the safest place for it if they fall back on the gun-play."
As if his word had evoked it, a storm of rifle bullets swept through the
car, smashing windows, breaking the remaining gas globes and splintering
the wood-work. Again and again the flashes leaped out of the surrounding
shadows and the air was sibilant with whining missiles.
Brissac had the infernal machine: at first he fell upon it and covered
it with his body; afterward he crawled with it into the nearest
state-room and muffled it in a roll of berth mattresses.
When the storm ceased, as suddenly as it had begun, they crept together
in the vestibule farthest from the commissary lead-hurling volcano to
count the casualties.
There was none; not even a bullet score or a splinter-wound to show for
the hot bombardment, though the side of the Nadia facing the commissary
was riddled.
"I'm believing all I've ever read about its taking a hundred pounds of
lead to kill one man in a war battle," said the New Yorker, grimly
humorous to the last. "How do you two C. E.'s account for it?"
"We don't," said Ford shortly. "We're merely thankful that all
humankind habitually shoots high when it's excited or in a hurry."
[Illustration: Brissac hurled the skillet like a clumsy discus]
Then he sprang afoot, secured his ax, and sent Brissac to the pantry to
rummage for other weapons. "A rush is the next thing in order," he
suggested; and they prepared as they could to meet it.
But the rush did not come. Instead of it, one man, carrying what
appeared to be a bundle of dripping rags, came cautiously into the open
and approached the shattered car. The night wind sweeping down from the
upper valley was with him, and the pungent odor of kerosene was wafted
to and through the broken windows.
"Oho!" said Adair. "Having safely shot you dead or disabled, they are
now going to give you Christian burial, Ford. Also, they will
comfortably obliterate all the marks and scars of this pleasant
evening's diversion. How near shall I let him come before I squander one
of the two remaining cartridges on him?"
"Wait," said Brissac in a half-whisper. In his second pantry rummaging
he had found nothing more promising than a cast-iron skillet--promising
because it had weight and a handle to wield it by. The intending
incendiary was no more than a few yards from his goal when Brissac rose
up opposite the nearest shattered window and hurled the skillet like a
clumsy discus. His aim was true to a hand's-breadth: a bullet from
Adair's pistol could have done no more. With a cry that was fairly
shogged out of him by the impact of the iron missile, the man flung away
his burden, dropped in his tracks and lay groaning.
They looked for another storm of lead to follow this, and hugged the
floor in readiness for it. When it did not come, Ford crept to the hole
in the car floor and listened long and intently. Half an hour he had
given Frisbie to get his track-layers together, and to cover the eight
miles of rough-laid rails with the construction train. What was delaying
him?
"You said Gallagher ditched your car: did it block the track?" he asked
of Adair.
"It did, didn't it, Brissac?" was the answer, and the assistant
confirmed it.
"Then that is why Frisbie can't get to us. Was Gallagher's engine still
on the rails?"
"It was."
Ford sat up and nursed his knees. "Dick will make a way if he can't find
one ready made. But it may take hours. Meanwhile, if these devils have
scouts out--"
"Yes?" said Adair.
"They'll bring the warning, and there won't be much more time wasted in
experiments. They can do us up, if they get right down to business."
"What are they doing now?" Adair asked of Brissac, who was on watch on
the commissary side.
"I'll be hanged if I know. It looks like a young cannon, and it's
pointed this way. By George! it's coming--coming by its all alone, too!"
By this time they were all watching the new menace. Brissac's
description fitted it accurately; a cylindrical object mounted upon a
pair of small wheels taken from the commissary store-room truck. It came
toward the Nadia by curious surges--a rush forward and a pause--trailing
what appeared to be a long iron rod behind it.
Ford hit upon the explanation. The cylindrical thing was another
gas-pipe bomb; the iron tail was a smaller pipe containing and armoring
the fuse, and serving also as the means of propulsion. They were
coupling on additional lengths of the fuse-carrying pipe as they were
needed; hence the jerking advances and pauses.
Adair's low laugh was as care-free as ever.
"A practical illustration of the tail wagging the dog," he remarked.
"But the dog will wag us good and plenty when they get him where they
want him. You can't fish that thing up through the hole with your
wire--or crop the tail."
"No; it's a run for it, this time," said Ford, rising and stripping his
coat.
But Brissac was pointing to three or four men dodging from shadow to
shadow under the masthead lights and circling wide to tighten the line
of circumvallation.
"We shan't run very far," he commented.
It seemed a hair-graying age to the watchers at the Nadia's windows
before the men behind the commissary barricade got their infernal
machine placed to their liking. They stared at it, all three of them,
fascinated, deaf and blind to all else. A minimized shudder as of
drumming wheels or escaping steam was in the air when they saw the flare
of the match that betokened the firing of the fuse, but no one of the
three heard it.
It was when the sputtering line of fire had buried itself in its tube
that they became suddenly alive to the unbelievable fact that a
locomotive was thundering down the yard on the Nadia's track. A rifle
cracked; then another and a third; but the engine came on as if its
driver bore a charmed life.
Surely Michael Gallagher must have prayed to the saints that night. He
did not know that the very seconds had become priceless: he knew only
that Frisbie had sent him on ahead to snake the president's car out of
the Horse Creek yard as quickly as possible. Yet if he could have seen
the bomb and the sputtering fuse, he could not have slowed more deftly
to let the automatic couplers clutch each other, nor, at the touch and
clamp, could he have reversed and gathered headway with greater skill.
The three occupants of the Nadia staggered to their feet as the private
car lunged ahead in the grasp of the big engine, increasing speed with
every wheel-turn. Mechanically, and as one man, they rushed to the rear
platform. The mock cannon stood where it had been thrust; but in the
camp street a handful of men were wrestling madly with the pipe
fuse-carrier, breaking it, wrenching it in pieces, and stamping futilely
upon the snake-like thing hissing and spitting under their feet.
"Look!" sobbed Adair. "They know--they've discovered that box-car! Oh,
why in the name of the pitiful Christ don't they drop it and run?"
This from the man who had laughed, and aimed and fired and laughed
again, in the heat of battle. But Ford's rejoinder was the bitter
malediction of the defeated industry captain. "Damn their worthless
lives!" he stormed. "In the next half-minute the Pacific Southwestern
stands to lose a quarter of a million dollars!"
It was but a vanishing glimpse that they had of the handful of madmen
stamping and dancing under the masthead light in front of the
commissary; a glimpse withdrawing swiftly into a dim perspective as the
Nadia was whisked around the curve and up the Horse Creek grade.
It was after Gallagher had picked up the lights of the waiting train of
armed track-layers, and was whistling to announce his success, that the
end came. For the three watchers on the rear platform of the president's
car the little constellation of arc-stars in the valley below was
suddenly blotted out in a skyward belching of gray flame; a huge
volcano-burst of momentarily illuminated dust. Instinctively they
braced themselves for the concussion that followed,--a bellowing
thunderclap and a rending of earth and air that shook the surrounding
hills and drowned the shriek of Gallagher's whistle.
A blast of air, down-drawn from the heights to fill the dreadful vacuum,
was still rocking the stopped car when Frisbie climbed nimbly to the
railed rear platform and swung his lantern to light the faces of the
three men braced in the doorway.
"A close call, gentlemen," was his only comment; and then he appealed
briefly to Ford for orders.
"Back us down slowly," said Ford shortly, "and follow with your train.
We may need the men."
Frisbie went forward through the wrecked private car, returning
presently to flag Gallagher along with the lantern swung over the
railing. Down in the valley of the Pannikin the heavy, sickening fumes
of the burned explosives hung in the air, and when the car swung in on
the straight line the red glare of a wrecked and burning oil tank
lighted the scene.
The camp site was blankly unrecognizable. Where the ten-tracked yard had
been there was a vast depression, half-filled with distorted steel and
débris indescribable, twisted iron and splintered wood, with the water
from the river pouring into it. The commissary buildings and the
surrounding bunk-shanties were gone, swept away as with the stroke of a
mighty broom; and the trees on the hill-sides above were scorched and
shriveled as if a forest fire had blasted them.
Frisbie was the first to speak after he had flagged Gallagher to a stand
on the farthermost edge of the devastation.
"Any use to turn out the crew and hunt for them?" he asked.
Ford shook his head.
"No. Leave M'Grath and a few others to stand guard and to flag the
incoming steel trains, and let's get out of this. I'm sick; and so is
Mr. Adair."
XXVI
THE STAR OF EMPIRE
A week, the most strenuous week in Copah's history, had passed, and
still the president's party delayed its return to what Miss Priscilla
Van Bruce constantly referred to as "civilization"; though the Farthest
West has always been slow to admit the derogatory comparison which the
word implies.
During the strenuous week much had happened, and much more was scheduled
to happen. For one twenty-four-hour day the ex-speculator in Mr.
Colbrith held out against the sharp attacks of the reawakened lust of
conquest. Then, from Jack's Canyon on the Transcontinental, from
men-clustered construction trains on the extension, over the passes from
Summit Lakes, and across the brown plains from Green Butte, poured the
army of gold-seekers, and the president was swept away and into the very
vortex of the stock-jobbing whirlpool.
It was not until the third day of the week that Adair came ambling into
Copah, riding a cart mule from Frisbie's camp. To his sister and his
aunt the young man told everything; to his uncle nothing. Between gasps
in the speculative frenzy Mr. Colbrith found time to complain bitterly
to his nephew of Ford's defection.
"It was dastardly!" he shrilled. "We had some words; I don't deny that
we had some words. But he was most unreasonable. He should have gone
about his business and let me have time to consider. Here are thousands
of people pouring into this place, everything at famine prices, no
supplies for our miners, no railroad to bring them. What's this I hear
about an accident at Horse Creek? Why isn't Ford on the ground attending
to his railroad building and straightening things out? Have I got to
forfeit the money-making chance of a lifetime and go and drag that track
into Copah with my own hands?"
Adair seemed suddenly to have lost his tongue, which was certainly glib
enough ordinarily. All he would say was that the engineering department
was still at work, he believed; that the track was approaching Copah,
slowly, perhaps, but pretty surely.
"But without a head!" snapped the irate president. "Ford is a traitor to
the company. Tell him so from me, sir, if you know where he is
skulking."
Adair did tell Ford, circumstantially, when he rode the cart mule out of
town the next morning and met the young engineer at the head of a
tremendously augmented track force, rushing the rails around the
swelling hills on the approach to the mining-camp-city.
"Oh, he's still up in the air," laughed the director, when he had
repeated the president's wrathful outburst. "Frantic because the road
isn't finished; frantic because he can't get in on all the ground-floors
in all the mining deals; frantic some more because he has to live in a
shack hotel while he has a private car and a good cook, as he thinks,
only a few miles away. Which reminds me: the '01' has a pretty good
cook, and the incomparible Johnson,--don't let them escape. Have you
sent the Nadia back to Denver for repairs?"
"Yes; Frisbie went over in it this morning."
"Frisbie?"
"Yes, I had to let him go. Word came from Leckhard as soon as we got the
wire reestablished, which was late last night. North was taken suddenly
ill the day after the explosion. He resigned at once by wire to the
executive committee in New York, and two days later he took a steamer
from Galveston for nobody knows where; health trip--doctor's
orders--Leckhard said. I sent Frisbie over to be acting manager of the
system, pending the president's--er--recovery from _his_ sudden illness.
Leckhard says the New York people are burning the wires trying to get
word to Mr. Colbrith."
"They may go on burning them," said Adair calmly. "Uncle Sidney isn't
going to quit until he owns a good half of the Copah district--or gets
his armature burned out. And if he were ready to quit, we shouldn't let
him. But how are things working out on the extension?--that is what
interests me."
"Bully!" was the enthusiastic reply. "We're spending money like water;
paying anything that's asked; and even then the men come and go like a
torchlight procession. But we are keeping the surfacing gangs neck-full
the entire length of the line, and Leckhard has already organized his
regular train service over the first hundred miles. That puts us on an
even footing with the Transcontinental at Jack's Canyon, and the tide is
fairly turned our way. When we lay the rails into Copah,--which will be
the day after to-morrow, if nothing pulls in two,--the first through
passenger train, with the '01' in tow, will be right behind us. Does the
report satisfy you?"
"Your word fits it: it's bully."
"Then I want my reward. When am I to be allowed to chase in and pay my
respects to your--er--aunt, and--and Miss Alicia?"
Adair laughed.
"My--er--aunt!" he mocked. "Much you care about Aunt Hetty. And I've a
thing or two to say about Alicia. Who gave you leave to fall in love
with my little sister, I'd like to know?"
"She did," retorted Ford brazenly. "Don't tell me you are going to try
to kick it over at this late day. You can't, you know."
Adair tilted his hat to the back of his head and thrust his hands into
his pockets.
"I'm no such wild ass of the prairies," he declared. "But, my good
friend, you don't come into town till you bring your railroad with you.
I know how it will be: you'd linger for just one more last fond
farewell, and about that time Uncle Sidney would drop in on you
unexpectedly. Then there'd be a family row, after which my Pacific
Southwestern stock wouldn't be worth a whoop. No; you wait till I get
Uncle Sidney safely where I want him--properly in the nine-hole, and
then I'll flag you in."
The chance for which the golden youth was waiting and working climaxed
on the day the extension rails came down the hill-side grade above the
town--a town now spreading into a wilderness of hastily built and
crowding structures. It was a simple pit he had digged for an old man
suddenly gone mad with the fever of mine-buying. From picking up stock
in a score of prospects, Mr. Colbrith had hedged by concentrating his
heavy investments in six or seven of the most promising of the partly
developed properties. Then, to make assurance reasonably sure, he had
sprung the modern method of combination upon his fellow stock-holders in
the producing mines. The promising group was to be merged in one giant
holding corporation, strong enough to control the entire Copah
situation.
But there were obstacles in the way; obstructions carefully placed, if
the truth must be told, by an unscrupulous young manipulator in the
president's own household. The Little Alicia was in the group, was the
keystone in the combination arch, as it chanced, and unhappily Grigsby
had parted with a grievous block of his share of the stock--a block
which could neither be recovered nor traced to its present holder. Not
to make a mystery of the matter, the certificates were safely locked in
a safety-deposit box in the vault of the Bank of Copah, and the key to
the box rattled in Adair's pocket. And because the Little Alicia could
not be included, three other necessary votes were withheld when the
president tried to get action.
Mr. Colbrith was in despair. A good many of his investments were
palpably bad; and they could be recouped only by the backing of the
combination. And the combination obstinately refused to combine unless
the Little Alicia could be gathered in. At the end of the ends Mr.
Colbrith appealed to his nephew.
"You know where Ford is," he began accusingly. "You needn't deny it. I
was in hopes we wouldn't have to ask him to sell us more than one share
of his stock, which he couldn't decently refuse to do if we let him set
his own price. But since we can't trace that block that Grigsby let go,
we must have nearly all of Ford's. Find him: get his stock if you have
to pay twice par for it. If you don't, I--I shall be the heaviest loser
in this camp, Charles Edward." It was gall and wormwood to the old man,
but it had to be swallowed.
"So you are coming around to ask a favor of Ford?" said the young man
unfeelingly. "He won't help you out. You mustn't forget that you kicked
him out of the family; or rather you kicked him to prevent his getting
into it."
"But think of the profit to him!" protested the president. "He paid only
twenty cents for his half of the Alicia; he told me so himself. At two
hundred he'd clear ninety thousand; a magnificent amount for so young a
man!"
"Ford doesn't care anything about money. You can't move him that way."
"Well, then, find him for me and I'll--I'll apologize," said Mr.
Colbrith, pressed now to the last extremity.
"He doesn't want your apologies, Uncle Sidney. Your little tiff was
between man and man, and he'd never think of holding you accountable for
anything you were foolish enough to say."
"Then what in heaven's name does he want?"--irascibly.
"Oh, a lot of things: reinstatement; your order to investigate the
Denver management; a chance to build his railroad unmolested; and, as a
side issue, a chance to whitewash your administration of Pacific
Southwestern by conducting the house-cleaning in your name--this last
because he thinks something of the family honor. He doesn't have to
consider us, you know. At the next annual meeting he can elect Brewster
president over your head: then you will have to stand for all the
grafting and deviltry that will be unearthed."
The ground for this duel between President Colbrith and the determined
young pace-setter was the lobby of the tar-paper-covered hotel, cleared
now of the impromptu mining-stock exchange, which had moved into
permanent quarters. The old man rose stiffly and stood grasping the
chair-back.
"The same reckless charges against Mr. North and his subordinates--and
now _you_ are making them!" he rasped. "They are groundless; groundless,
I tell you!"
Adair looked at his watch, listened a moment as for some expected sound
from out-of-doors, and motioned toward the vacated chair.
"Sit down, Uncle Sidney, and let me tell you what happened at Horse
Creek camp a week ago last night," he said evenly; and then he told the
story of the attempt upon Ford's life, of the siege of the Nadia, of the
terrible catastrophe which had involved all three of the MacMorroghs,
the commissary staff, Eckstein, and the headquarters camp. When he
finished, the president was shaking as if from a chill. Yet one thread
of the strong strand of loyalty still held.
"It was horrible--fiendish!" he shuddered. "But it was the MacMorroghs'
fight. It does not necessarily incriminate North."
"It does," said Adair, in the same even tone. "I told you that we left a
few men at the wrecked camp to warn the incoming material trains. They
found a single survivor of the thirteen men who tried to destroy us and
the Nadia. It was Eckstein, North's secretary, and before he died he
amply confirmed all of our guesses. They had plotted to have you quarrel
with Ford. Ford had bought his half of the Little Alicia without any
prompting, but from that as a starting point the entire scheme was
worked up. The MacMorroghs' bookkeeper, a man named Merriam--who is at
present in Copah, and whose deposition I have had taken before a justice
of the peace--was detailed to win Frisbie over to the change of
route--no difficult thing, since the change was for the better. But
Merriam's part was chiefly to keep Frisbie from finding out anything
about Ford's mine; which he did. Am I making it clear?"
The president bowed his head.
"Then, when you came West on your inspection trip, the trap was sprung.
You were told that Ford had been doing a dishonorable thing, and you
were urged to come over here and see for yourself. To make sure that
there should be no slips, Penfield was sent with you, ostensibly as
your acting secretary, but really as a spy--"
"Oh, no; I can't think that of young Penfield," protested the president.
"I say yes; and the proof is that Penfield has confessed. He was scared
into it when I told him what had happened at Horse Creek and gave him
his choice of telling me what he knew, or going to jail. Then I came on
the scene at the inopportune moment, and after North had carefully
issued instructions intended to delay me as much as possible, he sent
Eckstein in post-haste by way of Jack's Canyon and the stage trail to
get ahead of me. You see, he was afraid to trust matters to Penfield,
who would most certainly have stopped short of the desperate measures
Eckstein and the MacMorroghs finally took. It was decided at a council
in which Penfield was present, that Ford's elimination must go through.
If you didn't quarrel with him and drop him, he was to be murdered."
Mr. Colbrith was silent for a long minute after Adair ceased speaking.
Then he looked up to say: "What was Ford doing at Horse Creek that
night? He had left me only a few hours before; and, as I have said, we
had--we had some words."
Adair smiled. "He was about to begin doing what he has been doing ever
since: flogging the extension into shape night and day to get it ready
to carry passengers and freight. He conceived it to be his duty--to you
as well as to the other stock-holders. And he _has_ flogged it into
shape. Look out of that window, Uncle Sidney!"
A long passenger train, crowded to the platforms, and with the private
car "01" in tow, was winding down the grade of the opposite hillside,
and as they stepped to the windows the engineer woke the echoes with the
engine whistle.
"The first one of many, let us hope," said the young man, standing at
his uncle's elbow. Then, with quite a different note in his voice: "It's
Stuart's work, all of it. He has scarcely stopped to eat or sleep since
that horrible night in the Pannikin valley. And that night, Uncle
Sidney, I fought shoulder to shoulder with him--as a brother should; he
is a man, and--there are not many more--like him."
The president's thin lips were drawn into straight lines, and the thin
goat's-beard stood out at the argumentative angle. Mr. Colbrith was
chary of his emotions.
"Will he sell us that stock in the Little Alicia, Charles Edward?"
Adair smiled at the determined return to the practical.
"No," he said; "I don't think he will--I shouldn't, if I were in his
place. But he will do the next best thing: he will marry Alicia and so
bring it into the family. And on the railroad conditions I have named,
I am quite sure he will make you his voting proxy if you want to use it
in forcing the combine."
The president took a turn as far as the clerk's counter and back. The
lobby was deserted, everybody having gone to welcome the first train
into Copah.