The Plunderer Read online

  “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” twang 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  When they again turned into the street, the long twilight had been replaced by night, and on the tops of the high peaks to the westward the light of the full moon was beginning to paint the chill white with a shining glow.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 assorted 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?”

  Dick 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 shirt 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 appraisement 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. Dick 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,” Dick 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 bums 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 Dick 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 buttons 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,” Dick 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 shield 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, Dick! For God’s sake, stop ’em!”

  Dick 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. Dick struck right and left, and in the little space 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 Dick 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

  “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.”

  Dick, 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.”

  Dick’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, Dick 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 “Smuts,” 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 scraped off the verdigris and accumulated 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, Dick 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 crashing across the pipe to go bounding down the hillside as it gained momentum with every leap.

  There was a startled snort, a sudden threshing of the brush, and it parted to disclose a girl astride a horse that was terrified and endeavoring his best to dismount his rider. Dick, 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 horsemanship.

  “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 Dick with large, intelligent eyes.

  “Ah,” said Dick, 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 assured, 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 associate 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 tha
t 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 Dick 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 Dick’s mind persisted in wandering afield to the chance encounter of the morning.

  The men had finished their hasty meal, in hasty miner’s fashion, 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.”