At four o’clock that afternoon, since it was Saturday, the men were paid
off for the week. No pay day will ever be satisfactory to the recipients
until that happy state of affairs is reached when each man himself
decides on the amount which is due him. Even then there will be some who
will leave the pay-window with the discontented feeling that they have
cheated themselves.
The bookkeeper, from his grated window, gave out the pay checks to the
line of Mexican laborers who, displaying their brass number tags, passed
before him. He kept up a running fire of argument. Over and over he was
obliged to explain the amounts of the checks.
“The mess bill comes out of you.”
“You had twenty dollars’ worth of coupons at the store.”
“No, you only worked five days this week.”
“Hospital fee is twenty-five cents.”
These were fair samples of the innumerable arguments which he
was compelled to go through with every week. And in spite of all
explanations, the poor miners would walk away from the window, looking
with dejected, unbelieving eyes at the small figures of their checks. Men
of this class can never realize that if out of wages of ninety dollars a
month they spend seventy-five for food and store coupons, the balance due
to them is not ninety dollars, but fifteen.
As usual on pay day afternoon, in the road before the office, little
groups of men were arguing excitedly among themselves, discussing
the manner in which they were “cheated.” The dejected droop of their
shoulders was accentuated by the quick, jerky movements of their arms as
they gesticulated.
Knowlton, the deputy sheriff, who was assigned to Kay, sat on the steps
before the office door. He was rolling a cigarette, seemingly unconscious
of the noisy crowd. But pay day was always likely to cause trouble, and
he was prepared for it.
[Illustration: “No one quite dared to lead an attack upon Knowlton, who
stood his ground beside the body.” _Page 241_]
The group of excited men augmented fast, as little knots of miners
were paid off, and found awaiting them a willing audience of their
grievances. A word will fire a crowd of this kind as quickly as a fuse
will set off a charge of giant powder.
Knowlton watched them closely, out of the corner of his eye. He saw one
of the leaders in the discussion stoop down and pick up a large rock.
“Hey, Rigas! Drop that, quick!” he shouted.
For answer the rock crashed through the glass of the office window.
Knowlton waded into the midst of the crowd, and seized Rigas by the
collar, almost hurling him off his feet. His rough tactics generally
overawed his prisoners, but Rigas had been drinking, and fought. The
crowd began to close in.
Knowlton dropped his hand to the point where the suspenders joined his
belt and whipped out his “automatic.” Raising it in the air, he swung
it down with all his strength upon Rigas’s head. There was a stunning
report, and the miner lay upon the ground, with a hole two inches wide
through his forehead. The crowd, muttering angry curses, drew back. No
one quite dared to lead an attack upon Knowlton, who stood his ground
beside the body, his still smoking gun in his hand. The camp doctor came
up on the run, having heard the sound of the report. Kneeling beside the
body, he gave short and incisive directions.
“Valrigo, Peres, Gonzales, and Escallerra; you four carry him over to the
hospital!”
The four men whom he had designated bent over and clumsily raised the
inanimate body.
“No, no,” said the doctor, “don’t let his head hang back. Here,
Valencella! Come and hold up his head. That is right. Now slowly with
him, boys; easy, don’t jolt him!”
The doctor walked beside the bearers, his hand on Rigas’s heart, which
for a wonder was still beating. Behind them fell in a sullen, straggling,
pushing procession of the other men, watching the blood drip from Rigas’s
head.
Then Knowlton turned, and walked slowly into the office. As he entered,
the volume of curses changed from a mutter to a roar. He found Loring on
his knees, locking the combination of the safe.
“Well, Mr. Loring, I’ve done it now. I’ve killed Rigas. These damned
automatics! You can beat a man over the head for a week with a Colt
without its going off.”
“Too bad!” said Stephen calmly, rising from his knees. “But the character
of Rigas was not such that he will be a great loss to the world. He was
always causing some sort of mischief.”
“It ain’t Rigas that I am worrying about,” said the deputy. “It’s the
rest of them.”
“How long can you hold them in check?” asked Stephen.
“If they were sober, I could hold them until hell froze, but they have
just been paid off, and by night they will all be drunk. Then there will
be trouble. It has been brewin’ for a week. Some agitator chap has been
talking it up to them about the way the Company was stealing from them. I
don’t jest know what we had better do,” he concluded, while he fingered
his gun nervously, and looked to Loring for guidance.
“Rigas is dead, you said?” asked Stephen.
“Well, not exactly. He might as well be, though. A forty-five calibre
hole through your head ain’t healthy. If he ain’t dead now, he won’t
live more than a few hours. And when he does die—!” Knowlton broke off
gloomily.
“What are you going to do about it, Mr. Loring?”
“We can only wait,” answered Loring. “We must not let them see that we
are anxious.”
“Ain’t you going to do _nothing_?” Knowlton looked at Loring in perfect
amazement.
Stephen smiled, and shook his head. “No, I am going to supper. I would
advise you to eat at the mess to-night, instead of at your shack. I am
afraid that at present you are not exactly popular.”
He walked off towards the eating-house, while Knowlton stood looking
after him blankly.
“He don’t realize that in about three hours after those men get to
drinking, the Kay mine won’t exist. If we had a real man in charge here,
we might do something about it. He thinks, I suppose, that because the
men like him there won’t be trouble. Hell! and I used to think he had
sense!” Knowlton almost snorted in his rage.
At supper every man was keyed to a high pitch of excitement. There were
only about twenty white men in camp, and though they were well armed,
the Mexicans outnumbered them more than fifteen to one. Stephen alone
refrained from joining in the flurry of question and conjecture which
whirled about the table. Although he seemed unmoved, a close observer
would have noticed that he gripped his knife and fork almost as if they
had been weapons. Wah slid his plate of soup before him, at the same time
patting him on the shoulder with affectionate interest.
“Me bludder like one owl,” he said.
“Hey, Wah, this soup is rotten!” called a young fellow from the end of
the table.
“Oh, lubbly, lubbly soup!” chanted Wah. “Lubbly, me bludder, lubbly.”
“I’m not your bludder, Wah,” answered the man politely. “I would rather
have an ape for a brother than you.”
“You me bludder, allee samee, allee samee.” Saying which, Wah disappeared
into the kitchen, only to stick his head a moment later through the
connecting window, and call: “Oh, you pig-faced Swede, Oh, you pig-faced
Swede! La, la, boom, boom!”
But even Wah was unable to break the tension that surrounded the supper.
As the men were lighting their pipes at the close of the meal, from
the gulch behind the camp where were the saloons, came the sound of a
fusillade of shots and a burst of shrill yelling.
“The game is on,” thought Loring.
As the noise outside became louder, Stephen said to the men: “I want all
you fellows to get your guns and go over into the office to guard the
safe. Go as quietly as you can so as not to stir things up. Keep quiet in
there and don’t shoot unless you are compelled to. We have just issued
some new stock, and if there is news of any fighting here the value will
go all to pieces. We must just wait, and keep quiet. Remember a fight
means almost ruin, and we have got to avoid it.”
Knowlton looked quickly over to McKay, and nodded. Both were experienced
men, and they knew that now was no time to think of stock values, but
of actually saving the mine, and the lives of the white men there. They
knew that serious trouble was intended, as since the shooting, every
outlet of the camp had been guarded by Mexicans. They knew that the only
chance, not for avoiding a fight, but for avoiding a massacre, lay in
an immediate attack on the Mexicans, before they were completely out of
hand. And Loring was thinking of stock values! Still, they remembered
that he was inexperienced, and they set down to indecision what seemed
like criminal folly. As for McKay, he had known Loring to fall once
before, and he was not hopeful for the outcome.
“Knowlton,” continued Loring, “you had better stay here with me. It won’t
do for the miners to think that you are hidden.”
“Well, I won’t be,” exclaimed Knowlton decisively. “There is only one
thing in this world that I am afraid of, and that is a fool!”
The men hurried to their tents to procure their firearms. From the window
of the mess Stephen watched them, as one by one they returned and slipped
into the darkened office. Then he stepped out on the porch, and seated
himself beneath the full glare of the hanging electric light. Knowlton,
with a dogged expression on his face, seated himself on the steps.
Another man came and joined them. It was McKay.
“Let me stay here with you, Steve,” he said gruffly.
“Thank you!” replied Stephen. Then he relapsed into silence.
Sitting with his watch beside him on the arm of the chair, and smoking
furiously, his eye traveled to Knowlton, and dwelt on the brown oiled
butt of the latter’s “automatic,” an odd-shaped lump against the white of
his shirt.
“That was the first time I ever killed a man by accident,” murmured
Knowlton, half to himself. “The Doc said after supper that Rigas might
possibly live another hour.”
“An hour, did you say?” asked Loring. Then again he sat in silence,
staring intently at his watch.
“Quarter past eight. He has lived more than an hour since supper.”
From the valley, seven miles away, came softly the whistle of the evening
train. The noise in camp was continually increasing in volume. Groups of
miners went by the mess shouting, singing, and whooping derisively. Every
now and then the babel of voices was punctuated by shots fired in rapid
succession as some one emptied his gun in the air.
By the hospital a silent group was waiting, waiting for Rigas to die.
The men on the porch watched that sinister mass with apprehension. The
effect was far more suggestive than that of the noisier portion of the
camp.
Suddenly the mass of men by the hospital stirred, heaved, and moved. From
a hundred throats came a dull roar.
“Rigas is dead,” said Loring, shutting his watch with a snap.
The crowd of men by the hospital began to roll towards the mess. As a
huge swell rolls in from the sea, so the black mass, swaying, rising,
falling, swept on. As it drew nearer, the white of the men’s faces stood
out in the glare of the electric lights even as the foam upon that wave.
“Put out the porch lights!” yelled Knowlton.
“I am manager here, and they stay lit,” shouted Loring back to him.
Even as the surf curls before breaking and sweeping up the beach, so the
wave of men seemed to rise and draw itself together, before surging up
the steps.
Stephen had stepped forward to the edge of the steps in front of
Knowlton. He raised his fist for silence, and such was the compelling
force in his eyes that for a moment he was obeyed. But as he started to
speak, a great hiss arose from the crowd, like the sound of escaping
steam from some giant locomotive. Loring gripped the railing of the porch
hard, and again shouted something.
“God, he’s crazy!” yelled Knowlton to McKay. “He is going to try and
argue.” Knowlton’s hand lay tightly on the gun in his belt.
“Steve has lost his head again,” thought McKay bitterly. “I might have
known that he didn’t have the stuff in him.”
A bottle whizzed by Loring’s ear, breaking with a crash against the
wall behind him. For an instant the sound of breaking glass caught the
attention of the crowd.
“You want the money in the safe?” shouted Loring.
“_Sí_, _sí_, yes, _sí_, yes, _sí_!” roared the crowd, in a mixture of two
languages.
The sound lulled for a second. Stephen waved his keys in the air. “You
shall have it.”
The shouting was wilder than before, and echoed from end to end of the
camp.
“Coward!” moaned McKay, sickened by such an exhibition. Some one in the
crowd fired at Loring, luckily with drunken aim. The bullet kicked up
the dust at the foot of the steps. Knowlton jumped to his feet, and
leveled his gun at the crowd.
“Sit down!” roared Stephen. Not knowing why he did so, Knowlton lowered
his gun and sank again into his chair.
“Do you want Knowlton?” shouted Loring, pointing to the deputy beside
him. As he spoke, he glanced at his watch, which lay in his hand. His
face was reeking with sweat.
“Do you want Knowlton?” he shouted again.
The howl that went up from the mob was as if from the throats of
blood-hungry beasts.
Knowlton’s face was white; but his eyes showed their scorn of Loring. He
looked at him in contempt, and looking, to his surprise, saw the tense
lines of his face light with the gleam of victory.
“You want Knowlton?” he shouted for the last time. “Then come and take
him!”
As the mob surged up the steps, a body of horsemen charged them fiercely
from behind. Right and left galloped the riders, beating the mob over the
heads with their Winchesters, or cutting them with their quirts, riding
down men beneath the weight of their horses. The mob scattered and fled
in every direction. The leader of the horsemen swung out of the saddle in
front of the steps, and Winchester in hand, walked up to Loring.
“Are you Mr. Loring?” he asked.
“Yes,” answered Stephen.
“Well, it seems as if we were just in time—not much too early, are we? We
just got your telegram in Dominion in time to raise a big posse, and pack
them onto the evening train. It was about the liveliest job that I ever
did, and I reckon it is one of the best,” said the sheriff, surveying the
scene with satisfaction. “How did the trouble start anyhow?” he asked.
Stephen explained rapidly. At the conclusion, the sheriff turned to
Knowlton: “Killed him by accident, eh? Too bad you didn’t have the
pleasure of meaning to. Now I guess we’d better clean up the camp a bit,
hadn’t we, Mr. Loring?”
Stephen agreed, and the sheriff sent his deputies in groups of twos and
threes, to raid the tents of the Mexicans, and gather in their arms.
Knowlton approached Loring in a stupefied manner.
“When could you have telegraphed?” he asked. “They have been guarding the
roads ever since the shooting.”
Stephen smiled. “When you jumped into that crowd, Knowlton, I sent Reade
out through the back window of the office to send a telegram for help,
and to get horses for them ready at the station camp.”
A light broke over McKay’s face. Walking up to Loring, he laid his hand
on his shoulder.
“By God, Steve, I am proud of you!” he said. Then turning to the arc
light which hung from the ceiling of the porch, he addressed it softly:
“And _that’s_ the man we fired!”