The Plunderer Page 11

  “Oh, I’ve heard it; but don’t pay any attention when it’s not so.”

  Bells Park leaned farther over, and lowered his shrill, garrulous voice to a thin murmur.

  “Well, I cain’t tell you what it is, but I want to give you the right lead. When that gets to goin’ on about newcomers in the Blue Mountains––fellers like you be––look out for storms.”

  “Go on! You’re full of stuff again!” Bill gibed, with his hearty laugh. “If we’d listened to all the mysterious warnin’s you’ve handed us since we came up here, Bells, we’d been like a dog chasin’ his tail around when it happened to be bit off down to the rump and no place to get hold of. Better look out! Humph!”

  The old engineer got up in one of his tantrums, fairly screamed with rage, threatened to leave as soon as he could get another job, and then tramped down the hill to the cabin he occupied with the other engineer. But that was not new, either, for he had made the same threat at least a half-dozen times, and yet the men from the Cœur d’Alenes knew that nothing could drive him away but dismissal.

  It was but two or three days later that the partners, coming from the assay-house to the mess late, discovered a stranger talking to the men outside under the shade of a great clump of tamaracks that nestled at the foot of a slope. They passed in and sat down at their table, wondering who the visitor could be. The cook’s helper, a mute, served them, and they were alone when they were attracted by a shrill, soft hiss from the window. They looked, and saw Bells Park. Nothing but his head, cap-crowned, was visible as he stood on tiptoe to reach the opening.

  “I told you to look out,” he said warningly. “Old Mister Trouble’s come. Don’t give anything. Stand pat. A walkin’ delegate from Denver’s here. God knows why. Look out.”

  His head disappeared as if it were a jack-in-the-box, shut down; and the partners paused with anxious eyes and waited for him to reappear. Dick jumped to his feet and walked across to the window. No one was in sight. He went to the farther end of the mess-house and peered through a corner of the nearest pane. Out under the tamaracks the stranger was orating, and punctuating his remarks with a finger tapping in a palm. His words were not audible; but Dick saw that he was at least receiving attention. He returned to the table, and told Bill what he had seen. The latter was perturbed.

  “It looks as if we were goin’ to have an argument, don’t it?” he asked, voicing his perplexity.

  “But about what?” Dick insisted. “We pay the union scale, and, while I don’t know, I believe there isn’t a man on the Cross that hasn’t a card.”

  “Well,” replied his partner, “we’ll soon see. Finished?”

  As they walked to the office, men began to hurry across the gulch toward the hoist, others toward the mill, and by the time they were in their cabin the whistle blew. It was but a minute later that they heard someone striding over the porch, and the man they assumed to be the walking delegate entered. He was not of the usual stamp, but appeared intent on his errand. Save for a certain air of craftiness, he was representative and intelligent. He was quietly dressed, and gave the distinct impression that he had come up from the mines, and had known a hammer and drill––a typical “hard-rock man.”

  “Gentlemen,” he said, “I am representing the Consolidated Miners’ Association.”

  He drew a neat card from a leather case in his pocket, and presented it, and was asked to seat himself.

  “What can we do for you?” Dick asked, wasting no time on words.

  “I suppose this mine is fair?”

  “Yes. It is straight, as far as I know.”

  “It has no agreement.”

  “But we are ready to sign one whenever it is presented.”

  The delegate drew a worn wallet from his pocket, extracted a paper, and tendered it.

  “I anticipated no trouble,” he said, but without smiling or giving any sign of satisfaction. “Would you mind looking that over, and seeing if it meets with your approval?”

  Dick stepped to the high desk at the side of the room which he had been utilizing as a drawing board, laid the sheet out, and began reading it, while Bill stood up and scanned it across his shoulders. Bill suddenly put a stubby finger on a clause, and mumbled: “That’s not right.”

  Dick slowly read it; and, before he had completed the involved wording, the finger again clapped down at another section. “Nor that. Don’t stand for it!”

  “What do you want, anyhow?” Bill demanded, swinging round and facing the delegate.

  The latter looked at him coolly and exasperatingly for a moment, then said: “What position do you occupy here, my man?”

  Dick whirled as if he had been struck from behind.

  “What position does he occupy? He is my superintendent, and my friend. Anything he objects to, or sanctions, I object to, or agree with. Anything he says, I’ll back up. Now I’ll let him do the talking.”

  The delegate calmly flicked the ash from a cigar he had lighted, puffed at it, blew the smoke from under his mustache toward the ceiling, and looked at the thin cloud before answering. It was as if he had come intent on creating a disturbance through studied insolence.

  “Well,” he said, without noticing the hot, antagonistic attitude of the mine owner, “what do you think of the proffered agreement?”

  “I think it’s no good!” answered Mathews, facing him. “It’s drawn up on a number-one scale. This mine ain’t in that class.”

  “Oh! So you’ve signed ’em before.”

  “I have. A dozen times. This mine has but one shift––the regular day shift. It has but one engineer and a helper. It has but one mill boss.”

  “Working eight batteries?”

  “No. You know we couldn’t work eight batteries with one small shift.”

  “Well, you’ve got to have an assistant millman at the union scale, you know,” insisted the delegate.

  “What to do? To loaf around, I suppose,” Bill retorted.

  “And you’ve got to have a turn up in the engine-house. You need another hoisting engineer,” continued the delegate, as if all these matters had been decided by him beforehand.

  Dick thought that he might gain a more friendly footing by taking part in the conversation himself.

  “See here,” he said. “The Croix d’Or isn’t paying interest. Maybe we aren’t using the requisite number of men as demanded under this rating; but they are all satisfied, and–––”

  “I don’t know about that,” interrupted the delegate, with an air of insolent assurance.

  “And if we can’t go on under the present conditions, we may as well shut down,” Dick concluded.

  “That’s up to you,” declared the delegate, with an air of disinterest. “If a mine can’t pay for the working, it ought to shut down.”

  The partners looked at each other. There was a mutual question as to whether it would be policy to throw the delegate out of the door. Plainly they were in a predicament, for the man was master, in his way.

  “Look here,” Bill said, accepting the responsibility, “this ain’t right. You know it ain’t. We’re in another class altogether. You ought to put us, at present, under–––”

  “It is right,” belligerently asserted the delegate. “I’ve looked it all over. You’ll agree to it, or I’ll declare the Croix d’Or unfair.”

  He had arisen to his feet as if arbitrarily to end the argument. For a wonder, the veteran miner restrained himself, although there was a hard, glowing light in his eyes.

  “We won’t stand for it,” he said, restraining Dick with his elbow. “When you’re ready to talk on a square basis, come back, and we’ll use the ink. Until then we won’t. We might as well shut down, first as last, as to lose money when we’re just breakin’ even as it is. Think it over a while, and see if we ain’t right.”

  “Well, you’ll hear from me,” declared the delegate, as he put his hat on his head and turned out of the door without any parting courtesy. “Keep the card. My name’s Thompson, you know.�
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  For a full minute after he had gone, the partners stared at each other with troubled faces.

  “Oh, he’s a bluff! That’s all there is to it,” asserted Mathews, reaching into the corner for his rubber boots, preparatory to going underground. “He knows it ain’t right, just as well as I do. If he can put this over, all right. If he can’t he’ll give us the other rating.”

  He left Dick making up a time-roll, and turned down the hill; and they did not discuss it again until they were alone that night.

  It was seven o’clock the next evening when the partners observed an unusual stir in the camp. They came into the mess-house to find that the men had eaten in unusually short order; and from the bench outside, usually filled at that hour with laughing loungers, there was not a sound. A strange stillness had invaded the colony of the Croix d’Or, almost ominous. Preoccupied, and each thinking over his individual trials, the partners ate their food and arose from the table. Out on the doorstep they paused to look down the cañon, now shorn of ugliness and rendered beautiful by the purple twilight. The faint haze of smoke from the banked fires, rising above the steel chimney of the boiler-house, was the only stirring, living spectacle visible; save one.

  “What does that mean?” Bill drawled, as if speaking to himself.

  Far below, just turning the bend of the road, Dick saw a procession of men, grouped, or walking in pairs. They disappeared before he answered.

  “Looks like the boys,” he said, using the term of the camps for all men employed. “I wonder where they are bound for? If it were pay night, I could understand. It would mean Goldpan, the dance halls, a fight or two, and sore heads to-morrow; but to-night––I don’t know.”

  Bill did not answer. He seemed to be in a silent, contemplative mood when they sat in the rough easy-chairs on the porch in front of the office and looked up at the first rays of light on the splendid, rugged peak above. Dick’s mind reverted to the lumberman’s daughter, as does the needle veer to the magnet; and for a long time they sat there, until the fires of their cigars glowed like stars. The moon came up, and the cross was outlined, dimly, above them, and against the background of black, cast upon the somber, starlit blue of the night.

  From far below, as if steel had been struck upon stone, came a faint, ringing sound. Living in that strange world of acuteness to which men of the high hills are habituated, they listened, alert. Accustomed, as are all those dwellers of the lonesome spots, to heeding anything out of the ordinary, they strained their ears for a repetition. Clattering up the roadway came the sound of a hard-ridden horse’s hoofs, then his labored breathing, and a soft voice steadying him to further effort. Into the shadows was injected something moving, some unfamiliar, living shape. It turned up the hill over the trail, and plunged wearily toward them. They jumped to their feet and stepped down off the porch, advancing to meet the belated visitor. The horse, with lathering neck and distended nostrils, paused before them. The moon cleared the top of the eastern ridges with a slow bound, lowering the shadows until the sweat on the horse’s neck glistened like a network of diamond dust strewn on a velvet cloak. It also lighted to a pallid gleam the still face of the night rider. It was Lily Meredith.

  “I’ve come again,” she said. “They’re trying to make trouble for you, down there in the camp. Bells Park came out and told me about it. The miners’ union stirred up by that man from Denver. Bells said the only chance you had was to come down there at once. They’ve split on your account––on account of the Croix d’Or. I’ve ridden two miles to warn you, and to get you there before the meeting breaks up. Bells will try and hold them until you can come and demand a hearing. If you don’t make it they will scab the mine. You must hurry. It’s your only chance. I know them, the best friends in peace, and devils when turned the other way.”

  She stopped abruptly and looked off at the moon, and then around over the dark and silent camp. Only one light was visible, that in the cook’s end of the mess-house, where that fat worthy lay upon his back and read a yellow-backed, sentimental novel. Faint and rumbling came the subdued roar of the mill at the Rattler, beating out the gold for Bully Presby; and through some vague prescience Dick was aware of its noise for the first time in weeks, and it conveyed a sense of menace. Everything was at stake. Everything watched him. He looked up at the white face of The Lily above him, and in the moonlight saw that her eyes were fixed, glowing, not on him or the scenes of the night, but on the aroused giant at his side.

  * * *

  CHAPTER XI

  BELLS’ VALIANT FIGHT

  “We’ll get there as soon as we can,” Dick said. “It may not do any good; but we’ll demand a word and give them an argument. I haven’t time to thank you now, Mrs. Meredith, but some day–––”

  “You owe me no thanks,” was her rejoinder. “It is I who owe you. Turn about, you know.”

  The big man said nothing, but took a step nearer to her horse, and looked up into her face with his penetrating eyes. He reached up and closed his hand over both of hers, and held them for an instant, and then whirled back into the cabin to get his hat. The horse pivoted and started away.

  “If I see Bells before you do,” a voice floated up from the shadows below, where the moon had not yet penetrated, “I’ll tell him you’re coming. So long.”

  As the partners dog-trotted down the trail, she was already a long way in advance. Now and then, as they panted up the steep path leading away behind the Rattler, whose lights glowed dimly, they heard faint sounds telling them that she was hastening back to Goldpan. The winding of the trail took them away from the immediate roar of the stamp mill behind, and they were still in the gloom, when they saw the horse and rider outlined for a moment high above them on the crest of the divide and they thought she stopped for a moment and looked back. Then the silhouette seemed to float down out of sight, and was gone.

  At the top, wordless, and sweating with effort, they filled their lungs, hitched their belts tighter, and plunged into the shadows leading toward the straggling rows of lights far below. They ran now, doggedly, hoping to arrive in the camp before the meeting came to an end.

  “All we want,” Bill said jerkily, as his feet pounded on the last decline, “is a chance to argue it out with the men themselves before this Denver feller gets his work in. I’m entitled to talk to ’em. I’ve got my own card, and am as good a union man as any of ’em. The boys’ll be reasonable if they stop to think.”

  They hastened up the roadway of the street, which was, as at any hour of the night, filled with moving men and clamorous with sound. They knew that the miners’ hall was at its farthest end over the Golden Age Saloon, and so lost no time in directing their steps toward it. A group in the roadway compelled them to turn out; and they were hurrying past, when a high, angry voice arrested them.

  “And that’s what they did to me––me, old Bells Park, who is sixty-four!”

  Dick turned into the crowd, followed by his partner, and began forcing his way through. Bells was screaming and sobbing now in anger, and venting a tirade of oaths. “If I’d been younger they couldn’t have done it so easily. If I’d ’a’ had my gun, I’d ’a’ killed some of ’em, I would!”

  As the partners gained the little opening around him, the light from a window disclosed the white-headed, little man. Two men were half-holding him up. His face was a mass of blood, which one of his supporters was endeavoring to wipe away with a handkerchief, and from all sides came indignant, sympathetic mutterings.

  “Who did that?” roared the heavy, infuriated voice of Bill as he turned to those around him.

  Bells, whose eyes were swollen shut, recognized the voice, and lurched forward.

  “Some fellers backin’ up that Denver thug,” he wailed. “I was tryin’ to hold ’em till you come. He had the meetin’ packed with a lot of bums I never saw before, and, when I told ’em what I thought of ’em and him, he ordered me thrown out. I tore my card to pieces and chucked ’em in his fat face, and then one of the fel
lers that came with him hit me. They threw me down the stairs, and might ’a’ killed me if there hadn’t been one or two of my friends there. They call ’emselves union miners! The dirty loafers!” And his voice screamed away again into a line of objurgations and anathemas until Bill quieted him.

  “Here, Dick,” he said, “give us a hand. We’ll take him over to Lily’s rooms and have her get Doc Mills.”

  His voice was unusually calm and contained. Dick had heard him use that tone but once before, when he made a proposition to a man in an Arizona camp that the road was wide, the day fine, and each well armed. He had helped bury the other man after that meeting, so now read the danger note.

  “I’ll go get The Lily to come up and open the door,” one of Bells’ supporters said; “and won’t you go for Doc?” He addressed the man on the other side of the engineer.

  “Sure!” replied the other.

  Within five minutes they were in Mrs. Meredith’s rooms again; and it seemed to Dick, as he looked around its dainty fittings, that it was forever to be a place of tragedy; for the memory of that terribly burned victim of the fire was still there, and he seemed to see her lying, scorched and unconscious, on the white counterpane.

  “His nose is busted, I think,” his partner said to The Lily, whose only comment was an abrupt exclamation: “What a shame! The cowards!”

  He turned to the woman with his set face, and, still speaking in that calm, deadly voice, said: “Do you happen to have your gun up here?”

  Her eyes opened wider, and Dick was about to interpose, when she answered understandingly: “Yes; but I’ll not give it to you, Bill Mathews.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said, as quietly as if his request or her refusal had been mere desultory conversation. “I might need one in a pinch; but if you can’t spare it, I reckon the boy and me can do what we have to do without one.”