Our high-noon wedding was in all respects as quiet and unostentatious
as we had planned it. The little brown box of a church, bare of
decorations because there was neither time nor the group of vicariously
interested young people to trim it, was only a few doors from the
Everton cottage, and we walked to it; Phineas Everton and I on each
side of the plank walk, and Polly between us with an arm for each.
Barrett had told a few of his friends, so there were enough people in
the pews to make it look a little less than clandestine. Barrett acted
as usher in one aisle and Gifford, very much out of his element but
doggedly faithful, did his part in the other. There was even a bit of
music; the Wagner as we went in, and a few bars of the Mendelssohn to
speed us as we went out. The good-byes were said at the church-door,
and the only abnormal thing about the leave-taking was Barrett's gift
to the bride, pressed into her hand as we were getting into the
carriage to go to the railroad station--a silver filigree hand-bag
stuffed heavy with five- and ten-dollar gold pieces, "to be blown in on
the wedding journey," as he phrased it.
We had agreed not to tell anybody where we were going; for that matter,
I didn't even tell Polly until after we had started. Turning southward
from Colorado Springs and stopping overnight in Trinidad, we took a
morning train on the Santa Fe and vanished into the westward void. A
day and a night beyond this we were debarking at Williams, Arizona, and
in due time reached our real hiding-place; a comfortable ranch house
within easy riding distance of that most majestic of immensities, the
Grand Canyon of the Colorado. It was Polly's idea; the choice of a
quiet retreat as against the social attractions of the great hotel on
the canyon's brink. We had each other, and that was sufficient.
Of that heavenly month, spent in a world far removed from all the
turmoil and distractions of modern civilization, there is nothing to be
here written down. For those who have drained a similar cup of
blissful happiness for themselves there is no need; and those who have
not would not understand. What I recall most vividly now is a single
unnerving incident; unnerving, I say, though at the time it was quickly
drowned in the flowing tide of joy.
It chanced upon a day toward the month's end when we had broken the
heavenly sequence of quiet days by riding a pair of our host's
well-broken cow ponies over to El Tovar for dinner. Since it was not
the tourist season there were not many guests in the great inn; but
one, a man who sat by himself in a far corner of the dining-room, gave
me a turn that made me sick and faint at my first sight of him. The
man was big and swarthy of face, and he wore a pair of drooping
mustaches. For one heart-stopping instant I made sure it was William
Cummings, the deputy prison warden who had so miraculously missed
seeing me in the dining-car of my train of escape. But since nothing
happened and he paid no manner of attention to us, I decided gratefully
that it was only a resemblance. There was no such name as Cummings on
the hotel register, which I examined after we left the dining-room, and
I saw no more of the man with the drooping mustaches.
Momentary as the shock had been, I found that Polly had remarked it.
She spoke of it on the ride back to our retreat at Carter's.
"Are you feeling entirely well, Jimmie, dear?" she asked; and before I
could reply: "You had a bad turn of some sort while we were at table.
I saw it in your face and eyes."
I hastened to assure her that there was nothing the matter with me;
that there couldn't be anything the matter with a man who had died and
gone to heaven nearly a month previous to the dinner at El Tovar.
"But the man has got to go back to earth again pretty soon, and take
the woman with him," she retorted, laughing. "Just think, Jimmie; it
has been nearly a month, as you say, and we haven't had a letter or a
telegram in all that time! Not that I'm regretting anything; I'm
happy, dearest--as happy as an angel with wings; but I want to see my
daddy."
The heavenly path was leading back into the old world again, the
fighting world, and I knew it, and presently we were taking all the
steps of the delightful vanishing in reverse; boarding the through
train at Williams, catching glimpses of the stupendous majesty of
mountain and plain as the powerful locomotives towed us up the grades
of the Raton, doing a brisk walk on the platform at Albuquerque while
the train paused, and all the rest of it.
From Trinidad I wired Barrett, telling him that we were on our way
home; that we should go in by way of Colorado Springs instead of
Florence, with a stop-over between trains for dinner at the Antlers. I
half-expected he would run down to the Springs to meet us, and so he
did, bringing Father Phineas with him. Polly's love for her father was
always very sweet and touching, and Barrett and I left them to
themselves at the meeting.
"I'm mighty glad to see you back, Jimmie, old man," Barrett declared,
when we had found a quiet corner in the rotunda. "You are looking like
a new man, and I guess you are one. And you are on your feet again
financially, too. We declared a dividend yesterday, and you've got a
bank account that will warm the cockles of your silly old heart."
"How is Gifford? and how are things at the mine?" I asked.
"Gifford is all right; only he's got too much money--doesn't know what
to do with it now that he has built all the new houses the camp will
stand for. And the Little Clean-Up is all right, too; though we are
digging into a small mystery just now."
"A mystery?" I queried.
"Yes. You remember how the branch vein in the two-hundred-foot level
was bearing off to the east?"
"I do."
"Well, three weeks ago the sloping carried us over into the Mary
Mattock ground, and I tell you what, Jimmie, I was more than glad we
had bought that claim outright while we could. The ore is richer than
anything we have found since we made the big strike at grass-roots, and
we'd be up against it good and hard if we hadn't paid those Nebraska
farmers what they asked and taken a clear title to the ground."
"But the mystery," I reminded him.
"It is a little trick of acoustics, I guess; it has happened in other
mines, so Hicks tells me. Some peculiar geological structure of the
porphyry in particular localities makes it carry sound like a telephone
wire. In that eastern adit of ours you can hear them working in the
Lawrenceburg as plainly as if they were only a few feet away."
"That is odd," I mused; "especially as the Lawrenceburg workings are
all in exactly the opposite direction--down the hill on their side of
the spur."
Barrett thrust his hands deep into his pockets.
"I have often wondered, Jimmie, if they really _are_ downhill. Nobody,
outside of the men on their own pay-roll, knows anything about it
definitely; and Blackwell wouldn't let an outside engineer go down his
shaft for a king's ransom. I know it, because I have tried to send
one. If the downhill story that we've been hearing should happen to be
a fake; if he should be under-cutting us, instead; it would explain a
heap of things."
"The stubborn lawsuit among others," I offered.
"Yes; the lawsuit. By the way, we've been up to our necks in that
while you've been hiding out. Blackwell's lawyers succeeded in
persuading the Federal court to grant a temporary injunction, in spite
of everything we could do, and we are operating now under an indemnity
bond big enough to make your head swim. The hearing to determine
whether the injunction shall be dissolved or made permanent is timed
for next Monday."
"Heavens!" I ejaculated. "We can't let them tie us up!"
"I don't think they are going to be able to. Benedict is feeling a
little better now and he thinks he has them sewed up in a blanket, only
he won't tell me how, and you never can tell what's going to happen
when the lawyers get at you. There are lots of holes in the legal
skimmer: for example, at the preliminary hearing Blackwell had three
surveyors who went on the stand and swore flat-footed that the lines on
our side of the spur were all wrong; that the Lawrenceburg group of
claims covered not only our original triangle, but the Mary Mattock as
well. Paid-for perjury, of course, but we couldn't prove it; so there
you are."
At my urging Barrett would have gone into this phase of the trouble
more deeply, but just then Polly and her father came across the rotunda
and we all went to the dining-room together. I shall never forget, the
longest day I live, just where our table for four stood, and how a
group of gabbling tourists had the three or four tables nearest to us,
and how the lights, due to some trouble with the electric current,
winked now and then, like the stage lights in a theater ticking off the
cues.
We had got as far as the black coffees, and Barrett was joking Polly
and telling her that she shouldn't take sugar, when I saw, through a
vista of the tourists, a square-shouldered, dark-faced man rising from
his place at a distant table. There was no mistaking him. He was the
man I had seen in the dining-room of the hotel at the Grand Canyon.
As he came toward us between the tables the resemblance, which I had so
confidently assured myself was only a resemblance, transformed itself
slowly into the breath-cutting reality, and I was staring up, wild-eyed
and speechless, into the face of the deputy warden, Cummings, when he
tapped me on the shoulder and said, loud enough for the others to hear:
"You've led us a pretty long chase, Weyburn, but we don't often miss,
and it's ended at last. I guess you'll have to come with me, now."