The Plunderer

Dick shook his head gravely.

“But who could it be?” he insisted. “Who is there that could want us out of the way badly enough to murder us? No one here knows or cares a continental about us! It seems incredible. It must have been sheer carelessness of some restless loafer who wanted to see the rock roll.”

Yet they knew that the theory was scarcely tenable. They walked farther along the path and found that it was one used by workmen, evidently, leading at last down the steep mountain side and across to the Rattler. They surmised that it must be one made by the timber cutters for the mine, and learned, in later months, that the surmise was correct.

“It makes one thing certain,” Bill declared that evening when, candidly discouraged, they sat on the little porch in front of the office they had made their home and discussed the day’s findings. “And that is that until we get a force to work here, if we ever do, it ain’t a right healthy place for us. Of course with a gang of men around there wouldn’t be a ghost of a chance for any enemy to get us; but until then we’d better watch out all the time. I begin to believe that about everything that’s happened to us here has been the work of somebody who ain’t right fond of us. Wish we could catch him at it once!”

There was a grim undercurrent in his wish that left nothing to words. They remembered that in all the time since their arrival they had seen no other human being, the Rattler men having left them as severely alone as if they had been under quarantine.

In the stillness of twilight they heard the slow, soft padding of a man’s feet laboriously climbing the hill, and listened intently at the unusual sound.

“Wonder who that is,” speculated Bill, leaning forward and staring at the dim trail. “Looks like a dwarf from here. Some old man of the mountain coming up to drive us off!”

“Hello,” hailed a shrill, quavering voice. “Be you the bosses?”

“We are,” Dick shouted, in reply, “Come on up.”

The visitor came halting up the slope, and they discerned that he was lame and carrying a roll of blankets. He paused before them, panting, and then dropped the roll from his back, and sat down on the edge of the porch with his head turned to face them. He was white headed and old, and seemed to have exhausted his surplus strength in his haste to reach them before darkness.

“I’m Bells Park,” he said. “Bells Park, the engineer. Maybe you’ve heard of me? Eh? What? No? Well, I used to have the engines here at the Cross eight or ten years ago, and I’ve come to take ’em again. When do I go to work? They hates me around here. They drove me out once. I said I’d come back. I’m here. I’m a union man, but I tell ’em what I think of ’em, and it don’t set well. When did you say I go to work?”

“I’m afraid you don’t go,” Dick answered regretfully.

The Cross, so far as he could conjecture, would never again ring with the sounds of throbbing engines. Already he was more than half-convinced that he should write to Sloan and reject his kindly offer of support. “We’ve been here but a week, but it doesn’t look promising to us.”

“Well, then you’re a pair of fools!” came the disrespectful and irascible retort. “They told me down in Goldpan that some miners had come to open the Cross up again. You’re not miners. I’ve hoofed it all the way up here for nothin’.”

The partners looked at each other, and grinned at the old man’s tirade. He went on without noticing them, speaking of himself in the third person:

“I can stay here to-night somewhere, can’t I? Bells Park is askin’ it. Bells Park that used to be chief in the Con and Virginia, and once had his own cabin here–cabin that was a home till his wife went away on the long trip. She’s asleep up there under the cross mark on the hill. Bells Park as came back because he wanted to be near where she was put away! She was the best woman that ever lived. I’m looking for my old job back. I can sleep here, can’t I?”

His querulous question was more of a challenge than a request, and Dick hastened to assure him that he could unroll his blankets in a bunk in the rambling old structure that loomed dim, silent, and ghostly, on the hill beyond where they were seated. His pity and hospitality led him farther.

“Had your supper?” he asked.

Bells Park shook his head in negation.

“Then you can share with us,” Dick said, getting to his feet and entering the cabin from which in a few moments came a rattle of fire being replenished, a coffee-pot being refilled, and the crisp, frying note of sizzling bacon and eggs.

“Who might that young feller be?” asked the engineer, glowering with sudden curiosity, after his long silence, into the face of the grizzled old prospector, who, in the interim, had sat quietly.

“Him? That’s Dick Townsend, half-owner in the mine,” Bill replied.

“Half owner? Cookin’ for me? Why don’t you do it? What right have you got sittin’ here on your long haunches and lettin’ a boss do the work? Hey? Who are you?”

“I’m his superintendent,” grinned Bill, appreciating the joke of being superintendent of a mine where no one worked.

“Oh!” said the engineer. And then, after a pause, as if readjusting all these conditions to meet his approval: “Say, he’s all right, ain’t he!”

“You bet your life!” came the emphatic response.

The applicant said no more until after he had gone into the cabin and eaten his fill, after which he insisted on clearing away the dishes, and then rejoined them in a less-tired mood. He squatted down on the edge of the porch, where they sat staring at the shadows of the glorious night, and appeared to be thoughtful for a time, while they were silently amused.

“You’re thinkin’ it’s no good, are you?” he suddenly asked, brandishing his pipe at Dick. “Well, I said you were a fool. Take it kindly, young feller. I’m an old man, but I know. You’ve been good to me. I didn’t come here to butt my nose in, but I know her better than you do. Say!” He pivoted on his hips, and tapped an emphatic forefinger on the warped planks beneath in punctuation. “There never was a set of owners shell-gamed like them that had the Croix d’Or! There never was a good property so badly handled. Two superintendents are retired and livin’ on the money they stole from her. One millman’s bought himself a hotel in Seattle with what he got away with. There was enough ore packed off in dinner-pails from the Bonanza Chute to heel half the men who tapped it. They were always lookin’ for more of ’em. They passed through a lead of ore that would have paid expenses, on the six-hundred-foot level, and lagged it rather than hoist it out. I know! I’ve seen the cars come up out of the shaft with a man standin’ on the hundred foot to slush ’em over with muddy sump water so the gold wouldn’t show until the car men could swipe the stuff and dump it out of the tram to be picked up at night. It ain’t the rich streaks that pays. It’s the four-foot ledge that runs profit from two bits to a couple of dollars a ton. That’s what showed on the six-hundred level. Get it?”

The partners by this time were leaning eagerly forward, half-inclined to believe all that had been told them, yet willing to discount the gabbling of the old man and find content. Until bedtime he went on, and they listened to him the next morning, when the slow dawn crept up, and decided to take the plunge. And so it was that Dick wrote a long statement of the findings to his backer in New York and told him that he was going to chance it and open the Croix d’Or again until he was satisfied, either that it would not pay to work, or would merit larger expenditure.

Once again the smoke belched from the hoisting house of the Cross, and the throb of the pumps came, hollow and clanking, from the shaft below. A stream of discolored water swirled into the creek from the waste pipes, and the rainbow trout, affrighted and disgusted, forsook its reaches and sought the pools of the river into which it emptied.

Slowly they gained on its depths, and each day the murk swam lower, and the newly oiled cage waited for its freshly stretched cable, one which had happened to be coiled in the store-house. The compressor shivered and vibrated as the pistons drove clean, sweet air through the long-disused pipes, and at last the partners knew they could reach the anticipated six-hundred-foot level and form their own conclusions.

“Well, here goes,” said Bill, grinning from under his sou’wester as they entered the cage with lamps in hand. “We’ll see how she looks if the air pipes aren’t broken.”

They saw the slimy black sides of the shaft slip past them as Bells Park dropped them into the depths, and felt the cage slow down as he saw his pointer above the drum indicate the approach of the six-hundred-foot level. They stepped out cautiously, whiffed the air, and knew that the pipes, which had been protected by the water, were intact, and that they had no need to fear foul air. The rusted rails, slime-covered, beneath their rubber boots, glowed a vivid red as they inspected the timbering above, and saw that the sparse stulls, caps, and columns were still holding their own, and that the heavy porphyritic formation would scarcely have given had the timbers rotted away. Dank, glistening walls and a tremulous waving blackness were ahead of them as they cautiously invaded the long-deserted precincts, scraping and striking here and there with their prospector’s picks in search of the lost lead.

“About two hundred feet from the shaft, Bells said,” Dick commented. “And this must be about the place where they cut through pay ore in search of another lobe of the Bonanza Chute. What thieves they were!”

He suddenly became aware that his companion was not with him, and whirled round. Back of him shone a tiny spark of flaring light, striving to illumine the solid blackness. He paused expectantly, and a voice came bellowing through the dark:

“Here it is. The old man’s right, I think. This looks like ore to me.”

Dick hastened back, and assisted while they broke away the looser pieces of green rock, glowing dully, and filled their sample sacks.

Three hours later they stood over the scales in the log assay-house above, and congratulated each other.

“It’ll pay!” Dick declared gleefully. “Not much, but enough to justify going on with the work. I am glad I wrote Sloan that I should draw on him, and now we’ll go ahead and hire a small gang to set the mill and the Cross in shape.”

They were like boys when they crossed to the engine house and told the news to the hard-worked engineer, who chuckeled softly and asserted that he had “told them so.”

“Now, the best way for you to get a gang around here,” he said, “is to go down to Goldpan and tell ‘The Lily’ you want her to pass the word, or stick a sign up in her place saying what men, and how many, you want.”

“Sounds like a nice name,” Mathews commented.

“The Lily?” questioned Dick, anxious as to who this camp character could be.

“Sure,” the engineer rasped, as if annoyed by their ignorance. “Ain’t you never heard of her? Well, her right name, so they tell, is Lily Meredith. She owns the place called the High Light. Everybody knows her. She’s square, even if she does run a dance hall and rents a gamblin’ joint. She don’t stand for nothin’ crooked, Lily don’t. She pays her way, and asks no favors. Go down and tell her you want men. They all go there, some time or another.”

He stooped over to inspect the fire under the small boiler he was working, and straightened up before he went on. Through the black coating on his face, he appeared thoughtful.

“Best time to see The Lily and get action is at night. All the day-shift men hang around the camp then, and, besides that, they’ve got a new batch of placer ground about a mile and a half over the other side, and lots of them fellers come over. Want to go to-day?”

The partners looked at each other, as if consulting, and then Dick said: “Yes. I think the sooner the better.”

Bells Park pulled the visor of his greasy little cap lower over his eyes, and stepped to the door.

“Come out here onto the yard,” he said, and they followed. “Go down to the Rattler, then bear off to the right. The trail starts in back of the last shanty on the right-hand side. You see that gap up yonder? Not the big one, but the narrow one.” He pointed with a grimy hand. “Well, you go right through that and drop down, and you’ll see the camp below you. It’s a stiff climb, but the trail’s good, and it’s just about two miles over there. It’s so plain you can make it home by moonlight.”

Without further ceremony or advice, he returned into the boiler-room, and the partners, after but slight preparations, began their journey.

It was a stiff climb! The sun had set, and the long twilight was giving way to darkness when they came down the trail into the upper end of the camp. Some embryo artist was painfully overworking an accordion, while a dog rendered melancholy by the unmusical noise, occasionally accompanied him with prolonged howls. A belated ore trailer, with the front wagon creaking under the whine of the brakes and the chains of the six horses clanking, lurched down from a road on the far side of the long, straggling street, and passed them, the horses’ heads hanging as if overwork had robbed them of all stable-going spirit of eagerness.

The steady, booming “clumpety-clump! clumpety-clump!” of a stamp-mill on a shoulder of a hill high above the camp, drowned the whir and chirp of night insects, and from the second story of a house they passed they heard the crude banging of a piano, and a woman’s strident voice wailing, “She may have seen better da-a-ys,” with a mighty effort to be pathetic.

“Seems right homelike! Don’t it?” Bill grinned and chuckled. “That’s one right nice thing about minin’. You can go from Dawson to Chiapas, and a camp’s a camp! Always the same. I reckon if you went up the street far enough you’d find a Miner’s Home Saloon, maybe a Northern Light or two, and you can bet on there bein’ a First Class.”

The High Light proved to be the most pretentious resort in Goldpan. For one thing it had plate-glass windows and a gorgeous sign painted thereon. Its double doors were wide, and at the front was a bar with a brass rail that, by its very brightness, told only too plainly that the evening’s trade had not commenced. Two bartenders, one with a huge crest of hair waved back, and the other with his parted in the middle, plastered low and curled at the ends, betokened diverse taste in barbering. A Chinese was giving the last polish to a huge pile of glasses, thick and heavy.

On the other side of the room, behind a roulette wheel, a man who looked more like a country parson than a gambler sat reading a thumbed copy of Taine’s “English Literature.” Three faro layouts stretched themselves in line as if watching for newcomers, and in the rear a man was lighting the coal-oil lamps of the dance hall. It was separated from the front part of the house by an iron rail, and had boxes completely around an upper tier and supported by log pillars beneath, and a tiny stage with a badly worn drop curtain.

“Is the boss here?” Bill asked, pausing in front of the man with a wave.

“Who do you mean–Lily?” was the familiar reply.

“Yes.”

“I think she’s over helpin’ nurse the Widder Flannery’s sick kids this afternoon. They’ve got chicken pox. Might go over there and see her if you’re in a rush.”

“We didn’t say we wanted to borrow money,” Bill retorted to the jocular latter part of the bartender’s speech. “What time will she be here?”

“About ten, I guess,” was the more courteous reply.

The partners walked out and past the row of buildings until they came to a general store, where they occupied themselves in making out an order for supplies and arranging for their delivery on the following day. The trader was a loquacious individual with the unmistakable “Yankee” twang and nasal whine of the man from that important speck of the United States called New England.

When they again turned into the street, the long twilight had been replaced by night, and on the tops of the high peaks to the westward the light of the full moon was beginning to paint the chill white with a shining glow. The street was filled with men, most of them scorning the narrow board walks and traversing the roadway. A pandemonium of sound was robbing the night of peace through music, of assorted character, which boiled forth from open doors in discordant business rivalry, but underneath it all was the steady, dull monotone of the stamp-mill, remorselessly beating the ore as if in eternal industry.

“Hardly know the place now, eh?” Bill said, as they entered the open doors of the High Light. “It certainly keeps gettin’ more homelike. Camp must be makin’ money, eh?”

Dick did not answer. He was staring at a woman who stood at the lower end of the bar outside, and talking to a man with a medicine case in his hand. He surmised that she must be The Lily, and was astonished. He had expected the customary brazen appearance of other camp women he had known in his years of wandering; the hard-faced, combatative type produced by greed. Instead, he saw a woman of perhaps thirty years of age, or in that vague boundary between thirty and thirty-five.

She was dressed in a short skirt, wore a spotless shirt waist over an exceptionally graceful pair of shoulders, and her hair, neatly coiled in heavy bronze folds, was surmounted by a white hat of the frontier type, dented in regulation form with four hollows.

From the hat to the high tan boots, she was neat and womanly; yet it was not this that attracted him so much as her profile. From the straight brow, down over the high, fine nose and the firm lips to the firmer chin, the face was perfect.

As if sensing his inspection, she turned toward him, and met his wondering eyes. Her appraisement was calm, repressed, and cold. Her face gave him the impression that she had forgotten how to smile. Townsend advanced toward her, certain that she must be the proprietress of the High Light.

“You are Miss Meredith?” he interrogated, as he halted in front of her.

“Mrs. Meredith,” she corrected, still unbending, and looking at him a question as to his business.

A forgotten courtesy impelled him to remove his hat as he introduced himself, but Mathews did not follow it when he was introduced, and reached out and caught her competent hand with a hard grip. Dick explained his errand, feeling, all the time under that steady look, that he was being measured.

“Oh, yes, they’ll be all right by to-morrow, Lily,” the doctor interrupted. “Excuse me for being so abrupt, but I must go now. Good-night.”

“Good-night,” she answered, and then: “I’ll be up there at three o’clock to-morrow afternoon. Ah, you were saying you wanted–”

She had turned to the partners again with her unfinished question leading them on to state their mission.

“Men. Here’s a list,” Dick answered, handing her a memorandum calling for go many millmen, so many drill runners, swampers, car handlers, and so forth; in all, a list of twenty odd.

“Who told you to come here?” She exploded the question as if it were vital.

“Park. Bells Park.”

She laughed mirthlessly between lips that did not smile and regular, white teeth. But her laugh belied her lack of sympathy.

“Poor old Bells!” she said, with a touch of sadness in her voice. “Poor old fool! I tried to keep him from gambling when he had money, and he went broke, like all the other fools. But he loved his wife. He made her happy. Some one in this world must be happy. So he came back, did he? And is up there at the Cross? Well, he’s a faithful man. I’m not an employment agency, but maybe I can help you. I would do it for Bells. I like him. Good men are scarce. The bums and loafers are always easy to get. There isn’t a mine around here that isn’t looking for good men, since they made that discovery over in the flat. Most of them broke to the placer ground. Wages are nothing when there’s a chance for better.”

She had not looked at Dick as she talked, but had her eyes fixed on the paper, though not seeming to scan its contents. The room was crowded with men and filled with a confused volume of sound as she spoke, the click and whir of the wheel, the monotonous voice of the student–turned gambler–calling “Single O and the house wins. All down?” the sharp snap of the case-keeper’s buttons before the faro layouts, the screech of the orchestra in the dance hall, and the heavy shuffling of feet; yet her words and intonations were distinct.

“We would like to get them as soon as we can,” Dick answered. “We have unwatered the main shaft and–”

From the dance hall in the rear there came a shrill, high shriek, oaths, shouts, and the orchestra stopped playing. Men jumped to their feet from the faro layouts, and then, mob-like, began to surge toward the door, while in the lead, uttering scream on scream, ran one of the dance-hall girls with her gaudy dress bursting into enveloping flame. She had the terror of a panic-stricken animal flying into the danger of the open air to die.

As if springing forward from live ground, Mathews leaped into her path, and caught her in his arms. He jammed her forward ahead of him, taking no pains to shield her body save with his bent arm, and seized the cover of the roulette wheel, which lay neatly folded on the end of the bar.

“Give me room!” he bellowed, in his heavy, thunderous voice. “Stop ’em, Dick! For God’s sake, stop ’em!”

Dick leaped in among the crowd that was madly stampeding–women with faces whose terror showed through masks of rouge, shrieking, men who cursed, trampled, and elbowed their way to the outer air, and the wild-eyed musicians seeking to escape from a fire-trap. Dick struck right and left, and in the little space created Bill swathed the girl in the cover, smothering the flames. And all the time he shouted:

“Don’t run. What’s the matter with you? Go back and put the fire out! Don’t be idiots!”

As suddenly as it had commenced the panic subsided, and the tide turned the other way. Sobbing women hovered round the door, and men began to form a bucket line. In a long age of five or ten minutes the excitement was over, and the fire extinguished. The dance-hall floor was littered with pieces of scorched wood torn bodily from the boxes, and the remnants of the lamp which had exploded and caused the havoc were being swept into the sodden, steaming heap in the center of the room.

Through the press at the sides came The Lily, who, in the turmoil, had sought refuge behind the bar. The partners, stooping over the unconscious, swaddled figure on the floor, looked up at her, and Dick saw that her face was as calm and unemotional as ever.

“Bring her to my room,” she said; “I’ll show you where it is. You, Tim,” she called to one of the bartenders, “go as quickly as you can and get Doctor Mills.”

The partners meekly followed her lead, pausing but once, when she turned to hold up an authoritative hand and tell the curious ones who formed a wake that they must go back, or at least not come ahead to make the case more difficult. Mathews carried his senseless burden as easily as if it were of no weight, and even as they turned up a hallway leading to a flight of stairs ascending to The Lily’s apartments, the doctor and bartender came running to join them.

Not until they had swathed the girl in cooling bandages did any one speak. Then, as they drew the sheet tenderly over her, they became conscious of one another. As Bill looked up through blistered eyelids, exposing a cruelly scorched face, his lips broke into a painful smile.

“Doctor,” The Lily said, “now you had better care for this patient.”

She put her firm, white fingers out, brushed the miner’s singed hair back from his brow, and said: “I’ve forgotten your name, but–I want to say–you’re a man!”

CHAPTER VI

MY LADY OF THE HORSE

“It serves you right for bein’ so anxious to help one of them dance-hall women; not but what I’d probably ’a’ done it myself,” was the croaking, querulous consolation offered by Bells Park as he sat beside the plainly suffering and heavily bandaged Bill that night, or rather in the early hours of the morning, in the cabin on the Cross. “They ain’t no good except for young fools to gallop around with over a floor.”

He poured some more olive oil over the bandages, and relented enough to add: “All but The Lily, and she don’t dance with none of ’em. She’s all right, she is. Mighty peart looker, too. None purtier than Dorothy Presby, though.”