposed lurking place, was hesitating only because his indolent
soul rebelled at the thought of having to drag Ford's body so many added
steps to its burial in the river, when the clink of shod hoofs upon
stone warned him that the time for scene-shifting had passed. Pushing
the mustang out of the line of sight from the trail, he flattened
himself against the great rock and waited.
Ford rode down the last declivity cautiously, for his horse's sake. The
trail came out of the hills abruptly, dropping into the rock-strewn
river valley within hailing distance of the camp. Well within the sweep
of the masthead lights across the stream, the boulder-strewn flat was as
light as day, save where the sentinel rocks flung their shadows; and
promptly at the first facing of the bright electrics, Ford's horse
stumbled aside from the path and began to take short cuts between the
thick-standing boulders for the river. This was how the Mexican,
instead of having his victim at a complete disadvantage, found himself
suddenly uncovered by the flank, exposed, recognized, and hailed in no
uncertain tones.
"Hello, Mattacheco! what are you doing here?" Ford had a flash-light
picture of the horse standing with his muzzle to the ground; of the man
flattened against the rock. Then he saw the dull gleam of the lights
upon blued metal. "You devil!" he shouted; and unarmed as he was,
spurred his tired beast at the assassin.
Here, then, was the weak link in Ruiz Gregorio's chain twisted to the
breaking point at the very outset. Instead of taking a deliberate
pot-shot at an unsuspecting victim, he was obliged to face about, to
fire hastily at a charging enemy, and to spring nimbly aside to save
himself from being ridden down. The saving jump was an awkward one: it
brought him into breath-taking collision with the upjerking head of the
mustang. When he had recovered his feet and his presence of mind, the
charging whirlwind had dashed through the shallows of the Pannikin, and
a riderless horse was clattering across the tracks in the railroad yard.
The Mexican waited prudently to see what the camp would say to the
single shot. It said nothing; it might have been deserted for all the
indications there were of life in it. Ruiz Gregorio snapped the empty
shell from his weapon, replacing it with a loaded one, and mounted and
rode slowly through the ford. The riderless horse disappearing across
the tracks gave him good hope that the hasty shot had accomplished all
that a deliberate one might have.
There was no dead man tumbled in a heap in the railroad yard, as he had
hoped to find. Silence, the silence of desertion, brooded over the
masthead arcs. Painfully the Mexican searched, at the verge of the
river, in the black shadows cast by the crowding material cars. Finally
he crossed over to the straggling street of the camp, walking now and
leading the spent mustang. Silence here, too, broken only by the
sputtering sizzle of the electrics. The huge mess tent was dark; there
were no lights, save in the closed commissary and in the president's
car: no lights, and not a man of the camp's crowding labor army to be
seen.
At a less strenuous moment the man-killer would have been puzzled by the
unusual stillness and the air of desertion. As it was, he was alertly
probing the far-flung shadows. The engineer, if only wounded, would
doubtless try to hide in the shadows in the railroad yard.
The Mexican left his horse in the camp street and made an instant search
between and under the material cars, coming out now and again to stare
suspiciously at the president's private car, standing alone on the
siding directly opposite the commissary. The Nadia was occupied. It was
lighted within, and the window shades were drawn down. Ruiz Gregorio
could never get far from the lighted car without being irresistibly
drawn back to it, and finally he darted back in time to see a man rise
up out of the shadow of the nearest box-car, spring to the platform of
the Nadia and kick lustily at the locked door. The door was opened
immediately by some one within, and the fugitive plunged to cover--but
not before the Mexican's revolver had barked five times with the rapid
staccato of a machine gun.
When Ruiz Gregorio, dropping the smoking weapon into its holster, would
have mounted to put into instant action the plan of the well-considered
alibi, a barrel-bodied figure launched itself from the commissary porch,
and a vigorous hand dragged horse and man into the shadow of the
stables.
"Off wid you now, you blunderin' dago divvle!" gritted the MacMorrogh
savagely. "It's all av our necks ye've put into a rope, this time, damn
you!"
The Mexican had dismounted and was calmly reloading his pistol.
"You t'ink-a he's not-a sufficiently kill? I go over to da car and
bring-a you da proof, _si_?"
"You'll come wid me," raved the big contractor. "'Tis out av your clumsy
hands, now, ye black-hearted blunderin' cross betune a Digger Indian and
a Mexican naygur! Come on, I say!"
The back room of the commissary to which the MacMorrogh led the way
held three men; Eckstein, and the two younger members of the contracting
firm. They had heard the fusillade in the camp street and were waiting
for news. Brian MacMorrogh gave it, garnished with many oaths.
"The pin-brained omadhaun av a Mexican has twishted a rope for all av
us! He's let Ford come back, alive; let him get to the very dure av the
prisident's car! Then, begorra! he must mades show himself under the
electhrics and open fire on the man who was kicking at the dure and
looking sthraight at him!"
Eckstein asked a single question.
"Did he get him? If he's dead he can't very well tell who shot him."
"That's the hell av it!" raged the big man. "Who's to know?"
Eckstein spat out the extinct cigar stump he was chewing.