Branded Part 28

Of that heavenly month, spent in a world far removed from all the turmoil and distractions of modern civilization, there is nothing to be here written down. For those who have drained a similar cup of blissful happiness for themselves there is no need; and those who have not would not understand. What I recall most vividly now is a single unnerving incident; unnerving, I say, though at the time it was quickly drowned in the flowing tide of joy.

It chanced upon a day toward the month's end when we had broken the heavenly sequence of quiet days by riding a pair of our host's well-broken cow ponies over to El Tovar for dinner. Since it was not the tourist season there were not many guests in the great inn; but one, a man who sat by himself in a far corner of the dining-room, gave me a turn that made me sick and faint at my first sight of him. The man was big and swarthy of face, and he wore a pair of drooping mustaches. For one heart-stopping instant I made sure it was William c.u.mmings, the deputy prison warden who had so miraculously missed seeing me in the dining-car of my train of escape. But since nothing happened and he paid no manner of attention to us, I decided gratefully that it was only a resemblance. There was no such name as c.u.mmings on the hotel register, which I examined after we left the dining-room, and I saw no more of the man with the drooping mustaches.

Momentary as the shock had been, I found that Polly had remarked it.

She spoke of it on the ride back to our retreat at Carter's.

"Are you feeling entirely well, Jimmie, dear?" she asked; and before I could reply: "You had a bad turn of some sort while we were at table.

I saw it in your face and eyes."

I hastened to a.s.sure her that there was nothing the matter with me; that there couldn't be anything the matter with a man who had died and gone to heaven nearly a month previous to the dinner at El Tovar.

"But the man has got to go back to earth again pretty soon, and take the woman with him," she retorted, laughing. "Just think, Jimmie; it has been nearly a month, as you say, and we haven't had a letter or a telegram in all that time! Not that I'm regretting anything; I'm happy, dearest--as happy as an angel with wings; but I want to see my daddy."

The heavenly path was leading back into the old world again, the fighting world, and I knew it, and presently we were taking all the steps of the delightful vanishing in reverse; boarding the through train at Williams, catching glimpses of the stupendous majesty of mountain and plain as the powerful locomotives towed us up the grades of the Raton, doing a brisk walk on the platform at Albuquerque while the train paused, and all the rest of it.

From Trinidad I wired Barrett, telling him that we were on our way home; that we should go in by way of Colorado Springs instead of Florence, with a stop-over between trains for dinner at the Antlers. I half-expected he would run down to the Springs to meet us, and so he did, bringing Father Phineas with him. Polly's love for her father was always very sweet and touching, and Barrett and I left them to themselves at the meeting.

"I'm mighty glad to see you back, Jimmie, old man," Barrett declared, when we had found a quiet corner in the rotunda. "You are looking like a new man, and I guess you are one. And you are on your feet again financially, too. We declared a dividend yesterday, and you've got a bank account that will warm the c.o.c.kles of your silly old heart."

"How is Gifford? and how are things at the mine?" I asked.

"Gifford is all right; only he's got too much money--doesn't know what to do with it now that he has built all the new houses the camp will stand for. And the Little Clean-Up is all right, too; though we are digging into a small mystery just now."

"A mystery?" I queried.

"Yes. You remember how the branch vein in the two-hundred-foot level was bearing off to the east?"

"I do."

"Well, three weeks ago the sloping carried us over into the Mary Mattock ground, and I tell you what, Jimmie, I was more than glad we had bought that claim outright while we could. The ore is richer than anything we have found since we made the big strike at gra.s.s-roots, and we'd be up against it good and hard if we hadn't paid those Nebraska farmers what they asked and taken a clear t.i.tle to the ground."

"But the mystery," I reminded him.

"It is a little trick of acoustics, I guess; it has happened in other mines, so Hicks tells me. Some peculiar geological structure of the porphyry in particular localities makes it carry sound like a telephone wire. In that eastern adit of ours you can hear them working in the Lawrenceburg as plainly as if they were only a few feet away."

"That is odd," I mused; "especially as the Lawrenceburg workings are all in exactly the opposite direction--down the hill on their side of the spur."

Barrett thrust his hands deep into his pockets.

"I have often wondered, Jimmie, if they really _are_ downhill. n.o.body, outside of the men on their own pay-roll, knows anything about it definitely; and Blackwell wouldn't let an outside engineer go down his shaft for a king's ransom. I know it, because I have tried to send one. If the downhill story that we've been hearing should happen to be a fake; if he should be under-cutting us, instead; it would explain a heap of things."

"The stubborn lawsuit among others," I offered.

"Yes; the lawsuit. By the way, we've been up to our necks in that while you've been hiding out. Blackwell's lawyers succeeded in persuading the Federal court to grant a temporary injunction, in spite of everything we could do, and we are operating now under an indemnity bond big enough to make your head swim. The hearing to determine whether the injunction shall be dissolved or made permanent is timed for next Monday."

"Heavens!" I e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed. "We can't let them tie us up!"

"I don't think they are going to be able to. Benedict is feeling a little better now and he thinks he has them sewed up in a blanket, only he won't tell me how, and you never can tell what's going to happen when the lawyers get at you. There are lots of holes in the legal skimmer: for example, at the preliminary hearing Blackwell had three surveyors who went on the stand and swore flat-footed that the lines on our side of the spur were all wrong; that the Lawrenceburg group of claims covered not only our original triangle, but the Mary Mattock as well. Paid-for perjury, of course, but we couldn't prove it; so there you are."

At my urging Barrett would have gone into this phase of the trouble more deeply, but just then Polly and her father came across the rotunda and we all went to the dining-room together. I shall never forget, the longest day I live, just where our table for four stood, and how a group of gabbling tourists had the three or four tables nearest to us, and how the lights, due to some trouble with the electric current, winked now and then, like the stage lights in a theater ticking off the cues.

We had got as far as the black coffees, and Barrett was joking Polly and telling her that she shouldn't take sugar, when I saw, through a vista of the tourists, a square-shouldered, dark-faced man rising from his place at a distant table. There was no mistaking him. He was the man I had seen in the dining-room of the hotel at the Grand Canyon.

As he came toward us between the tables the resemblance, which I had so confidently a.s.sured myself was only a resemblance, transformed itself slowly into the breath-cutting reality, and I was staring up, wild-eyed and speechless, into the face of the deputy warden, c.u.mmings, when he tapped me on the shoulder and said, loud enough for the others to hear:

"You've led us a pretty long chase, Weyburn, but we don't often miss, and it's ended at last. I guess you'll have to come with me, now."

XXII

A Woman's Love

It is useless for me to try to picture the consternation which fell upon the four of us when the deputy warden touched me on the shoulder and spoke to me. I can't describe it. I only know that Barrett sprang up, gritting out the first oath I had ever heard him utter; that a look of shocked and complete recognition leaped into the mild brown eyes of the old metallurgist; that Polly was standing up with her arms outstretched across the table as if she were trying to reach me and drag me out of the crushing wreck of all our hopes.

When he found that I was not going to offer any resistance, c.u.mmings was very decent--not to say kindly. He let me walk with the others out of the dining-room; made no show of his authority in the rotunda or at the elevators to point me out as a prisoner; and in the up-stairs room to which he took me, pending the departure-time of the earliest eastbound train, he let me see and talk, first with Barrett, and afterward with my wife.

In this most trying exigency Barrett proved to be all that my fancy had ever pictured the truest of friends. His first word a.s.sured me that he meant to stand by me to the last ditch, and I knew it was the word of a man who never knew when he was beaten. While c.u.mmings smoked a cigar in the window-seat I told Barrett the whole pitiful story, beginning with the night when I had promised Agatha Geddis that I would pull her father out of the hole he had digged for himself and ending with my appearance in the Cripple Creek construction camp.

Barrett believed the story, and I didn't have to wait for him to tell me so. I could see it in his eyes.

"Jimmie!" he said, wringing my hand as if he would crush it, "you've got the two of us behind you--I'm speaking for Gifford because I know exactly what he will say. We'll spend every dollar that ever comes out of the Little Clean-Up, if needful, to buy you justice! But I wish you had told me all this before; and, more than that, I wish you had told Polly."

"My G.o.d, Bob!" I groaned; "don't rub it in!" And then I told him brokenly how I had known Polly as a little girl in Glendale, and how I was certain that her father had more than once been on the verge of recognizing me. Then, in such fashion as I could, I made my will, or tried to, telling him that Polly must have her freedom, and that he must help her get it, and that my share in the mine must go to her.

"It is the only return I can make her for the deception I have put upon her," I said; "and I want you to promise me that----"

In the midst of all this Barrett had turned aside, swearing under his breath, which was his only way, I took it, of letting me know how it was rasping him. But now he whirled upon me and broke in savagely:

"Stop it, you d.a.m.ned maniac! If you have lived with Polly Everton a whole month and don't know her any better than that, you ought to be shot! She is waiting now to have her chance at you, and I'm not going to take any more of her time." Then he went soft again: "You keep a stiff upper lip, and we'll get you out of this if we have to retain every lawyer this side of New York!"

Polly came so soon after Barrett left that I knew she must have been waiting in the corridor. c.u.mmings was considerate enough to shift his smoking-seat to the other window and to turn his back upon us. All the cynics in the world to the contrary notwithstanding, there is a tender spot in the heart of every man that was ever born, if one can only be fortunate enough to touch it.

"_My darling_!" That is what she said when I took her in my arms; and for a long minute nothing else was said. Then she drew away and held me at arm's length, and there was that in her dear eyes to make me feel like the soldier who faces the guns with a shout in his heart and a song on his lips, knowing that death itself cannot rob him of the Great Recompense.

"You needn't say one word--Jimmie--_my husband_! I have known it all, every bit of it, from the first--from that Sunday morning when Daddy took me over to your mine," she whispered. "I--I loved you, dearest, when I was only a foolish little school-girl, and your sister and I have exchanged letters ever since Daddy and I left Glendale. So I knew; knew when they sent you to prison for another man's crime, and knew, even better than your mother and sister did, why you let them do it. Oh, Jimmie!"--with a queer little twist of the sweet lips that was half tears and half smile--"if you could only know how wretchedly jealous I used to be of Agatha Geddis!"

"You needn't have been!" I burst out. "But you don't know it all.

Last winter--in Denver----"

She nodded sorrowfully.

"Yes, dear; I knew that, too. I knew that Agatha Geddis was using you again--against your will; and that this time she had a cruel whip in her hand. We had all heard of the broken parole; it was in the home newspapers, and, besides, your sister wrote me about it."

"And in the face of all this, you----"

She nodded again, brightly this time, though her eyes were swimming.