Nadia, besides Ford?"
"The two naygurs."
"No one else?"
MacMorrogh shook his head. "No wan."
"You are sure Mr. Adair and Brissac are out of the way?"
"They got Gallagher to push them up to Frisbie's track camp in Misther
North's car an hour before dark."
"None of your men are likely to drift in from the other way up the
line?"
"Not unless somebody carries the news av the gold sthrike--and there's
nobody going that way to carry it. The camp's empty but for us."
Eckstein rose and buttoned his coat.
"You have held your own strikers--the men you can depend upon: how many
do we count, all told?"
"Thirteen, counting the five av us here, and the felly that runs the
electhric light plant."
"H'm; it's a hell of a risk: thirteen men knowing what only one should
know--and what that one should hurry to forget. But your butter-fingered
Mexican has left us no choice. Ford knows enough now to send some of us
over the road for life. If he got into that car alive, he must never
come out of it alive."
Brian MacMorrogh had unlocked a cupboard in the corner of the room. It
was a well-filled gun-rack, and he was passing the Winchesters out to
his brothers.
"'Tis so," he said briefly. Then: "There's the two naygurs in the car:
what av thim, Misther Eckstein?"
Eckstein took one of the guns and emptied the magazine to make sure of
the loading.
"We are thirteen to one; the negroes don't count," he replied coldly.
"Call in your men and we'll go and do what's got to be done."
XXV
THE SIEGE OF THE NADIA
With a horse that could have been handled Ford would not have run away
when the charge upon the Mexican failed of its purpose. So far from it,
he tried to wheel and charge again while the man was reeling from his
collision with the rearing mustang.
But the bronco from the Copah stable, with the flash and crash of the
pistol-shot to madden it, took the bit between its teeth and
bolted--safely through the shallows of the stream crossing and up to the
level of the railroad yard beyond, but swerving aside at the first of
the car shadows to fling its rider out of the saddle. Ford gathered
himself quickly and rolled under a car. His right arm had no feeling in
it, whether from the shot or the fall he could not determine.
The numbness had become a prickling agony when he heard the Mexican
splashing through the river to begin his search. Ford's field of vision
was limited by the car trucks, but he kept the man in sight as he could.
It filled him with sudden and fiery rage to be hunted thus like a
defenseless animal, and more than once he was tempted to make a dash for
the engineers' quarters on the hillside above the commissary--a rifle
being the thing for which he hungered and thirsted.
But to show himself under the lights was to invite the fate he had so
narrowly escaped. He knew Mattacheco's skill as a marksman: the Mexican
would not be rattled twice in the same half-hour. Ford gripped the
benumbed arm in impotent writhings.
"Now, by recognizing him, I've fixed it so that he is obliged to kill
me," he muttered. "It's my life, or his neck for a halter, and he knows
it. The blood-thirsty devil! If I could only get to Brissac's
bunk-shanty and lay my hands on a gun ..."
There seemed to be no chance of doing that most desirable thing. The
Mexican was now afoot and coursing the railroad yard like a baffled
hound. Ford saw that it was only a question of minutes until his
impromptu hiding-place would be discovered, and he began to look for
another. The Nadia was but a short distance away, and the lighted deck
transoms beckoned him.
It was instinct rather than intention that made him duck and plunge
headlong through the suddenly opened door of the private car at the
glimpse of his pursuer standing beside his horse in the open camp
street. This was why the pistol barked harmlessly. Springing to his
feet, and leaving the frightened negro who had admitted him trying to
barricade the door with cushions from the smoking-room seats, Ford burst
into the lighted central compartment.
It was not empty, as he had expected to find it. Two men, startled by
the shots and the crash of breaking glass, were prepared to grapple him.
It was Brissac, the invalided assistant, who cried, "Hold on, Mr.
Adair--it's Ford, and he's hurt!"
Ford met the involuntary rush, gathered the two in his uncrippled arm
and dragged them to the floor.
"That's in case my assassin takes a notion to turn loose on the
windows," he panted. Then he gasped out his story while Brissac got the
aching right arm out of its sleeve and looked for the injury.
Adair listened to the story of the attempted murder awe-struck, as one
from the civilized East had a right to be.
"By Jove!" he commented; "I thought I had bumped into all the different
varieties of deviltry since I left Denver yesterday morning, but this
tops 'em. Actually tried to kill you in cold blood? But what for,
Stuart?--for heaven's sake, what for?"
"Because he was hired to: because his masters, the MacMorroghs, and
their master, North, have staked their roll on this last turn of the
cards. I know too much, Adair. The president was sent over here to get
rid of me. That failing, word was passed down the line that I was to be
effaced. A few hours ago this Mexican overheard me telling your sister
what I proposed to do to North and the MacMorroghs. That's why he--Ouch!
Roy; that is my arm you're trying to twist out of joint, man!"
"It's all right," laughed the Louisianian; "it is only a crazy-bone bump
that you got when the bronc' threw you. Say, Ford; I thought you claimed
to know how to ride a horse!"
Adair was feeling in his pockets for the inevitable cigarette case.
"What he overheard you telling Alicia?" he mused. "I'm evidently two or
three chapters behind. But no matter; this is the now; the very
immediate now. Will your assassin keep on feeling for you?"
Ford shook his head. "Not any more just at present, I guess. He has
waited too long. That fusillade of his will have turned the entire camp
out by this time, and the Macs don't want any inconvenient witnesses."
"Witnesses?" echoed Adair. "Then you don't know--Say, Stuart; there
isn't a white man in this camp besides us three--unless you count the
MacMorroghs and their commissary garrison as white men. News of the
great gold strike got here about three o'clock, and every laborer within
hearing of it shouldered pick and shovel and lined out up the new track
for Copah."
"What!" shouted Ford. "And these dash-_dashed_ MacMorroghs didn't try
to hold them?"
"I don't know about that. I had Mr. Brissac, here, over in the '01'--I
came across the mountain in North's car, you know--dosing him with
things out of Doctor Van Bruce's traveling case, and trying to get him
in shape to show me the way to Copah. After the stampede, which took all
the four-legged horses as well as the two-legged asses, I persuaded your
man Gallagher to hitch his engine to our car to drag us up to Frisbie's
camp at the front. I thought Frisbie would probably be in communication
with you. Gallagher's intentions were good, but about three miles up
Horse Creek he ditched the car so thoroughly that we couldn't inhabit
it; so we got out and walked back."
"All of which brings on more talk," said Ford gravely. "From what you
say, I gather that the MacMorroghs are still here. Did any one see you
come back?"
"I don't know. It was after dark when we straggled in, and we didn't
ring any bells or blow any whistles."
Ford stood up.
"Does either one of you happen to have anything bigger than a
pocket-knife in the way of a weapon?" he asked.
"Why? what are you going to do?" Adair demanded.
"I am going to separate you two from my highly dangerous presence," said
Ford definitely. "The MacMorroghs' outfit of a dozen or fifteen
cutthroat scoundrels, captained, for the moment, by Eckstein, North's
right-hand man, are doubtless just across the way in the back room of
the commissary. You say the camp is otherwise deserted: the MacMorroghs
don't know that you are here; and they do know that I am, dead or alive.
Moreover, Mattacheco has doubtless told them by this time that I saw and
recognized him. Wherefore, it's up to them to see that I never get a
chance to go before a grand jury."
"You sit down on the floor," said Adair. He had found a cigarette and
was crimping the end of it. "Have you a fraction of an idea that we are
going to allow you to make a Jonah of yourself for us? Sit down, I say!
Who's got a gun?"
Brissac had crept to a window and was reconnoitering the deserted camp
street and the commissary through a peephole in the drawn shade. As
Adair spoke, he sprang back, tripped Ford and fell with him, crying:
"Down! both of you!"
At the cry there was a shot from without, and a window on the exposed
side of the Nadia fell in shivers. There were yells of terror from the
cook's pantry, and the two negroes came crawling through the side
vestibule, their eyes like saucers and their teeth chattering. Ford
jumped up and turned off the Pintsch lights; and he was barely down
again when another shot broke a second window.
"Wouldn't that jolt you?" said Adair. "They are feeling for you with
both hands. What a heaven's pity it is that we haven't so much as a
potato popgun among us to talk back with. What did you see, Mr.
Brissac?"
"A crowd of them bunched on the commissary porch. One of them was
sighting a Winchester at the car when I got busy."
Adair was again lamenting the lack of arms when the negro porter
produced a pocket bulldog pistol of the cheap and uncertain sort.
"Y-y-y-yah you is, Mistuh Charles," he stuttered.
"Ah, Williams--concealed weapons? That is fifty dollars fine in your
native Tennessee, isn't it?" Then to Brissac: "Please go to the farther
window and mark down for me, Mr. Brissac. I don't like to have those
fellows do all the bluffing."
While the assistant was complying, a third bullet from the commissary
porch tore high through the car, smashing one of the gas globes. Adair
crawled to a broken window and the cheap revolver roared like an
overloaded musket.
"Good shot!" said Brissac, from his marking post. "You got one of them:
he's down and they're dragging him inside. Now they have all ducked to
cover."
"That settles any notion of a palaver and the pipe of peace, I guess,"
said Adair, as indifferently as if he had just brought down a clay
pigeon. "Prophesy, Stuart: what comes next?"
Ford shook his head.
"They can't quit now till they are sure I am permanently obliterated;
they have gone too far. They'll credit me with that shot of yours, and
they will take it as a pretty emphatic proof that I still live. Hence,
more war."
"Well, what do we do? You are the captain."
"Picket the car and keep a sharp lookout for the next move. Brissac, you
take the forward end, and I'll take the rear platform. Adair, post your
Africans in here where they'll do the most good, and see that they don't
go to sleep on their jobs."
The disposition of forces was quickly made, after which suspense set in.
Silence and the solitude of the deserted camp reigned unbroken; yet the
watchers knew that the shadows held determined enemies, alertly
besieging the private car. To prove it, Adair pulled down a portière,
gave it bulk with a stuffing of berth pillows, and dropped the bundle
from one of the shattered windows. Three jets of fire belched from the
nearest shadow, and the dummy was riddled. Adair fired at one of the
flashes, resting the short-barreled pistol across the window ledge, and
the retaliatory shot brought Ford hurrying in from his post.
"For heaven's sake, don't waste your ammunition!" he whispered. "One of
them has gone up to the powder-house after dynamite. I heard the
creaking of the iron door."
Adair whistled softly. "Dynamite! That will bring things to a focus
beautifully, won't it? When they have blown us up, I wonder how they
will account to Uncle Sidney for the loss of his car?"
Brissac had come running in at the sound of the firing. He missed the
grim humor in Adair's query.
"Car, nothing!" he retorted. "Better say the entire camp and everything
in it! There's a whole box-car load of dynamite and caps out here in the
yard--sub-contractors' supplies waiting for the freighters' teams from
the west end. If they smash us, the chances are ten to one that there'll
be a sympathetic explosion out yonder in the yard somewhere that will
leave nothing but a hole in the ground!"
"No," said Ford. "I gave orders myself to have that car set down below
the junction when the Nadia came in."
"So you did; and so it was," Brissac cut in. "But afterward it got mixed
in the shifting, and it's back in the yard--I don't know just where."
Adair turned to the cowering porter.
"Have you any more cartridges for this cannon of yours, Williams?" he
asked.
"N-n-no, sah."
"Then we have three more chances in the hat. Much obliged for the
dynamite hint, Stuart. I'll herd these three cartridges pretty
carefully. Back to your sentry-boxes, you two, and make a noise if you
need the artillery."
Another interval of suspense followed, thickly scored with pricklings of
anxiety for the besieged. Then an attempt was made from the rear. Ford
saw a dodging shadow working its way from car to car in the yard and
signaled softly to Adair.
"Hold low on him," he cautioned, when the New Yorker was at his elbow,
"those cheap guns jump like a scared cow-pony." Then he added: "And pray
God you don't hit what he's carrying."
Adair held low and bided his time. There was another musket-like roar,
and an instant though harmless reply from two rifles on the other side
of the Nadia. But the dodging shadow was no longer advancing.
"I've stopped him for the time being, anyhow," said Adair, exulting like
a boy. "If we only had a decent weapon we could get them all, one at a
time."
"This was crude," Ford commented. "Eckstein will think up something
better for the next attempt."
It was a prophecy which found its fulfilment after another sweating
interval of watchfulness. This time it was Brissac who made the
discovery, from the forward end of the Nadia. The nearest of the
material cars was a box, lying broadside to the private car on the next
side-track but one. From behind the trucks of the box-car a slender
pole, headed with what appeared to be an empty oyster tin, and trailing
a black line of fuse, was projecting itself along the ground by slow
inchings, creeping across the lighted space between the two cars.
Brissac promptly gave the alarm.
"This is where we lose out, pointedly and definitely," predicted Adair,
still cheerful. "Anybody want to try a run for it?"
It was Ford who thought of the two negroes.
"Tell them, Roy," he said to Brissac. "Perhaps they would rather risk
the rifles."
Brissac crept back to the central compartment, and the two watchers
marked the progress of the inching pole, with its dynamite head and the
ominous black thread of communication trailing like a grotesque horn
behind it. At the crossing of the intervening track it paused, moving
back and forth along the steel like a living thing seeking a passage.
Finally the metallic head of it appeared above the rail, hesitated, and
came on slowly. At that moment there was a shout, and the two negroes,
hands held high, tumbled from the opposite step of the Nadia and ran
toward the commissary stables. Three shots bit into the silence, and the
fat cook ran on, stumbling and shrieking. But the man Williams stopped
short and fell on his face, rolling over a moment later to lie with arms
and legs outspread.
"God!" said Ford, between his set teeth; "they saw who they were--they
couldn't help seeing! And there was no excuse for killing those poor
devils!"
But there was no time for reprisals, if any could have been made. When
Brissac rejoined the two in the forward vestibule, the stiff-bodied
snake with its tin head and trailing horn was crossing the second rail
of the intervening siding.
"We've got to think pretty swiftly," suggested Adair, still cool and
unruffled. "I might be able to hit that tin thing at this short
distance, but I suppose that would only precipitate matters. What do you
say?"
Ford could not say, and Brissac seemed to have become suddenly petrified
with horror. He was staring at the lettering on the box-car
opposite--the one under whose trucks the dynamiters were hiding.
"Look!" he gasped; "it's the car of explosives, and they don't know it!"
Then he darted back into the Nadia's kitchen, returning quickly with a
huge carving-knife rummaged from the pantry shelves. "Stand back and
give me room," he begged; and they saw him lean out to send the
carving-knife whistling through the air: saw it sever the head from the
stiff-bodied snake--the head and the trailing horn as well.
"Good man!" applauded Adair, dragging the assistant engineer back to
safety before any of the sharpshooters had marked him down. "Where did
you learn that trick?"
"It is my one little accomplishment," confessed the Louisianian. "An old
Chickasaw chief taught me when I was a boy in the bayou country."
The peril was over for the moment. The severed pole was withdrawn, and
for what seemed like an endless interval the attack paused. The three
besieged men kept watch as they might, creeping from window to window.
Out under the blue glare of the commissary arc-light the body of the
negro porter lay as it had fallen. Once, Ford thought he heard groans
from the black shadow where the fat cook had disappeared, but he could
not be sure. On the other side of the private car, and half-way between
it and the forty-thousand-pound load of high explosives, the petard
oyster-tin lay undisturbed, with the carving-knife sticking in the sand
beside it.
"What will they try next?" queried Adair, when the suspense was again
growing intolerable.
"It is simple enough, if they happen to think of it," was Ford's
rejoinder. "A few sticks of dynamite in a plugged gas-pipe: cut your
fuse long enough, light it, and throw the thing under the car. That
would settle it."
Adair yawned sleepily.
"Well, they've got all night for the inventive part of it. There's no
rescue for us unless somebody--a good husky army of somebodies--just
happens along."
"The army is less than eight miles away--over at Frisbie's camp," said
Ford. "With Dick to lead them, the track-layers would sack this place in
about five minutes. If I could only get to the wire!"
Brissac heard the "if."
"Let me try to run their picket line, Ford," he said eagerly. "If I can
get around to our quarters and into the telegraph tent--"
"You couldn't do it, Roy. There is the proof of it," pointing to the
body of the slain negro. "But I have been thinking of another scheme.
The track-camp wire is bracketed across the yard on the light-poles. I
have my pocket relay. I wonder if we could manage to cut in on that
wire?"
"Wait a minute," Brissac interrupted. He was gone but a moment, and when
he returned he brought hope with him.
"The wire is down and lying across the front vestibule," he announced
excitedly. "They must have cut it up yonder by the telegraph tent and
the slack has sagged down this way."
"Which gives us a dead wire without any batteries," said Ford gloomily;
and then: "Hold on--aren't there electric call-bells in this car,
Adair?"
"Yes, several of them; one in each state-room."
"Good! that means batteries of some sort," said Ford. "Rummage for
them, Brissac, while I get that wire in here."
The wire was successfully pulled in through the front vestibule without
giving the alarm. Ford twisted it in two when he had enough of it to
reach the central compartment. Adair did sentry duty while the two
technicians wrought swiftly. The bell battery was found, the ground
connection made with a bit of copper wire stripped from one of the
state-rooms, and Ford quickly adjusted the delicate spring of the tiny
field relay.
What he feared most was that the few dry-cells of the bell battery would
not supply the current for the eight miles of line up Horse Creek. For a
time, which lengthened to dragging minutes, the anxious experimenters
hung over the tiny field instrument. The sensitive magnet seemed wholly
dead. Then, suddenly, it began to tick hesitantly in response to Ford's
tapping of the key.
"Thank God, the battery is strong enough," he exclaimed. "Now, if there
is somebody within hearing at Frisbie's end of the line ..."
He was clicking persistently and patiently, "E-T," "E-T," "E-T,"
alternating now and then with the Horse Creek call and his own private
code letter, when Adair came up from his post at one of the rear
windows. The golden youth was the bearer of tidings, but Ford held up
his hand for silence: some one was breaking in to reply from
Frisbie's--Frisbie, himself, as the minimized tickings speedily
announced.
Ford snipped out his call for help in the fewest possible words:
Arm M'Grath's gang and bring it by train to Horse Creek, quick.
MacMorroghs are trying to dynamite us in the Nadia. FORD.
Almost without a break in the insect-like tickings the reply came:
Stand them off; help coming.
The thing done, the master workman in Ford snatched at the helm.
Did you catch and hold the pick-and-shovel men from this camp?
he clicked anxiously.
Got them all herded here and ready to go back to work--for more
pay,
answered Frisbie; and Ford ticked one more word, "Hurry," and closed the
key with a sigh of relief. Then, and not until then, Adair said: "Is
that all, for the present? If it is, I'm sorry to have to report that
the beggars outside have hit upon your gas-pipe scheme. They are rolling
a round, black thing with a string attached down upon us from the
commissary. The slant of the hill is just enough to keep it coming where
the ground is smooth."
From sheer force of habit, Ford disconnected his field telegraph, cased
and pocketed it. Then there was an instant adjournment to the rear
windows on the camp side. Happily, the rolling bomb was as yet only on
the way. Pebbles and roughnesses intervened here and there to stop or to
turn it aside, and since it was out of reach of their longest pole, the
dynamiters would start it on again by throwing stones at it.
Hereupon ensued a struggle which, under other conditions, would have
figured as horse-play. One after another the three men in the car heaved
cushions, pillows, obstructions of any sort, in the path of the rolling
menace. And behind the commissary barricade the dynamiters patiently
twitched the bomb by the firmly fastened fuse this way and that to avoid
the obstacles, or sent it forward under the impact of well-directed
missiles.
Ford was the first of the three to recognize the futility of the cushion
barricades.
"They'll beat us--they'll drop it in the ditch right here under us in
spite of fate!" he juried. "Brissac: go and break the glass in the
accident tool-case and bring me the ax, quickly!" And when he had it;
"Now get me a piece of that telegraph wire and bend a hook on the end
of it--jump for it; you'll have to twist it off with your fingers!"
With an energy that made no account of the lamed arm, Ford tore up the
carpet and fell to work fiercely, cutting a hole through the car floor;
while Brissac broke a piece from the wire and bent a finger-shaped hook
on the end of it. Adair, with his eye at a hole in a window shade, gave
his attention to the attack.
"They are getting it here, slowly but surely," he reported. "It is going
to roll under us just about where you are.... Now it has gone past my
line of sight." And a moment later, in the same drawling monotone: "They
have lighted the fuse, but there is a good long string of it to burn
through. Take your time--" then, with a sudden failure in the monotone:
"No, by Jove! you can't take your time! The fire is jumping across the
road to beat the band!"
The hole was opened through the floor, and Ford was on his stomach with
his face and an arm in the aperture, fishing desperately for the loop in
the fuse. It was his success, his sudden drawing of the loop up into the
car, that had shocked Adair out of his pose. Brissac was ready with the
ax, and the instant the loop appeared it was severed, the burning end
cast off, and the other end, with the bomb attached, was safely drawn up
into the car.
The perspiration was running from Ford's face in streams when he had
the engine of death securely in his hands.