The Plunderer Part 8

"It serves you right for bein' so anxious to help one of them dance-hall women; not but what I'd probably 'a' done it myself," was the croaking, querulous consolation offered by Bells Park as he sat beside the plainly suffering and heavily bandaged Bill that night, or rather in the early hours of the morning, in the cabin on the Cross.

"They ain't no good except for young fools to gallop around with over a floor."

He poured some more olive oil over the bandages, and relented enough to add: "All but The Lily, and she don't dance with none of 'em. She's all right, she is. Mighty peart looker, too. None purtier than Dorothy Presby, though."

d.i.c.k, looking up from where he sat with his tired chin resting on his tired hands and elbows, thought of the gruff Bully Presby with some interest.

"Oh, so the old Rattler owner has a daughter, eh?"

"I don't mean old skinflint Presby!" sharply corrected the engineer.

"He ain't the only Presby in this whole United States, is he? He don't own the whole world and the name, even if he thinks he does. This Presby I'm talkin' about ain't no kin of his. He's too white. He owns all them sawmills on the other side of the Cross peak, about four miles from here. Got a railroad of his own. Worth about a billion, I reckon."

d.i.c.k's momentary interest subsided, but he heard the old man babbling on:

"I worked for him once, when Dorothy was a little bit of a kid. Him and me fought, but he's a white man. She's been away to some of those fool colleges for women back East, they say, for the last four or five years. It don't do women no good to know too much. My wife couldn't read or write, and she was the best woman that ever lived, bar none."

He looked around as if delivering a challenge, and, finding that no one was paying any attention to him, subsided, fidgeted for a minute, and then said he guessed he'd "turn in so's the water wouldn't gain on the pumps in the mornin'."

On the insistent demand of his partner, d.i.c.k also retired shortly, and the cabin on the hillside was dark save for the dim light that glowed in the sufferer's room.

They began to straggle in, the men wanted, before the partners had finished their breakfast on the following morning. Some of them were real miners, and others were nondescripts, bearing out The Lily's statement that good men were scarce, but all were hired as they came, and the Croix d'Or began to thrill with activity.

A fat cook--and no miner can explain why a camp cook is always fat--beamed from the mess-house door. A blacksmith, accepting the ready name of "s.m.u.ts," oiled the rusted wheels of his blower, and swore patiently and softly at a new helper as he selected the drills for sharpening. Three Burley drill runners tinkered with their machines, and sc.r.a.ped off the verdigris and acc.u.mulated dust of storage; millmen began to reset the tables, strip the damaged plates, and lay in new water pipes to drip ceaselessly over the powered ore.

Over all these watched Bill with his bandaged face, rumbling orders here and there, and tirelessly active. Out on the pipe line, winding by cut and trestle from the reservoir in the high hills, d.i.c.k superintended repairs and laid plans.

Leaving his gang replacing sections near the power-house, he climbed up the length of the line to discover, if possible, how far the labors of the vandal had extended. Foot by foot he had traversed it, almost to the reservoir itself, when he paused to breathe and look off at the mountains spread below and around.

The Cross, in the distance, was softened again to a miracle of dim yellow laid against a field of purple, and, like a speck, a huge eagle swept in circles round its point to come to rest on its extreme summit. He turned from admiring its flight to inspect a bowlder that had tumbled down from the slope above and come to rest in a big dent; it had smashed in the top of the pipe. He picked up a piece of a storm-broken limb, used it as a lever, and sent the rock cras.h.i.+ng across the pipe to go bounding down the hillside as it gained momentum with every leap.

There was a startled snort, a sudden thres.h.i.+ng of the brush, and it parted to disclose a girl astride a horse that was terrified and endeavoring his best to dismount his rider. d.i.c.k, surmising that horse and rider had suffered a narrow escape from the bowlder, ran toward them remorsefully, but the girl already had the animal in control after a display of splendid horsemans.h.i.+p.

"Thank you," she said, as he hastened toward the horse's head, intent on seizing the snaffle. "Please don't touch him. I can quiet him down."

"I am so sorry," he pleaded, with his hat in his hand. "I had no idea that any one ever rode up this way."

"Don't apologize," she answered, with a careless laugh. "No one ever does, save me. It's an old and favorite view of mine. I used to ride here, to see the Cross, many years ago, before I went away to school.

So I came back to see my old friend, and--well--your bowlder would have struck us if my horse hadn't jumped."

She laughed again, and reached a yellow-gauntleted hand down to pat her mount's shoulder with a soothing caress. The horse stopped trembling, and looked at d.i.c.k with large, intelligent eyes.

"Ah," said d.i.c.k, remembering the garrulity of the engineer. "I believe you must be Miss Presby."

Even as she said simply: "I am, but how did you know? I don't remember ever seeing you," he took note of her modish blue riding-dress with divided skirts and patent-leather boots. There was a clean freshness about her person, a smiling candor in her eyes, and a fine, frank girlishness in her face that attracted him beyond measure. She appeared to be about twenty years of age, and was such a girl as those he had known and danced with, in those distant university days when his future seemed a.s.sured, and life a joyous conquest with all the odds in his favor. Now she was of another world, for he was, after all, but a workingman, while she, the daughter of a millionaire lumberman, would dance and a.s.sociate with those other university men whose financial incomes enabled them to dawdle as they pleased through life. He had no bitterness in this summary, but he sustained an instant's longing for a taste of that old existence, and the camaraderie of such girls as the one who sat before him on her horse.

"No," he said, looking up at her, "you never saw me before. I have been in the Blue Mountains but six weeks. I am Richard Townsend."

Her face took on a look of aroused interest, different from the casual look she had been giving him in the brief minute of their meeting.

"Oh," she said, "then you must be the Mr. Townsend of the Croix d'Or.

I learned of your arrival last night after I came home. You are rehabilitating the old mine?"

"Yes," he answered, smiling. "At least we are trying to. As to the outcome--I don't know."

"You mustn't say that!" she protested. "Faith in anything is the first requisite for success. That's what it says in the copybooks, doesn't it?"

She laughed again in her clear, mezzo voice, and then with a resumption of gravity gathered her reins into a firmer grip, and, as her horse lifted his head in response to the summons, said: "Anyway, I thank you for volunteering to rescue me, Mr. Townsend, and wish you lots of good luck, but please don't start any more bowlders down the hill, because if you do I shall be robbed of my most enjoyable trip each day. Good-by."

"Don't be afraid," he called to her, as she started away. "There are no more bowlders to roll."

He stood and watched her as she rode, masterfully seated on the black horse, around a crag that stuck out into the trail.

"'Faith in anything is the first requisite for success,'" he repeated to himself, striving to recall whether or not it was, as she had intimated, a hackneyed proverb for the young; yet there was something bracing in it, coming from her calm, young, womanly lips. "That's it; she has it," he again said to himself. "'Faith.' That's what I need."

And he resumed his tramp up the mountainside with a better courage and more hope for the Croix d'Or. He was still vaguely troubled when he made his way back past the power-house, in a sliding, scrambling descent, his boots starting tiny avalanches of shale and loose rock to go clattering down the mountainside.

The new men were proving competent under the direction of a boss pipeman who had been made foreman, and d.i.c.k trudged away toward the mine, feeling that one part of the work, at least, would be speedily accomplished.

Bill was still striding backward and forward, but devoting most of his attention to cleaning up the mill, and declared, with a wry smile, that he never felt better in his life, but never liked talking less.

When the noon whistle shrieked its high, staccato note from the engine-house, they went up to the mess, and seated themselves at the head of the table. As a whole, the men were fairly satisfactory. Bill stared coldly down the table, and appeared to be mentally tabulating those who would draw but one pay-check, and that when their "time" was given them, but d.i.c.k's mind persisted in wandering afield to the chance encounter of the morning.

The men had finished their hasty meal, in hasty miner's fas.h.i.+on, silently, and tramped, with clumping feet, out of the mess-house to the shade of its northern side before Bill had ended his painful repast. Whiffs of tobacco smoke and voices came through the open windows, where the miners lounged and rested on a long bench while waiting for the whistle.

"Don't you fool yourself about Bully Presby," one of them was saying.

"It's true he's a hard man, and out for the dust every minute of his life, but he's got nerve, all right. He'll bulldoze and fight and growl and gouge, but he's there in other ways. I don't like him, and we quit pretty sudden, yet I saw him do somethin' once that beat me."

"Did you work on the Rattler?" another voice queried.

"No," the other went on, "I worked for him down on the Placer Belle in California. It was under the old system and was a small mine. Kept all the dynamite on the hundred-foot level in an old chamber. Every man went there to get it when it was time to load his holes. I was startin' for mine one evenin', whistlin' along, when I smelled smoke.

Stopped and sniffed, and about weakened. Knowed it was comin' from the powder room down there. It wan't more'n twenty feet from the shaft, and there was two or three tons of it in that hole. Ran back and gave the alarm bell to the engineer, then ducked my head and went toward the smoke to see if anything could be done before she blew up the whole works. On his hands and knees, with all that was left of his coat, was Bully. He'd got the fire nearly smothered out, and we coughed and spit, and drowned the rest of the sparks from the water barrel. He'd fought it to a finish all alone, and I had to drag him out to the cage that was slidin' up and down as if the engineer was on a drunk, and every time it went up I could see the boys' faces, kind of white, and worried, and hear the alarms bangin' away like mad. But he'd put the fire out there with all that stuff around him. That took some nerve, I tell you!"

"What did he do for you?" asked another voice.

The narrator gave a heavy laugh, and chuckled.

"Do for me? When he got fresh air in him again, up in the hoist, he sat up and opened his hand. In it was a candlestick and a snipe, burned on the side till the wick looked about a foot long. 'Who owns this candlestick?' says he. No one spoke, but some of us knowed it belonged to old Deacon Wells, an absent-minded old cuss, but the deacon had a family of nigh on to ten kids. So n.o.body answered. 'Some fool left this here,' Bully bellowed, tearing around. 'And that's what started the fire. I'll kick the man off the works that owns the stick.' Still n.o.body said anything. He caught me grinnin'. 'You know who it was,' says he. 'Sure I do,' says I, 'but I'm a little tongue-tied.' Then he told me he'd fire me if I didn't say who it was.

'Give me my time-check,' says I, and he gave it. He found out afterward I was the man that dragged him out, and sent a letter up to Colusa askin' me to come back, but I didn't go. Don't s'pose he'd remember me now, and don't know as I'd want him to. Any man that works for Bully comes about as near givin' away his heart's blood as any one could, and live."

The voices went rumbling on, and d.i.c.k sat thinking of the strange, powerful man of the Rattler.

"Three of the millmen know their business," mumbled Bill, as if all the time he had been mentally appraising his force. "Two are rumdums.

The chips isn't bad. He could carpenter anywhere, and if he's as smart a timberman as he is millwright, will make good. The engineer that's to relieve Bells ain't so much, but I'll leave it to Bells to cuss him into line. That goes. Two of the Burley men are all right, and I fired the third in the first hour because he didn't know what was the nut and which the wrench. s.m.u.ts is a gem. He put the pigeon-blue temper on a bunch of drills as fast as any man could have done it."

d.i.c.k did not answer, but concentrated his mind on the work ahead. The whistle blew, and he compelled Bill to submit to new bandages, following the doctor's instructions, and smiled at his steady swearing as the wrappings were removed and the blisters redressed. They walked across to the hoist, entered the cage, and felt the sinking sensation as they were dropped, rather than lowered, to the six-hundred-foot level. The celerity of the descent almost robbed him of breath, but he thought of st.u.r.dy old Bells' boast, that he had "never run a cage into the sheaves, nor dropped it to the sump, in forty years of steam."

Lights glowed ahead of them, and they heard hammering. The suck of fresh air under pressure, vapored like steam, whirled around them in gusts, and the water oozed and rippled beside their feet as they went forward. The carpenter was putting in a new set of timbers, and his task was nearly finished, while beside him waited a drill man and a swamper with the c.u.mbersome, spiderlike mechanism ready to set. The carpenter gave a few more blows to a key block, and methodically flung his hammer into his box and hurried back out through the tunnel toward the cage, intent on resuming his work at the mill.

Bill tentatively inspected the timbers, tapped the roof with a pick taken from the swamper's hands, heard the true ring of live rock, and backed away. The drill was drawn up to the green face of ore.