The Mystery of The Barranca Part 10

Smiling, Seyd raised doubtful shoulders. "_Quien sabe_, senor?"

"Ahem!" Billy coughed. "Now you justify the continuance of my wretched existence. All the same, while it may be correct in theory your darned morality is mighty uncomfortable practice. That girl could cook. The next time you fall in love please--"

"_Now_, what are you talking about?"

"What have I done?"

Before his look of hopeless surprise Seyd's anger faded. "I beg your pardon. Of course you didn't know, but--I'm already married."

"You?"

"Me." With grim sarcasm he added, "And you know that it is against the law of both G.o.d and man for a married man to fall in love."

Feeling dimly that something was expected of him, but debarred from congratulations by the other's irony, Billy floundered, bringing several attempts at speech to a lame conclusion. "When--when did it--happen?"

"Happen? That's it." Seyd jumped at the word. "It _happened_ in New Mexico three years ago when I was down there 'experting' the Calumet group. She was the daughter of a mine foreman, pretty and neat as a grouse in the fall, but of the hopelessly common type. I don't have to describe her. You've seen them, in pairs, swinging their skirts along the boardwalks of any small town, their eyes on every man and a burst of giggles always on tap. I should never have paid her any serious attention if several of her admirers hadn't done me the honor of getting jealous. Until one big lout warned me to leave her alone under penalty of broken bones it was never more than a mild flirtation, but after that I went deeper--so deep that it was soon impossible for me to withdraw.

At least, I thought it was then, though I have since come to regard my marriage with her almost as a crime. You see, I thought it would break her heart, but in less than a week after the marriage I discovered that she was nothing but a bundle of small vanities bound up in a pretty skin, that she hadn't a thought above the money and position she expected to gain through me. And how she changed! As a girl she was soft, fluffy, and innocent as a kitten, but one by one her small vanities and frivolities developed into appet.i.tes and pa.s.sions, and I awoke to the fact that she was altogether animal--a beautiful animal, prettier than ever in her young wifehood, but without the slightest capacity for intellectual or spiritual development.

"If that had been all--one can love a handsome horse or a dog, and I have seen women of as low a type to be lifted out of themselves by the strength of their love. But she was absolutely selfish--loved only herself. What made it even more unbearable, she was conceited with the supreme conceit of absolute ignorance that scorns all that is unknown to itself. She would try to impose her own inch-and-a-half notions of things upon me, and she did not hesitate to pit the sc.r.a.ps of knowledge she had picked up around the mines against my professional training. She was bound to remold me on her own crude model. Actual wickedness would have been easier to bear, and I can a.s.sure you that the third month of our married life found me absolutely miserable. Fortunately, I received a commission just then to 'expert' a group of Mexican mines, and, as she preferred civilization as it goes in New Mexico to the hardships of a trip through the Sonora desert, I left her behind. Later I came south on a prospecting trip through the Sierra Madres, and have never seen her since."

All through he had spoken with the furious vehemence of a man easing a load off his mind. Thrusting a letter into Billy's hand, he finished, walking away: "Read that--I got it at the station yesterday. It reveals more than I could tell you in the next twenty-four hours."

And it surely did. The stiff round hand, as much as the bald statement of want and desires, revealed a nature blind to all but its own ends.

Every phrase was a cry or complaint. He had no business to go off and leave her alone! All her friends agreed that it was a "shame and a disgrace." But he needn't think that she would stand such treatment forever! He had better come home, and that at once! So far she hadn't tried to "better herself." But it wasn't for lack of the chance! There was a gentleman--no fresh dude or college guy, but a rich mining man, eminently respectable, who had shown a decided interest! He (Seyd) had better look out. Thus and so did the awkward hand run over many pages, and, while Billy's eye followed, his expression gradually settled in complete disgust.

"Hopelessly common! You poor chap," he muttered, looking after Seyd, who was now helping Caliban to arrange the goods as he carried them from the mules into the adobe. "To think that you have had this on your mind all this time!" After a moment's reflection he added, "But--married or unmarried, you are still in love."

Unaware of this frank opinion, Seyd went on arranging the stores. While working, the eager vehemence of his manner settled into heavy brooding, and it was not for some time that a cheerful flash indicated his arrival at some conclusion.

"I've got it!" he murmured. And turning so suddenly that Caliban dropped the package he was carrying in, he asked, "Hast thou any acquaintance at San Nicolas?"

Rea.s.sured that the strange gringo madness was not to be vented on him, the hunchback nodded. "One of the kitchen women is daughter to my sister."

He nodded again in answer to a second question as to whether his niece could convey certain information to the senorita Francesca's ear?

"_Si_, there is always gossip moving among the women. It could be pa.s.sed through Rosa, her maid."

For a man who had just taken offense at the very suggestion that he was in love Seyd's face expressed a surprising amount of satisfaction. A little sheepishly he now went on: "It must be that thou wouldst care to see thy relative? To-morrow is Sunday, and, as thy service has been good, it shall be a holiday, and thou shalt have a mule to ride to San Nicolas."

To tell the truth, the hunchback did not seem overjoyed at the prospect, at least not until Seyd tossed a silver peso on the table. "This is to buy thee meat and drink by the way, and if it be that thy niece can whisper--"

His beady eyes glittering with comprehension, the hunchback broke in, "That the dove flew at thy coming. She shall know it, senor--also from whose hand she came hither."

The quickness with which the fellow leaped to his meaning was rather disconcerting, and Seyd blushed. But, commanding his guilty colors, he brazened it out. "But see! She is not to know that it proceeds from me."

"_Si_, senor." The man's quick grin indicated an unearthly comprehension. "It will be a bit of gossip from the mouth of a muleteer."

It was at this juncture that Billy, who had just returned to work after washing the blood from his face, heard a cheerful whistling inside.

When, an hour later, he went in to help with supper he found Seyd his usual cheerful self. Next morning his spirits were still higher, but did not attain their meridian until Caliban departed for San Nicolas, bravely attired in a gaudy suit which he had dug from some obscure corner of the stable. Toward evening, however, a touch of anxiety dampened his mood. It might almost have been regarded as premonitory of the news Caliban delivered in the dusk outside.

"The senorita Francesca has gone to visit her mother's people at Cuernavaca. It is not known when she will return."

"Very well; thou hast done thy share," Seyd answered.

His quiet tone, however, did not deceive the hunchback. "Did I not say these gringos were a mad people?" he demanded of Calixto, showing two pesos by the light of the stable lantern. "He pays me a peso to bring him good news, and gives me two when I return with bad--and to think that I was minded to feed him lies. Truly, there is no knowing when to have them! 'Tis the truth serves best with fools and gringos."

CHAPTER X

"Done--at last!"

Sprawled on the flat of his back, with his curly head propped on his hands and his lime-eaten boots spread at a comfortable angle, Billy gazed upon their completed labor. The "well"--into which the liquid copper matte would presently be flowing--crucible, slag spout, blast pipes, or tuyeres, and canvas blowers, even the inclined way that led up to the platform over the loading trap, all were finished, and from the solid bed to the tip top of the brick chimney shaft Billy's vision embraced it all. Including the tons of charcoal that Caliban had burned and brought in from the woods, and the piles of ore which Seyd and Calixto had broken into smelting size with "spalling" hammers, all stood ready for the match that Seyd scratched while echoing Billy's observation.

"Done--at last!"

When the shavings and wood were fairly started under the mixed charge of charcoal and ore Seyd also lay down to watch the first smoke. Under the vigorous blast it quickly appeared--a thin blue spiral which waxed in volume and blackness. In thirty minutes it laid a sooty finger halfway across the Barranca above the hills, a sinister portent to the rancheros and peons, one that found a dark reflection in Don Luis's frown as he looked out from the upper patio of San Nicolas, far away.

Unconscious, however, of alien observation, Seyd watched the fluctuations of the black smoke with lazy enjoyment. He permitted his fancy to float with the waving pennon out over the valley down the river, where it set him aboard a log raft with his first shipment of copper matte and set him drifting down to the coast, where he could either sell to the United Metals Company or ship by sea to California smelters. There was nothing impractical about his musings. Independent of the gold values it carried, one smelting would trans.m.u.te their thirty-dollar ore into copper matte worth a hundred and twenty dollars a ton. At a liberal estimate the extra twenty would pay expenses, and with a profit of a hundred dollars on an output of sixty or seventy a week during the two months before the rains, there was a small fortune in it.

Next year they could both import their labor and put in a regular plant.

Thereafter they would be in a position to deliver "blister" copper instead of matte to the market. Why, flaming under the breath of this first success, fancy leaped out to all sorts of possibilities, raised wharves, bunkers, storehouses in the jungle below, set a fleet of flat-bottomed sternwheelers on the river. And never was there such a river! He was traveling its long reaches in thought when fancy suddenly steered his argosy of dreams into the San Nicolas landing.

The next second he was sitting again in the shaded gallery of the upper patio, its flowers and bird song, sunshine and fountain splash in his eyes and ears. As on the other day, he watched Francesca bending over her G.o.dchild, and while he was contrasting her air of tender solicitude with the cold hauteur of her face a month ago he thought she looked up with a smile. He was answering it when the smiling eyes were wiped out by the intrusion of some unpleasant thought.

"You fool!" he chided himself. Then, sitting suddenly up, he smote Billy on the thigh with force that drew a yell of anguish. "It's a mint, boy!

A blooming mint! I wouldn't trade my share for the best gold mine in Tonopah. Next year we'll put in a big plant--"

"Reverberatories with water jackets!" Billy enthusiastically took up the tale.

"Sure, and we'll build down on the flat by the river and deliver the ore by--"

"Gravity. Aerial cable--self-dumping buckets--"

"We'll refine our own matte--"

"Market our own copper and gold." His blue eyes shining, Billy ran on: "In five years we'll be rich, then for a rest and a trip. New York, London, Paris, with Nice and Monte Carlo thrown in. Europe in a touring-car, by golly! Egypt and the Pyramids! A steam yacht and a trip around the world! Hurray for us!"

"In the mean time"--Seyd led him gently back to earth--"remember, please, that this is your trick. Go and stoke up, or there'll be no Paris in yours."

And surely their days of ease lay a long way off. Long and hard as they had labored, the completion of the smelter merely marked the beginning of still more strenuous tasks. Upon them and the two peons would rest the entire weight of running the smelter at its full capacity. Besides the breaking of the ore, tapping of the slag, continuous firing, they would have to burn their own charcoal after the first supply ran out.

Though they had spread the strain by dividing day and night into shifts, it would have been work enough for four times their number.

Seyd's first shift ended at twelve that night, but, though he sent Caliban off to his sleep, he himself sat up to wait for the first matte, which was due to come trickling from the spouts at any moment. Reclining his head, propped on his hand, he watched Billy and Calixto, both now of one color, each at his task, one working the blowers while the other dumped fresh ore and charcoal into the loading trap. At such times the blast would send a burst of flame high over the chimney top, lighting the house, stables, green ore mounds, showing ghostly trees beyond as under a calcium glare. Though the roar of the blast fell like a lullaby on his tired ears, excitement kept him awake till the first matte flowed in a red stream out of the tap.

"She'll go a hundred and fifty to the ton!" Billy exclaimed, after a careful examination of a cooled sample. Then, waving his hand at the huge ore mounds, he groaned: "What a shame that we hadn't enough labor and capital. We could have run it all through before the rains."