It is no part of my purpose to burden this narrative with the story of
the development of our mine. Let it be sufficient to say that it
speedily proved to be one of the most phenomenal "producers" among the
later discoveries in the Cripple Creek district. The stories of such
spectacular successes have been made commonplace by the newspapers, and
that of the "Little Clean-Up" would--if I should give the real name of
our bonanza--be remembered and recognized by many who saw it grow by
leaps and bounds from a mere prospect hole to a second "Gold Coin."
To summarize briefly. Within a month we had settled down to business
and were incorporated, with Barrett as president, and Gifford, who
chose his own job, resident manager and superintendent. The
secretary-treasurership, combined under one office head, fell to me.
With a modern mining plant in operation, the sinking and driving paused
only at the hours of shift-changing; and after we began shipping in
quantity our bank balances grew like so many juggler's roses--this
though we had to spend money like water in the various lawsuits which
sprang up from day to day.
Many of these suits were based upon cross-claims--contentions that we
were overlapping other properties--and most of these we were able to
compromise by buying off the litigants. By this means we acquired the
entire area of the original triangle. When the news of our strike
reached Nebraska, the owners of the Mary Mattock sought to break their
sale to us on the ground that we had stacked the cards against them.
But our lawyers were too shrewd to be caught in such a flimsy net as
this. At Benedict's suggestion we drove a drainage tunnel on the
purchased property and unwatered the three shafts which the Nebraskans
had sunk; an expedient which enabled us to prove to the satisfaction of
the courts that the Mary Mattock, at the time of its abandonment by its
original owners, was nothing more than a series of prospect holes, and
that the property was valueless save for a dumping ground.
Through all these bickerings and compromisings the Lawrenceburg fight
held on, giving us the most trouble and costing the most money.
Blackwell proved himself to be a scrapper of sorts, leaving no
expedient untried in his attempts to tie us up and put us out of
business. Shortly after we began developing in earnest, he put a
shaft-sinking force on the nearest of the Lawrenceburg upper claims on
the hillside above us, hoping, as we supposed, to flood us out by
tapping one of the numerous underground water bodies with which the
region abounds and turning it loose on us. At least, we could imagine
no other reason for the move, since the growing dump at this upper
working was entirely barren of ore, and remained so.
On our own part we were able to get back at Blackwell only in small
ways. When he tried to shut us out of our wagon road right-of-way in
the gulch, we beat him in the courts and made him pay damages for
obstructing us. Later, when his upper dump began to encroach upon our
ground, we sued him again and got more damages, with a peremptory order
from the court to vacate.
Still later we took Phineas Everton away from him. The assayer had had
some disagreement with Blackwell, the nature of which was not
explained, but which I, for one, could easily understand, and Everton,
apologetic now for his early suspicion of us, had told Barrett that he
was open to a proposal. The proposal was promptly made and we
installed Everton as our assayer and expert in the town offices,
fitting up a laboratory for him which lacked nothing that money could
buy in the way of furnishings and equipment.
Consequent upon this change, Barrett and I both saw more of the
Evertons. They took a small house in town and Polly welcomed us both,
making no distinction, so far as I could determine, between the
president and the secretary-treasurer. Barrett's attitude toward Polly
puzzled me not a little. He was a frequent visitor in the cottage on
the hill, but he rarely went without asking me to go along. If he were
really Mary Everton's lover, he was certainly going about his
love-making most moderately, I concluded.
I like to remember that I was loyal to him at this time in spite of the
puzzlement. It is perhaps needless to say that these cottage visits
had done their worst for me and I was hopelessly in love with the
sweet-faced, honest-hearted young woman who had grown out of the
brown-eyed little girl of the Glendale school-days. Nevertheless, I
was still able to recognize the barrier which my conviction,
imprisonment and escape, together with the ever-present peril of
recapture, interposed; also I was able to recognize Barrett's prior
claim, and the fact that he could leave wife and children the priceless
heritage of a good name and a clean record--as I could not.
Touching this matter of peril, the period of our beginnings as a
corporation was not without its alarms. Twice I had seen Kellow at a
distance, and once I had stood beside him at the hotel counter where he
had been examining the registered list of names at a moment when I, all
unconscious of his presence until I was elbowing him, had stopped in
passing to ask a question of the clerk. That near-encounter showed me
that I was neither better nor worse than the man who had stood, loaded
weapon in hand, on the sidewalk in the heart of a June night, coldly
deliberating upon the advisability of committing a murder. I was
conscious of a decent hope that Kellow wouldn't look up and recognize
me--as he did not--but coincident with the hope the homicidal devil was
whispering me to be ready with the pistol, without which I never went
abroad any more, even to cross the street from my rooms to the office.
And I was ready.
This mania, which seemed fated to seize me at any moment when my
liberty was threatened, added another stone to the barrier of good
resolutions which I had builded in behalf of my loyalty to Barrett and
a more or less chivalrous consideration for Mary Everton and her future
peace of mind. If the ex-convict might not venture, the potential
man-slayer was at a still greater disadvantage.
I recall, as vividly as if it were yesterday, how the first small
breach was made in this barrier of good resolutions. Barrett and I
were in Denver together, joining forces in our regular monthly fight
with the smelter pirates. We had been to the theater and were smoking
bedtime cigars in the mezzanine lounge of the Brown Palace. I have
forgotten the name of the play we had seen, and even the plot of it;
all that I recollect is that it turned upon the well-worn theme of
loyalty in love.
Barrett seldom talked of himself or his past, even to me; and I was
closer to him, I think, than anyone else in the West. But the play
seemed to have touched some hidden spring. Almost before I knew it he
was telling me of his college days, and of his assured future at that
time as the only son of a well-to-do New England manufacturer.
"Those were the days when I didn't have a care in the world," he said.
"My father was the typical American business man, intent upon piling up
a fortune for my mother and sister and me. I couldn't see that he was
wearing himself out in the effort to get ahead, and at the same time to
give us all the luxuries as we went along; none of us could see it.
His notion was to put me through the university, give me a year or so
abroad, and then to take me into the business with him. . . . Don't
let me bore you."
"You are not boring me," I said.
"Then there was the girl: that had been arranged for both of us, too,
though we were carefully kept from suspecting it. I can't tell you
what she was to me, Jimmie, but in a worldful of women she was the only
one. She was in college, too, but we had our vacations together--at a
little place on the Maine coast where her people and mine had cottages
less than a stone's throw apart."
Barrett's cigar had gone out, but he seemed not to know it. His eyes
were half-closed, and for the moment his strong clean-cut young face
looked almost haggard. I let him take his own time. In such
confidences it is only the sympathetic ear that is welcome; speech in
any sort can scarcely be less than impertinent.
"I shall never forget our last summer together," he went on, after a
bit. "It seemed as if everything conspired to make it memorable. We
were both fond of canoeing and sailing and swimming; she could do all
three better than most men. Then there were the moonlit nights on the
beach when we sat together on the white sands and planned for the
future, the future of clear skies, of ambitions working out their
fulfilment in the passing years, the blessed after-while in which there
were to be an ideal home and little children, and always and evermore
the love that makes all things beautiful, all things possible.
"We planned it all out in those August days and moonlit nights. I had
one more year in the university, and after that we were to be married
and go to Europe together. No young fellow in this world ever had
brighter prospects than I had on the day when I went back to college to
begin my senior year, Jimmie." He paused for a moment and then went on
with a deeper note in his voice. "The lights all went out, blink,
between two days, as you might say. The treasurer of the company of
which my father was the president became an embezzler, and the crash
ruined us financially and practically killed my father--though the
doctors called it heart failure. And I had been at home less than a
month, trying to save something out of the wreck for my mother and
sister, when I lost the girl."
"She couldn't stand the change in circumstances?" I offered.
"She was drowned in a yachting accident, and they never found her body."
"Oh, good heavens!" I exclaimed, suddenly and acutely distressed and
remorseful for the cynical suggestion I had thrust in.
He shook his head slowly. "It came near smashing me, Jimmie. It
seemed so unnecessary; so hideously out of tune with everything. I
thought at the time that I should never get over it and be myself
again, and I still think so, though the passing years have dulled the
sharp edges of the hurt. There never was another girl like her, and
there never will be another--for me."
"But you will marry, some day, Bob," I ventured.
"Possibly--quite probably. Sentiment, of the sort our fathers and
mothers knew, has gone out of fashion, and the money chase has made new
men and women of the present generation. But some of the old longings
persist for a few of us. I want a home, Jimmie, and at least a few of
the things that the word stands for. Some day I hope to be able to
find a woman who will take what there is left of me and give me what
she can in return. I shan't ask much because I can't give much."
"I guess you have already found her," I said, with a dull pain at my
heart.
"Not Polly," he denied quickly. "I couldn't get my own consent to
cheat a woman like Polly Everton. She has a right to demand the best
that a man can give, and all of it. Besides, it doesn't lie altogether
with me or my possible leanings, in Polly's case--as no man knows
better than yourself."
"Oh, you are wrong there, entirely wrong!" I hastened to say. "Polly
and I are the best of good friends--nothing more."
His smile was a deal more than half sad.
"If there is 'nothing more,' Jimmie, it is very pointedly your own
fault," he returned. "I've been wondering what you are waiting for.
You have been poking your head into the sand like a silly old ostrich,
but you haven't fooled me--or Polly, either, I think--for a single
minute. What's the obstacle?"
I was silent. Not even to so close a friend as Robert Barrett could I
give the real reason why my lips were sealed and must remain so. He
went on, after a time, good-naturedly ignoring my hesitancy.
"It was all right at first, of course; while we couldn't tell whether
we had a mine or only a costly muddle of litigation. But it's
different now. We are going to beat the Lawrenceburg people in the
end, and apart from that, if we should split up right here and now,
we've got an undivided surplus of--how much was it yesterday?--you've
got the records."
"A little under a million."
"Call it nine hundred thousand to divide among the three of us. Your
share of that would at least enable you and Polly to begin light
house-keeping in a five-room flat, don't you think?"
What could I say? How could I tell him that he was opening a door for
me that I could never enter; that by all the canons of decency and
honor I should never seek to enter? In the mingled emotions of the
moment there was a blind anger at the thought that he had unconsciously
made my hard case infinitely harder by showing me that my loyalty to
him was entirely needless.
"There are good reasons why I can't think of such a thing," I began;
but when I would have gone on the words froze in my throat. Since the
hour was nearly midnight, the mezzanine lounge was practically
deserted. But as I choked up and stopped, a couple, a man and a woman
who had come around from the other side of the gallery parlors, passed
us on their way to the elevator alcove.
I hardly saw the man of the pair. A second after they had passed I
could not have told whether he was black or white. That was because
the woman, fair, richly gowned, statuesquely handsome and apparently in
perfect health, was Agatha Geddis.