Claim Number One Part 24

"Oh, I knew it! I knew it!" she cried, poignant anguish in her wailing voice. "I told that chief of police that; I told him that very thing!"

"Did you go to that brute?" he asked, clutching her almost roughly by the wrist.

"William Bentley and I," she nodded. "The chief wouldn't help. He told us that you were in no danger in Comanche."

"What else?" he asked.

"Go on with the story," said she.

"Yes. I came back to semiconsciousness with that floating sensation which men had described to me, but which I never experienced before, and heard voices, and felt light on my closed eyes, which I hadn't the power to open. But the first thing that I was conscious of, even before the voices and the light, was the smell of whisky-barrels.

"Nothing smells like a whisky-barrel. It's neither whisky nor barrel, but whisky-barrel. Once you have smelled it you never forget. I used to pa.s.s a distillery warehouse on my way to school twice a day, and the smell of whisky-barrels was part of my early education; so I knew.

"From the noise of voices and the smell of the barrels I judged that I must be behind the stage of the variety-theater tent, where they kept the stock of whisky for the bar. In a little while I was able to pick up the ident.i.ty of one of the voices. The other one--there were two of them near me--belonged to a man I didn't know. You have heard us speak, when we were back in camp, of Hun Shanklin, the gambler?"

She nodded, her face white, her lips parted, her breath hanging between them as by a thread.

"It was his voice that I heard; I was coming stronger every second. I made out that they were talking of my undesirable presence in that community. Shanklin owed me a grudge on account of a push that I gave his table one night when he was robbing a young fool with more money than brains by his downright crooked game. That shove laid the old rascal's scheme bare and kept him out of several thousand dollars that night.

"I supposed until last night that his sole object in a.s.saulting me in the dark was to pay off this score; but there was another and more important side to it than that. Shanklin and the fellow with him, whoever it was, knew that I was the winner of Number One, and they wanted me out of the way.

"I'm not clear yet in my mind just why; but they must have had some inside information ahead of others in Comanche that I, and not Peterson, was the lucky man, as reported first. For that extra wasn't out then."

"It was all a swindle, the extra," she hastened to explain. "That editor knew all the time who Number One was. He held your name back just so he might sell a lot more papers. We found out about it after we came here."

"Of course Shanklin was in with him some way. They're all crooks," the doctor commented.

"Perhaps the other man was that wicked chief of police," said she. "I wouldn't consider him above it."

"Nor I," Slavens admitted. "But I don't know; I never heard him speak. I thought I heard that other voice this morning here in Meander, but I'm not sure. I'll be listening. I must get on with my yarn, and I warn you now that I'm going to tax your credulity and try your confidence before I'm through.

"I lay there gathering strength while they talked about putting me away, like a man who had been choked. I couldn't see them when I opened my eyes, for they were back of me somewhere, moving the barrels and boxes around. There was a lantern standing on the ground near my head, and the thought came to me that if I could knock it over and put it out I might make a stagger for the outside and get clear of them. So I upset it.

"The thing didn't go out. It lay on its side, burning away the same as ever, but the move I had made tipped it off to them that I wasn't all in. I heard Shanklin swearing as he came toward me, and I picked up what strength I had, intending to make a fight for it. I wasn't as brisk as I believed myself to be, unluckily, and I had only made it to my knees when they piled on to me from behind. I suppose one of them hit me with a board or something. There's a welt back there on my head, but it don't amount to anything."

"The cowards!" she breathed, panting in indignation.

"I wish we could find a name in some language that would describe them,"

said he; "I've not been able to satisfy myself with anything that English offers. No matter. The next thing that I knew I was being drenched with icy water. It was splashing over my head and running down my face, and the restorative qualities of it has not been overrated by young ladies who write stories about fainting beauties for the magazines, I can hereby testify. It brought me around speedily, although I was almost deaf on account of a roaring, which I attributed to the return circulation in my battered head, and sickened by an undulating, swirling motion by which I seemed to be carried along.

"I felt myself cramped, knees against my chin, and struggled to adjust my position more comfortably. I couldn't move anything but my hands, and exploration with them quickly showed me that I was in a box, rather tight on sides and bottom--one of those tongue-and-groove cases such as they ship dry goods in--with the top rather open, as if it had been nailed up with sc.r.a.ps. The water was splashing through it and drenching me, and I knew in a flash, as well as if they had told me what they were going to do, what they had done. They had carted me to the river and thrown me in."

"The canon! The canon!" said she, shuddering and covering her face with her hands. "Oh, that terrible water--that awful place!"

"But I am here, sitting beside you, with the sun, which I never hoped to see again, shining on my face," he smiled, stroking her hair comfortingly, as one might a.s.suage the terror of a child.

Agnes lifted her head in wondering admiration.

"You can speak of it calmly!" she wondered, "and you went through it, while it gives me a chill of fear even to think about it! Did you--come to sh.o.r.e before you entered the canon?"

"No; I went through it from end to end. I don't know how far the river carried me in that box. It seemed miles. But the canon is only two miles long, they say. The box floated upright mainly, being pretty well balanced by my weight in the bottom, but at times it was submerged and caught against rocks, where the current held it and the water poured in until I thought I should be drowned that way.

"I was working to break the boards off the top, and did get one off, when the whole thing went to pieces against a rock. I was rolled and beaten and smashed about a good bit just then. Arms were useless. The current was so powerful that I couldn't make a swimming-stroke. My chief recollection of those few troubled moments is of my arms being stretched out above my head, as if they were roped there with the weight of my body swinging on them. I supposed that was my finish."

"But you went through!" she whispered, touching him softly on the arm as if to recall him from the memory of that despairing time.

"I came up against a rock like a dead fish," said he, "my head above water, luckily. The current pinned me there and held me from slipping down. That saved me, for I hadn't strength to catch hold. The pressure almost finished me, but a few gasps cleared my lungs of water, and that helped some.

"There is no need for me to pretend that I know how I got on that rock, for I don't know. A man loses the conscious relation with life in such a poignant crisis. He does heroic things, and overcomes tremendous odds, fighting to save what the Almighty has lent him for a little while. But I got on that rock. I lay there with just as little life in me as could kindle and warm under the ashes again. I might have perished of the chill of that place if it hadn't been that the rock was a big one, big enough for me to tramp up and down a few feet and warm myself when I was able.

"I don't know how far along the canon I was, or how long it was after day broke over the world outside before the gray light sifted down to me. It revealed to me the fact that my rock of refuge was about midway of the stream, which was peculiarly free of obstructions just there. It seemed to me that the hand of Providence must have dashed me against it, and from that gleam I gathered the conviction that it was not ordained for me to perish there. I could not see daylight out of either end of the canon, for its walls are winding, and of course I had nothing but a guess as to how far I had come.

"There was no foothold in the cliffs on either hand that I could see, and the pounding of that heavy volume of water down the fall of the canon seemed to make the cliffs tremble. I had to get ash.o.r.e against the cliff-side, somehow, if I ever intended to get out, and I intended to get out, no two ways about it. I might drown if I plunged in, but I might not. And I was certain to starve if I stuck to the rock. So I took off my coat, which the river had spared me, and let myself down from the lower end of the rock. I had that rolling and thrashing experience all over again, still not quite so bad, for there was daylight to cheer me every time my head got clear of the water.

"There's no use pulling the story out. I made it. I landed, and I found that I could work my way along the side of the cliff and over the fallen ma.s.ses by the waterside. It wasn't so bad after that.

"My hope was that I might find a place where a breach in the cliff would offer me escape that way, but there was none. The strip of sky that I could see looked no wider than my hand. I saw the light at the mouth of the canon when it was beginning to fall dusk in there. I suppose it was along the middle of the afternoon."

"We were over there about then," said she, "thinking you might have gone in to try for that reward. If we only had known!"

"You could have come over to the other end with a blanket," said he, touching her hand in a little communicative expression of thankfulness for her interest. "There is a little gravelly strand bordering the river at that end. After its wild plunge it comes out quite docile, and not half so noisy as it goes in. I reached that strip of easy going just as it was growing too dark for safe groping over the rocks, and when I got there my legs bent like hot candles.

"I crawled the rest of the way; when I got out I must have been a sight to see. I know that I almost frightened out of his remaining wits a sheep-herder who was watering his flock. He didn't believe that I came through the canon; he didn't believe anything I said, not even when I told him that I was cold and hungry."

"The unfeeling beast!"

"Oh, no; he was just about an average man. He had a camp close by, and let me warm and dry myself by his fire; gave me some coffee and food when he saw that I wasn't going to hurt him, but I don't believe he shut an eye that entire night. He was so anxious to get rid of me in the morning that he gave me an old hat and coat, and that was the rig I wore when I returned to Comanche."

"The hotel-keeper gave you the message that we left?" she asked.

"He was surly and ungracious, said he didn't know where you were. I was of the opinion that you had turned my baggage over to him, and that he found it convenient to forget all about it."

"We brought it here--it's in my room now; and we told him when we left where we were going, Mr. Bentley and I."

"Well, what little money I had was in my instrument-case," said he. "So I was up against it right. I knew there was no use in lodging a complaint against Shanklin, for I had no proof against him, and never could convince a jury that I was in my right mind if I should tell my story in court. So I let that pa.s.s."

"It was a miraculous deliverance from death!" Agnes exclaimed, taking her breath freely again. Tears mounted to her eyes as she measured Dr.

Slavens' rugged frame as if with a new interest in beholding a common pattern which had withstood so much.

He told her of meeting Mackenzie, and of finding the lost die; of the raid they had made by means of it on Shanklin's money; of his discovery of the midnight extra in the pockets of the gambler's coat.

"So there you have it all," said he, smiling in embarra.s.sment as if the relation of so much about himself seemed inexcusable. "Anyway, all of the first part of the story. The rest is all on dry land, and not interesting at all."

"But you hadn't had time to look over the land; you didn't know the good locations from the worthless," said she. "How did you pick out the claim you filed on?"

"Well, there's a little more of the story, it seems, after all. There was a plot between Shanklin and another to file Peterson on a certain tract and then buy him out, I suppose."

He told her of the telegram signed "Jerry," and of Shanklin's reply.