IN THE PIT OF NIGHT
Hugh strolled down Turkey Creek Avenue and lost himself in the crowd
which filled the walks and jostled its overflow into the road. Piodie
called itself a city, but it had as yet no street lights, no sewers, no
waterworks, no graded roads, and no sidewalks other than a few whipsawed
planks laid by private enterprise. It had, however, plenty of saloons,
dance halls, and gambling houses. These advertised their wares to the
world with a childlike candour, flinging shafts of light from windows
and open doors upon the muddy lane between the rows of buildings.
The night was alive with the jubilant and raucous gaiety of a young
mining camp. Pianos jingled and fiddles whined dance music to the
accompaniment of shuffling feet. The caller’s sing-song lifted above the
drone of voices.
“Alemane left. Right hand to yore pardner an’ grand right an’ left.
Swing yore pardners an’ promenade you know where.”
This was punctuated by loud and joyous whoops from a dancer who had been
imbibing not wisely but too well. Laughter, the rattle of chips, the
clink of glasses, the hum of inaudible words, all contributed to the
medley of sound rising into the starlit night.
McClintock weaved in and out, eyes and ears open to get a line on the
town. It was a live camp. So much was apparent at a glance. But how much
of this life was due to the money that had been brought here, how much
of it to the ore which had been taken out of the Piodie mines. He met
acquaintances, men he had known at Aurora and Virginia City. These
introduced him to others. From them he heard fabulous stories of
suddenly acquired wealth. Mike Holloway had bumped into a regular “glory
hole” to-day that would make him a millionaire. The Standard Union was
shipping ore assaying so much a ton that the amount had to be whispered.
Compared to this town, Aurora, Dayton, Gold Hill, and Eureka were built
on insignificant lodes. Hugh detected in much of this a note of
exaggeration, but he knew that at bottom there was a large sediment of
truth.
He went out again from the saloon where he had been gathering
information and joined the floating population outside. In sex it was
largely masculine. The feminine percentage was rouged and gaudily
dressed.
Without any plan he drifted down Turkey Creek Avenue enjoying the raw,
turbulent youth of the place. Two men were standing in the shadow of an
unlighted building as he passed. McClintock did not see them. One of the
men pressed the other’s arm with his hand to give a warning.
“That’s Hugh McClintock,” he whispered.
The second—a huge slouching figure with unkempt hair and beard—gave
from his throat a guttural snarl. Simultaneously his hand slipped back
toward his hip.
“Not right here, Dutch,” the smaller man murmured. “If you want him get
him from the alley as he’s comin’ back. You can do that an’ make yore
getaway back to Monument Street.”
Hugh wandered to the end of the street, unaware of the lumbering figure
that followed warily on the other side of the road. The street came to
an end at a sheer hill rise. Here the young man stood for several
minutes enjoying the quiet of the black night. Faintly the noise of
Piodie’s exuberance drifted on the light breeze. At this distance it was
subdued to a harmony not unpleasant to the ear.
After a time he turned and walked slowly back toward the business
section of town. He took his way leisurely. He had nothing to do but
turn in at his lodging place, and the night was still young. Out in the
open it was pleasanter than in a stuffy room, eight by eight.
The buildings had been put up in a haphazard fashion without much regard
to the street frontage, entirely as the fancy of the owners had
dictated. Hugh came to one abutting on the alley. It was a storage
warehouse, and it projected almost into the street. In the lee of it the
young man stopped to light a cigarette.
Something whizzed past his ear and stuck quivering in the wooden wall.
In the darkness streaks of fire flamed—one, two, three. The roar of the
shots, pent in the alleyway, boomed like those of a howitzer. With one
swift dive of his lithe body Hugh found cover behind a dry-goods box. In
transit his revolver leaped to air.
But he did not fire. He lay, crouched close against the box, listening
with taut nerves for any sound that might betray the position of his
enemy.
None came. Presently he peered round the corner of the box. The darkness
was Stygian. The blackness of the night was emphasized by the narrowness
of the alley. Somewhere in that dark pit before him the ambusher lay,
unless he had crept noiselessly away.
Protected by the box, Hugh might have crawled to the corner of the
building, turned it, and so escaped. But he had no thought of doing
this. He meant to find out if possible who this expert knife thrower
was. If he had in town an enemy who hated him enough to lie in wait to
do murder it was his business to discover who the man was. First, he
wanted to get the ruffian lying thirty or forty feet from him. Next, he
meant to try to gain possession of the knife sticking in the wall.
The second hand of his watch ticked away the minutes. The large hand
moved from the figures III to IV, crept on to V, passed the half-hour
mark. Hugh did not know how long he lay there. His guess would have been
hours. He began to think that the other man had made an escape.
On hands and knees, the barrel of his revolver clenched between his
strong white teeth, McClintock crawled round the box, hugging the wall
closely as he moved. His advance was noiseless, slow, so careful that it
was punctuated with a dozen stops to listen. Someone was beating a drum
down the street and the sound of it deadened any closer stir. He
calculated that this was an advantage as well as a drawback. If he could
not hear the other man, then it followed that the other man could not
hear him.
Plank by plank he followed the wall, each motion forecast and executed
so deliberately that it could not betray him. In the dense darkness he
could see nothing, but he estimated he must be close to the knife in the
wall.
He rose to his knees, still without a sound. His hand groped for the
hilt of the bowie. It closed on—a thick hairy wrist.
“Goddamighty!” a startled voice screamed, and the wrist was jerked
swiftly away.
Hugh’s brain functioned instantly. The owner of the knife, moved by the
same desire as himself, had crept forward to recover it.
McClintock plunged, head down and arms wide. His full weight back of the
drive, he crashed into the retreating enemy and flung him backward.
The marching years had developed Hugh. His stringiness was gone. He was
a large man, tall and straight, with hard-packed muscles. No wildcat of
the Sierras was more lithe and supple than he. But as he struggled with
this ruffian, now on top, now underneath, their legs thrashing wildly as
each tried to pin the other down, McClintock knew that the fellow with
whom he grappled was bigger than he, thicker through the body, broader
across the shoulders.
They whirled over and over. Thick thighs clamped themselves to Hugh’s
waist. Huge fingers closed on his throat. He threw up an arm, and at the
same time a jagged bolt of pain shot through it. In the flesh of the
biceps the blade of a bowie sheathed itself.
His breath shut off, the warm blood welling from his arm, Hugh gave a
desperate heave of his body and flung the man astride of him forward and
to the left. He spun round with pantherish swiftness and launched
himself at the bulk of energy gathering itself for another attack.
They went down together, Hugh on top. His wounded arm pinned down the
wrist with the knife. The assassin felt for McClintock’s eye socket with
his thumb and gouged at it. The niceties of civilized warfare had no
place in this conflict with a primordial brute. Dodging the thumb, Hugh
found his mouth pressed against the forearm he held captive. The strong
teeth that had been carrying the revolver until the two had come to
grips closed on the tendons of the hairy arm. The man underneath gave a
yell of pain. His fingers relaxed and opened. The handle of the bowie
slipped away from them.
With his free arm the gunman tried to drag out a revolver. Hugh’s fist,
hard as knotted pine, drove savagely into the bearded face. It struck
again and again, with the crushing force of a pile driver. Grunting with
pain, the murderer covered up to escape punishment. He was lying cramped
against the wall in such a way that he could not get at his six-shooter.
The man bellowed with rage and thrashed about to avoid that flailing
fist. His boot heel found a purchase against the wall and he used it to
pry himself out of the corner into which he had been flung.
The fighters rolled out from the building, for the moment free of each
other. A flying boot struck Hugh in the forehead and dazed him. He
scrambled to his feet. His foe was legging it down the alley with all
the grace of a bear in a hurry to get away.
McClintock started to pursue, then changed his mind abruptly. The man
was armed and he was not. If he should run him down the ruffian would
turn and murder him. At least he had written his John Hancock on the
fellow’s face and would know him again if he saw him soon.
The victor quartered over the ground. Presently he found his revolver
and the bowie knife that had slashed his arm. He slid the revolver into
its holster and the knife into his boot leg. From the alley he stepped
back to the street.
The drum was still booming. He guessed that the affray had not taken
more than five minutes from start to finish.
For the first time he became aware of a throbbing pain in his arm. When
he pulled up his sleeve he saw that it was soggy with blood. The sight
of the long jagged wound affected him oddly. He leaned against a
hitching post for support, overcome by a faintness which surged over
him.
He laughed grimly. “Blood beginnin’ to scare you at this late date,” he
said to himself aloud. This brought him a touch of sardonic amusement.
He had passed through three big pitched battles of the war, half-a-dozen
skirmishes, and had been slightly wounded twice.
For first aid he tied a handkerchief around the wound as best he could,
using his free hand and his teeth to make the knot. Ten minutes later he
was in the office of a doctor.
“You’re lucky,” the doctor said. “Knife ploughed along close to the
surface. Didn’t strike an artery. How’d you come to do it?”
“I didn’t do it. The other fellow did. With this.” Hugh pulled the bowie
from his boot leg.
After he had dressed the wound the doctor examined the murderous-looking
knife. He handed it back to Hugh with a dry comment.
“Did I say you were lucky? That’s a weak word for it. You must carry the
left hind foot of a graveyard rabbit caught in the dark of the moon. How
did he come to leave that knife behind?”
“He didn’t explain why. I kinda gathered he was in a hurry. Probably had
an engagement down the street.”
The doctor’s keen eyes took in the strong grave face, the splendid
figure, the imperturbable composure of the patient. It occurred to him
that a Sierra grizzly would be no more dangerous than this man if he
were aroused to action.
“Did you kill him?” he asked hesitantly.
“Not this time,” McClintock answered quietly.
When he left, the doctor’s gaze followed him out of the office. He
wondered who this light-stepping Hermes could be. In his years of
practice he had never met a finer specimen of humanity, judged on a
physical basis of health, strength, and coördination of nerves and
muscle.