We held our second war council shortly after Phineas Everton and his
daughter had disappeared over the shoulder of the spur on their way
back to the Lawrenceburg. I gave my two partners the gist of the
conversation with the assayer, briefly and without comment. Gifford
oozed profanity; but Barrett laughed and said:
"Every little new thing we run up against merely urges us to let out
one more notch in the speed of the hurry hoist. Everton's suspicion is
an entirely natural one, and for my part, I only hope he and Blackwell
will hang on to it. If they should, there is an even chance that they
will watch their ore sheds a little closer and leave it to us to make
the first move in the imagined blackmailing scheme--all of which will
give us more time."
"That's all right; but we can't bet on the 'hang on,'" was Gifford's
demurrer. "They may think they've got the straight of it now, but
there's no law against their changing their minds mighty suddenly.
Suppose Everton shows up his bit of a sample, and they both take a
second whirl at the thing and pull down a guess that it isn't stolen
Lawrenceburg ore, after all? We've got to improve upon this
pick-a-back ore shipment of ours, some way, and do it mighty quick."
This was the biting fact; we all accepted it as our most pressing need
and fell to discussing ways and means. There was already a full
wagon-load of the sacked ore hidden under the sleeping-shack, and at
the rate the lode was widening we could confidently figure on getting
out as much more every second day, or oftener. There was a good wagon
road to town from the Lawrenceburg plant, but of course we dared not
use it so long as we were making any attempt to maintain secrecy. The
alternative was a long haul down our own gulch, around the end of the
spur, and across the slope of the mountain-side below. Even this, the
only other practicable route, would be in plain sight from the
Lawrenceburg workings, once the team should pass out upon the bare
lower hillside.
Moreover, we were obliged to consider the risk involved in taking at
least one other man--the driver of the team--into our confidence.
Since the hauling would have to be done in the night, an honest man
would suspect crookedness, and the other kind would blackmail us to a
finish. Gifford spoke of this, saying that it was a choice between the
devil and the deep blue sea.
None the less, we were all agreed that the wagon-hiring hazard would
have to be taken, and at the close of the talk Barrett went to town to
make the arrangement. It was after dark when he returned. His mission
had been miraculously successful: he had not only found a trustworthy
teamster who was willing, for a good, round sum, to risk his horses on
the mountain at night; he had also interviewed the superintendent of
the sampling works and concluded a deal by the terms of which the
company--as a personal favor to Barrett--agreed to treat a limited
quantity of our highest-grade ore in wagon-load lots, making cash
settlements therefor.
It lacked only an hour of midnight when the team, making a wide detour
to avoid being heard from the Lawrenceburg, reached our location on the
slope of the spur. We all helped with the loading; and when all was
ready, Gifford, whose turn it was to go to town, borrowed Barrett's
shot-gun and climbed to a seat beside the driver.
With every precaution taken--a dragging pine-tree coupled on behind the
load to serve instead of the squealing brakes, and many injunctions to
the driver to take it easy and to do his swearing internally--the
outfit made more noise than a threshing-machine bumping down the gulch.
We kept pace with it, Barrett and I, following along the crest of the
spur with an apprehensive eye on the Lawrenceburg. But there was no
unusual stir at the big plant on the other side of the ridge; merely
the never-ceasing clank and grind of the hoist and the pouring thunder
of the ore as the skip dumped its load into the bins.
Having nothing to detain him in town, Gifford made a quick trip and was
with us again a little after four o'clock in the morning. At the crack
of dawn Barrett and I were in the shaft under a new division of time.
Now that we had the team hauling for us, we chopped up the shifts so
that there would be two of us in the hole continuously, day and night.
Again I have the memory of a week of grinding toil, broken--for me, at
least--only by the nights when it came my turn to ride to town on the
load of ore. On both occasions I recall that I went fast asleep on the
high seat before the wagon had gone twenty rods down the gulch; slept
sitting bolt upright, with the shot-gun across my knees, and waking
only when the driver was gee-ing into the yard of the sampling works in
town; lapses that I may confess here, though I was ashamed to confess
them to my two partners.
During this second week we heard nothing from Blackwell or from any of
the Lawrenceburg contingent. But several strangers had drifted along,
stopping to peer down our shaft and to ask multitudinous questions.
Knowing well enough that we could not keep up the killing toil
indefinitely, and that the discovery crisis was only postponed from day
to day, we yet took heart of grace. The purchase money for the ore was
pouring in a steady stream into Barrett's bank to our credit; and with
the accounting for the third wagon-load we had upward of $80,000 in the
fighting fund.
Gifford went in as wagon guard on the Monday night load, and getting an
early start from the mountain, he had a little time to spend on the
streets in town. On his return he brought news; the news we had all
been expecting and waiting for.
"The big trouble's on the way," he reported. "Bennett Avenue's all lit
up with the news that there's been a new strike on Bull Mountain. I
heard about it mighty near everywhere I went. Up to date nobody seems
to know just where it is, or who has made it; but they've got hold of
the main guy, all right. One fellow told me he had it straight from
the sampling works. Some cuss on the inside, I reckon, who doesn't
know enough to keep his blame' mouth shut, has gone and leaked."
"I'd like mighty well to see another eighty thousand in the bank before
we have to shut our eyes and begin handing it out to the lawyers," said
Barrett. "Besides, when we get ready to build a shaft-house and put in
machinery, we'll have to have more ground room. After the news gets
out, we'll just about have to blanket what land we buy with
twenty-dollar gold-pieces."
"With the Lawrenceburg hemming us in the way it does, we won't be able
to buy elbow room at any kind of a price, will we?" asked Gifford, who
had not gone into the topographies as minutely as Barrett and I had.
"There are the three corners of the original triangle which we weren't
able to cover in our claim," Barrett explained. "And down yonder on
that gulch flat that we are using for a wagon road there is a claim
called the 'Mary Mattock' which was taken up and worked and dropped a
year or so ago by a Nebraska syndicate. When I was in town last week I
gave Benedict, of Benedict & Myers, the job of running down the owners,
with the idea that we might possibly wish to buy the ground a little
later on.
"Good work!" Gifford applauded. "I wouldn't have thought of anything
as foxy as that."
"I told Benedict we'd buy the Mary Mattock if we could get it at a
reasonable figure, or lease it if we couldn't buy it," Barrett went on.
"It is probably worthless to its present owners as it stands; its three
shafts are full of water, and I'm told the Nebraskans spent fifty
thousand dollars trying to pump them. But the minute the 'Little
Clean-Up' gets into the newspapers, the Mary Mattock, being next door
to us, will figure in the market as a bonanza, whether it is or isn't."
Gifford cut himself a chew of tobacco from his pocket-plug.
"I wish to gracious we had that other eighty thousand you're honing
for, right now," he protested. "This tin-basin trot's sure getting on
my nerves, as the fella said. We'd ought to have the shaft-house and
machinery set up and going, this minute, and a good, husky bunch of men
at work in that hole, digging out dollars where we're scratching for
pennies."
"I don't want to be the shy man of this outfit," Barrett put it
quickly. "We can have the machinery if you fellows think we dare use
the money to buy it."
Gifford and I both said No, deferring to Barrett's better judgment.
And since this talk was getting us nowhere and was wasting time which
was worth ten dollars a minute, we broke it off and went to work.
It was in the latter part of this third week, on a night when my turn
at the wagon guarding had come in regular course, that I was made to
understand that no leaf in the book of a man's life can be so firmly
pasted down that a mere chance thumbing of the pages by an alien hand
may not flip it back again.
By imperceptible inchings we had been starting the wagon earlier and
earlier on each successive trip; and on the evening in question it was
no later than ten o'clock when I turned the consignment of ore over to
the foreman at the reduction works. Ordinarily, I should have taken
the road back to the hills at once, intent only upon getting to camp
and between the blankets as speedily as possible. But on this night a
spirit of restlessness got hold of me, and, leaving Barrett's shotgun
in the sampling works office, I strolled up-town.
Inasmuch as a three-months' residence in a mining-camp is the full
equivalent of as many years spent in a region where introductions
precede acquaintance, I was practically certain to meet somebody I
knew. The somebody in this instance proved to be one Patrick Carmody,
formerly a hard-rock boss on the Midland branch construction, and now
the working superintendent of a company which was driving a huge
drainage tunnel under a group of the big mines of the district.
The meeting-place was the lobby of the hotel, and at the Irishman's
invitation I sat with him to smoke a comradely cigar. Carmody was not
pointedly inquisitive as to my doings; was content to be told that I
had been "prospecting around." Beyond that he was good-naturedly
willing to talk of the stupendous undertaking over which he was
presiding, expatiating enthusiastically upon air-drill performance,
porphyry shooting, the merits of various kinds of high explosives,
deep-mine ventilation, and the like.
While he talked, I smoked on, luxuriating like a cat before a fire in
the comfortable lounging-chair, the cheerful surroundings, the stir and
bustle of the human ebb and flow, and the first half-hour of real
idleness I had enjoyed in many days.
It was after Carmody had been dragged away by some fellow hard-rock
enthusiast that I had my paralyzing shock. Sitting in a chair less
than a dozen feet distant, smoking quietly and reading a newspaper, was
a man whose face would have been familiar if I had seen it in the
golden streets of the New Jerusalem or in the deepest fire-chamber of
the other place; a face with boring black eyes, and with a cruel mouth
partly hidden by freshly crimped black mustaches: the face, namely, of
my sometime prison-mate, Kellow.
My shocked recognition of this man who tied me to my past annihilated
time and distance as if they had never been. In a flash I was back
again in a great stone building in the home State, working over the
prison books and glancing up now and then to the cracked mirror on the
opposite wall of the prison office which showed me the haggard features
and cropped hair of the convict Weyburn.
The memory shutter flicked, and I saw myself walking out through the
prison gates with the State's cheap suit of clothes on my back and the
State's five dollars in my pocket, a paroled man. Another click, and I
had dragged through the six months of degradation and misery, and saw
myself sitting opposite Kellow in the back room of a slum saloon in a
great city, shivering with the cold, wretched and hungry. Once again I
saw his sneer and heard him say, "It's all the same to you now, whether
you cracked the bank or didn't. You may think you can live the prison
smell down, but you can't; it'll stick to you like your skin. Wherever
you go, you'll be a marked man."
It is a well-worn saying that life is full of paper walls. A look, a
turn of the head, the recognition which would follow, and once more I
should be facing a fate worse than death. Kellow knew that I had
broken my parole. He would trade upon the knowledge, and if he could
not use me he would betray me. I knew the man.
Five minutes earlier I had been facing the world a free man; free to go
and come as I pleased, free to sit and smoke with a friend in the most
public place in the camp. But now I slid from my chair with my hat
pulled over my eyes and crept to the door, watching Kellow every step
of the way, ready to bolt and run, or to turn and fight to kill, at the
slightest rustling of the upheld newspaper. Once safely outside in the
cool, clean night air of the streets I despised myself with a loathing
too bitter to be set in words. But the fact remained.
It was like the strugglings of a man striving to throw off the
benumbing effects of an opium debauch--the effort to be at one again
with the present. The effort was no more than half successful when I
stepped into a late-closing hardware store and bought a weapon--a
repeating rifle with its appropriate ammunition. Barrett had said
something about the lack of weapons at the claim--we had only the
shot-gun and Gifford's out-of-date revolver--and I made the purchase
automatically in obedience to an underlying suggestion which was
scarcely more than half conscious.
But once more in the street, and with the means in my hands, a sudden
and fierce impulse prompted me to go back to the hotel lobby and kill
the man who held my fate between his finger and thumb. Take it as a
virtue or a confession of weakness, as you will, but it was only the
thought of what I owed Barrett and Gifford that kept me from doing it.
So it was a potential murderer, at least in willing intention, who took
the long trail back under the summer stars to the hills, with the rifle
and Barrett's shot-gun--the latter picked up in passing the sampling
works--nestling in the hollow of his arm. God or the devil could have
given me no greater boon that night than the hap to meet Kellow on the
lonesome climb. I am sure I should have shot him without the faintest
stirring of irresolution. By the time I reached our gulch I was fuming
over my foolishness in buying the rifle--a clumsy weapon that would
everywhere advertise my purpose. What I needed, I told myself, was a
pocket weapon, to be carried day and night; and the next time I should
go to town the lack should be supplied.
For by now all scruples were dead and I was assuring myself grittingly
that the entire Cripple Creek district was too narrow to hold the man
who knew, and the man who was afraid.