The Plunderer Part 11

"Them beans," declared the fat cook, plaintively, "looks as if they had been put through some sort of shrivelin' process. The dried prunes are sure dry all right! Must have been put up about the time they dried them mummy things back in Egypt. Apuricots? Humph! I soaked some of 'em all day and to-night took one over to the shop and cut it open with a chisel to see if it was real leather, or only imitation. The canned salmon, and the canned tripe is all swells so that the cans is round instead of flat on the ends. I reckon you'd better go down and see that storekeeper. I da.s.sen't! If I did I'd probably lose my temper and wallop him. If somebody don't go, the men here'll be makin' a mistake, blamin' it on me, and I can't exactly see how they could keep from hangin' me, if they want to do justice."

He had stood in the doorway of the office to voice his complaint, and now, without further words walked away toward his own particular section of the little camp village.

"So that's the way that trader down there filled the order, is it?"

d.i.c.k said, frowning at his companion.

The latter merely grunted and then offered a solution.

"Probably," he said, "that stuff was sent up here without bein'

opened, just as he got it. If that's so it ain't his fault. About half the rows in life come from takin' things for granted. The other half because we know too well how things did happen."

He stood up and stretched his arms.

"What do you say we go down and hear what the trader has to say? If he's square he'll make good. If he ain't--we'll make him!"

Taking it for granted that the younger man would accompany him, he was already slipping off his working s.h.i.+rt and peering around the corners of the room for his clean boots. d.i.c.k hesitated and had to be urged.

He wondered then if it were not possible that something beside the errand to the trader's caused Bill's eagerness; but wisely kept the idea to himself.

The camp was in the dusk when they entered it, the soft dusk that falls over early summer evenings in the hills, when everything in nature seems drowsily awaiting the night. They thought there was an unusual hush in the manner of those they met. Men talked on the corners or in groups in the roadway with unaccustomed earnestness.

Women leaned across window sills and chatted across intervening s.p.a.ces with an air of anxiety; the very dogs in the street appeared to be subdued. At the trader's there was not the usual small gathering of loungers, squatted sociably around on cracker boxes and packing cases, and the man with the tw.a.n.g was alone.

"Say, there's something wrong with that stuff you sent us," Bill began, and the trader answered with a soft, absent-minded, "So?"

Bill repeated the words of the cook; but the storekeeper continued to stare out of the door as if but half of what was said proved interesting.

"I'll send up and bring it back to-morrow," he replied when the miner had concluded his complaint. "The fact is it's a job lot I bought in Portland, and I didn't look at it. Came in yesterday. I ain't--I ain't exactly feelin' right. I suppose you heard about it?"

The partners looked at him questioningly, but he did not s.h.i.+ft his eyes from the door through which he still appeared to be staring away into the distance, and it was easy to conjecture, from the expression of his eyes, that he was seeing a tragedy.

"I'm sort of busted up," he went on, without looking at them. "You see I had a brother over there. A s.h.i.+ft boss, he was. Him and me was more than brothers. We was friends. It don't seem right that Hiram was down there, in the dark, when the big cave came--came just as if the whole mountain wanted to smash them men under it. It don't seem right! I can't quite get it all yet. I'm goin' over there on the stage in the mornin'. He's left a widder and a couple of little shavers. I'm goin'

to bring 'em here."

"We don't quite understand you," d.i.c.k said, hesitatingly, and with sympathy in his voice. "We haven't heard about it--whatever it is. I'm sorry if----"

The trader straightened up from where he had been leaning on his elbows across the counter and they saw that his face was drawn.

"Oh, I see," he said, in the same slow, hopeless voice. "I forgot you men don't come down here very often and that my driver never has anything to say to anybody. Why, it's the Blackbird mine over across the divide--on the east spur. Bad, old fas.h.i.+oned mine she was, with crawlin' ground. Lime streaks all through the formation and plenty of water. n.o.body quite knows how it happened. There was a big slip over there a few days ago on the four-hundred-foot level. Thirty odd men back of it. Timbers went off, they say, like a gatlin' gun. I just can't seem to understand how they didn't handle that ground better. It don't look right to me!"

He stooped and twisted his fingers together and the palms of his hands gave out dry, rasping sounds. His att.i.tude seemed inconsistent with the immobility of his face, but d.i.c.k surmised that he was trying to regain control of his emotions. He had a keen desire to know more of the particulars of the tragedy, but sensed from the storekeeper's appearance that he was scarcely able to give a coherent account of it.

His words had already told his sorrow. Bill's voice broke the pause.

"We're right sorry we bothered you about the supplies," he said, softly. "But we didn't know, you see. I reckon we ain't in any big hurry. You just take your time about fixin' it up. We can live on most anything for a day or two."

The storekeeper looked at him gratefully and then lowered his eyes again. He turned away from them with a long sigh.

"Nope," he said. "Much obliged. I'll send my man up to-morrow.

Business keeps a-goin' on just the same, no matter who pa.s.ses out. If you or me died to-night, the whole world would just keep joggin'

along. I'll send up."

They turned and walked out, feeling that anything they could say would be useless, and sound hollow, and they did not speak until they were some distance farther up the street.

"He's hard hit, poor cuss!" Bill said. "Wonder what the rest of it was. Lets go on up toward the High Light. Seems as if it must have been pretty bad. What's the commotion down there?"

Ahead of them they saw men cl.u.s.tering toward a central point, and others who had been in the street hurrying forward to be absorbed into the group. They quickened their steps a trifle, speculating as to whether it could mean a brawl, or something relating to the disaster of which they had just learned. It proved the latter. A man was standing in the center of the gathering crowd with the reins of a tired horse hanging loosely over his arm. He was talking to the doctor, who was asking him questions.

"No," Bill and d.i.c.k heard him say as they crowded into the group, "there ain't nothin' you can do, Doc. It's all over with 'em. I was there until quite late. G.o.d! It's awful!"

"Anybody get out at all?" someone asked.

"No. That's a cinch. You see they were driving back in and feeling for the ledge. Blocking out, I think. Pretty lean ore, over there, you know. So there was just one drift away from the shaft, and it was in that she caved."

There was a moment's silence and then a half-dozen questions asked almost in the same moment. The man turned first to one and then to another as if striving to decide which query should be answered first, and shook his head hopelessly.

"They didn't have a chance," he a.s.serted. "It happened three days ago, as you all know. They sent over to Arrapahoe and all the boys over there went and volunteered. They worked just as many men as could get into the drift at a time, and they spelled each other in half-hour s.h.i.+fts, so's every man could do his best. They hadn't got in twenty feet before they saw that she was bad. Seemed as if the whole drift had been wiped out. It was as solid as rock in place--just as if the whole mountain had slipped!"

"Did you go down, Jim?" the doctor asked.

For reply the man held up his hands. d.i.c.k, close behind him and peering forward to see them in the light that came from a street lamp, saw they were a ma.s.s of blisters with the skin torn away, red and bleeding. The answer was too eloquent to require words for the man they called Jim had evidently been there and striving madly, as had others, in the attempt to rescue. There was a surge forward as the crowd pressed in, each man trying to inspect these evidences of the tragedy. The questions were coming faster and from all sides. Most frequently the anxious demand, coupled with a p.r.o.nounced eagerness was, "Is there anything any of us can do? Can we help if we get over there?"

"How far over is it?" Bill asked the man nearest him.

"Forty-miles," was the answer. They were all willing to travel that far, or farther, if they could be of any a.s.sistance whatever.

"No, there's no use in going," the man in the center said. "There's more men there now than can be handled, and all they're doing is to try to get at the boys' bodies. It's sure that they can't live till they're taken out. You all know that! They're gone, every one of 'em.

And that ain't the worst. They left twenty-six widows, most of 'em with children!"

A groan went up from the crowd. The word pa.s.sed back along like the waves cast up by a rock thrown into the center of a pool of blackness.

It began at the center with its repet.i.tion as the words were conveyed to those out of earshot. "He says there's twenty-six widows. He says there's a lot of children."

The questions were flowing inward again.

"No, boys, there ain't a thing you can do," the man they called Jim repeated. "That is, there ain't a thing can be done for the boys underground. They're gone; but somebody ought to do what can be done for them that's left. It's money that helps the most. That's the best way to show that most all of us had friends who went out."

He turned and climbed back into his saddle in the little open s.p.a.ce, and there was another moment's silence. The crowd looked up at him now, as he sat there in the center of the light thrown downward, feebly, from the lamp.

"Give me room, boys, won't you?" he asked. "My cayuse is about all in.

There ain't nothing more to tell. There ain't a thing you can do; but just what I said. Those women and children will need money. They're all broke."

The crowd slowly parted and he rode through a narrow lane where his stirrups brushed against those in the front ranks, and then the gathering began to twist backward and forward, to disintegrate, to spread itself outward and up the street of the camp. It talked in a subdued way as it went. There were but few in it who did not know and picture the meaning of all that had been imparted by the courier--the desperate alarm, the haggard, sobbing women in front of a hoist, the relays of men who were ready to descend and beat hammer on steel and tear madly at slow-yielding rock, the calls for a rest while carpenters hastily propped up tottering roofs and walls, the occasional warning shouts when men fell back to watch other huge ma.s.ses of rock fall into the black drift, and the instants when some rescuer, overwrought, thought he heard sounds of "rock telegraphing"

and bade the others pause and listen. There were those among the men on the street who had seen the desperate, melancholy conclusions, when hope, flaming ever more feebly, guttered out as a burned candle and died. There were those among them who had been in those black holes of despair and been rescued, to carry scars of the body for life, but recklessly forget the scars of the mind, the horrors of despair.

Comparative strangers to the camp as were the two men of the Cross, they appreciated the full meaning of the blow; for doubtless there was scarcely a man around them who had not known some of those who perished in that terrible, lingering agony. Besides they were miners all.

"Pretty tough luck, isn't it?"

They found themselves confronted by the doctor, who had turned at the sound of their voices as they resumed conversation.

"We just learned of it," d.i.c.k answered, "and know scarcely anything whatever of it, save what we just heard."