FROM Leadville to the point in the sky-line of the Continental Divide
where the southern shoulder of Mount Massive dips to Hagerman's Pass,
the railway grade climbs with the old Glenwood trail; and when Malta
was left behind and the ascent fairly begun, Jeffard had fleeting
glimpses of the road over which he and Garvin and the patient burro
had toiled eastward the day before. From outer curves and promontories
doubled at storming speed the hoof-beaten trail flicked into view
and disappeared; and at times the brief vistas framed a reminiscent
picture of two foot-weary pilgrims plodding doggedly in the wake of a
pack-laden ass.
It was impossible to conceive that these phantoms belonged to
to-day's yesterday. The crowding events of a few hours had already
pushed them into a far-away past; their entities were lost in the
kaleidoscopic whirl which had transformed the two men no less than
their prefigurings. What had the foolish witling raving yonder on his
way to despoilment and death with the two plunderers in common with
the self-contained son of the wilderness, who had but yesterday been
his brother's keeper in a world of disheartenment? And this other;
steam-hurrying on his way to the same goal, with set jaw and tight
lips and resolute purpose in his eyes; by how much or little could he
be identified with the undeterminate one, whose leaden-footed trudgings
the storming locomotive was taking in reverse?
Through some such cycle the wheel of reflection rolled around to its
starting point in things present, and Jeffard awoke to the moving
realities of steep grades and breath-cutting curves, yawning abysses
and hurtling cliffs, flitting backward to the cacophone _obbligato_
of the exhaust and the clangorous cries of racking machinery. The
engineer braced on his box was a muscular giant, with the jaw of a
prizefighter, and steel-gray eyes that had long since looked death out
of countenance. Jeffard took his measure in an appraisive glance. "If
your engineer is good for anything," Bartrow had said; and the glance
slew the conditional doubt. What a fearless driver of fast locomotives
might do toward reversing the fate of the besotted one would be done.
In the mean time the race was to the judicious rather than to the
swift. The interminable succession of grades and curves clogged the
wheels, and the great engine snorted and wallowed on its upward way,
slowing down at times until the throbbing puffs of the escaping steam
seemed to beat no more than leisurely minuet-time. But the climbing
miles to the summit of the pass were measured doggedly, if not with
speed. No trifling advantage of tangent or "let-up" was passed without
fresh spurrings of the throttle; and when the engine swept around the
long curve which is the approach to the telegraph station at the
summit tunnel, the engineer glanced at his watch and nodded across to
his passenger.
"We're goin' to make it," he said, in answer to Jeffard's shouted
inquiry. "It'll be a close call, but the old Ninety-seven's a bird."
At the station the operator tossed a telegram through the cab window.
It was from Bartrow, and its major purpose was to give the figures of
the assay, which he had obtained from the little German. They were
sufficiently significant, and Bartrow's added urgings were unnecessary.
"I'm standing over the train dispatcher here with a club," he wired.
"Don't make any economical mistake at your end of the string."
The engineer had finished oiling around and had clambered back to his
box. The water supply was replenished, and the fireman was uprearing
the tank-spout. Jeffard crossed the footboard and thrust a little roll
of bank notes between the fingers of the brawny hand on the throttle
lever. The engineer smoothed the bills on his knee and wagged his head
as one doubtful.
"That's pretty well up to a month's pay."
"Well, you are going to earn it."
"Better keep it till I do," said the stalwart one, offering it back.
"No; I'm not afraid to pay you in advance. You are going to do your
best, and I am not trying to bribe you. It's yours, whether we make it
or not."
The big man thrust the bills into his pocket and opened the throttle.
"You go over there and sit down and hold your hair on," he commanded.
"I'm goin' to break the record when we get out into daylight on the
other side o' the mountain."
Jeffard was still groping for hand and foot holds on the fireman's
seat when the locomotive rolled out of the western portal of the
summit tunnel and the record-breaking began. Of the brain-benumbing
rush down the gorges of the Frying Pan on a flying locomotive, one
recalls but a confused memory; a phantasmagoric jumble of cliffs and
chasms, backward-flitting forests and gyrating mountain peaks, trestles
and culverts roaring beneath the drumming wheels, the shrieks of the
whistle and the intermittent stridor of escaping steam in the iron
throat of the safety-valve; a goblin dance of matter in motion to a war
blast of chaotic uproar. One sets the teeth to endure, and comes back
to the cosmic point of view with a deep-drawn sigh of relief when the
goblin dance is over, and the engine halts at the junction where the
Aspen branch leaves the main line and crosses the Frying Pan to begin
the ascent of the Roaring Fork.
From this point the competing railways parallel each other, and at the
junction the trains on either line are within whistle call. To the
engineer's question the telegraph operator nodded an affirmative.
"Yep; she's just gone by. That's her whistlin' for Emma now. What's the
rush?--backed to beat her into Aspen?"
The engineer nodded in his turn, and signed the order for the right
of way on the branch. A minute later the junction station was also
a memory, and Jeffard was straining his eyes for a glimpse of the
passenger train on the other line. A short distance to the southward
the rival lines meet and cross, exchanging river banks for the
remainder of the run to Aspen. The passenger train was first at the
crossing, and Jeffard had his glimpse as the engine slackened speed.
Not to lose a rail-length in the hard-fought race, Jeffard's man ran
close to the crossing to await his turn, and the light engine came to a
stand within pistol shot of the train, which was slowly clanking over
the crossing-frogs. Jeffard slipped from his seat and went over to the
engineer's gangway. It would be worth something if he could make sure
that Garvin was on the train.
The espial was rewarded and punished in swift sequence. The trucks of
the smoking-car were jolting over the crossing, and Jeffard saw the
head and shoulders of the insane one filling an open window. It was
conspicuously evident that Garvin had drained the bottle to the frenzy
mark. He was yelling like a lost soul, and shaking impotent fists at
the halted engine. Jeffard's eye measured the distance to the moving
car. It was but down one embankment and up the other.
"That's my man," he said quickly to the engineer. "Do you suppose I
could make it across?"
"Dead easy," was the reply; and Jeffard swung down to the step of the
engine to drop off. The impulse saved his life. As he quitted his hold
a hairy arm bared to the elbow was thrust out of the window next to
the yelling maniac. There was a glint of sun-rays on polished metal,
and a pistol ball bit out the corner of the cab under the engineer's
arm-rest. Jeffard desisted, and climbed to his place when the moving
train gathered headway.
"Damn a crazy loon, anyway," said the engineer, much as one might pass
the time of day. "They'd ought to have sense enough to take his gun
away from him."
Jeffard explained in a sentence. "It wasn't the crazy one; it was one
of the two cut-throats who are kidnaping him--the fellows I'm trying
to beat."
"The fellers you're goin' to beat," corrected the engineer. "We'll head
'em off now if the Ninety-seven goes in on three legs. The gall o' the
cusses!--why, they might ha' shot somebody!"
From the crossing in the lower valley neither line encounters any
special obstacle to speed; and under equal conditions a locomotive race
up the Roaring Fork might be an affair of seconds and rail lengths
for the victor. But the light engine with regardless orders speedily
distanced the passenger train with stops to make; and when the smokes
of the mountain-girt town at the head of the valley came in sight, the
big engineer pulled his watch and shouted triumphant:--
"Eleven-forty,--and their time's twelve-five. We'll be twenty minutes
to the good in spite o'"--
It is conceivable that he would have used a strong figure, but the
depravity of things inanimate took the word out of his mouth. There
was a tearing crash to the rear; a shock as if a huge projectile had
overtaken them; and the flying locomotive came to earth like an eagle
with a mangled wing. It was a broken axle under the tender; a tested
steel shaft which had outlived the pounding race across the mountains
only to fall apart in the last level mile of the home stretch. Jeffard
clambered down with the enginemen, and saw defeat, crushing and
definite, in the wreck under the tender. But the big engineer was a man
for a crisis. One glance at the wreck sufficed, and the fireman got his
orders in shot-like sentences.
"Up with you, Tom, and give her the water,--both injectors! Drop me the
sledge, and get the pinch-bar under the head o' that couplin'-pin when
I drive it up. Give her a scoop 'r two o' coal--'nough to run in with.
By cripes! we'll beat 'em yet!"
The minced oath came from beneath the engine, and was punctuated by
mighty upward blows of the sledge hammer on the coupling-pin, whose
head was rising by half-inch impulses from its seat in the footplate.
Jeffard saw and understood. The engineer meant to cut loose from the
wreck and finish the run without the tender.
"Use me if you can," he offered. "What shall I do?"
"Climb up there and help Tom with that bar. If we can pull this pin
we're in it yet."
Jeffard laid hold with the fireman, and together they pried at the
reluctant pin. It yielded at length, but when the engineer had
disconnected the water and air hose and mounted to his place in the
cab, the roar of the oncoming passenger train was ajar in the air.
"You stay with the wreck, Tom, and flag it!" was the final command; and
then to Jeffard, as the engine shot away from its disabled member: "How
much time have you got to have?"
"I don't know. It depends upon how much those fellows have found out,
and how drunk my partner is. At the worst, a minute or two will serve."
It was still to be had, but in the very yard a thrown switch
intervened, and the small margin vanished. The passenger train was in,
and Jeffard saw defeat again; but he dropped from the locomotive and
ran up the yard, forgetting in the heat of it that he had elided two
meals in the twenty-four hours. The final dash brought its reward. He
took the first vehicle that offered and reached the principal hotel
in time to see Garvin and his keepers descend from a carriage at the
entrance.
"Yes, sir; in one moment. Those three fellows who came in just now?
They've gone up to their room. Be with us over night?"
Thus the hotel clerk in answer to Jeffard's gasping inquiry. To whom
the proletary, fighting desperately for some semblance of equanimity:--
"I--I'll be here indefinitely; no, I have no baggage; I'll pay in
advance. Can you give me the room next to these men? The crazy one is
my partner, and I'll be responsible for him."
The clerk hesitated, but Jeffard won his cause without knowing it by
the necessary parade of bank-notes in the pecuniary affair.
"Certainly, sir; the boy will show you up. You won't trouble him? All
right; Number Nineteen--second floor, third door to the right. Dinner
is served, when you're ready."
If Jeffard had forgotten his directions the uproar in Number Eighteen
would have guided him. Garvin's voice, uplifted in alternate
malediction and maudlin bathos, jarred upon the air of the corridor.
Jeffard paused. The long chase was ended and only a pine door
intervened between pursuer and pursued. He laid a hand on the doorknob.
His breath came hard, and the veins in his forehead were like knotted
whipcords. While he paused some broken babblings from within wrought
a swift change in him. The knotted veins relaxed and he laughed, not
mirthfully but with a cynical upcurve of the lip. His hand slipped from
the doorknob, and he stole away, cat-like, to let himself noiselessly
into the adjoining room.
There was a door of communication between the two rooms, bolted on
Jeffard's side, and with the knob removed. He went on his knees to
the square hole through the lock, but the angle of vision included no
more than a blank patch of the opposite wall. Then he laid his ear
to the aperture. Out of the jangling discord beyond the door came
fragmentary lucidities pieceable together into a strand of sequence.
Garvin had told all he knew, or all he could remember, and the robbery
paused at the trivial detail of the most feasible route over the
mountains from Aspen. But to make sure, and possibly to provide against
the contingency of having to eliminate Garvin, some rude map was
needed; and this one of the plunderers was evidently trying to draw
under instructions from the witling. At the mention of a map, Jeffard
rummaged his pockets without taking his ear from the door. From one of
them he drew a crumpled bit of paper, thumbed and crease-broken. It was
Garvin's map of the claim and the trail, passed over for inspection
in the hollow of a certain lambent evening months before and never
returned.
Who shall say what was behind the inscrutable darkling of the eyes of
him when he returned the paper to his pocket and bent to listen with
four senses lending their acuteness to the fifth? Was it a softening
memory of the loving-kindnesses of one James Garvin to a man soul-sick
and body-wasted, snatched as a charred brand out of a fire of his own
kindling? Or was it the stirring of a ruthless devil of self; a devil
never more than dormant in any heart insurgent; a fell demon of the pit
whose arousing waits only upon opportunity, whose power is to transform
pity into remorseless ingratitude and ruth into relentless greed? There
was room for the alternative.
"Here; take another nip o' this and pull yourself together,"--it was
the voice of the hawk-faced one. "If you wasn't such a howlin' idiot
you'd see that we're the only friends you've got. I keep a-tellin' you
that that slick pardner o' yours was on that wild ingine, and if you
don't sink a shaft on your wits he's a-goin' to do you up cold!"
The appeal brought blood as a blow. The crash of an overturned chair
was followed by an explosion of cursings, the outcries of a soul in
torment. And when the madman choked in the fullness of it, a voice
said: "Pick up that chair, Pete, and pull him down. He'll be seein'
things in a minute, and that'll settle the whole shootin'-match." There
was a struggle short but violent, the jar of a forcible downsetting,
and a sound as of one flinging his arms abroad upon the table. After
which the tormented one became brokenly articulate. What he said is
unrecordable. With maudlin oath and thick-tongued ravings he rehearsed
his fancied wrongs and breathed forth promises of vengeance, calling
down the wrath of the spheres upon one Henry Jeffard and his posterity
to the third and fourth generation.
"That's all right; I'd kill him on sight, if I was you. But just now
you're killin' time, instid. First you know, he'll be on his way acrost
the range, and then where'll you be? You don't even know that he didn't
locate that claim before you came out. Git down to business and tell us
where that valley is, if you ever knowed. You said it was on a creek"--
Jeffard rose and went softly across the room to sit on the edge of the
bed. The unfathomable light was still in his eyes, and his thought
wrought itself into words.
"It's done; they'll wring it out of him, and then fling him aside like
so much offal. I wonder if it is worth while to try to save it--for
him. What good would it do him?--or, rather, what evil thing is there
that it wouldn't make possible for him? What devil of curiosity led
me to open this Pandora-box of responsibility? For I am responsible,
first for the finding, and now for the keeping, and hereafter for what
shall come of it. That is, if I save it--for him." He got upon his feet
and tiptoed back to the door of communication, listening once more.
The clamor had quieted down, and the scratching of a pen gnawed the
silence. Then came the voice of the hawk-faced one.
"There she is; you sign your name right there and it'll be all right.
It's the only way; you're too drunk to pull strings with that pardner
o' yours, and we're goin' to stand by you, see? All we want is the
authority."
Jeffard started back and made as if he would fling himself against the
locked door. Then he thought better of it.
"That simplifies it," he mused, pacing up and down with noiseless
steps. "He has signed away whatever right he had, and now it's my turn.
If I pay the price I can checkmate them. But can I pay the price?
Surely, if any man can; I, who have deliberately turned my back upon
the world's approval for a much less thing. And in the end the money
will atone."
A stir in the adjoining room admonished him that the time for action
had come. He wheeled quickly and let himself into the corridor. A key
was rattling in the lock of Number Eighteen as he passed, but he found
the stair before the bolt was shot. In the lobby he stopped to ask
a hurried question of a man who was opening his mail at the public
writing-table. The question was answered curtly, but the man left his
letters and went to the door to point the reply.
"I see it; thank you," said Jeffard; and went his way rapidly, with
now and then a glance behind him as if to make sure that he was not
followed.
In a few minutes he came back, walking slowly, with his head down and
his hands in the pockets of the brown duck miner's coat. There was a
knot of loungers in front of the hotel, gathered about the door and
peering in; a group of curious ones, which grew by accretions from the
by-passers. A disturbance of some sort was afoot in the lobby--two
persuasive ones struggling peaceably with a drunken man, while the
bystanders looked on with smiles pitying or cynical, each after his
kind.
Jeffard pushed into the circle, and those who remarked him said that he
seemed to see nothing but the struggling trio. Some of the onlookers
were near enough to hear what he said to the two who were not drunk.
"The game is closed, gentlemen, and you are out of it. When you get on
the ground you will find the claim located--in my name."
Two right hands made simultaneous backward dips, and two potential
murderers apparently realized the folly of it at the same instant. But
the drunken one spun around with his face ablaze, a fiercer madness
than that of drink burning in his bloodshot eyes.
"You? You played the sneak an' located hit behind my back? In your
name, d' ye say?--your name? Well, by God, you hain't got a name!"
A pistol cracked with the oath, and Jeffard put his hands to his head
and pitched forward. The crowd fell back aghast, to surge inward again
with a rush when the reaction came. Then a shout was raised at the
door, and the haggard manslayer, cured now of all madness save that of
fear, burst through the inpressing throng and disappeared.