The Plunderer Part 7

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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sed 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 Cla.s.s."

The High Light proved to be the most pretentious resort in Goldpan.

For one thing it had plate-gla.s.s windows and a gorgeous sign painted thereon. Its double doors were wide, and at the front was a bar with a bra.s.s 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 gla.s.ses, 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" tw.a.n.g 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 s.h.i.+ning 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 a.s.sorted 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?"

d.i.c.k 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 s.h.i.+rt 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 apprais.e.m.e.nt 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. d.i.c.k 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," d.i.c.k 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 b.u.ms 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 d.i.c.k 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 b.u.t.tons 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," d.i.c.k 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 s.h.i.+eld 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, d.i.c.k! For G.o.d's sake, stop 'em!"

d.i.c.k 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. d.i.c.k struck right and left, and in the little s.p.a.ce 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 d.i.c.k 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