The Heart of Canyon Pass

Hurley was half tempted to go to the Grub Stake and make an inquiry or two, but since that notable night when Steve Siebert had held up Tolley and his gang, Joe had seldom been inside the place. He did, however, wander along the now quiet street toward the honkytonk.

It was drawing toward evening, and a drizzle of rain, which had threatened all day, swept across the West Fork and muffled the town almost instantly as in a gray blanket. The roar of Runaway River in the canyon blew back into Joe’s ears and made him deaf to most other sounds.

But as he crossed the mouth of the alley beside Tolley’s place he heard a sharp “Hist!” He turned to look. A girl, wrapped in a fluttering cloak, stood there, dimly revealed in the thicker darkness of the alley.

“Well, what do you want?” demanded the mining man.

“Mr. Hurley!”

“Great saltpeter! what’s the matter, Rosy?”

“Hush! Shet your yawp!” warned the piano player. “Want to get me into trouble?”

“Not a bit. What’s up?”

“I don’t know. But it’s something – something bad.”

“Bad? About whom?”

“Parson Hunt and his sister Betty.”

“Betty Hunt?” muttered the mining man with an emphasis that would have told a woman of much less discernment than Rosabell Pickett all that was necessary.

“Yeppy. You like her, Joe Hurley. You want to look out for her. Somebody has got to. That Dick Beckworth – ”

“Dick the Devil?”

“You said it! He’s got something on her.”

“He’s got something on Betty Hunt? Never!”

“No use layin’ your hand on your gun butt. It needs something besides that. When fire’s touched to the end of the fuse, no use tryin’ to stamp on the ashes. It is burning toward the powder barrel. The thing’s started. Dick’s told it about her – ”

“Told what?” asked Hurley, almost shaking the girl.

“That she was married back East, long before she come out here, and is posing here as an unmarried woman. He says he knows the man that was married to her.”

Hurley was stricken dumb for the moment. Yet recovery was swift. He stammered:

“She – she might. It’s no crime. She – she might have got a divorce and taken her maiden name again, if it’s true. But I wouldn’t take Dick the Devil’s word as to the color of the blue sky.”

“He’s got a paper to prove it. I seen him show it to Boss Tolley. I run to get you. I saw you at the Wild Rose. I figger you are the one to tell the parson.”

“And who’s to tell Betty?” Joe inquired. “I – I – ”

“Oh! What’s that?” exclaimed Rosabell, shrinking away. “I – I thought it was thunder.”

A muttering sound grew in Hurley’s hearing, but he paid little attention to it at first. Was it this Betty had meant all the time, when she had kept him at arm’s length? When she had told him that there was somebody back East who, at least, had her promise?

Then the air quaked as though there had been a volcanic upheaval within the immediate district of Canyon Pass. Rosabell shrieked and ran back into the gloom, disappearing toward the rear door of the Grub Stake. Joe ran out into the street, seeing other men coming from the shops and saloons.

His gaze by chance was turned upon the wagon track down the slope beyond the West Fork. He saw a flaming patch of white there. It came down the wagon track with terrific speed. In a moment he realized that it was a white pony and rider.

Lashing the steed the rider forced it into the West Fork. The animal had to swim for it. It seemed as though the stream had filled terrifically within the last few minutes.

Out of the flood scrambled the pony. It was not until then that anybody recognized Nell Blossom and her cream-colored mount. She urged the horse up into the town and they heard her clear voice rising above the sullen thunder of the three rivers:

“The Overhang! The Overhang! It’s down – it’s filled the canyon! Runaway River is stoppered like with a cork in the neck of a bottle. The flood is coming!”

CHAPTER XXIX – HIS LAST CARD

Hunt lingered in his sister’s room after Joe Hurley had left them. They were talking when Maria came up to take away the tea things. The Mexican woman was greatly excited.

“Those bad men! She get it now – in the neck you say, si? My goodness, yes! He no run you out of town lak’ he say, Señor Hunt.”

“Who is this who wants to run me out?” asked Hunt good-naturedly. “I must be getting awfully unpopular in some quarters.”

“Those bad man at Tolley’s Grub Stake. Ah, yes, Señor! She hate you – my goodness, yes!”

Betty began to be troubled – as she always was when she heard her brother’s peace threatened.

“Have you heard something new, Maria?” she asked the woman.

“Cholo, he hear. He come just now from the sheriff. A man come to town and he say he want those bad man.”

“What bad man? Not my brother?” cried Betty.

“Madre de Dios! Is the Señor Hunt bad?” gasped Maria. “Why, it is Dick the Deevil I say.”

“Ah-ha!” muttered Hunt, with more interest than surprise. He did not look at Betty. “This man has something against Dick Beckworth?”

“Cholo whisper to me, jus’ now, before I come up here, that the sheriff weel arres’ Dick the Deevil. For robbery and swindle, you say. Si!”

“This is news!” ejaculated Hunt, putting on his coat and hat. “I must go down and get the particulars.”

“Oh, Ford!”

What Betty might have said – how much she might have betrayed of her secret to her brother at that moment – will never be known. Before he could turn to look at her anguished face the house shook, and an atmospheric tremor seemed to pass over the town. An “airquake” was the better term for it! And with it they heard a continuous thundering roar that seemed to mingle with, yet almost drown, the chorus of the rivers which had been a monotone in their ears all day.

Maria screamed and flew out of the room. Hunt exclaimed:

“Something’s blown up at one of the mines, perhaps. But Joe is all right. He could not have got far away from the hotel.”

It was not until he ran down and reached the street that he learned the truth. Nell had pulled in her wet and exhausted pony before the hotel and was surrounded by the excited populace. Joe was with her, and Hunt, seeing both safe, was relieved.

The parson listened to her story with amazement and some of the dread that the older inhabitants of Canyon Pass felt. Something like this had happened twenty years before. She had seen a great landslide – a large part of the Overhang she thought – fall into the canyon. Already the rivers were backing up. Filled as they were by the recent unseasonable rains, the flood, if the canyon bed was really closed by the landslide, would soon rise into the town.

Hunt and Hurley joined a party that launched a big batteau to go down the Runaway to the first turn in the canyon wall to see just what the danger was. Most of the other inhabitants of Canyon Pass were crowding into Main Street. It might be that all would have to get back to the headlands where the mines were in order to escape the flood.

Betty, alone in her room in the hotel, saw the people milling about below and could only guess what it meant. She did not dare go down to ask about the catastrophe, and Maria did not return. But as she sat there, trembling not altogether from fear of what might happen to the town, she saw the knob of her door turn slowly. There was somebody in the hall – somebody coming in!

In her terror – terror of she knew not what – the girl could not move. She could only watch the frail door sag slowly open. She saw a hand with a sparkling diamond upon it. But it was a man’s hand. A shoulder appeared as the door was thrust farther inward.

Then she saw the face of the intruder.

“Andy Wilkenson!”

Betty did not know that her voice was audible. But as the man slid in with the sleekness of a cat and closed the door behind him, he whispered:

“So you know me all right, do you? Then that makes it easier. You’ve got to hide me, Betty. They are after me. I got out of the Grub Stake through a window – just in time.”

He laughed. There was a reckless gayety in his manner that was forced; but it seemed to Betty more terrible than if he had shown fear.

“You wouldn’t want them to get your husband, would you, honey?” he went on, his back against the door, his eyes glittering. “And there’s going to be high water. I can’t get away at once. I’ve got to hide. You’ll have to keep me here.” He chuckled. “A girl wouldn’t give her hubby up to the sheriff, would she? I – ”

“Go away!” she gasped.

“Not a chance!” exclaimed Dick lightly. “That sheriff will comb the town. But he will never come into your bedroom, honey. And I’m going to stay here till the flurry is over.”

He took a step into the room. Betty shrank from him. Her eyes were now aflame – and there was something besides fear in them.

“I will give you time to get out, Andy Wilkenson,” she said hoarsely. “But no more. All I have to do is to raise this window and scream – ”

“Dare to!” he snapped. “I’ll stay right here. You’re my wife – ”

“Nobody will believe that if I deny it!” she exclaimed.

“So you think I can’t prove it?” He laughed again. “I know that you would deny it if you could. I know that you even tore up the marriage certificate that old minister gave you. But I went back to him and got a copy. And I have got a copy of the license record, and all. Think I’m a fool? You may have fooled me about your aunt’s money; but one never knows when such a moment as this may come. If you give me up to the sheriff, I’ll tell ’em all just who and what you are. Mrs. Andy Wilkenson! Sounds good, don’t it? And ‘Andy Wilkenson’ is Dick Beckworth. Being married under an assumed name don’t make the tie any less binding, Betty. You are married to me hard and fast, and I’m going to turn the fact to good account. Don’t doubt it!”

“I – I’ll call my brother,” said Betty weakly.

“I bet he doesn’t know, either. Nor that Joe Hurley you’ve been chumming around with,” and Dick chuckled hugely. “Oh, I’ve got you, my girl. You had the chance to call me, and call me good, that time. But it’s my turn now. You are going to hide me here, and then help me get away. I know your breed. You’d die rather than let the story of our marriage get to the people of Canyon Pass.”

The girl sat huddled in the chair by the window. She stared at him with an intensity of horror that seemed to have paralyzed her whole body. And what he said – his final declaration – she knew was true.

She would much rather die than have it revealed to all Canyon Pass that Dick the Devil was the discarded husband of the Reverend Willett Ford Hunt’s sister!

The smile with which Dick watched the agonized girl marked the cruelty that was the underlying trait of his whole character. He knew she suffered. He knew how she suffered now. And he exulted in it.

But he was, too, fearful for his own safety. The crime he had committed miles away across the sheep range, and which had set the sheriff on his track, was a most despicable one. It was, too, in this community a crime that might easily excite the passions of the rougher element. Men had been lynched for much less than Dick Beckworth’s crime!

With night coming on, the waters about the town rising, and no means for quick egress before morning at least, Dick the Devil realized that his only hope lay with this tortured girl. Aside from the satisfaction it gave him to make her shield him, he was quite aware that no better place than Betty Hunt’s room could be imagined in which he might hide from the officers.

“There’s a closet,” he said finally, seeing the small door in the partition. “Put me in that. You can let your brother in if you like – or Joe Hurley.” He sneered at her. “They’ll never believe the proper Betty Hunt has a man hidden in her room. What’s that?”

He hissed the question, grabbing the handle of the closet door, and looked back at the one opening from the hall. There was a light step outside; the door-knob rattled.

“Quick!” breathed Dick. “Don’t say a word – ”

He tried to open the closet door. Although it was a spring latch, it was likewise locked. All Betty’s little valuables were in the closet, and she had the key.

“The key!” shrilled the man. “You fool! Do you want me to give the thing away? As sure as you are alive I’ll tell them you’re my wife. Quick!”

Betty did not move. She shook her head. The door-knob was again rattled. A muffled voice cried:

“Betty!”

The knob turned – as it had before, slowly, hesitatingly. The door was pushed inward. Dick the Devil snatched a pistol from its sling under his left armpit, with the motion of a rattlesnake about to strike.

Nell Blossom stepped into the room and closed the door swiftly behind her. She had seen Betty. Her cry of “Betty! what’s happened?” was answered by a sigh from Dick of such relief that it seemed like a sob.

Alert as she could be, Nell wheeled to look at the man. Although there was no light in the room and the evening was drawing on, the singer knew that half-crouching figure at first glance. She saw, too, the flash of the weapon in the gambler’s hand.

“Dick Beckworth! I might have known you’d come sneaking to a girl’s room to hide,” said Nell, her voice quite unshaken. “Put away that gun. I’m not the sheriff.”

Dick was silent. But he had the grace to put away his gun. Nell said to Betty:

“Has he scared you, honey? Don’t you mind. Dick the Devil has got his comeupance this time, I reckon. The minute he steps out of this house they’ll nab him. Somebody saw him sneak in by the back way. But nobody thought of his daring to come into your room. Come on, you, get out! Take your miserable carcass off to some other part of the house.”

“Oh, Nell!” breathed Betty.

“Don’t you be afraid, honey,” said the cabaret singer again. “This rascal knows me, I reckon. It’s too bad he wasn’t killed – like I thought he was – back last spring when I was fool enough to be caught by his sleek ways and talk. Oh, yes! I played the fool. And I come pretty near believing since that time that there wasn’t any decent men in the world. All because of that whelp.”

For once Dick Beckworth had nothing to say. At another time he might have flouted the girl. But the moment was not propitious. He stood and glared from Nell to Betty, and back again; but said nothing.

“Come! Beat it!” said Nell harshly. “Don’t you hear me?”

“I am going to remain here,” Dick said in a low voice. “Right here.”

“Not much!” Nell wheeled to open the door. “I’ll call ’em up. They are watching for you below.”

“Nell!” gasped Betty.

“You better speak for me,” sneered Dick. “I don’t reckon that you two girls will turn me over to the sheriff. Don’t forget, Nellie, that once I was your honey-boy.”

The mining-camp girl’s whole person seemed to fire under this spur. Her face blazed. She was tense with wrath – wrath that she could not for the moment audibly express.

But when she did speak her voice was as hard as ice and her accents as cold:

“Dick Beckworth, you get out of here! March!”

“Not much.”

Nell had been riding. She never went abroad on horseback without wearing her belt and gun. The latter flashed into her hand too quickly for Dick to have again produced his weapon, had he so desired.

“Put ’em up!” was Nell’s concise command. “Don’t flutter a finger wrong. I been thinking for months that I saw you go over that cliff to your death. Maybe I worried some over being the possible cause of your taking that drop. But I feel a whole lot different about you now, Dick Beckworth. Keep your hands up and march out of this room.”

The man, sneering, his countenance torn with emotion, his eyes as glittering as those of an angered serpent, came forward into the middle of the room again. He was staring at Betty rather than at Nell. He said to the former:

“You going to let me go out, Betty?”

“Oh! Oh! I – ”

“Don’t mind even to answer him – the dog!” Nell muttered. “I swear, after this, I would not lift a hand to stop the boys from stringing him up.”

“Is that so?” queried Dick, turning to her again. “You think you’ve got things your own way, don’t you? I’ll show you. Betty! tell this girl what and who I am and why I am not going to leave this room. Tell her, my dear, why you can’t bear to see me given up to the sheriff.”

“You dog!” ejaculated Nell.

“Tell her, Betty,” commanded Dick, but without raising his voice.

The parson’s sister, fairly writhing in her chair, put up her clasped hands to Nell. She whispered brokenly:

“Don’t – don’t send him out. Don’t tell, Nell. I – I couldn’t bear it!”

“In the name of common sense,” queried the singer, “what do you mean? This fellow’s frightened you out of your wits.”

“No, no! For my sake – ”

“You’re crazy. He can’t hurt you. I have him under my gun. If he makes a move – ”

“Betty!” shot in Dick.

“For Ford’s sake let him stay!” begged Betty, and sank back in her chair again, almost at the point of collapse.

CHAPTER XXX – CLEARING SKIES

Betty Hunt had, after all, retained her self-possession in a considerable degree throughout this trying interview. Dick Beckworth’s appearance had startled her; but already she had schooled her mind to expecting an interview with him.

Really, the coming of Nell Blossom and what had followed her entrance had disturbed Betty more than Dick’s appearance. But now she had got a clutch again upon her mental processes and at this moment, when Dick was about to reveal to the cabaret singer the fact that Betty was his wife, the Eastern girl apprehended and seized upon the plea she believed would, more than any other, cause Nell to let the villain remain without question.

For, with the hotel surrounded and the officers searching for Dick, it was probable that the moment he stepped out of the room he would be caught. So Betty cried:

“For Ford’s sake let him stay!”

It was, after all, a shot in the dark. Betty had not been sure up to this moment that Nell really felt toward the parson as his sister knew Hunt felt toward Nell. But she was in a desperate plight. Betty could not bear to have even her girl friend know of her relation to Dick Beckworth, not as Dick would tell it! And if the villain spread the tale as he promised, Betty knew that her brother’s work might be greatly injured even in such a community as Canyon Pass.

For after all, although the mining town was not like Ditson Corners, human nature is about the same everywhere. Betty had done nothing disgraceful in marrying Dick Beckworth and leaving him so abruptly. But for hiding the unfortunate alliance and posing here as an unmarried girl, the tongue of gossip would undoubtedly drag both her own name and Ford’s through the mire of half-truths and suppositions.

If Nell loved Ford and thought that Dick might reveal something that would injure the parson, Betty hoped the singer would relent. Afterward she could in her own way explain to Nell.

The latter stared now at Betty; but Dick was quite in the line of her gun and her hand did not tremble.

“You – you mean he’s got something on the parson?” she asked.

Dick grinned. Betty tried to speak. Before another word could be said, however, there was a sudden outbreak of sound from below and loud voices on the stair.

“Betty!” shouted Joe Hurley’s voice.

“Is Nell Blossom there?” called Hunt.

Both young men were tramping up to this very room. They would be here in thirty seconds.

Betty came to her feet as though galvanized by an electric shock. She fumbled in her bosom and drew forth the key of the closet door. She extended it to Dick.

“Let him – let him hide!” she gasped.

Nell lowered her gun. Dick grabbed the key, the grin on his face demoniac, and leaped across the floor on the balls of his feet. In a flash he had the door open, was inside, the door closed and the spring lock snapped. Nell thrust the gun back into its holster. Came a thunderous knock upon the door.

“Girls!” shouted Hunt, “may we come in?”

Betty and Nell looked at each other. The latter sat down on the bed. Betty dropped back into her chair.

“Of course you may come in, Ford,” she said in a voice that, if not unshaken, seemed calm to the ears of the men.

Hunt and Hurley, both splashed with mud, appeared at the open door.

“Pack a bag, Betty,” said her brother. “The water is backing up into the town, and although we don’t believe it will rise high, it may come in over the lower floor. It won’t be pleasant here to-night. Joe suggests that we take you both up to his office at the Great Hope. That can be made comfortable for you until we see just how bad a time Canyon Pass is in for.”

“If you say so,” said Betty in a low voice. “Will you go, Nell?”

“Sure,” declared the other girl.

She thought that probably anything was better for Betty than to remain here. In ten minutes they set forth, hurrying down and out of the hotel. Sheriff Blaney, and a red-faced man whom Betty remembered having seen before on the Hoskins trail hunting a fugitive, was on the porch.

“Derned funny where that Dick Beckworth has holed up,” Blaney was saying. “But he can’t get out of town to-night, that’s sure.”

That was a night scarcely to be forgotten in the annals of Canyon Pass. The people streamed up the muddy roads on to the highlands all night long while the waters rose higher and higher. They could hear toward morning the crashing of undermined buildings, but not until dawn did the fugitives learn all the damage of the flood.

Then, just before sunrise, there sounded several tremendous explosions from below, in the canyon. Joe Hurley and a gang of engineers had been down there all night, and the several charges of dynamite they put in at the barrier across the river brought the relief that had been hoped. In an hour a way was burst through the wall of fallen débris and the mad waters tore a passage to freedom.

The flood began to recede, and by the time the expedition got back from the canyon in the batteau, the mud hole of Main Street could be seen again from the site of the Great Hope. Joe Hurley looked grave, however, when he rejoined his friends in the little shack of an office.

“It’s done a sight of damage,” the mining man said. “A lot of folks will have to double up till new shacks can be built. The church – Tolley’s old place – is standing, Willie.”

“I see it is,” returned the parson. “But I miss some buildings – ”

“You miss one in particular,” said his friend quickly. “I don’t know but you and Betty are chief among the flood sufferers.”

“What do you mean, Joe?” Betty asked quickly.

“The hotel. It was undermined and is in ruins; looks like it had been rammed. Oh!” as he saw Betty pale, “nobody was hurt. Cholo Sam and Maria are safe. Fact is, not a life lost as far as we know. It might have been a whole lot worse. We had great luck.”

“Great luck!” murmured Betty, looking at Nell, whose face likewise showed a strange anxiety.

“Talking about luck,” added Hurley suddenly. “What do you know about old Steve and Andy? They’ve been out all night.”

“What do you mean?” asked Hunt. “They haven’t gone back to the desert?”

“Not on your life. They’ve been prospecting where they prospected twenty years ago. Or that’s what I figger. Just at dawn, after we let off those shots that started the dam-busting, I spied ’em prowling around up there on the side of the canyon. Reckless as kids, those old tykes are. Might another slip come ’most any time.”

“Oh!” said Betty, “I hope you did not leave them in danger, Joe.”

“If they were, I couldn’t help ’em,” Hurley replied. “You can’t influence those old desert rats any more than you could lead an iron horse to drink. No, sir! Steve and Andy were up there on a shelf that was uncovered by the last slip, a-holding hands and ghost-dancing like a couple of Piute Injuns. Acted plumb crazy.

“They must have swum the West Fork to get there. And I bet they didn’t go together. But when they got up there and saw the way open – ”

“To what?” interrupted Nell. “You haven’t told us what they found.”

“That’s so,” chuckled Joe. “They’ve found something all right. I reckon Steve and Andy can’t be fooled when it comes to ‘color.’ They certainly have made a ten-strike. Steve shouted down to me that the slip had uncovered the mother lode. Of course, they are claiming everything in sight. Got their claims staked out, and if it’s really a sure-enough find I expect there will be a small stampede to that side of the canyon. There’s gold all through those cliffs. This is a gold country. Some day they’ll find out how to work the Topaz Desert as a paying proposition. The wash from these headlands and the canyon sides has been carried out into the desert by the Runaway for a couple of million years – more or less.”