The Plunderer Read online

  “There he is!” she called in her high treble voice. “Up there in number five! The man that carried Pearl out and got burned himself.”

  Some man near her climbed to the little stage and pointed, took off his hat, and shouted: “A tiger for that man! Now! All together! Whooee! Whooee! Whooee! Ow!”

  In the wild yell that every one joined, Bill was abashed. He shrank back into the box, flushed and embarrassed, while Dick laughed outright, with boyish enjoyment at his confusion, and The Lily watched him with a soft look in her eyes, and then stared down at the floor below.

  Suddenly her figure seemed to stiffen, and the look on her face altered to one of cold anger. She peered farther over as if to assure herself of something, and Dick, following her eyes, saw they were fixed on a man who stood leaning against one of the pillars near the entrance to the dance floor. He alone, apparently, was taking no part in the demonstration in Bill’s honor, but glowered sullenly toward the box. It took no long reasoning for Dick to know why. The man was the one who had been the watchman at the mine when they arrived.

  The band struck up again, and another dance began, the enthusiasts forgetting Bill as quickly as they had saluted him; but the ex-watchman continued to lean against the post, a picture of sullenness, and in the box The Lily stood with knitted brows, as if trying to recollect him.

  “Well,” she said at last, “I must go now. Come and see me whenever you can, both of you. I like you.”

  They arose and followed her out of the box, and down the flimsy stairs that led to the floor below. She paused on the bottom step, and clutched the casing with both hands, then tried to get a closer look at the ex-watchman, who had turned away until but a small part of his face was exposed. She walked onward, still looking angrily preoccupied, to the end of the bar, and the partners were on the point of bidding her good-night, when she abruptly started, seemed to tense herself, and exclaimed: “Now I know him!”

  The partners wondered when she made a swift clutch under the end of the bar and slipped something into the bosom of her jacket. She took five or six determined steps toward the ex-watchman and tapped him on the shoulder.

  He whirled sharply as if his mind had guilty fears, and faced her defiantly.

  Those immediately around, suspecting something unusual, stopped to watch them, and listened.

  “So you are here in Goldpan, are you, Wolff?” she demanded, with a cold sneer in her voice.

  He gave her a fierce, defiant stare, and brazenly growled: “You’re off. My name’s not Wolff. My name’s Brown.”

  “You lie!” she flared back, with a hard anger in her voice. “Your name is Gus Wolff! You get out of this place, and don’t you ever come in again! If you do, I’ll have you thrown out like a dog.”

  He glowered at the crowd that was forming around him, as crowds invariably form in any controversy, and then started toward the door, but he made a grave mistake. He called back a vile epithet as he went.

  “Stop!” she commanded him, with an imperious, compelling tone.

  He half-turned, and then shrugged his shoulders, and made as if to move on.

  “Stop, I said!”

  He turned again to face a pistol which she had snatched from her jacket, and now the partners, amazed, understood what that swift motion had meant. He halted irresolutely.

  “You used a name toward me that I permit no man to use,” she said fiercely. “So I shall explain to these men of Goldpan who you are, Gus Wolff! You were in Butte five years ago. You induced a poor, silly little fool named Rose Trevor to leave the dance hall where she worked, and go with you. You were one of those who believe that women are made to be brutalized. But good as most of them are, and bad as some of them are, there is none, living or dead, that you are or were fit to consort with. You murdered her. Don’t you dare to deny it! They found her dead outside of your cabin. They arrested you, and tried you, and should have hanged you, but they couldn’t get the proof of what everybody believed, that you––you brute––had killed, then thrown her over the rocks to claim that she had fallen there in the darkness.”

  She paused as if the tempest of her words had left her breathless, and men glared at him savagely. It seemed as if every one had crowded forward to hear her denunciation.

  “Bah!” she added scornfully. “The jury was made up of fools, and men knew it. The sheriff himself told you so when he slipped you out of the jail where he had protected you, and let you loose across the border in the night. Didn’t he? And he told you that if ever you came back to Butte, he would not turn a hand to keep you from the clutches of the mob; didn’t he? And now you are plain ‘Mister Brown,’ working somewhere back up in the hills, are you? Well, Mr. Brown, you keep away from the High Light. Get out!”

  Some one made a restless motion, and declared the man should be hanged, even now, but The Lily turned her angry eyes on the speaker, and silenced him.

  “Not if I can help it, or any of my friends can,” she said coolly. “There’ll be no mobbing anybody around here. I’ve said enough. Let him alone, but remember what kind of a blackguard he is. That’s all!”

  She turned back and tossed the pistol behind the bar, and the crowd, as if her words and the advice of the more contained element prevailed, resumed its play. She looked up, and saw the partners waiting to bid her good-night, and suddenly bit her lip, as if ashamed that they had seen her fury unmasked.

  “We’re going now,” Bill said, reaching out his hand. She did not take it, but looked around the room with unreadable eyes.

  “I’ll walk with you to the beginning of your trail,” she said. “I’m sick of this,” and led the way out into the night.

  For half the length of the long street, she strode between them, wordless, and then suddenly halted and held her arms apart appealingly.

  “What must you think of me?” she said, with a note of grief in her voice. “Oh, you two don’t know it all! You don’t know what it takes to make a woman, who tries to be decent, rebellious at everything under the skies. What brutes there are walking the earth! Sometimes, lately, I begin to doubt if there is a God!”

  “And that,” exclaimed the quiet, steadfast young voice at her side, “is unworthy of you and your intelligence.”

  She halted again, as if thinking.

  “And I,” said the giant, in his deep, musical tones, “know there’s one. It takes more than men to make me believe there ain’t. I know it when I look at them!” He waved his hands at the starlit mountains surrounding them, and towering in serenity high up to the cloudless spaces.

  “I’d be mighty ashamed to doubt when I can see them,” he said, “and if they went away, I’d still believe it; because if I didn’t, I couldn’t see no use in livin’ any more. It’s havin’ Him lean down and whisper to you once in a while, in the night, when everything seems to be goin’ wrong, ‘Old boy, you did well,’ that keeps it all worth while and makes a feller stiffen his back and go ahead, with his conscience clean and not carin’ a cuss what anybody says or thinks, so longs as he knows that the Lord knows he did the right thing.”

  She faltered for a moment, and Dick, staring through the darkness at her, could not decide whether it was because the woman in her was melting after the storm of anger, or whether she was merely weighing his partner’s words. As abruptly as had been any of her actions in all the time they had known her, she turned and walked away from them, her soft “Good-night” wafting itself back with a note of profound sadness and misery.

  “I’ve decided what she is,” Bill said, as they paused for a last look at the lights of the camp. “She’s all woman, and a mighty good one, at that!”

  * * *

  CHAPTER VIII

  THE INCONSISTENT BULLY

  “Them beans,” declared the fat cook, plaintively, “looks as if they had been put through some sort of shrivelin’ process. The dried prunes are sure dry all right! Must have been put up about the time they dried them mummy things back in Egypt. Apuricots? Humph! I soaked some of ’em a
ll day and to-night took one over to the shop and cut it open with a chisel to see if it was real leather, or only imitation. The canned salmon, and the canned tripe is all swells so that the cans is round instead of flat on the ends. I reckon you’d better go down and see that storekeeper. I dassen’t! If I did I’d probably lose my temper and wallop him. If somebody don’t go, the men here’ll be makin’ a mistake, blamin’ it on me, and I can’t exactly see how they could keep from hangin’ me, if they want to do justice.”

  He had stood in the doorway of the office to voice his complaint, and now, without further words walked away toward his own particular section of the little camp village.

  “So that’s the way that trader down there filled the order, is it?” Dick said, frowning at his companion.

  The latter merely grunted and then offered a solution.

  “Probably,” he said, “that stuff was sent up here without bein’ opened, just as he got it. If that’s so it ain’t his fault. About half the rows in life come from takin’ things for granted. The other half because we know too well how things did happen.”

  He stood up and stretched his arms.

  “What do you say we go down and hear what the trader has to say? If he’s square he’ll make good. If he ain’t––we’ll make him!”

  Taking it for granted that the younger man would accompany him, he was already slipping off his working shirt and peering around the corners of the room for his clean boots. Dick hesitated and had to be urged. He wondered then if it were not possible that something beside the errand to the trader’s caused Bill’s eagerness; but wisely kept the idea to himself.

  The camp was in the dusk when they entered it, the soft dusk that falls over early summer evenings in the hills, when everything in nature seems drowsily awaiting the night. They thought there was an unusual hush in the manner of those they met. Men talked on the corners or in groups in the roadway with unaccustomed earnestness. Women leaned across window sills and chatted across intervening spaces with an air of anxiety; the very dogs in the street appeared to be subdued. At the trader’s there was not the usual small gathering of loungers, squatted sociably around on cracker boxes and packing cases, and the man with the twang was alone.

  “Say, there’s something wrong with that stuff you sent us,” Bill began, and the trader answered with a soft, absent-minded, “So?”

  Bill repeated the words of the cook; but the storekeeper continued to stare out of the door as if but half of what was said proved interesting.

  “I’ll send up and bring it back to-morrow,” he replied when the miner had concluded his complaint. “The fact is it’s a job lot I bought in Portland, and I didn’t look at it. Came in yesterday. I ain’t––I ain’t exactly feelin’ right. I suppose you heard about it?”

  The partners looked at him questioningly, but he did not shift his eyes from the door through which he still appeared to be staring away into the distance, and it was easy to conjecture, from the expression of his eyes, that he was seeing a tragedy.

  “I’m sort of busted up,” he went on, without looking at them. “You see I had a brother over there. A shift boss, he was. Him and me was more than brothers. We was friends. It don’t seem right that Hiram was down there, in the dark, when the big cave came––came just as if the whole mountain wanted to smash them men under it. It don’t seem right! I can’t quite get it all yet. I’m goin’ over there on the stage in the mornin’. He’s left a widder and a couple of little shavers. I’m goin’ to bring ’em here.”

  “We don’t quite understand you,” Dick said, hesitatingly, and with sympathy in his voice. “We haven’t heard about it––whatever it is. I’m sorry if–––”

  The trader straightened up from where he had been leaning on his elbows across the counter and they saw that his face was drawn.

  “Oh, I see,” he said, in the same slow, hopeless voice. “I forgot you men don’t come down here very often and that my driver never has anything to say to anybody. Why, it’s the Blackbird mine over across the divide––on the east spur. Bad, old fashioned mine she was, with crawlin’ ground. Lime streaks all through the formation and plenty of water. Nobody quite knows how it happened. There was a big slip over there a few days ago on the four-hundred-foot level. Thirty odd men back of it. Timbers went off, they say, like a gatlin’ gun. I just can’t seem to understand how they didn’t handle that ground better. It don’t look right to me!”

  He stooped and twisted his fingers together and the palms of his hands gave out dry, rasping sounds. His attitude seemed inconsistent with the immobility of his face, but Dick surmised that he was trying to regain control of his emotions. He had a keen desire to know more of the particulars of the tragedy, but sensed from the storekeeper’s appearance that he was scarcely able to give a coherent account of it. His words had already told his sorrow. Bill’s voice broke the pause.

  “We’re right sorry we bothered you about the supplies,” he said, softly. “But we didn’t know, you see. I reckon we ain’t in any big hurry. You just take your time about fixin’ it up. We can live on most anything for a day or two.”

  The storekeeper looked at him gratefully and then lowered his eyes again. He turned away from them with a long sigh.

  “Nope,” he said. “Much obliged. I’ll send my man up to-morrow. Business keeps a-goin’ on just the same, no matter who passes out. If you or me died to-night, the whole world would just keep joggin’ along. I’ll send up.”

  They turned and walked out, feeling that anything they could say would be useless, and sound hollow, and they did not speak until they were some distance farther up the street.

  “He’s hard hit, poor cuss!” Bill said. “Wonder what the rest of it was. Lets go on up toward the High Light. Seems as if it must have been pretty bad. What’s the commotion down there?”

  Ahead of them they saw men clustering toward a central point, and others who had been in the street hurrying forward to be absorbed into the group. They quickened their steps a trifle, speculating as to whether it could mean a brawl, or something relating to the disaster of which they had just learned. It proved the latter. A man was standing in the center of the gathering crowd with the reins of a tired horse hanging loosely over his arm. He was talking to the doctor, who was asking him questions.

  “No,” Bill and Dick heard him say as they crowded into the group, “there ain’t nothin’ you can do, Doc. It’s all over with ’em. I was there until quite late. God! It’s awful!”

  “Anybody get out at all?” someone asked.

  “No. That’s a cinch. You see they were driving back in and feeling for the ledge. Blocking out, I think. Pretty lean ore, over there, you know. So there was just one drift away from the shaft, and it was in that she caved.”

  There was a moment’s silence and then a half-dozen questions asked almost in the same moment. The man turned first to one and then to another as if striving to decide which query should be answered first, and shook his head hopelessly.

  “They didn’t have a chance,” he asserted. “It happened three days ago, as you all know. They sent over to Arrapahoe and all the boys over there went and volunteered. They worked just as many men as could get into the drift at a time, and they spelled each other in half-hour shifts, so’s every man could do his best. They hadn’t got in twenty feet before they saw that she was bad. Seemed as if the whole drift had been wiped out. It was as solid as rock in place––just as if the whole mountain had slipped!”

  “Did you go down, Jim?” the doctor asked.

  For reply the man held up his hands. Dick, close behind him and peering forward to see them in the light that came from a street lamp, saw they were a mass of blisters with the skin torn away, red and bleeding. The answer was too eloquent to require words for the man they called Jim had evidently been there and striving madly, as had others, in the attempt to rescue. There was a surge forward as the crowd pressed in, each man trying to inspect these evidences of the tragedy. The questions were coming f
aster and from all sides. Most frequently the anxious demand, coupled with a pronounced eagerness was, “Is there anything any of us can do? Can we help if we get over there?”

  “How far over is it?” Bill asked the man nearest him.

  “Forty-miles,” was the answer. They were all willing to travel that far, or farther, if they could be of any assistance whatever.

  “No, there’s no use in going,” the man in the center said. “There’s more men there now than can be handled, and all they’re doing is to try to get at the boys’ bodies. It’s sure that they can’t live till they’re taken out. You all know that! They’re gone, every one of ’em. And that ain’t the worst. They left twenty-six widows, most of ’em with children!”

  A groan went up from the crowd. The word passed back along like the waves cast up by a rock thrown into the center of a pool of blackness. It began at the center with its repetition as the words were conveyed to those out of earshot. “He says there’s twenty-six widows. He says there’s a lot of children.”

  The questions were flowing inward again.

  “No, boys, there ain’t a thing you can do,” the man they called Jim repeated. “That is, there ain’t a thing can be done for the boys underground. They’re gone; but somebody ought to do what can be done for them that’s left. It’s money that helps the most. That’s the best way to show that most all of us had friends who went out.”

  He turned and climbed back into his saddle in the little open space, and there was another moment’s silence. The crowd looked up at him now, as he sat there in the center of the light thrown downward, feebly, from the lamp.

  “Give me room, boys, won’t you?” he asked. “My cayuse is about all in. There ain’t nothing more to tell. There ain’t a thing you can do; but just what I said. Those women and children will need money. They’re all broke.”