Branded Part 18

It lacked only an hour of midnight when the team, making a wide detour to avoid being heard from the Lawrenceburg, reached our location on the slope of the spur. We all helped with the loading; and when all was ready, Gifford, whose turn it was to go to town, borrowed Barrett's shot-gun and climbed to a seat beside the driver.

With every precaution taken--a dragging pine-tree coupled on behind the load to serve instead of the squealing brakes, and many injunctions to the driver to take it easy and to do his swearing internally--the outfit made more noise than a threshing-machine b.u.mping down the gulch.

We kept pace with it, Barrett and I, following along the crest of the spur with an apprehensive eye on the Lawrenceburg. But there was no unusual stir at the big plant on the other side of the ridge; merely the never-ceasing clank and grind of the hoist and the pouring thunder of the ore as the skip dumped its load into the bins.

Having nothing to detain him in town, Gifford made a quick trip and was with us again a little after four o'clock in the morning. At the crack of dawn Barrett and I were in the shaft under a new division of time.

Now that we had the team hauling for us, we chopped up the shifts so that there would be two of us in the hole continuously, day and night.

Again I have the memory of a week of grinding toil, broken--for me, at least--only by the nights when it came my turn to ride to town on the load of ore. On both occasions I recall that I went fast asleep on the high seat before the wagon had gone twenty rods down the gulch; slept sitting bolt upright, with the shot-gun across my knees, and waking only when the driver was gee-ing into the yard of the sampling works in town; lapses that I may confess here, though I was ashamed to confess them to my two partners.

During this second week we heard nothing from Blackwell or from any of the Lawrenceburg contingent. But several strangers had drifted along, stopping to peer down our shaft and to ask mult.i.tudinous questions.

Knowing well enough that we could not keep up the killing toil indefinitely, and that the discovery crisis was only postponed from day to day, we yet took heart of grace. The purchase money for the ore was pouring in a steady stream into Barrett's bank to our credit; and with the accounting for the third wagon-load we had upward of $80,000 in the fighting fund.

Gifford went in as wagon guard on the Monday night load, and getting an early start from the mountain, he had a little time to spend on the streets in town. On his return he brought news; the news we had all been expecting and waiting for.

"The big trouble's on the way," he reported. "Bennett Avenue's all lit up with the news that there's been a new strike on Bull Mountain. I heard about it mighty near everywhere I went. Up to date n.o.body seems to know just where it is, or who has made it; but they've got hold of the main guy, all right. One fellow told me he had it straight from the sampling works. Some cuss on the inside, I reckon, who doesn't know enough to keep his blame' mouth shut, has gone and leaked."

"I'd like mighty well to see another eighty thousand in the bank before we have to shut our eyes and begin handing it out to the lawyers," said Barrett. "Besides, when we get ready to build a shaft-house and put in machinery, we'll have to have more ground room. After the news gets out, we'll just about have to blanket what land we buy with twenty-dollar gold-pieces."

"With the Lawrenceburg hemming us in the way it does, we won't be able to buy elbow room at any kind of a price, will we?" asked Gifford, who had not gone into the topographies as minutely as Barrett and I had.

"There are the three corners of the original triangle which we weren't able to cover in our claim," Barrett explained. "And down yonder on that gulch flat that we are using for a wagon road there is a claim called the 'Mary Mattock' which was taken up and worked and dropped a year or so ago by a Nebraska syndicate. When I was in town last week I gave Benedict, of Benedict & Myers, the job of running down the owners, with the idea that we might possibly wish to buy the ground a little later on.

"Good work!" Gifford applauded. "I wouldn't have thought of anything as foxy as that."

"I told Benedict we'd buy the Mary Mattock if we could get it at a reasonable figure, or lease it if we couldn't buy it," Barrett went on.

"It is probably worthless to its present owners as it stands; its three shafts are full of water, and I'm told the Nebraskans spent fifty thousand dollars trying to pump them. But the minute the 'Little Clean-Up' gets into the newspapers, the Mary Mattock, being next door to us, will figure in the market as a bonanza, whether it is or isn't."

Gifford cut himself a chew of tobacco from his pocket-plug.

"I wish to gracious we had that other eighty thousand you're honing for, right now," he protested. "This tin-basin trot's sure getting on my nerves, as the fella said. We'd ought to have the shaft-house and machinery set up and going, this minute, and a good, husky bunch of men at work in that hole, digging out dollars where we're scratching for pennies."

"I don't want to be the shy man of this outfit," Barrett put it quickly. "We can have the machinery if you fellows think we dare use the money to buy it."

Gifford and I both said No, deferring to Barrett's better judgment.

And since this talk was getting us nowhere and was wasting time which was worth ten dollars a minute, we broke it off and went to work.

It was in the latter part of this third week, on a night when my turn at the wagon guarding had come in regular course, that I was made to understand that no leaf in the book of a man's life can be so firmly pasted down that a mere chance thumbing of the pages by an alien hand may not flip it back again.

By imperceptible inchings we had been starting the wagon earlier and earlier on each successive trip; and on the evening in question it was no later than ten o'clock when I turned the consignment of ore over to the foreman at the reduction works. Ordinarily, I should have taken the road back to the hills at once, intent only upon getting to camp and between the blankets as speedily as possible. But on this night a spirit of restlessness got hold of me, and, leaving Barrett's shotgun in the sampling works office, I strolled up-town.

Inasmuch as a three-months' residence in a mining-camp is the full equivalent of as many years spent in a region where introductions precede acquaintance, I was practically certain to meet somebody I knew. The somebody in this instance proved to be one Patrick Carmody, formerly a hard-rock boss on the Midland branch construction, and now the working superintendent of a company which was driving a huge drainage tunnel under a group of the big mines of the district.

The meeting-place was the lobby of the hotel, and at the Irishman's invitation I sat with him to smoke a comradely cigar. Carmody was not pointedly inquisitive as to my doings; was content to be told that I had been "prospecting around." Beyond that he was good-naturedly willing to talk of the stupendous undertaking over which he was presiding, expatiating enthusiastically upon air-drill performance, porphyry shooting, the merits of various kinds of high explosives, deep-mine ventilation, and the like.

While he talked, I smoked on, luxuriating like a cat before a fire in the comfortable lounging-chair, the cheerful surroundings, the stir and bustle of the human ebb and flow, and the first half-hour of real idleness I had enjoyed in many days.

It was after Carmody had been dragged away by some fellow hard-rock enthusiast that I had my paralyzing shock. Sitting in a chair less than a dozen feet distant, smoking quietly and reading a newspaper, was a man whose face would have been familiar if I had seen it in the golden streets of the New Jerusalem or in the deepest fire-chamber of the other place; a face with boring black eyes, and with a cruel mouth partly hidden by freshly crimped black mustaches: the face, namely, of my sometime prison-mate, Kellow.

My shocked recognition of this man who tied me to my past annihilated time and distance as if they had never been. In a flash I was back again in a great stone building in the home State, working over the prison books and glancing up now and then to the cracked mirror on the opposite wall of the prison office which showed me the haggard features and cropped hair of the convict Weyburn.

The memory shutter flicked, and I saw myself walking out through the prison gates with the State's cheap suit of clothes on my back and the State's five dollars in my pocket, a paroled man. Another click, and I had dragged through the six months of degradation and misery, and saw myself sitting opposite Kellow in the back room of a slum saloon in a great city, shivering with the cold, wretched and hungry. Once again I saw his sneer and heard him say, "It's all the same to you now, whether you cracked the bank or didn't. You may think you can live the prison smell down, but you can't; it'll stick to you like your skin. Wherever you go, you'll be a marked man."

It is a well-worn saying that life is full of paper walls. A look, a turn of the head, the recognition which would follow, and once more I should be facing a fate worse than death. Kellow knew that I had broken my parole. He would trade upon the knowledge, and if he could not use me he would betray me. I knew the man.

Five minutes earlier I had been facing the world a free man; free to go and come as I pleased, free to sit and smoke with a friend in the most public place in the camp. But now I slid from my chair with my hat pulled over my eyes and crept to the door, watching Kellow every step of the way, ready to bolt and run, or to turn and fight to kill, at the slightest rustling of the upheld newspaper. Once safely outside in the cool, clean night air of the streets I despised myself with a loathing too bitter to be set in words. But the fact remained.

It was like the strugglings of a man striving to throw off the benumbing effects of an opium debauch--the effort to be at one again with the present. The effort was no more than half successful when I stepped into a late-closing hardware store and bought a weapon--a repeating rifle with its appropriate ammunition. Barrett had said something about the lack of weapons at the claim--we had only the shot-gun and Gifford's out-of-date revolver--and I made the purchase automatically in obedience to an underlying suggestion which was scarcely more than half conscious.

But once more in the street, and with the means in my hands, a sudden and fierce impulse prompted me to go back to the hotel lobby and kill the man who held my fate between his finger and thumb. Take it as a virtue or a confession of weakness, as you will, but it was only the thought of what I owed Barrett and Gifford that kept me from doing it.

So it was a potential murderer, at least in willing intention, who took the long trail back under the summer stars to the hills, with the rifle and Barrett's shot-gun--the latter picked up in pa.s.sing the sampling works--nestling in the hollow of his arm. G.o.d or the devil could have given me no greater boon that night than the hap to meet Kellow on the lonesome climb. I am sure I should have shot him without the faintest stirring of irresolution. By the time I reached our gulch I was fuming over my foolishness in buying the rifle--a clumsy weapon that would everywhere advertise my purpose. What I needed, I told myself, was a pocket weapon, to be carried day and night; and the next time I should go to town the lack should be supplied.

For by now all scruples were dead and I was a.s.suring myself grittingly that the entire Cripple Creek district was too narrow to hold the man who knew, and the man who was afraid.

XV

The Broken Wagon

The day following the Kellow incident being Sunday, the three of us s.n.a.t.c.hed an hour or so in the early forenoon for a breathing s.p.a.ce.

Sitting around the plank table in the bunk shack we took account of stock, as a shopkeeper would say. It was apparent to all of us that the blazoning abroad of our secret could not now be long delayed. A new gold strike yielding ore worth anywhere from one to twenty-five dollars a pound was startling enough to make a stir even in the one and only Cripple Creek, and it seemed nothing short of a miracle that we had not already been traced and our location identified.

It was Barrett's gift to take the long look ahead. At his suggestion, Gifford, who was something of a rough-and-ready draftsman, sketched a plan for the necessary shaft-house and out-buildings, fitting the structures to our limited s.p.a.ce. When the fight to retain possession should begin we meant to strike fast and hard; Barrett had already gone the length of bargaining, through a friend in town, for building material and machinery, which were to be rushed out to us in a hurry at the firing of the first gun in what we all knew would be a battle for existence.

During this Sunday morning talk I was little more than an abstracted listener. I could think of nothing but the raw hazard of the previous night and of the frightful moral abyss into which it had precipitated me. In addition there were ominous forebodings for the future. So long as Kellow remained in Cripple Creek, danger would lurk for me in every shadow. Since the calamity which was threatening me would also involve my partners, at least to the extent of handicapping them by the loss of a third of our fighting force, it seemed no less than a duty to warn them. But I doubt if I should have had the courage if Barrett had not opened the way.

"You're not saying much, Jimmie. Did the trip to town last night knock you out?" he asked.

It was my opportunity, and I mustered sufficient resolution to seize it.

"No; it didn't knock me out, but it showed me where I've been making a mistake. I never ought to have gone into this thing with you two fellows; but now that I am in, I ought to get out."

"What's that!" Gifford exploded; but Barrett merely caught my eye and said, very gently, "On your own account, or on ours, Jimmie?"

"On yours. There is no need of going into the particulars; it's a long story and a pretty dismal one; but when I tell you that last night I was on the point of killing a man in cold blood--that it's altogether probable that I shall yet have to kill him--you can see what I'm letting you in for if I stay with you."

Gifford leaned back against the shack wall and laughed. "Oh, if _that's_ all," he said. But again it was Barrett who took the soberer view.

"You are one of us, Jimmie," he declared. "If you've got a blood quarrel with somebody, it's our quarrel, too: we're partners. Isn't that right, Gifford?"

"Right it is," nodded the carpenter.

"We are not partners to that extent," I objected. "If I should tell you all the circ.u.mstances, you might both agree with me that I may be obliged to kill this man; but on the other hand, you--or a jury--would call it first-degree murder; as it will be."

Barrett looked horrified, as he had a perfect right to.