EVEN in a Colorado mining town a shooting affray at midday in the lobby
of the principal hotel creates more or less of a sensation, and it
was fully fifteen minutes before the buzz of public comment subsided
sufficiently to suffer Mr. Mark Denby to go back to his letters and
telegrams. He had made one in the circle of onlookers; had seen and
heard, and, now that the wounded man had been carried to his room and
cared for, and the hunt was up and afield for the would-be murderer,
was willing to forget. But a traveling salesman at the opposite
blotting-pad must needs keep the pool astir.
"Say, wasn't that the most cold-blooded thing you ever saw? 'Y gad!
I've heard that these Western towns were fearfully tough, but I had
no idea a man wouldn't be safe to sit down and write his house in the
lobby of a decent hotel. 'Pon my word, I actually heard the 'zip' of
that bullet!"
Denby looked across at the hinderer of oblivion, and remembered that
the salesman had been well to the rear of the battery in action.
Wherefore he said, with a touch of the gravest irony: "You'll get used
to it, after a bit. Suppose you take a spin around the block in the
open air; that will doubtless steady your nerves so you can write the
house without a quiver."
"Think it would? I believe I'll try it; I can't hold a pen still to
save my life. But say, I might happen to run up against that fellow,
and he might recognize me and think I was after him."
"In which case he would in all probability draw and quarter you and
take your scalp for a memento. On second thought, I don't know but
you're safer where you are."
The mere suggestion was perspiratory, and the traveling man mopped
his face. But there are occasions when one must talk or burst, and
presently he began again.
"Say, I suppose they'll lynch that fellow if they catch him, won't
they?"
The badgered one came to attention with a fine-lined frown of annoyance
radiating fan-like above his eyes. He was of the stuff of which
man-masters are made; a well-knit figure of a man, rather under than
over the average of height and breadth, but so fairly proportioned as
to give the impression of unmeasured strength in reserve,--the strength
of steel under silk. His face was bronzed with the sun-stain of the
altitudes, but it was as smooth as a child's, and beardless, with thin
lips and masterful eyes of the sort that can look unmoved upon things
unnamable.
"Lynch him? Oh, no; you do us an injustice," he said, and the tone was
quite as level as the eye-volley. "We don't lynch people out here for
shooting,--only for talking too much."
Whereat one may picture unacclimated loquacity gasping and silenced,
with the owner of the "Chincapin" and other listed properties going
on to read his letters and telegrams in peace. The process furthered
itself in the sequence of well-ordered dispatch until a message, damp
from the copying-press and dated at Leadville, came to the surface. It
covered two of the yellow sheets in the spacious handwriting of the
receiving operator, and Denby read it twice, and yet once again, before
laying it aside. Whatever it was, it was not suffered to interrupt the
orderly sequence of things; and Denby had read the last of the letters
before he held up a summoning finger for a bell-boy.
"Go and ask the clerk the name of the man who was shot, will you?"
The information came in two words, and the querist gathered up his
papers and sent the boy for his room key. At the stairhead he met the
surgeon and stopped him to ask about the wounded man.
"How are you, Doctor? What is the verdict? Is there a fighting chance
for him?"
"Oh, yes; much more than that. It isn't as bad as it might have been;
the skull isn't fractured. But it was enough to knock him out under the
circumstances. He had skipped two or three meals, he tells me, and was
under a pretty tense strain of excitement."
"Then he is conscious?"
The physician laughed. "Very much so. He is sitting up to take my
prescription,--which was a square meal. Whatever the strain was, it
isn't off yet. He insists that he must mount and ride this afternoon
if he has to be lashed in the saddle; has already ordered a horse, in
fact. He is plucky."
"Then he is able to talk business, I suppose."
"Able, yes; but if you can get anything out of him, you'll do better
than I could. He won't talk,--won't even tell what the row was about."
"Won't he?" The man of affairs crossed the corridor and tapped on the
door of Number Nineteen. There was no response, and he turned the knob
and entered. The shades were drawn and there was a cleanly odor of
aseptics in the air of the darkened room. The wounded man was propped
among pillows on the bed, with a well-furnished tea-tray on his knees.
He gave prompt evidence of his ability to talk.
"Back again, are you? I told you I had nothing to say for publication,
and I meant it." This wrathfully; then he discovered his mistake,
but the tone of the careless apology was scarcely more conciliatory.
"Oh--excuse me. I thought it was the reporter."
Bartrow's correspondent found a chair and introduced himself with
charitable directness. "My name is Denby. I am here because Mr. Richard
Bartrow wires me to look you up."
Jeffard delayed the knife and fork play long enough to say:
"Denby?--oh, yes; I remember. Thank you," and there the interview bade
fair to die of inanition. Jeffard went on with his dinner as one who
eats to live; and Denby tilted his chair gently and studied his man as
well as he might in the twilight of the drawn shades. After a time, he
said:--
"Bartrow bespeaks my help for you. He says your affair may need
expediting: does it?"
Jeffard's rejoinder was almost antagonistic. "How much do you know of
the affair?"
"What the whole town knows by this time--added to what little Bartrow
tells me in his wire. You or your partner have stumbled upon an
abandoned claim which promises to be a bonanza. One of you--public
rumor is a little uncertain as to which one--tried to euchre the other;
and it seems that you have won in the race to the Recorder's office,
and have come out of it alive. Is that the summary?"
He called it public rumor, but it was rather a shrewd guess. Jeffard
did not hasten to confirm it. On the contrary, his reply was evasive.
"You may call it an hypothesis--a working hypothesis, if you choose.
What then?"
The promoter was not of those who swerve from conclusions. "It follows
that you are a stout fighter, and a man to be helped, or a very great
rascal," he said coolly.
Again the knife and fork paused, and the wounded man's gaze was at
least as steady as that of his conditional accuser. "It may simplify
matters, Mr. Denby, if I say that I expect nothing from public rumor."
The mine-owner shrugged his shoulders as an unwilling arbiter who
would fain wash his hands of the ethical entanglement if he could.
"It's your own affair, of course,--the public opinion part of it. But
it may prove to be worth your while not to ignore the suffrages of
those who make and unmake reputations."
"Why?"
"Because you will need capital,--honest capital,--and"--
He left the sentence in the air, and Jeffard brought it down with a
cynical stonecast.
"And, under the circumstances, an honest capitalist might hesitate,
you would say. Possibly; but capital, as I know it, is not so
discriminating when the legal requirements are satisfied. There will be
no question of ownership involved in the development of the 'Midas.'"
"Legal ownership, you mean?"
"Legal or otherwise. When the time for investment comes, I shall be
abundantly able to assure the capitalist."
"To guarantee the investment: doubtless. But capital is not always as
unscrupulous as you seem to think."
"No?"--the tilt of the negative was almost aggressive. "There are
borrowers and borrowers, Mr. Denby. It's the man without collateral who
is constrained to make a confidant of his banker."
The blue-gray eyes of the master of men looked their levelest, and the
clean-shaven face was shrewdly inscrutable. "Pardon me, Mr. Jeffard,
but there are men who couldn't borrow with the Orizaba behind them."
Jeffard parried the eye-thrust, and brushed the generalities aside in a
sentence.
"All of which is beside the mark, and I have neither the strength nor
the inclination to flail it out with you. As you say, I shall need
capital--yours or another's. State the case--yours, or mine,--in so
many words, if you please."
"Briefly, then: the equity in this affair lies between you and the man
who tried to kill you. I mean by this that the bonanza is either yours
or his. If it were a partnership discovery there would have been no
chance for one of you to overreach the other. You'll hardly deny that
there was a sharp fight for possession: you both advertised that fact
pretty liberally."
Jeffard was listening with indifference, real or feigned, and he
neither denied nor affirmed. "Go on."
"From the point of view of an unprejudiced observer the evidence is
against your partner. He comes here drunk and abusive, in company with
two men whose faces would condemn them anywhere, and squanders his lead
in the race in a supplementary carouse. And a little later, when he
finds that you have outclassed him, he shoots you down like a dog in a
fit of drunken fury. To an impartial onlooker the inference is fairly
obvious."
"And that is?"--
"That your partner is the scoundrel; that the discovery is yours,
and that he and his accomplices were trying to rob you. I don't mind
saying that this is my own inference, but I shall be glad to have it
confirmed."
Jeffard looked up quickly. "Then Bartrow hasn't told you"--
"Bartrow's message was merely introductory; two pages of eulogy, in
fact, as any friendly office of Dick's is bound to be. He doesn't go
into details."
Jeffard put the tea-tray aside and with it the air of abstraction, and
in a better light his interlocutor would not have failed to remark the
swift change from dubiety to assurance.
"Will you bear with me, Mr. Denby, if I say that your methods are a
little indirect? You say that the evidence is against James Garvin,
and yet you give me to understand that it will be well if I can clear
myself."
"Exactly; a word of assurance is sometimes worth many deductions."
"But if, for reasons of my own, I refuse to say the word?"
The promoter's shrug was barely perceptible. "I don't see why you
should refuse."
Jeffard went silent at that, lying back with closed eyes and no more
than a twitching of the lips to show that he was not asleep. After what
seemed an interminable interval to the mine-owner, he said:--
"I do refuse, for the present. A few days later, when I have done what
I have to do, there will be time enough to discuss ways and means--and
ethics, if you still feel inclined that way. May I trouble you to
run that window-shade up?" He was sitting on the edge of the bed and
groping beneath it for his shoes.
The promoter admitted the light and ventured a question.
"What are you going to do?"
"Get on the ground with the least possible delay."
The shoes were found, but when the wounded one bent to lace them the
room spun around and he would have fallen if Denby had not caught him.
"You're not fit," said the master of men, not unsympathetically. "You
couldn't sit a horse if your life depended upon it."
"I must; therefore I can and will," Jeffard asserted, with fine
determination. "Be good enough to ask the bell-boy to come in and lace
my shoes."
The man with a mission to compel other men smiled. His fetish was
indomitable resolution, for himself first, and afterward for those who
deserved; and here was a man who, whatever his lacks and havings in
the ethical field, was at least courageous. Having admitted so much,
the promoter went down on one knee to lace the courageous one's shoes,
dissuading him, meanwhile.
"You can't go to-day; the wound-fever will come on presently, and
you'll be a sick man. Let it rest a while. Having put himself on the
criminal side of the fence by trying to kill you, your partner will
hardly dare to jump the claim in person; he will have to find a proxy,
and that will ask for time,--more time than the sheriff-dodging will
permit."
"His proxies are here, and they will act without instructions from
him," said Jeffard, with his hands to his head and his teeth set to
keep the words from shaping themselves into a groan.
"You mean the two who were with him?"
"Yes. So far as the present fight is concerned, the three are one; and
two of them are still free to act."
"So?--that's different." Denby finished tying the second shoe and rose
to begin measuring a sentinel's beat between the window and the door,
pacing evenly with his brows knitted and his hands clasped behind him.
"You know what to expect, then?"
"I know that I have been twice shot at within the past two hours, and
that the moments are golden."
"But you are in no condition to go in and hold it alone! You'll have to
meet force with force. You ought to have at least three or four good
men with you."
"What I have to do presupposes a clear field," said Jeffard guardedly.
"If it should come to blows, the discussion of--of ethics will be
indefinitely postponed, I'm afraid."
"Humph! I suppose your reasons are as strong as your obstinacy. How far
is it to your claim?"
"I don't know the exact distance; about twenty miles, I believe. But
there is a mountain range intervening."
"You can't ride it in your present condition; it's a sheer physical
impossibility."
"I shall ride it."
"What is the use of being an ass?" demanded the master of men, losing
patience for once in a way. "Don't you see you can't stand alone?"
Jeffard struggled to his feet and wavered across the room to a chair.
Denby laughed,--a quiet little chuckle of appreciation.
"I didn't mean literally; I meant in the business affair. You'll
have to have help from the start. That means that you will have to
trust some one. From what you say it is evident that there will be
an immediate attempt made to jump the claim; an attempt which will
be afoot and on the ground long before you can get there. Let us be
reasonable and take hold of the live facts. I have a man here who is
both capable and trustworthy. Let me send him in with a sufficient
force to stand off the jumpers until you are able to hold your own."
Jeffard shook his head. "I can't do it, unreasonable as it may seem. I
must go first and alone. That is another mystery, you will say, but I
can't help it. If I win through it alive I shall be here again in a day
or two, ready to talk business. More than that I can't say now."
Denby's thin lips came together in a straight line, with a click of the
white teeth behind them. "As you please. I am not going about to prove
to you that you would lose nothing by trusting me from the start. Can I
do anything toward helping you off?"
"Yes; you can give me your shoulder down the stair and a lift into the
saddle."
The little journey to the ground floor was made in silence. When they
were passing the desk the clerk said: "Your horse is at the door, Mr.
Jeffard. I was just about to send up word. Are you feeling better?"
"I am all right." He leaned heavily on the counter and paid his bill.
"Did the liveryman leave any message?"
"No, only to say that he has stocked the saddle-bags as you directed."
The personally conducted journey went on to the sidewalk, and Denby
heaved the wounded one into the saddle, steadying him therein till the
vertigo loosed its hold.
"Anything else you can delegate?"
"No, thank you; nothing that I think of."
"You are still determined to go?"
"Quite determined."
"Well, you are a stubborn madman, and I rather like you for it; that's
all I have to say. Good luck to you."
Jeffard gathered the reins and sat reflective what time the broncho
sniffed the cool breeze pouring down from the higher slopes of the
western range. When the horse would have set out, Jeffard restrained
him yet another moment.
"You intimated a few minutes ago that I was afraid to trust you, Mr.
Denby," he said, picking and choosing among the words as one who has
a difficult course to steer. "I do trust you as far as I can trust
any one at the present crisis, and I'll prove it." He drew a crumpled
bit of paper from his pocket, and smoothed it upon the pommel of the
saddle. "Here is a rough map of the claim and the trails by which it
may be reached. If I'm not back in Aspen in three days, fit out your
expedition and go in prepared to take and hold the property. The men
you will find in possession will be robbers,--and murderers,--and you
may have to fight for it; but that won't matter. In the right-hand
tunnel wall, a few feet from the entrance, you will see a crevice where
the dynamite was kept. In the bottom of that crevice you'll find my
last will and testament, and I'm going to believe that you will carry
out its provisions to the letter."
The promoter's smile was of grimness, with quarterings of approval.
"Which is to say that you'll be safely dead and buried. Barring your
idiotic stubbornness, you are a man after my own heart, Mr. Jeffard,
and I'll willingly be your executor. Are you armed?"
"No; I told you it would depend upon speed. I have no weapons."
"What! And you are going on a forlorn hope with an even chance of
having to fight for your life? Wait a minute."
He ran back into the hotel, coming out again presently with a repeating
rifle and a well-filled cartridge belt. "There is such a thing as
cold nerve carried to the vanishing point in foolhardiness, Mr.
Jeffard," he said. "Put this belt on while I sling the rifle under the
saddle-flap. Can you shoot straight?"
"It is extremely doubtful. A little target practice as a boy"--
"Target practice!--and you may have to stand off a gang of desperadoes
who can clip coins at a hundred yards! You'd better reconsider and give
me time to organize a posse."
"No; thank you--for that and everything else. Good-by."
Denby stood on the curb and watched his man ride slowly up the street
and take the turn toward the southern mountains. After which he went
back to his place at the public writing-table in the lobby, picking
up the hotel stenographer on the way. For a preoccupied half-hour he
dictated steadily, and when the last letter was answered got up to pace
out the transcribing interval. In the midst of it he drifted out to the
sidewalk and stood staring absently up the street, as, an hour earlier,
he had gazed after the lessening figure of the obstinate one. But this
time there were two horsemen in the field of vision wending their
way leisurely to the street-end. Denby, thinking pointedly of other
things, saw them and saw them not; but when they, too, took the turn to
the southward, he came alive to the probabilities in the heart of an
instant.
"By all that's good!--they're after him, as sure as fate!" he muttered;
and a little later he was quizzing the proprietor of a livery stable
around the corner.
"Do you know those two fellows who have just left, Thompson?"
"You bet I don't; and I made 'em put up the collateral for the whole
outfit before they got away."
"Where did you say they were going?"
"Didn't say, did I? But somewheres up Jackfoot Gulch was what they told
me."
"H'm; that is east. And just now they are riding in another direction.
You sold them the horses, you say?"
The man grinned. "Temp'rarily. I'll take 'em back at the same price,
less the tariff, if I ever see 'em again. I ain't takin' no chances on
stray strangers with any such lookin'-glass-bustin' faces as they've
got. Not much, Mary Ann."
"It is well to be careful. Have you seen my man Donald since dinner?"
"Yes; he was here just now and said he'd be back again. Want him?"
Denby looked at his watch. "Yes. If he doesn't come back within five
minutes, send some of the boys out to hunt him up. Tell him to outfit
for himself and me for two days, and to be at the hotel at three,
sharp. Give him the best horses you can lay your hands on."
"Always yours to command, Mr. Denby. Anything else?"
"That's all."
The promoter left the stable and walked quickly to the hotel. At the
entrance he met an acquaintance and stopped to pass the time of day.
"How are you, Roberts?--By the way, you are just the man I wanted to
see; saves me a trip to the Court House. Did a fellow named Jeffard,
J-e-f-f-a-r-d, file a notice and affidavit on a claim called the
'Midas' just after dinner?"
"No. He came over to ask me if there was any way in which he could
secure himself. It seems that he neglected to post a notice on the
claim before coming out with his samples,--why, he didn't explain."
Denby nodded and went on, talking to himself. "So!--that's his little
mystery, is it? The 'Midas' isn't located yet, and until he gets that
notice posted and recorded, it's anybody's bonanza. I hope Donald can
pick up the trail and follow it. If he can't, there'll be one plucky
fellow less in the world, and two more thugs to be hanged, later on."