The Plunderer Part 3

He was surprised to notice that Presby's heavy brows adjusted themselves to a scowl. He wondered why the mine owner should be antagonistic to him, when there was nothing at stake.

"Well, I am," a.s.serted Presby. "I hired the watchman up there, and I see to it that all the stuff lying around loose isn't stolen."

"On whose authority, may I ask?" questioned d.i.c.k, without thought of giving offense, but rather as a means of explaining his position.

"Sloan's. Why, you don't think I'm watching it because I want it, do you, young man? The old watchman threw up his job. I had Sloan's address, and wrote him about it. Sloan wrote and asked me to get a man to look after it, and I did. Now, you show me that you've got a right to go on the grounds of the Cross Mine, and I'll give an order to the watchman."

There was absolute antagonism in his tone, although not in his words.

d.i.c.k thought of nothing at the moment but that he had one sole proof of his owners.h.i.+p, the letter from Sloan himself. He unb.u.t.toned the flap of his s.h.i.+rt pocket, and, taking out a bundle of letters, selected the one bearing on the situation.

"That should be sufficient," he said, throwing it, opened, before Presby.

The latter, without moving his solid body in the least, and as if his arms and hands were entirely independent of it, stolidly picked up the letter and read it. d.i.c.k could infer nothing of its reception. He could not tell whether Presby was inclined to accept it as sufficient authority, or to question it. Outside were the sounds of the Rattler's activity and production, the heavy, thunderous roar of the stamp mill, the clash of cars of ore dumped into the maws of the grizzly to be hammered into smaller fragments in their journey to the crusher, and thence downward to end their journeys over the thumping stamps, and out, disintegrated, across the wet and shaking tables.

It seemed, as he stood waiting, that the dust of the pulverized mountains had settled over everything in the office save the granite-like figure that sat at the desk, rereading the letter which had changed all his life. For the first time he thought that perhaps he should not have so easily displayed that link with his past. It seemed a useless sacrilege. If the mine-owner was not reading the letter, he was pondering, unmoved, over a course of action, and took his time.

d.i.c.k thought bitterly, in a flash, of all that it represented. The quarrel with his father on that day he had returned from Columbia University with a mining course proudly finished, when each, stubborn by nature, had insisted that his plan was the better; of his rebellious refusal to enter the brokerage office in Wall Street, and declaration that he intended to go into the far West and follow his profession, and of the stern old man's dismissal when he a.s.serted, with heat:

"You've always taken the road you wanted to go since your mother died.

I objected to your taking up mining engineering, but you went ahead in spite of me. I tried to get you to take an interest in the business that has been my life work, but you scorned it. You wouldn't be a broker, or a banker. You had to be a mining engineer! All right, you've had your way, so far. Now, you can keep on in the way you have selected. I'll give you five thousand dollars, but you'll never get another cent from me until you've learned what a fool you're making of yourself, and return to do what I want you to do. It won't be long!

There's a vast difference between dawdling around a university learning something that is going to be useless while your father pays the bills, and turning that foolish education into dollars to stave off an empty belly. You can go now."

In those days the house of Phillip Townsend had been a great name in New York. Now this was all that was left of it. Dissolution, death, and dust, and a half-interest in an abandoned mine! The harsh voice of Bully Presby aroused him from his thoughts.

"All right," it said. "This seems sufficient, but if you've got the sense and judgment Sloan seems to think you have, you'll come to the conclusion that there's not much use in wasting any of his good, hard dollars on the Croix d'Or. It never has paid. It never will pay. I offered to buy it once, but I wouldn't give a dollar for it now, beyond what the timber above ground is worth. It owns a full section of timberland, and that's about all."

He reached for a pen and wrote a note to the watchman, telling him that the bearer, Richard Townsend, had come to look over the property and that his orders must be accepted, and signed it with his hard-driven scrawl. He handed it up to d.i.c.k without rising from his seat, and said: "That'll fix you up, I think."

As if by an afterthought, he asked: "Have you any idea of the condition of the mine?"

"No," d.i.c.k answered, as he folded the letter and put it into his pocket, together with the one from his late father's partner.

"Well, then, I can tell you, it's bad," said Presby, fixing him with his cool, hard stare. "The Cross is spotted. Once in a while they had pay chutes. They never had a true ledge. There isn't one there, as far as anybody that ever worked it knows. They wasted five hundred thousand dollars trying to find it, and drove ten thousand feet of drifts and tunnels. They went down more than six hundred feet. She's under water, no one knows how deep. It might take twenty thousand to un-water the sinking shaft again, and at the bottom you'd find nothing. Take my advice. Let it alone. Good-day."

d.i.c.k walked out, scarcely knowing whether to feel grateful for the churlish advice or to resume his wonted att.i.tude of self-reliance and hold himself unprejudiced by Presby's condemnation of the Croix d'Or.

He wondered if Bully Presby suspected him of having been friendly with the mob of drunken ruffians at the road house, but he had been given no chance to explain.

At the bottom of the gulch he found Bill sprawled at length on his elbows almost under the forefeet of one of the burros which was nosing him over in a friendly caress. He called out as he approached, and the big prospector sat up, deftly snapped the cigarette he had been smoking into the creek with his thumb and forefinger, and got to his feet.

"Do we get permission to go on the claim?" he grinned, as Townsend reached him.

"Yes, I've got an order to the watchman. The old man doesn't seem to think much of it. Says it's spotted. Had rich pay chutes, but they pinched. No regular formation. Always been a loser. Thinks we'd be foolish to do anything with it."

"Good of him, wasn't it?"

d.i.c.k looked quickly at the hard, lined face of his companion.

"That's the first thing I've heard that made me feel better," declared the prospector, as he swung one of the burro's heads back into the trail and hit the beast a friendly slap on the haunches to start it forward. "Whenever a man, like this old feller seems to be, gives me that kind of advice, I sit up and take notice."

"Why--why, what do you know about him?" d.i.c.k asked, falling into the trail behind the pack animals, which had started forward with their slow jog trot, and ears swaying backward and forward as they went.

"While you was gone," Mathews answered, "I had a long talk with a boy that came along and got friendly. You can believe boys, most of 'em.

They know a heap more than men. They think out things that men don't.

Kids are always friends with me; you know that. I reckon, from what I gathered, that this Presby man is about as hard and grasping an old cuss as ever worked the last ounce of gold out of a waste dump. He makes the men save the f.a.gs of the candles and the drips, so's he can melt 'em over again. He runs a company store, and if they don't buy boots and grub from him, they have to tear out mighty quick. He fired a fireman because the safety-valve in the boiler-house let go one day twenty minutes before the noon s.h.i.+ft went back to work. If he says, 'Let the Cross alone,' I think it's because he wants it."

"You couldn't guess who he is," d.i.c.k said, preparing to move.

"Why? Do I know him?"

"In a way. He's the man we saw the mob tackle, back there at the road house."

Bill gave a long whistle.

"So that's the chap, eh? Bully Presby! Well, if we ever run foul of him, we've got our work cut out for us. Things are beginnin' to get interestin'. 'I like the place,' as Daniel said when he went to sleep in the lion's den."

They opened the gate through the barricade without any formality, and were well started up the inclined road of the Croix d'Or before they encountered the watchman who had given them so much trouble. As he came toward them, frowning, they observed that he had buckled a pistol round him as if to resist any intrusion in case it should be attempted without instructions. d.i.c.k handed him Presby's order, and the man read it through in surly silence; then his entire att.i.tude underwent a swift change. He became almost obsequiously respectful.

"I'll have to go down and have a talk with Mr. Presby," he said, and would have ventured a further remark, but was cut short by the mine-owner.

"Yes, you'd better go and see him," d.i.c.k said concisely. "And when you go, take all of your dunnage you can carry, then come back and get the rest. I shall not want you on the claim an hour longer than necessary for you to get your stuff away. You're too good a man to have around here."

The fellow gave a shrug of his shoulders, an evil grin, and turned back up the road to vanish in what had evidently been the superintendent's cabin, and noisily began to whistle as he gathered his stuff together. The partners halted before the door, and d.i.c.k looked inside.

"I suppose you have the keys for everything, haven't you?" he called.

The man impudently tossed a bundle at him without a word. Apparently his belongings were but few, which led the newcomers to believe that he had taken his meals at the Rattler, and perhaps slept there on many nights. They watched him as he rolled his blankets, and prepared to start down the trail.

"The rest of that plunder in there, the pots and the lamp, belong to the mine," he said. And then, without other words, turned away.

"That may be the last of him, and maybe it won't!" growled Bill, as he began throwing the hitches off the tired burros that stood panting outside the door. "Anyway, it's the f.a.g end of him to-night."

They were amazed at the lavish expenditure of money that had been made in the superintendent's quarters. There were a porcelain bathtub brought up into the heart of the wilderness, a mahogany desk whose edges had been burned by careless smokers, and a safe whose door swung open, exposing a litter of papers, mine drawings, and plans. The four rooms evidently included office and living quarters, and they betokened a reckless financial outlay for the purpose.

"Poor Dad!" said d.i.c.k, looking around him. "No wonder the Cross lost money if this is a sample of the way the management spent it."

He stepped outside to where the canon was beginning to sink into the dusk. The early moon, still behind the silhouette of the eastern fringe of peaks and forests, lighted up the yellow cross mark high above, and for some reason, in the stillness of the evening, he accepted it as a sign of promise.

CHAPTER IV

THE BLACK DEATH

It took seven days of exploration to reveal the condition of the Cross of Gold, and each night the task appeared more hopeless. The steel pipe line, leading down for three miles of sinuous, black length, from a reservoir high up in the hills, had been broken here and there maliciously by some one who had traversed its length and with a heavy pick driven holes into it that inflicted thousands of dollars of expense.

The Pelton wheels in the power house, neglected, were rusted in their bearings, and without them and the pipe line there could be no electric power on which the mill depended. The mill had been stripped of all smaller stuff, and its dynamos had been chipped with an ax until the copper windings showed frayed and useless. The shoes of the huge stamps were worn down to a thin, uneven rim, battering on broken surfaces. The Venners rattled on their foundations, and the plates had been scarred as if by a chisel in the hands of a maniac.