The Plunderer Part 14

As he topped the hill he suddenly listened, and his steps quickened.

From below a new sound had been added to the threnody of the hills; a new note, grumbling and roaring, insistent and strong. Its message was plain. The mill of the Cross was running again for the first time in years; and, even as he looked down on the red roof, the whistle in the engine-house gave a series of cheerful toots in salute of the fact.

Down on the flat in front of the long structure which held, in its batteries, almost two-score stamps, a tall figure came out, and looked around as if seeking him, and then, casting its eyes upward, beheld him, and lifted a battered hat and swung it overhead. It was Bill, rejoicing in his work.

A car of ore slid along the tramway, with the carboy dangling one leg over the back end while steadying himself by the controller, as if he had been thus occupied for years. d.i.c.k tore his hat off, threw it in the air, and shouted, and raced down the hill. From now on it must be work; unless they met with great success--then--he dared not stop to think of what then.

He hastened on down to the mill and entered the door. Everything about it, from the dumping of the cars sixty feet above, the wrench of the crushers breaking the ore into smaller fragments, the clash of the screens as it came on down to the stamps, and their terrific "jiggety-jig-jig," roared, throbbed, and trembled. Every timber in the structure seemed to keep pace with that resistless shaking as the tables slid to and fro, dripping from the water percolating at their heads, to distribute the fine silt of crushed, muddy ore evenly over the plates in the steady downward slant. Already the bright plates of copper, coated with quicksilver, were catching, retaining, amalgamating the gold.

"The venners need a little more slant, don't you think?" bellowed his partner, with his hands cupped and held close against d.i.c.k's ear in the effort to make himself heard in that pandemonium where millmen worked the s.h.i.+ft through without attempting to speak.

In the critical calculation of the professional miner, d.i.c.k forgot all other affairs, and leaned down to see the run of water. He nodded his head, beckoned to the mill boss, and by well-known signs indicated his wish. He scrambled above and studied the pulp, slipping it through his fingers and feeling its fineness, and speculating whether or not they would be troubled with any solution of lead that would render the milling difficult and slime the plates so that the gold would escape to go roistering down the creek with waste water. It did feel very slippery, and he was rea.s.sured. He was eager to get to the a.s.say-house and make his first a.s.say of "tailings," refuse from the mill, to discover what percentage of gold they were saving, and, in parlance, "How she would run on mill test."

Fascinated in his inspection and direction of certain minor changes, he was astonished when the noise suddenly dropped from fortissimo to a dull whine, as the mill slowed down to a stop for the noon hour. And the afternoon pa.s.sed as quickly while he worked over the bucking board--a plate used to crush ore for a.s.saying--in the a.s.say-house, and watched the gasoline flare and fume in his furnaces to bring the little cupels, with their ma.s.s of powdered, weighed, and numbered samples, to a molten state. He took them out with his tongs, watched them cool, and weighed, on the scales that could tell the weight of a lead pencil mark on a sheet of paper, the residue of gold, thus making his computations. He was not pleased with the result. The green lead was not as rich as they had believed.

"It won't pay more than fifty cents a ton with the best milling we can do," he said to Bill, who came eagerly into the a.s.say office.

"But you know the old idea--that she gets richer as we go down?" his partner a.s.serted. "If it pays fifty cents a ton at the mill plates, we'll open up the face of the ledge and put on a day and night s.h.i.+ft.

We can handle a heap of ore with this plant. It begins to look to me as if the Cross is all to the good. Come on. Let's go down to the power-house and see how things look down there when we're working."

They had been contemplating a new timber road, and, after visiting the power plant and finding it trim, and throbbing with its new life, they cut across and debouched into the public road leading up the canon, by the banks of the stream, to the Rattler. When almost at the fork, where their own road branched off and crossed the stream to begin its steep little climb up to the Croix d'Or, they saw a man standing on the ap.r.o.n of the bridge, and apparently listening to the roar of their mill. His back was toward them, and seemingly he was so absorbed in the sounds of industry from above that he did not hear them approach until their feet struck the first planks leading to the heavy log structure. He turned his head slowly toward them, and they recognized him as Bully Presby. It was the first time either of them had seen him since the evening in the camp.

"So you're running, eh?" he asked d.i.c.k without any preliminary courtesy.

"Yes, we started the mill to-day."

"On ore, or waste?" There was a sneer in his question which caused d.i.c.k to stiffen a trifle; and Bill frowned, as if the question carried an insult.

Still the younger man was inclined to avoid words.

"Naturally, we shouldn't put waste through the mill," he said coldly.

"We have opened up an old vein which the other managers did not seem to think worth while."

"And so, I suppose, showing superior knowledge, you will demonstrate that the men before you were a set of dubs? Humph! From babes and fools come wisdom!"

His voice was hard and cynical, and his grim lips curled with a slightly contemptuous twitch. The hot, impulsive streak in d.i.c.k leaped upward. His eyes were angry when he answered.

"If you apply the latter to me," he retorted hotly, "you are going pretty far. I don't know what business it is of yours. We have never asked you for any advice, and we don't want any. I expect no favors from any one, and if I did, am certain, in view of your att.i.tude, that I shouldn't ask them from you."

"Steady! Steady, boy!" admonished his partner's drawling voice at his side. d.i.c.k did not utter other words that were surging to his tongue, and finished with an angry shrug of his shoulders.

Bill turned coolly to the owner of the Rattler, and appeared to probe him with his eyes; and his stare was returned with one as searching as his own.

"Who are you?" Presby asked, as if the big miner were some man he had not noticed before.

"Me? My name's Mathews. I'm superintendent of the Croix d'Or," Bill answered, as calmly as if the form of question had been ignored.

"And I suppose the young Mister Townsend relies on you for advice, and that he----"

"He don't need to rely on any one for advice," interrupted the soft, repressed voice. "I rely on him. He knows more than I do. And say," he added, taking a step toward Bully Presby, and suddenly appearing to concentrate himself with all his muscles flexed as if for action, "I've mined for thirty-five years. And I've met some miners. And I've never met one who had as little decency for the men on the next claim, or such bullying ways as you've got."

Presby's face did not change in the least, nor did he s.h.i.+ft his eyes.

There was an instant's pause, and he showed no inclination to speak.

"'Most every one around these diggings seems to be kind of buffaloed by you," Bill added; "but I sort of reckon we ain't like them. I'm handin' it to you right straight, so you and me won't have any trouble after this, because if we do--well, we'd have to find out which was the better man."

Bully Presby's eyes flashed a singular look. It seemed as if they carried something of approval, and at the same time a longing to test the question of physical superiority. And then, abruptly, he laughed.

Astonished by this strange, complex character, Bill relaxed, and turned toward his partner. d.i.c.k, seeing that the interview was ended, as far as the necessity for saying anything was concerned, moved across the bridge, and Bill took a last hard stare at the mine owner.

The latter laughed again, with his cold, cynical rumble.

"I think," he said, "that when the Cross shuts down for good, I'd like to give you a job. When it does, come and see me."

Without another look, word, or sign of interest, he turned his back on them, and marched up the hill toward the Rattler.

CHAPTER X

TROUBLE STALKS ABROAD

August had come, with its broiling heat at midday and its chill at night, when the snow, perpetual on the peaks, sent its cold breezes downward to the gulches below. Here and there the gra.s.s was dying. The lines on d.i.c.k's brows had become visible; and even Mathews' resolute sanguinity was being tested to the utmost. The green lead was barely paying expenses. There had come no justification for a night s.h.i.+ft, and use of all the batteries of the mill, for the ledge of ore was gradually, but certainly, narrowing to a point where it must eventually pinch out.

Five times, in as many weeks, d.i.c.k had crossed the hill and waited for Miss Presby. Twice he had been bitterly disappointed, and three times she had cantered around to meet him. Their first meeting had been constrained. He felt that it was due to his own bald discovery that he wanted her more than anything in life, and was debarred from telling her so. In the second meeting she had been the good comrade, and interested, palpably, in the developments at the Croix d'Or.

"You should sink, I believe," she had said hesitatingly, as if with a delicate fear that she was usurping his position. "I know this district very well, indeed; and there isn't a mine along this range that has paid until it had gone the depth. Do I talk like a miner?"

She laughed, in cheerful carelessness as if his worries meant but little to her.

"You see, I've heard so much of mines and mining, although my father seldom talks of them to me, that I know the geological formation and history of this district like a real miner. I played with nothing but miners' children from the time I was so high, pigtails and pinafores, until I was this high, short skirts and frocks."

She indicated the progressive stages of her growth with her riding crop, as if seeing herself in those younger years.

"Then my father sent me to an aunt, in New York, with instructions that I was to be taught something, and to be a lady. I believe I used to eat with my knife when I first went to her home."

She leaned back and laughed until the tears welled into her eyes.

"She was a Spartan lady. She cured me of it by rapping my knuckles with the handle of a silver-plated knife. My, how it hurt! I feel it yet! I wonder that they were not enlarged by her repeated admonitions."

d.i.c.k looked at them as she held them reminiscently before her, and had an almost irresistible desire to seize and crush the long, slender, white fingers in his own. But the end of the meeting had been commonplace, and they had parted again without treading on embarra.s.sing ground.

d.i.c.k had heard no more from the owner of the Rattler, save indirectly, nor met him since the strained pa.s.sage of the bridge; but mess-house gossip, creeping through old Bells, who recognized no superiors, and calmly clumped into the owner's quarters whenever he felt inclined, said that the neighboring mine was prodigiously prosperous.

"I heard down in Goldpan," he squeaked one night, "that Wells Fargo takes out five or six bars of bullion for him every mill clean-up. And you can bet none of it ever gets away from that old stiff."

"But how does this news leak out?" d.i.c.k asked, wondering at such a tale, when millmen and miners were distinguished for keeping inviolate the secrets of the property on which they worked.

"Wells Fargo," the engineer answered. "None of the boys would say anything. He pays top wages and hires good men. Got to hand that to him. He brags there ain't no man so high-priced that he can't make money off'n him--Bully Presby does. And they ain't no better miner than him on earth. He can smell pay ore a mile underground--Bully Presby can."