Branded Part 19

"You couldn't do a thing like that!" he protested.

"Yesterday I should have been just as certain as you are that it was beyond the possibilities; but now, since last night, it's different.

And that is why I say you ought to fire me. You can't afford to carry any handicaps; you need a.s.sets, not liabilities."

Gifford got up and went to sit on the doorstep, where he occupied himself in whittling thin shavings of tobacco from a bit of black plug and cramming them into his pipe. Barrett accepted this tacit implication that he was to speak for both.

"If you pull out, Jimmie, it will be because you want to; not because anything you have said cuts any figure with us. And whether you go or stay, there will be two of us here who will back you to the limit.

That's about all there is to say, I guess; only, if I were you, I shouldn't be too sudden. Take a day to think it over. To-morrow morning, if you still think it's the wise thing to do--the only thing to do--we'll write you a check, Gifford and I, for your share in the bank account; and after we get going we'll make such a settlement with you for your third as will be fair and just all around."

This put an entirely new face upon the matter. I hadn't dreamed of such a thing as standing upon my rights in the partnership.

"Like the mischief, you will!" I retorted. "Do you think I'm that kind of a quitter?--that I'd take a single dollar out of the Little Clean-up's war chest? Why, man alive! my only object in getting out would be to relieve you two of a possible burden!"

Barrett's smile was altogether brotherly. "It's the only way you can escape us," he averred; and with that the dissolution proposal was suffered to go by default.

There were half a dozen stragglers to come lounging over the spur or up the gulch that Sunday afternoon, sharp-set, eager-eyed prospectors, every man of them, and each one, we guessed, searching meticulously for the mysterious bonanza about which everybody in town was gossiping. It was only the fact that the hills were fairly dotted with embryotic mines like our own--this and the other fact that our dump showed no signs of ore--that saved us.

Two of these prying visitors hung around for an hour or more, and one of the pair wanted to go down in the shaft, which was now deep enough to be quite safe from prying eyes at the surface. I was acting as windla.s.s-man at the time, and I bluffed him, telling him that with two men working in the hole there wasn't room for a third--which was true enough. But beyond this fact there were by this time the best of reasons for keeping strangers out of our shaft. To name the biggest of them, our marvelous Golconda vein had widened steadily with the increasing depth until now we were sinking in solid ore.

It was Gifford's turn to guard the ore load that night, and after the team got away I persuaded Barrett to go to bed. He was showing the effects of the terrible toil worse than either the carpenter or myself, and I was afraid he might break when the fighting strain came. I had yet to learn what magnificent reserves there were in this clean-cut, high-strung young fellow who, when we began, looked as if he had never done a day's real labor in his life.

Since we had never yet left the shaft unguarded for a single hour of the day or night, I took my place at the pit mouth as soon as Barrett's candle went out. It was a fine night, warm for the alt.i.tude and brightly starlit, though there was no moon. In the stillness the subdued clamor of the Lawrenceburg's hoists floated up over the spur shoulder; and by listening intently I fancied I could hear the distant rumble of our ore wagon making its way down the mountain.

In the isolation and loneliness of the night watch it was inevitable that my thoughts should hark back to the near-meeting with Kellow, and to the moral lapse which it had provoked. Doubtless every man rediscovers himself many times in the course of a lifetime. In prison I had been sustained by a vindictive determination to win out and square accounts with Abel Geddis and Abner Withers. After my release another motive had displaced the vengeful prompting: the losing fight for reinstatement in the good opinion of the world seemed to be the only thing worth living for.

But now I was finding that there was a well-spring of action deeper than either of these, and the name of it was a degrading fear of consequences--of punishment. With a most hearty loathing for the lower depths of baseness uncovered by craven fear, one may be none the less a helpless victim of a certain ruthless and malign ferocity to which it is likely to give birth. Sitting with my back propped against the windla.s.s and the newly purchased rifle across my knees, I found that cowardice, like other base pa.s.sions, may suddenly develop an infection.

With nerves twittering and muscles tensely set, I was ready to become a homicidal maniac at the snapping of a twig or the rolling of a pebble down the hillside.

In such crises the twig is predestined to snap, or the pebble to roll.

Some slight movement on my part set a little cataract of broken stone tumbling into the shaft. Before I could recover from the p.r.i.c.kling shock of alarm, I heard footsteps and a shadowy figure appeared in the path leading over the spur from the Lawrenceburg. Automatically the rifle flew to my shoulder, and a crooking forefinger was actually pressing the trigger when reason returned and I saw that the approaching intruder was a woman.

I was deeply grateful that it was too dark for Mary Everton to see with what teeth-chatterings and reactionary tremblings I was letting down the hammer of the rifle when she came up. For that matter, I think she did not see me at all until I laid the gun aside and stood up to speak to her. She had stopped as if irresolute; was evidently disconcerted at finding the claim shack dark and apparently deserted.

"Oh!" she gasped, with a little backward start, as I rose from the empty dynamite box upon which I had been sitting. Then she recognized me and explained. "I--I thought you would be working--you have been working nights, haven't you?--and I came over to--to speak to Mr.

Barrett."

Under other conditions I might have been conventionally critical. My traditions were still somewhat hidebound. In Glendale a young woman would scarcely go alone at night in search of a man, even though the man might be her lover.

"Barrett has gone to bed: I'll call him," I said, limiting the rejoinder to the bare necessities.

"No; please don't do that," she interposed. "I am sure he must be needing his rest. I can come again--at some other time."

I was beginning to get a little better hold upon my nerves by this time and I laughed.

"Bob is needing the rest, all right, but he will murder me when he finds out that you've been here and I didn't call him. If you want to save my life, you'd better reconsider."

"No; don't call him," she insisted. "It isn't at all necessary, and--and perhaps you can tell me what I want to know--what I ought to know before I----" the sentence trailed off into nothing and she began again rather breathlessly: "Mr. Bertrand, can you--can you satisfy me in any way that you and your two friends have a legal right to this claim you are working? It's a perfect--impertinence in me, to ask, I know, but----"

"It is a fair question," I hastened to a.s.sure her; "one that any one might ask. With the proper means at hand--maps and records--I could very easily answer it."

"But--but there may have been mistakes made," she suggested.

"Doubtless there were; but we haven't made them. The Lawrenceburg Company owns the ground on two sides of us, and for some considerable distance beyond us toward the head of the gulch; but I can a.s.sure you that our t.i.tle to the Little Clean-Up is perfectly good and legal in every way."

"It is going to be disputed," she broke in hurriedly. "Mr. Blackwell has talked about it--before me, just as if I didn't count. Telegrams have been pa.s.sing back and forth, and the Lawrenceburg owners in the East have given Mr. Blackwell full authority to take such steps as he may think best. I--that is, Daddy and I--have known Mr. Barrett for a long time, and I couldn't let this thing happen without giving him just a little warning. Some kind of legal proceedings have already been begun, and you are to be driven off--to-morrow."

"Oh, I guess not; not so suddenly as all that," I ventured to say.

There were many questions to come crowding in, but I could scarcely expect the a.s.sayer's daughter to answer them. Her father had plainly declared his belief that we were stealing Lawrenceburg ore and planning a blackmailing scheme: had he told Blackwell? The query practically answered itself. If Blackwell had been told that we were salting our claim with ore stolen from the Lawrenceburg sheds, the "legal proceedings" would have been a simple arrest-warrant and a search for stolen property. Had Everton told his daughter? This was blankly incredible. If he had told her that we were thieves, she would never have gone so far aside from her childhood hatred of duplicity and wrong-doing as to come and warn us.

"I was afraid you might not believe me," she said, with a little catch in her voice; and then: "I can't blame you; after what you have suf--after all that has happened."

If I hadn't been completely lost in admiration for her keen sense of justice, and more or less bewildered by her beauty and her nearness, I might have caught the significance of what she was trying to say. But I didn't.

"No; I didn't mean that," I denied warmly. "I do believe every word you have said. No one who knows you could disbelieve you for a moment."

"But you don't know me," she put in quickly.

I saw how near I had come to self-betrayal and tried to fend my little life-raft off the rocks.

"You will say that we have met only once before to-night, and then only casually. Will you permit a comparative stranger to say that that was enough? Your soul looks out through your eyes, Miss Everton, and it is an exceedingly honest soul. I know you must have strong reasons for coming to tell us what Blackwell is doing; and if I didn't quite understand the motive at first--with you your father's daughter, you know, and your father in the service of the----"

"I know," she interrupted. "But you lose sight of the larger things.

If you have been telling me the truth about your ownership of this claim, a great wrong is going to be done. I couldn't stand aside and let it be done, could I?"

Something in her manner of saying this recalled most vividly the little girl of the long ago, hot-hearted in her indignation against injustice of every sort.

"No, I am sure you couldn't: I don't believe you know how to compromise with wrong of any kind. But you ought not to take my unsupported word about the matter of ownership. Let me call Barrett."

"It isn't necessary. If you say that you three have an honest right to be here, I believe you implicitly. And what I have done is nothing.

My father would have done it if he hadn't--if he didn't----"

"You needn't say it," I helped out. "Your father thinks we are trying to hold the Lawrenceburg people up, and I don't blame him. When he was up here the other day--the day you were both here--he thought he caught us red-handed. It wasn't so; he was quite mistaken; but for reasons which I can't explain just now I couldn't very well take the only course which would have undeceived him."

"I--I think I understand," she returned, guardedly. "You--you haven't been stealing ore from the Lawrenceburg sheds?"

I laughed and said a thing that I wouldn't have said to any other living human being on earth at that stage of the game.

"If we can manage to hold our own for just a little while longer, Robert Barrett will be a very rich man, Miss Everton. May I venture to hand you a lot of good wishes before the fact? I know this is only a very old friend's privilege, but----"

Her embarra.s.sment was very charming, and, as I saw it, most natural.

"I--indeed, I wasn't thinking any more of Mr. Barrett than I was of--of you and--and Mr. Gifford," she faltered. "I simply couldn't bear to think of this terrible thing dropping upon you out of a clear sky if--if you hadn't been doing anything to deserve it. Can you defend yourselves in any way?"

"We can try mighty hard," I a.s.serted. "That is what I meant when I said that we were not going to be driven off to-morrow. Possession is nine points of the law. We have our little foothold here, and we shall try to keep it. I'll tell Barrett when he wakes, and we'll be ready for them when they come. Now you must let me take you back home. You really oughtn't to be here alone, you know."

She made no objection to the bit of elder-brother-ism, but half-way up to the summit of the spur she had her small fling at the conventions.

"I don't admit that I ought not to have come alone; neither that, nor your right to question it," she said definitively. "You protest because you are conventional: so am I conventional--but only so far as the conventions subserve some good end. There are situations in which the phrase, 'it isn't done,' becomes a mere impertinence. This is life in the making, up here in these desolate hills, and we who are taking part in the process are just plain men and women."