The Plunderer Part 20

"Wolff, you've heard," said the old millman, with solemnity. "If you've got any messages you want sent, we'll send them. If you want time to pray, this is your chance. There's nothing you can say is going to change it. You are as good as dead. Boys, some of you get one of those beams that's tore loose there at the side, fasten the rope around the end, and shove it over the edge of the wall above the canon there for a few feet. He shall hang above the dam he dynamited."

Wolff knew that they were in earnest. There was something more inexorable in their actions than in a court of law. At the last he showed some courage of a brute kind, reviling them all, sputtering forth his hatred, and interlarding it with a confession and threats of what he wanted to do. They silenced him by leading him to the wall and adjusting the noose. Once more Rogers besought him to pray and then, when he again burst into oaths, they thrust him off. The fall was as effective as ever hangman devised.

"In the morning, boys," said the smith, "a half-dozen of us must be up early and come back here. The hound is at least ent.i.tled to a half-way decent burial. I'll call some of you to come with me."

That was their sole comment. They had neither regrets, compunctions, nor rancor. They had finished their task according to their own ideas of justice, without hesitation.

At the Croix d'Or the partners, worried over their problems, and somewhat astonished at the non-appearance of the force, sat on the bench by the mess-house, smoking and silent.

In soft cadence they heard, as from the opposite side of the gulch, the tramping of feet. Swinging along in the dusk the men came, shadowy, unhalting, and homeward bound, like so many tired hounds returning after the day's hunt. Their march led them past the bench; but they did not look up. There was an unusual gravity in their silence, a p.r.o.nounced earnestness in their att.i.tude.

"Well," called d.i.c.k, "what did you learn?"

It was the smith who answered, but the others never halted, continuing that slow march to the bunk-house.

"We got him."

"Where is he, then?"

"Hanging to a beam across the dam he blew up," was the remorseless response.

He started as if to proceed after the others, then paused long enough to add: "It was that feller that used to be watchman here; the feller that tried to shoot Bill that night. Found him in that old, deserted cabin near the Potlach. Had the shoe on him, and at last said he did it, and was sorry for just one thing, that he didn't get all of us.

Said he'd 'a' blown the bunk-house and the office up in a week more, and that he'd tried to get you two with a bowlder and had killed your burros--well, when we swung him off, he was still cursing every one and everything connected with the Croix d'Or."

He paused for an instant, then came closer, and lowered his voice.

"And that ain't all. He said just before he went off--just like this--mind you: 'I'd 'a' got Bully Presby, too, because he didn't treat me fair, after me doin' my best and a-keepin' my mouth shut about what I knew of the big lead.' Now, what in h.e.l.l do you suppose he meant by that?"

CHAPTER XIV

"THOUGH LOVE SAY NAY"

"Of one thing I am sure," said d.i.c.k on the following day, when they began to readjust themselves for a decision, "and that is that if we can find work for them, there isn't a man on the works that I don't want to keep. They are too true and loyal to lose."

"We could drive into the blacksmith's tunnel," Bill said; "and I've an idea we might strike something when we pa.s.s under that hard cone just above--well, just about under where Bells is. I saw it yesterday when we were up there for the first time. That would give the millman and his gang something to do. Some of 'em can take out the rest of the green lead, and after that drift see if it comes in again. And the others that can't do anything underground, can turn to and build up the dam, with a few masons to help, and, when a new wheel comes, the millman will know how to set that all right again. So, you see, we don't have to lose any of them that has stood by us, so long as Sloan is ready to take his gamble and the hundred thousand lasts. Before that's gone, we'll just have to make good. And somehow I feel we will."

As if to add to the mental trials of the half-owner of the Croix d'Or, but another day elapsed after this decision and adjustment before he received a letter from a Seattle broker offering him a price for his interest in the mine. Thus wrote the agent:

"My client has the timber and water rights of your property in view more than anything underground, which, on the advice of experts who have visited the property in previous years, he seems to regard as worthless. He informs me that you are, to all intents, representing not only your own interest, but that of the other partner, who places implicit confidence in you. I presume that you will therefore be amenable to doing all you can to save from the wreckage of the dead property all that is possible in behalf of that partner as well as yourself, and am authorized to make you the extremely liberal offer of sixty thousand dollars for the full t.i.tle to the property."

The price was ridiculously low, and d.i.c.k knew it; yet if the mine produced nothing more, and was, as the experts were supposed to have reported, worthless, the amount was extremely liberal. But for Bill he would have hesitated to decline such an offer. That worthy, however, threw his head back and roared derisively.

"Sixty thousand? Sixty thousand! What does that idiot think men who have dropped a quarter of a million in a property would quit for? Does he think that sixty thousand is any saving from a wreck like this has been? Tell him to chase himself--that the tail goes with the hide, and you'll quit clean whipped, or not at all."

But d.i.c.k was loath to refuse any offer without consulting his superior in New York, and accordingly wandered off into the hills to think. It was late in the afternoon, and he mechanically tramped over the trail to the pipe line, where, when hope ran higher, he had dared to dream.

The whole situation had become a nerve-racking tragedy of mind and action. His desperate desire for success after his self-acknowledgment that he loved Miss Presby, and then the blows that had been rained on him and the mine, the failure of the green lead to hold out when it had at least promised and justified operation--all c.u.mulated into a disheartening climax which was testing his fort.i.tude as it had never been tried before. He was not of those who lack either persistence, determination, or moral bravery; and it was this last characteristic, coupled with a certain maturing caution, which made him question the honesty of proceeding to lay out, perhaps, the entire hundred thousand volunteered by Sloan, with such little certainty of returns. Had the money been his own, he would have taken the chances uncomplainingly; but his judgment told him that, had he been sent to the Croix d'Or as an expert to pa.s.s an opinion on the justification of putting a hundred thousand into the ground, under present conditions, he would have advised against it.

He went as far as the reservoir. Its wreckage seemed to mock his efforts. To rebuild it alone meant big expense in a country where every barrel of cement had to be brought in on the backs of pack mules, and where stone masons received unduly high wages. The repairs to the plant would not prove so heavy; but after that? None knew better than he the trials of expensive prospecting underground, the long drives to end in nothing, the drifts that tapped no ore, the ledges that promised to come in strongly, and led the worker on with hope deferred until his purse was exhausted. The cruelty of nature itself flaunting the golden will-o'-the-wisp in the blackness of the earth.

He stood on a timber thrown carelessly on the brink of the gorge, and suddenly thought how it happened to be there, and for what tragic purpose it had served--a gallows. He shuddered, thinking of the mentally distorted wretch who had died at its end, cursing as the men of the Cross pushed him over to gasp and wrench his life away fifty feet above the ruin he had wrought. He wondered where the man had been buried, and hurried back along the pipe line to try and forget that episode.

A little flutter of white from a clump of brush attracted his eyes, and he extracted from the brambles a dainty handkerchief still fragrant with the personality of the girl he loved. He lifted it to his lips tightly, and, with a heart that was almost in pain, dropped to the line, and sat on the pipe, bent, and utterly dejected. He sat there for some minutes, and then a sound caused him to straighten himself with a jerk. The black horse was thundering down the hill as he had seen it on those other mornings when, looking backward, the "world was young."

"I saw you, Mr. Townsend," Miss Presby said as he a.s.sisted her to alight, and her voice was sympathetic and grave. "You are unhappy. I don't blame you. I have heard all about it, and--well, I have had to fight an hourly impulse to come to you ever since I heard the news.

Oh, my friend, believe me, I am so sorry! So sorry!"

He could not reply, lest his voice betray the emotions aroused by her kindly sympathy. All his yearnings were fanned to flame by the cadence of her voice and the softness of her eyes. Mechanically he resumed his place on the pipe, and she seated herself by his side, half-facing him. Her slender foot, booted, braced against the ground, and almost touching his heavy miner's boot, tapped its toe on the sward as if she were impatient to find words.

"It has been a little tough," he said; "but it seems less hard to me now that I know you care."

He had blundered in his first words to the beginning of dangerous heights, and his pulses gave a wild throb when he glanced up at her and saw a light in her face, in her eyes, in her whole att.i.tude, that he had never surprised there before. Words, unuttered, leaped hotly from his heart; a mad desire to tell of his love, of the visions he had seen in the air, on the blue of the peaks, in the cool shadows of the forests, in the black depths hundreds of feet under the ground. Of how the Croix d'Or had come to represent, not financial success, but a battle for her, and his love.

His face went white, and he bit his dry, twisting lips, and clenched his hands until they hurt.

"Not now!" he savagely commanded himself. "Not now!"

She appeared to be thinking of something she had to say, and her first words rendered him thankful that he had held his tongue, otherwise he might never have known the depths of the girl seated there by his side.

"I don't want you to think me forward," she said quietly; "but I have wanted for the last two days to ask you something. It makes it easier now that I know you know, that--that I care for it. What are your--your--how are your finances?"

She had stammered it out at last, and, now that the conversation had been led in that direction, he could speak. He sat there quietly, as if by a comrade, and told her all. Told her of his boyhood, his father's death, and that he, in his own right, had nothing in the world but youth and a half-owners.h.i.+p in the Croix d'Or, which threatened to prove worthless. He voiced that dread of wasting his backer's money when he had none of his own to put with it, meeting dollar for dollar as it was thrown into the crucibles of fate. He stopped at last, a little ashamed of having so completely unbosomed himself, for he was by habit and nature reticent.

"You have made it a great deal easier for me," she said, with an a.s.sumption of gayety. "I can say what I've been thinking of for two days without spludging all over my words."

She laughed as if in recollection of her previous embarra.s.sment, and again became seriously grave, and went on:

"They say my father is a hard man. At times I have been led to believe it; but he has been a good father to me, and I appreciate it and his worries more, after a four years' absence in an Eastern school, and--well, perhaps because I am so much older now, and better able to judge leniently. I have never known much of his business from his lips. It is one subject on which he is not exactly loquacious, as probably you know."

Again she laughed a little, grim laugh. d.i.c.k had opened his lips to say that he had never met her father, when she continued:

"On the day I met you first, up here by your pipe line, the day you almost ended my bright young career by starting a half-ton bowlder down the hill--don't interrupt with repeated apologies, please--I had my birth anniversary. I was twenty-one, and--my own boss."

"Congratulations, belated, but fervent."

"Thank you; but you again interrupt. On that day when I went home, my father, in his customary gruff way, turned back just as he was going to the office where he lives at least eighteen hours out of every twenty-four, and threw in my lap a bank-book. 'Joan,' he said, 'you're of age now. That's for you. It's all yours, to do just what you dam'

please with. I have nothing to do with it. If you make a fool use of it, it'll be your fault, not mine. I'm giving it to you so that if anything happened to me, or the Rattler, you'd not be helplessly busted.'"

He jumped to his feet with an exclamation.

"The Rattler! The Rattler! And--and your name is Joan and not Dorothy, and you are Bully Presby's daughter?"

He was bewildered by surprise.

"Why, yes. Certainly! Didn't you know that--all this time?"