The Three Partners

He was right in his conjecture. Even the men who would have willingly “held him up” a moment after, at the bidding of Steptoe, saw no reason for declining a free drink “without prejudice.” And it was a part of the irony of the situation that Steptoe and Van Loo were also obliged to participate to keep in with their partisans. It was, however, an opportune diversion to Van Loo, who managed to get nearer the door leading to the back entrance of the hotel, and to Mr. Jack Hamlin, who was watching him, as the men closed up to the bar.

The toast was drunk with acclamation, followed by another and yet another. Steptoe and Van Loo, who had kept their heads cool, were both wondering if Hamlin’s intention were to intoxicate and incapacitate the crowd at the crucial moment, and Steptoe smiled grimly over his superior knowledge of their alcoholic capacity. But suddenly there was the greater diversion of a shout from the road, the on-coming of a cloud of red dust, and the halt of another vehicle before the door. This time it was no jaded single horse and dust-stained buggy, but a double team of four spirited trotters, whose coats were scarcely turned with foam, before a light station wagon containing a single man. But that man was instantly recognized by every one of the outside loungers and stable-boys as well as the staring crowd within the saloon. It was James Stacy, the millionaire and banker. No one but himself knew that he had covered half the distance of a night-long ride from Boomville in two hours. But before they could voice their astonishment Stacy had thrown a letter to the obsequious landlord, and then gathering up the reins had sped away to the railroad station half a mile distant.

“Looks as if the Boss of Creation was in a hurry,” said one of the eager gazers in the doorway. “Somebody goin’ to get smashed, sure.”

“More like as if he was just humpin’ himself to keep from getting smashed,” said Steptoe. “The bank hasn’t got over the effect of their smart deal in the Wheat Trust. Everything they had in their hands tumbled yesterday in Sacramento. Men like me and you ain’t goin’ to trust their money to be ‘jockeyed’ with in that style. Nobody but a man with a swelled head like Stacy would have even dared to try it on. And now, by G-d! he’s got to pay for it.”

The harsh, exultant tone of the speaker showed that he had quite forgotten Van Loo and Hamlin in his superior hatred of the millionaire, and both men noticed it. Van Loo edged still nearer to the door, as Steptoe continued, “Ever since he made that big strike on Heavy Tree five years ago, the country hasn’t been big enough to hold him. But mark my words, gentlemen, the time ain’t far off when he’ll find a two-foot ditch again and a pick and grub wages room enough and to spare for him and his kind of cattle.”

“You’re not drinking,” said Jack Hamlin cheerfully.

Steptoe turned towards the bar, and then started. “Where’s Van Loo?” he demanded of Jack sharply.

Jack jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “Gone to hurry up his girl, I reckon. I calculate he ain’t got much time to fool away here.”

Steptoe glanced suspiciously at Jack. But at the same moment they were all startled—even Jack himself—at the apparition of Mrs. Barker passing hurriedly along the veranda before the windows in the direction of the still waiting buggy. “D—n it!” said Steptoe in a fierce whisper to the man next him. “Tell her not THERE—at the back door!” But before the messenger reached the door there was a sudden rattle of wheels, and with one accord all except Hamlin rushed to the veranda, only to see Mrs. Barker driving rapidly away alone. Steptoe turned back into the room, but Jack also had disappeared.

For in the confusion created at the sight of Mrs. Barker, he had slipped to the back door and found, as he suspected, only one horse, and that with a side-saddle on. His intuitions were right. Van Loo, when he disappeared from the saloon, had instantly fled, taking the other horse and abandoning the woman to her fate. Jack as instantly leaped upon the remaining saddle and dashed after him. Presently he caught a glimpse of the fugitive in the distance, heard the half-angry, half-ironical shouts of the crowd at the back door, and as he reached the hilltop saw, with a mingling of satisfaction and perplexity, Mrs. Barker on the other road, still driving frantically in the direction of the railroad station. At which Mr. Hamlin halted, threw away his encumbering saddle, and, good rider that he was, remounted the horse, barebacked but for his blanket-pad, and thrusting his knees in the loose girths, again dashed forwards,—with such good results that, as Van Loo galloped up to the stagecoach office, at the next station, and was about to enter the waiting coach for Marysville, the soft hand of Mr. Hamlin was laid on his shoulder.

“I told you,” said Jack blandly, “that I had plenty of time. I would have been here BEFORE and even overtaken you, only you had the better horse and the only saddle.”

Van Loo recoiled. But he was now desperate and reckless. Beckoning Jack out of earshot of the other passengers, he said with tightened lips, “Why do you follow me? What is your purpose in coming here?”

“I thought,” said Hamlin dryly, “that I was to have the pleasure of getting satisfaction from you for the insult you gave me.”

“Well, and if I apologize for it, what then?” he said quickly.

Hamlin looked at him quietly. “Well, I think I also said something about the lady being the wife of a friend of mine.”

“And I have left her BEHIND. Her husband can take her back without disgrace, for no one knows of her flight but you and me. Do you think your shooting me will save her? It will spread the scandal far and wide. For I warn you, that as I have apologized for what you choose to call my personal insult, unless you murder me in cold blood without witness, I shall let them know the REASON of your quarrel. And I can tell you more: if you only succeed in STOPPING me here, and make me lose my chance of getting away, the scandal to your friend will be greater still.”

Mr. Hamlin looked at Van Loo curiously. There was a certain amount of conviction in what he said. He had never met this kind of creature before. He had surpassed even Hamlin’s first intuition of his character. He amused and interested him. But Mr. Hamlin was also a man of the world, and knew that Van Loo’s reasoning might be good. He put his hands in his pockets, and said gravely, “What IS your little game?”

Van Loo had been seized with another inspiration of desperation. Steptoe had been partly responsible for this situation. Van Loo knew that Jack and Steptoe were not friends. He had certain secrets of Steptoe’s that might be of importance to Jack. Why should he not try to make friends with this powerful free-lance and half-outlaw?

“It’s a game,” he said significantly, “that might be of interest to your friends to hear.”

Hamlin took his hands out of his pockets, turned on his heel, and said, “Come with me.”

“But I must go by that coach now,” said Van Loo desperately, “or—I’ve told you what would happen.”

“Come with me,” said Jack coolly. “If I’m satisfied with what you tell me, I’ll put you down at the next station an hour before that coach gets there.”

“You swear it?” said Van Loo hesitatingly.

“I’ve SAID it,” returned Jack. “Come!” and Van Loo followed Mr. Hamlin into the station hotel.

CHAPTER VI

The abrupt disappearance of Jack Hamlin and the strange lady and gentleman visitor was scarcely noticed by the other guests of the Divide House, and beyond the circle of Steptoe and his friends, who were a distinct party and strangers to the town, there was no excitement. Indeed, the hotel proprietor might have confounded them together, and, perhaps, Van Loo was not far wrong in his belief that their identity had not been suspected. Nor were Steptoe’s followers very much concerned in an episode in which they had taken part only at the suggestion of their leader, and which had terminated so tamely. That they would have liked a “row,” in which Jack Hamlin would have been incidentally forced to disgorge his winnings, there was no doubt, but that their interference was asked solely to gratify some personal spite of Steptoe’s against Van Loo was equally plain to them. There was some grumbling and outspoken criticism of his methods.

This was later made more obvious by the arrival of another guest for whom Steptoe and his party were evidently waiting. He was a short, stout man, whose heavy red beard was trimmed a little more carefully than when he was first known to Steptoe as Alky Hall, the drunkard of Heavy Tree Hill. His dress, too, exhibited a marked improvement in quality and style, although still characterized in the waist and chest by the unbuttoned freedom of portly and slovenly middle age. Civilization had restricted his potations or limited them to certain festivals known as “sprees,” and his face was less puffy and sodden. But with the accession of sobriety he had lost his good humor, and had the irritability and intolerance of virtuous restraint.

“Ye needn’t ladle out any of your forty-rod whiskey to me,” he said querulously to Steptoe, as he filed out with the rest of the party through the bar-room into the adjacent apartment. “I want to keep my head level till our business is over, and I reckon it wouldn’t hurt you and your gang to do the same. They’re less likely to blab; and there are few doors that whiskey won’t unlock,” he added, as Steptoe turned the key in the door after the party had entered.

The room had evidently been used for meetings of directors or political caucuses, and was roughly furnished with notched and whittled armchairs and a single long deal table, on which were ink and pens. The men sat down around it with a half-embarrassed, half-contemptuous attitude of formality, their bent brows and isolated looks showing little community of sentiment and scarcely an attempt to veil that individual selfishness that was prominent. Still less was there any essay of companionship or sympathy in the manner of Steptoe as he suddenly rapped on the table with his knuckles.

“Gentlemen,” he said, with a certain deliberation of utterance, as if he enjoyed his own coarse directness, “I reckon you all have a sort of general idea what you were picked up for, or you wouldn’t be here. But you may or may not know that for the present you are honest, hard-working miners,—the backbone of the State of Californy,—and that you have formed yourselves into a company called the ‘Blue Jay,’ and you’ve settled yourselves on the Bar below Heavy Tree Hill, on a deserted claim of the Marshall Brothers, not half a mile from where the big strike was made five years ago. That’s what you ARE, gentlemen; that’s what you’ll continue TO BE until the job’s finished; and,” he added, with a sudden dominance that they all felt, “the man who forgets it will have to reckon with me. Now,” he continued, resuming his former ironical manner, “now, what are the cold facts of the case? The Marshalls worked this claim ever since ‘49, and never got anything out of it; then they dropped off or died out, leaving only one brother, Tom Marshall, to work what was left of it. Well, a few days ago HE found indications of a big lead in the rock, and instead of rushin’ out and yellin’ like an honest man, and callin’ in the boys to drink, he sneaks off to ‘Frisco, and goes to the bank to get ‘em to take a hand in it. Well, you know, when Jim Stacy takes a hand in anything, IT’S BOTH HANDS, and the bank wouldn’t see it until he promised to guarantee possession of the whole abandoned claim,—‘dips, spurs, and angles,’—and let them work the whole thing, which the d–d fool DID, and the bank agreed to send an expert down there to-morrow to report. But while he was away some one on our side, who was an expert also, got wind of it, and made an examination all by himself, and found it was a vein sure enough and a big thing, and some one else on our side found out, too, all that Marshall had promised the bank and what the bank had promised him. Now, gentlemen, when the bank sends down that expert to-morrow I expect that he will find YOU IN POSSESSION of every part of the deserted claim except the spot where Tom is still working.”

“And what good is that to us?” asked one of the men contemptuously.

“Good?” repeated Steptoe harshly. “Well, if you’re not as d–d a fool as Marshall, you’ll see that if he has struck a lead or vein it’s bound to run across OUR CLAIMS, and what’s to keep us from sinking for it as long as Marshall hasn’t worked the other claims for years nor pre-empted them for this lead?”

“What’ll keep him from preempting now?”

“Our possession.”

“But if he can prove that the brothers left their claims to him to keep, he’ll just send the sheriff and his posse down upon us,” persisted the first speaker.

“It will take him three months to do that by law, and the sheriff and his posse can’t do it before as long as we’re in peaceable possession of it. And by the time that expert and Marshall return they’ll find us in peaceful possession, unless we’re such blasted fools as to stay talking about it here!”

“But what’s to prevent Marshall from getting a gang of his own to drive us off?”

“Now your talkin’ and not yelpin’,” said Steptoe, with slow insolence. “D–d if I didn’t begin to think you kalkilated I was goin’ to employ you as lawyers! Nothing is to prevent him from gettin’ up HIS gang, and we hope he’ll do it, for you see it puts us both on the same level before the law, for we’re both BREAKIN’ IT. And we kalkilate that we’re as good as any roughs they can pick up at Heavy Tree.”

“I reckon!” “Ye can count us in!” said half a dozen voices eagerly.

“But what’s the job goin’ to pay us?” persisted a Sydney man. “An’ arter we’ve beat off this other gang, are we going to scrub along on grub wages until we’re yanked out by process-sarvers three months later? If that’s the ticket I’m not in it. I aren’t no b—y quartz miner.”

“We ain’t going to do no more MINING there than the bank,” said Steptoe fiercely. “And the bank ain’t going to wait no three months for the end of the lawsuit. They’ll float the stock of that mine for a couple of millions, and get out of it with a million before a month. And they’ll have to buy us off to do that. What they’ll pay will depend upon the lead; but we don’t move off those claims for less than five thousand dollars, which will be two hundred and fifty dollars to each man. But,” said Steptoe in a lower but perfectly distinct voice, “if there should be a row,—and they BEGIN it,—and in the scuffle Tom Marshall, their only witness, should happen to get in the way of a revolver or have his head caved in, there might be some difficulty in their holdin’ ANY OF THE MINE against honest, hardworking miners in possession. You hear me?”

There was a breathless silence for the moment, and a slight movement of the men in their chairs, but never in fear or protest. Every one had heard the speaker distinctly, and every man distinctly understood him. Some of them were criminals, one or two had already the stain of blood on their hands; but even the most timid, who at other times might have shrunk from suggested assassination, saw in the speaker’s words only the fair removal of a natural enemy.

“All right, boys. I’m ready to wade in at once. Why ain’t we on the road now? We might have been but for foolin’ our time away on that man Van Loo.”

“Van Loo!” repeated Hall eagerly,—“Van Loo! Was he here?”

“Yes,” said Steptoe shortly, administering a kick under the table to Hall, as he had no wish to revive the previous irritability of his comrades. “He’s gone, but,” turning to the others, “you’d have had to wait for Mr. Hall’s arrival, anyhow. And now you’ve got your order you can start. Go in two parties by different roads, and meet on the other side of the hotel at Hymettus. I’ll be there before you. Pick up some shovels and drills as you go; remember you’re honest miners, but don’t forget your shootin’-irons for all that. Now scatter.”

It was well that they did, vacating the room more cheerfully and sympathetically than they had entered it, or Hall’s manifest disturbance over Van Loo’s visit would have been noticed. When the last man had disappeared Hall turned quickly to Steptoe. “Well, what did he say? Where has he gone?”

“Don’t know,” said Steptoe, with uneasy curtness. “He was running away with a woman—well, Mrs. Barker, if you want to know,” he added, with rising anger, “the wife of one of those cursed partners. Jack Hamlin was here, and was jockeying to stop him, and interfered. But what the devil has that job to do with our job?” He was losing his temper; everything seemed to turn upon this infernal Van Loo!

“He wasn’t running away with Mrs. Barker,” gasped Hall,—“it was with her MONEY! and the fear of being connected with the Wheat Trust swindle which he organized, and with our money which I lent him for the same purpose. And he knows all about that job, for I wanted to get him to go into it with us. Your name and mine ain’t any too sweet-smelling for the bank, and we ought to have a middleman who knows business to arrange with them. The bank daren’t object to him, for they’ve employed him in even shadier transactions than this when THEY didn’t wish to appear. I knew he was in difficulties along with Mrs. Barker’s speculations, but I never thought him up to this. And,” he added, with sudden desperation, “YOU trusted him, too.”

In an instant Steptoe caught the frightened man by the shoulders and was bearing him down on the table. “Are you a traitor, a liar, or a besotted fool?” he said hoarsely. “Speak. WHEN and WHERE did I trust him?”

“You said in your note—I was—to—help him,” gasped Hall.

“My note,” repeated Steptoe, releasing Hall with astonished eyes.

“Yes,” said Hall, tremblingly searching in his vest pocket. “I brought it with me. It isn’t much of a note, but there’s your signature plain enough.”

He handed Steptoe a torn piece of paper folded in a three-cornered shape. Steptoe opened it. He instantly recognized the paper on which he had written his name and sent up to his wife at the Boomville Hotel. But, added to it, in apparently the same hand, in smaller characters, were the words, “Help Van Loo all you can.”

The blood rushed into his face. But he quickly collected himself, and said hurriedly, “All right, I had forgotten it. Let the d–d sneak go. We’ve got what’s a thousand times better in this claim at Marshall’s, and it’s well that he isn’t in it to scoop the lion’s share. Only we must not waste time getting there now. You go there first, and at once, and set those rascals to work. I’ll follow you before Marshall comes up. Get; I’ll settle up here.”

His face darkened once more as Hall hurried away, leaving him alone. He drew out the piece of paper from his pocket and stared at it again. Yes; it was the one he had sent to his wife. How did Van Loo get hold of it? Was he at the hotel that night? Had he picked it up in the hall or passage when the servant dropped it? When Hall handed him the paper and he first recognized it a fiendish thought, followed by a spasm of more fiendish rage, had sent the blood to his face. But his crude common sense quickly dismissed that suggestion of his wife’s complicity with Van Loo. But had she seen him passing through the hotel that night, and had sought to draw from him some knowledge of his early intercourse with the child, and confessed everything, and even produced the paper with his signature as a proof of identity? Women had been known to do such desperate things. Perhaps she disbelieved her son’s aversion to her, and was trying to sound Van Loo. As for the forged words by Van Loo, and the use he had put them to, he cared little. He believed the man was capable of forgery; indeed, he suddenly remembered that in the old days his son had spoken innocently, but admiringly, of Van Loo’s wonderful chirographical powers and his faculty of imitating the writings of others, and how he had even offered to teach him. A new and exasperating thought came into his feverish consciousness. What if Van Loo, in teaching the boy, had even made use of him as an innocent accomplice to cover up his own tricks! The suggestion was no question of moral ethics to Steptoe, nor of his son’s possible contamination, although since the night of the big strike he had held different views; it was simply a fierce, selfish jealousy that ANOTHER might have profited by the lad’s helplessness and inexperience. He had been tormented by this jealousy before in his son’s liking for Van Loo. He had at first encouraged his admiration and imitative regard for this smooth swindler’s graces and accomplishments, which, though he scorned them himself, he was, after the common parental infatuation, willing that the boy should profit by. Incapable, through his own consciousness, of distinguishing between Van Loo’s superficial polish and the true breeding of a gentleman, he had only looked upon it as an equipment for his son which might be serviceable to himself. He had told his wife the truth when he informed her of Van Loo’s fears of being reminded of their former intimacy; but he had not told her how its discontinuance after they had left Heavy Tree Hill had affected her son, and how he still cherished his old admiration for that specious rascal. Nor had he told her how this had stung him, through his own selfish greed of the boy’s affection. Yet now that it was possible that she had met Van Loo that evening, she might have become aware of Van Loo’s power over her child. How she would exult, for all her pretended hatred of Van Loo! How, perhaps, they had plotted together! How Van Loo might have become aware of the place where his son was kept, and have been bribed by the mother to tell her! He stopped in a whirl of giddy fancies. His strong common sense in all other things had been hitherto proof against such idle dreams or suggestions; but the very strength of his parental love and jealousy had awakened in him at last the terrors of imagination.

His first impulse had been to seek his wife, regardless of discovery or consequences, at Hymettus, where she had said she was going. It was on his way to the rendezvous at Marshall’s claim. But this he as instantly set aside, it was his SON he must find; SHE might not confess, or might deceive him—the boy would not; and if his fears were correct, she could be arraigned afterwards. It was possible for him to reach the little Mission church and school, secluded in a remote valley by the old Franciscan fathers, where he had placed the boy for the last few years unknown to his wife. It would be a long ride, but he could still reach Heavy Tree Hill afterwards before Marshall and the expert arrived. And he had a feeling he had never felt before on the eve of a desperate adventure,—that he must see the boy first. He remembered how the child had often accompanied him in his flight, and how he had gained strength, and, it seemed to him, a kind of luck, from the touch of that small hand in his. Surely it was necessary now that at least his mind should be at rest regarding HIM on the eve of an affair of this moment. Perhaps he might never see him again. At any other time, and under the influence of any other emotion, he would have scorned such a sentimentalism—he who had never troubled himself either with preparation for the future or consideration for the past. But at that moment he felt both. He drew a long breath. He could catch the next train to the Three Boulders and ride thence to San Felipe. He hurriedly left the room, settled with the landlord, and galloped to the station. By the irony of circumstances the only horse available for that purpose was Mr. Hamlin’s own.

By two o’clock he was at the Three Boulders, where he got a fast horse and galloped into San Felipe by four. As he descended the last slope through the fastnesses of pines towards the little valley overlooked in its remoteness and purely pastoral simplicity by the gold-seeking immigrants,—its seclusion as one of the furthest northern Californian missions still preserved through its insignificance and the efforts of the remaining Brotherhood, who used it as an infirmary and a school for the few remaining Spanish families,—he remembered how he once blundered upon it with the boy while hotly pursued by a hue and cry from one of the larger towns, and how he found sanctuary there. He remembered how, when the pursuit was over, he had placed the boy there under the padre’s charge. He had lied to his wife regarding the whereabouts of her son, but he had spoken truly regarding his free expenditure for the boy’s maintenance, and the good fathers had accepted, equally for the child’s sake as for the Church’s sake, the generous “restitution” which this coarse, powerful, ruffianly looking father was apparently seeking to make. He was quite aware of it at the time, and had equally accepted it with grim cynicism; but it now came back to him with a new and smarting significance. Might THEY, too, not succeed in weaning the boy’s affection from him, or if the mother had interfered, would they not side with her in claiming an equal right? He had sometimes laughed to himself over the security of this hiding-place, so unknown and so unlikely to be discovered by her, yet within easy reach of her friends and his enemies; he now ground his teeth over the mistake which his doting desire to keep his son accessible to him had caused him to make. He put spurs to his horse, dashed down the little, narrow, ill-paved street, through the deserted plaza, and pulled up in a cloud of dust before the only remaining tower, with its cracked belfry, of the half-ruined Mission church. A new dormitory and school-building had been extended from its walls, but in a subdued, harmonious, modest way, quite unlike the usual glaring white-pine glories of provincial towns. Steptoe laughed to himself bitterly. Some of his money had gone in it.