It may be imagined with what inward tremblings I took on the duties of the new job the next day. Kenniston, eager to be gone on his prospecting tour, gave me only a short forenoon over the pay-rolls; but as to this, the routine was simple enough. It was what he said at parting that gave me the greatest concern.

"You have to go to the bank at the Creek and get the money, you know," he said. "I usually go on the afternoon train. That will make you late for banking hours, but if you wire ahead they'll have the money counted out and ready for you. Then you can catch the evening train to the junction and come up on one of the construction engines. Better take one of the commissary .45's along, just for safety's sake—though in all the trips I've made I've never needed a gun."

The week following Kenniston's drop-out was a busy one, with time-books to check and enter, commissary deductions to be made, and the payrolls to be gotten out. My office was a small room or space partitioned off from the commissary, the partition being of matched boards, breast-high, and above that a rough slat grille like those in country railroad stations. As I worked at the bracketed shelf which served as a high desk, I could see the interior of the commissary, and those who came and went. It may have been only a fancy, but it seemed to me that Dorgan came in oftener than usual; and more than once I caught him peering at me through the slatted grille, with the convict's trick of looking aside without turning his head. It was for this reason, more than for any other, that I recalled Kenniston's advice and armed myself when I went to Cripple Creek on the day before pay-day to get the money from the bank.

The short journey to town was uneventful. A construction locomotive took me down to the main line junction, where I caught the regular train from Denver. But on the way from the railroad station to the bank in Cripple Creek I had a shock, followed instantly by the conviction that I was in for trouble. On the opposite side of the street, and keeping even pace with me, I saw Dorgan.

Barrett (for obvious reasons I cannot use real names) was the man I had been told to ask for at the bank, and it was he who admitted me at the side door, the hour being well past the close of business. He was a clean-cut, alert young fellow; a Westerner, I judged, only by recent adoption.

"You are Bertrand, from the Hadley and Shelton camps?" he asked; and then, as I produced my check and letter of authority; "You don't need the letter. Kenniston told me what you'd look like. Your money is ready."

In one of the private rooms of the bank the currency was counted out, the count verified, the money receipted for, and I was ready to start back. Barrett walked to the railroad station with me, helping with the valise money bag, which was heavy with a good bit of coin for making change. We got better acquainted on the walk, and I warmed immediately to the frank, open-mannered young bank teller, little dreaming what this acquaintance, begun in pure business routine, was destined to lead to in the near future.

Barrett saw me safely aboard of my return train, and stood on the platform at the open window of the car talking to me until the train started. On my part this leave-taking talk was more or less perfunctory; I was scanning the platform throng anxiously in search of a certain heavy-shouldered man with a sinister face; and when, just as the train began to move, I saw Dorgan swing himself up to the step of the car ahead, I knew what was before me—or thought I did—and surreptitiously drew the .45 from the inside coat-pocket where I had carried it, twirling the cylinder to make sure that it was loaded and in serviceable condition.

There was an excellent chance for a hold-up at the junction. It was coming on to dusk as the through train made the stop, and there was no town, not even a station; nothing but a water tank and the littered jumble of a construction yard. My engine was making up a train of material cars to be taken to our end-of-track camp, and I had to wait for it to come within hailing distance.

Dorgan got off the through train at the same time that I did. I stood with the money valise between my feet and folded my arms with a hand inside of my coat and grasping the butt of the big revolver, shaking a bit because all this was so foreign to anything I had ever experienced, but determined to do what seemed needful at the pinch. Oddly enough, as I thought, the track foreman made no move to approach me. Instead, he kept his distance, busying himself with the filling and lighting of a stubby black pipe. After a little time, and before it was quite dark, my engine backed down to where I was standing and I climbed aboard with my money bag, still with an eye on Dorgan. The last I saw of him he was sitting on the end of a cross-tie, pulling away at his pipe and apparently oblivious to me and to everything else. But I made sure that when the material train should pull out he would be aboard of it; and the event proved that he was.

Obsessed with the idea that Dorgan had chosen the time to make his "clean-up," I took no chances after the end-of-track camp was reached. The money valise went with me to the mess tent, and I ate supper with my feet on it, and with the big revolver lying across my knees. After supper I lugged my responsibility over to the commissary pay-office, and by the flickering light of a miner's candle stowed the money in the ramshackle old safe which was the only security the camp afforded.

Past this I lighted the lamps and busied myself with the account books. There was little doing in the commissary—it was too near pay-day for the men to be buying much—and the clerk who had taken over my former job shut up shop quite early. At nine o'clock I was alone in the store-room building; and at a little before ten I put out the lights and lay down on the office cot with a sawed-off Winchester—a part of the pay-office armament—lying on the mattress beside me.

A foolish thing to do, you say?—when at a word I might have had all the help I needed in guarding the pay-money? No; it wasn't altogether foolhardiness; it was partly weakness. For, twist and turn it as I might, there was always the unforgivable thing at the end: the fact that by calling in help and betraying Dorgan to others, I, once his prison-mate, and even now, like him—though in a lesser degree—a law-breaker, would become a "snitch," an informer, a traitor to my kind. A wretchedly distorted point of view? Doubtless it was. But the three years of unmerited punishment and criminal associations must account for it as they may.

I don't know how long the silent watch was maintained. One by one the night noises of the camp died down and the stillness of the solitudes enveloped the commissary. The responsibility I was carrying should have kept me awake, but it didn't. If the coming of sleep had been gradual I might have fought it off, but the healthy life of the camp had given me leave to eat like a workingman and to fall asleep like one when the day was ended. So after the stillness had fairly laid hold of me I was gone before I knew it.

When I opened my eyes it was with a startled conviction that I was no longer alone in the little boxed-in office. In the murky indoor darkness of a moonless night I could barely distinguish the surroundings, the shelf-desk, the black bulk of the old safe, the three-legged stool, and at the end of the room the gray patch which placed the single window. Then, with a cold sweat starting from every pore, I saw the humped figure of a man beside the safe. As nearly as I could make out, he was sitting with his back to the wall and his knees drawn up, and by listening intently I could hear his measured breathing.

It required a greater amount of brute courage than I had thought it would to spring to a sitting posture on the cot and cover the squatting figure with the rifle slewed into position across my knees. The man made no move to obey when I ordered him to hold up his hands. Then I spoke again.

"I've got the drop on you, Dorgan—or Murphey; whichever your name is," I said. "If you move I shall kill you. You see, I know who you are and what you are here for."

A voice, harsh but neither threatening nor pleading, came out of the shadows beside the safe.

"You ain't tellin' me nothin' new, pally. I spotted you a good while back, and I knowed you'd lamped me. You was lookin' f'r me to bust in here to-night?"

"I was. After you followed me to Cripple Creek and back I knew about what to expect."

"And you was layin' f'r me alone?—when you could 'a' had Collins and Nixon and half a dozen more if yous 'd squealed f'r 'em?"

"I didn't need any better help than this," I answered, patting the stock of the Winchester. "The jig's up, Dorgan. You can't crack this safe while I'm here and alive. I suppose you got in by the window: you can go out the same way."

"You're aimin' to turn me loose?" said the voice, and now I fancied there was a curious trembly hoarseness in it.

"You heard what I said."

"Listen a minute, pally: if you'll hold that gun right stiddy where it is and let out a yell 'r two, you can earn five hundred doughboys. Ye didn't know that, did you?"

"I know you broke jail and skipped for it, but I didn't know how much the warden was willing to pay to get you back."

"It's five hundred bones, all right. Study a minute: don't you want the five hundred?"

"No; not bad enough to send you back to 'stir' for it."

There was a dead silence for the space of a long minute, and while it endured the man sat motionless, with his back against the wall and his hands locked over his knees. Then: "They'd all pat you on the back if yous was to let out that yell. I brought ten years with me when the warden give me my number, and I'm thinkin' they was comin' to me—all o' them."

"But you don't want to go back?"

"Not me; if it was to come to that, I'd a damned sight rather you'd squeeze a little harder on that trigger you've got under your finger; see?"

"Then why did you take this long chance?" I demanded. "You say you knew I had spotted you; you might have known that I'd be ready for you."

"I kind o' hoped you would," he said, drawling the words. "Yes; I sure did hope ye would—not but what I'm thinkin' I could 'a' done it alone."

"Done what alone? What are you driv——"

The interruption was imperative; a fierce "Hist!" from the corner beside the safe, and at the same instant a blurring of the gray patch of the window, a sash rising almost noiselessly, and two men, following each other like substance and shadow, legging themselves into the office over the window-sill. At first I thought Dorgan had set a trap for me; but before that unworthy suspicion could draw its second breath, the track foreman had hurled himself upon the two intruders, calling to me to come on and help him.

The battle, such as it was, was short, sharp and decisive, as the darkness and the contracted fighting space constrained it to be. Though I dared not shoot, I contrived to use the rifle as a club on the man who was trying to choke Dorgan from behind, and after a hard-breathing minute or two we had them both down, one of them half stunned by the blow on his head from the gun-barrel, and the other with an arm twisted and temporarily useless. Under Dorgan's directions I cut a couple of lengths from a rope coil in the commissary with which we tied the pair hand and foot, dragging them afterward to the freer floor space beyond the pay-office partition.

"They'll be stayin' put till mornin', I'm thinkin'," was Dorgan's comment as we retreated to the scene of the battle. Then, as he edged toward the open window: "Ye won't be needin' me any more to-night . . . I'll duck whilst the duckin's good."

"Not just yet," I interposed, and pulled him to a seat on the cot beside me. "I want to know a few things first. You knew about the raid these fellows were planning?"

"Sure, I did."

"Tell me about it."

"I piped 'em off about a week ago—when Kenniston 'd gone. They talked too much, and too loud, d'ye see? The lay was f'r to chase in to the Creek wit' you—an' they did—an' get you on the road, if they could; if that didn't work, they was to crack the safe"—this with the contempt of the real craftsman for a pair of amateurs. "D'ye see, the boss 'd been dippy enough to write the combination on a piece o' paper when Kenniston ducked out—f'r fear he'd be forgettin' it, maybe, and these dubs o' the world nipped the paper."

"See here, Dorgan; was that why you followed me to town this afternoon?" I shot at him.

"Ye've guessed it."

"And it was for the same reason that you sneaked in here while I was asleep?"

"Ye've guessed it ag'in."

"You didn't want the bosses to be robbed?"

The escaped convict had his face propped between his hands with his elbows resting on his knees.

"I'm thinkin' maybe it's six o' one and a half-dozen o' tother," he said soberly. "I wasn't carin' so damned much about the bosses, square as they've been to me. But I puts it up like this: here's you, and you'd spotted me, and you hadn't snitched; you'd been in 'stir' yourself, and knowed what it was: d'ye see?"

I smiled in the darkness. It was the brotherhood of the underworld.

"And you lined up square at the finish, too, as I knowed yous would," he went on. "You sees me pipin' yous off in town, and you was thinkin' maybe I'd drop in here to-night and crack this old box f'r the swag there'd be in it. You laid f'r me alone, because yit you wouldn't be willin' to give me up. Ain't that the size of it, pally?"

"You've guessed it," I said, handing his own words back to him. "And now one more question, Dorgan: have you quit the crooked business for keeps?"

He was up and moving toward the open window when he replied.

"Who the hell would know that? I was a railroad man, pally, before I took to the road. These days I'm eatin' my t'ree squares and sleepin' good. But some fine mornin' a little man that I could break in halves wit' my two hands 'll come dancin' along wit' a paper in his pocket and a gun in his fist; and then it'll be all over but the shoutin'—or the fun'ral. There's on'y the one sure thing about it, pally: I'll not be goin' back to 'stir'—not alive; d'ye see? So long . . . don't let them ducks get loose on yous and come at yous fr'm behind, whilst maybe you'd be dozin' off."

And with this parting injunction he was gone.



XII

A Cast for Fortune

The incident of the frustrated safe robbery was an incident closed, so far as any difference in Dorgan's attitude toward me was concerned, at the moment when he disappeared through the open window of the pay-office. For the next two or three weeks I saw him only as he chanced to drop into the commissary of an evening; and upon such occasions he ignored me absolutely.

Only once more while the work of branch-line building continued did we have speech together. It was in the evening of a day when the new line, then nearly completed, had been honored with visitors; a car-load of them up from Denver in some railway official's private hotel-on-wheels. It so happened that my duties had taken me up to the actual end-of-track—by this time some miles beyond our headquarters camp at Flume Gulch—and I was there when the special, with its observation platform crowded with sightseers, came surging and staggering up over the uneven track of the new line.

I paid little attention to the one-car train as it passed me, save to note that there were women among the railroad official's guests. The sightseers were quite outside of my purview—or within it only as temporary hindrances to a job we were all pushing at top speed. A short distance beyond me the train came to a stand in the midst of Dorgan's crew and I saw some of the people getting off the car. Just then a construction engine came along on the siding, and, my errand to the front being accomplished, I flagged it and went back to headquarters.

As I have said, Dorgan dropped into the commissary that evening. His ostensible errand was to buy some tobacco, but after he had filled his pipe he lingered until the sleepy commissary clerk began to turn the loiterers out preparatory to closing the place for the night. It was then that Dorgan gave me a sign which I rightly interpreted; when I released the catch of the pay-office door he slipped in and sat down on the cot where he would be out of sight of those in front. Here he smoked in sober silence until Crawford, the commissary man, had gone out and locked the door on the empty storeroom.

"I was wantin' to tip yez off," was the way he began, after we had the needful privacy. "You'd be after seein' that kid-glove gang up at the front this mornin'?"

I nodded.

"Know anybody in that bunch?"

"I didn't notice them particularly," I replied. "I understood they were Denver people—friends of somebody in the railroad management."

"There was women," he said significantly.

"I know; I saw some of them."

"Yes; and be the same token, there was one of them lamped yous off. I listened at her askin' one o' the men who you was; d'ye see?"

Instantly I began to ransack my brain for the possibilities, and almost at once the talk on the train with Horace Barton, the wagon sales manager, flashed into the field of recollection.

"Could you describe the woman for me?" I asked.

Dorgan made hard work of this, though it was evident that he was trying his best. His description would have fitted any one of a round million of American women, I suppose; yet out of it I thought I could draw some faint touches of familiarity. The stumbling description, coupled with Barton's assertion that Agatha Geddis was living in Colorado, fitted together only too well.

"Did you hear what she said to the man?" I inquired, and my mouth was dry.

"On'y a bit of it. She says, says she: 'Who is that man wit' a French beard—the young man in his shirt-sleeves?' The felly she t'rowed this into was one o' the kid-gloves, and he didn't know. So he went to Shelton, who was showin' the crowd around on the job. When he comes back, he tells her your name is Jim Bertrand, and that you makes a noise like the camp paymaster."

"Well?" I prompted. "Go on."

"She laughs when he says that. 'Jim Bertrand, is it?' says she. 'Will you do me a favor, Mister Jullybird'—'r some such name. 'Go and ask that young man how did he leave all the folks in Glendale. I want to see him jump,' says she. He didn't do it because at that same minute yous was walkin' down the track to flag Benson's ingine."

The bolt had fallen. The woman could have been no other than Agatha Geddis. Once more I stood in critical danger of losing all that I had gained. There was only one faint hope, and that was that she had not heard of the broken parole. I had to go to the water jug in the Commissary and get a drink before I could thank Dorgan for telling me.

"'Tis nothin'," he said shortly. Then, after a protracted pause: "What can she do to yous, pally?"

"She can send me up for two years; and then some—for the penalties."

Again a silence intervened.

"'Twas in the back part o' my head to take a chance and ditch that damn' special when she was comin' back down the gulch," said Dorgan, at length, as coolly as if he were merely telling me that his pipe had gone out. "But if I'd done it, it would have been just my crooked luck to 'a' killed everybody on it but that woman. What'll ye be doin'?"

"Nothing at present. We shall finish here in a week or so more, and then I'll see."

That ended it. After Dorgan had got another match for his pipe, I let him out at the side door of the commissary, and he went his way across to the sleeping shacks on the other side of the tracks.

Two weeks later it was this story of the inquisitive young woman, weighing in the balance with some other things, that determined my immediate future course. The work on the branch line was completed, and my employers had taken a dam-building contract in Idaho. I was offered the job of bookkeeper and paymaster, combined, on the new work, with a substantial raise in salary, and the temptation to accept was very strong. But I argued, foolishly, perhaps, that so long as I remained in the same service as that in which she had discovered me, Agatha Geddis would always be able to trace me; that my best chance was to lose myself again as speedily as possible.

The "losing" opportunity had already offered itself. By this time I had made a few acquaintances in town and was beginning to be bitten by the mining bug. Though I was a late comer in the district, and Cripple Creek had fully caught its stride as one of the greatest gold-producing camps in the world some time before my advent, "strikes" were still occurring frequently enough to keep the gold seekers' excitement from dying out. With the greater part of my Hadley-and-Shelton earnings in my pocket, and with muscles camp-hardened sufficiently to enable me to hold my own as a workingman, I decided to take a chance and become a prospector.

We went at it judiciously and with well-considered plans, three of us: the bank teller, Barrett, a young carpenter named Gifford, and myself. Altogether we could pool less than a thousand dollars of capital, but we determined to make the modest stake suffice. By this time the entire district had been plotted and replotted into mining claims; hence we did our preliminary prospecting in the records of the land office. A careful search revealed a number of infinitesimally small areas as yet uncovered by the many criss-crossing claims; and among these we chose a triangular-shaped bit of mountain side on the farther slope of Bull Mountain, with a mine called the "Lawrenceburg," a fairly large producer, for our nearest neighbor.

There was a good bit of discussion precedent to the making of this decision. Barrett thought that we stood but a slight chance of finding mineral in the over-prospected area. The Lawrenceburg was a full quarter of a mile distant from our triangle, and its "pay-streak" was said to dip southward, while our gulch slope lay on the other side of a spur and due northeast. It was a further examination of the land-office records that turned the scale. Among the numerous unworked claims lying higher up the gulch, beyond and adjoining our proposed location, we found three whose ownership we traced, through a number of transfers apparently designed to hide something, to the Lawrenceburg.

Barrett, a fine, keen-witted young fellow whose real name, if I might give it, would be familiar to everybody in the West, was the first to draw the probable inference.

"Jimmie, you've got the longest head in the bunch," was his comment; this because I had chanced to be the one to make the discovery of the well-concealed ownership. "At some period in the history of the Lawrenceburg, which is one of the oldest mines on Bull Mountain, its owners have had reason to believe that their pay streak was going to run the other way—to the northeast. They undertook to cover the chance by making these locations quietly, and through 'dummy' locators, on the other side of the spur."

"But how did they come to overlook this patch we're figuring on?" asked Gifford, the carpenter.

"That was somebody's blunder," Barrett offered. "These section plats we have been studying may have been made after the locations were staked out; in all probability that was the case. That sort of thing happens easily in a new country like this. It was an oversight; you can bet to win on that. If those Lawrenceburg people had any good business reason for locating these claims beyond us, they had precisely the same reason for covering this intervening bit of ground that we are going to grab."

Gifford took fire at once; and if I didn't it was only because we were not yet in possession, and I thought there might be many chances for a slip between the cup and the lip. This talk took place at night in Barrett's room in town, and before we separated our plans were fully made. Gifford and I were to start at once—that night, mind you—for Bull Mountain to locate a claim which should cover as completely as possible the entire area of the irregular triangle. The location made, the carpenter and I were to work the claim as a two-man proposition. Barrett was to retain his place in the bank, so that the savings from his salary might add more capital. We even went so far as to christen our as yet unborn mine. Since we were picking up—or were going to pick up—one of the unconsidered fragments after the big fellows had taken their fill of the loaves and fishes, we proposed to call our venture "The Little Clean-Up."

I shall always remember Barrett's good-natured grin when the meeting was adjourned.

"You two will have the hot end of it," he remarked. "You're going to do the hard work, and all you've left me is a chance to do the starving act. Right here is where I see myself giving up this palatial apartment and going into a boarding-house. For heaven's sake, eat light, you two. We may have to sink a hundred feet in solid rock before we find anything."

We went in light marching order, Gifford and I; and the early dawn of the following morning found us driving our location stakes and pacing off the boundaries of the new claim. I like to remember that we were neither too new to the business, nor too much excited, to be careful and methodical. The triangular patch of unclaimed ground lay along the slope, with the apex of the triangle pointing toward the hill-hidden Lawrenceburg. Ignoring any vein directions which might develop later on, we laid off our location to fit the ground, taking in all the space we could legally hold; which would be, of course, only the triangle, though our staking necessarily overlapped this area on all sides. If we should be lucky enough to make a strike, ground space for our operations was going to be at a premium, and at the very best there wasn't an inch of room to spare.

I don't know just why we should have been afraid that anybody would have been foolish enough to try to "jump" an unworked claim; but we were, and we decided at once that we would not leave the ground unwatched now that our stakes were driven and our notice duly posted. Accordingly, Gifford went back to town to make the needful land-office entry and to bring out the supplies, tools, and a wagon-load of lumber for a shack, leaving me to stand guard with an old horse-pistol of Gifford's for a weapon. It was after dark when I heard the wagon trailing up the gulch, and I had had nothing to eat since morning. But I was free and hopeful—and happy; with the nightmare past becoming more and more a thing to be pushed aside and comfortably ignored.

Looking back at it now, I can see that our venture was haphazard to the tenderfoot degree. Having built a sleeping shack out of the lumber, we picked a place for the prospect shaft solely with reference to its convenience on the hillside. But for this we had plenty of precedents. What the miners of any other district would have called sheer miracles of luck were the usual thing in the Cripple Creek region. From the earliest of the discoveries the region had been upsetting all the well-established mining traditions, and the tenderfoot was quite as likely to find mineral as was the most experienced prospector; more likely, in fact, since the man with everything to learn would not be hampered by the traditions.

The top layer of fine gravel which answers for soil in the district carries gold "float"—"color," a Californian would say,—in numberless localities over an area of many square miles; a fact which was well known long before any one knew of the underlying treasures which have since been taken out of the deep workings. But there are no vein outcroppings on the surface, and the prospector's first task is to uncover the bed-rock by sinking one or more test pits through the gravel. In some one of these shallow shafts he may—or may not—make his discovery. If successful, he will find, on some well-cleaned surface of the bed-rock, a fine broken line; a minute vein in many instances so narrow as to be discoverable only by the use of a magnifying-glass; and that discolored line will be his invitation to dig deeper.

By the morning of the second day Gifford had built our rude windlass, and the work of shaft sinking was begun. The gravel layer varies in thickness in different parts of the district, ranging from a few inches in some places to many feet in others. In our case we were less than waist-deep in the hole, and had not yet set up the windlass, when we reached the upper surface of the bed-rock.

Generally speaking, the Cripple Creek district is a dry region as to its surface, but we were lucky enough to have a trickling rivulet in our gulch. It was dark before we had carried water in sufficient quantity to wash off the uncovered bed-rock bottom in our hole, so we turned in without knowing what we had found, or whether or not we had found anything.

I was cooking the bacon and pan-bread the next morning when Gifford, who had gone early into the hole with a bucket of water and a scrubbing-brush, came running up to the shack with his eyes bulging.

"We—we've got it!" he gasped. "Where's that magnifying-glass?"

I left the bacon to burn if it wanted to and ran with him to the shallow shaft. He had scrubbed the solid rock of the pit bottom until it was as bare as the back of a hand, and across the cleaned stone, running from southwest to northeast, there was a thin line of discoloration showing plainly enough as a fissure vein. Gifford dug a little of the crack-filling out with the blade of his pocket-knife and we examined it under the magnifier. We were both ready to swear that we could see flecks and dust grains of free gold in the bluish-brown gangue-matter; but that was purely imagination.

I think neither of us knew or cared that the bacon was burned to a blackened crisp when we got back to it. The breakfast was bolted like a tramp's hand-out, and before the sun was fairly over the shoulder of the eastern mountain we were back in the hole with hammer and drills. The frantic haste was entirely excusable. While it was true that a greater number of the Cripple Creek discoveries had widened satisfactorily from the surface down, becoming more and more profitable at increasing depths, it was also true that some of them had begun as "knife-blades" and had so continued. What Gifford and I did not know about drilling and shooting rock would have filled a library of volumes; none the less, by noon we had succeeded in worrying a couple of holes in the solid shaft bottom, had loaded them, and were ready for the blast.

If any real miner should chance to read this true and unvarnished tale of our beginnings he will smile when I confess that we cut the fuses four feet long and retreated a good quarter of a mile up the gulch after they were lighted. In our breathless eagerness it seemed as if we waited a full half-hour before the shallow hole vomited a mouthful of broken rock and dust, and a dull double rumble told us that both shots had gone off. Gifford was a fairly good sprinter, but I beat him on the home run. The hole was half full of shattered rock and loosened gravel and we went at it with our bare hands. After a few minutes of this senseless dog-scratching, Gifford sat down on the edge of the pit and burst out laughing.

"I guess there ain't any manner o' need for us to go plumb locoed," he said. "We've got all the time there is, and a shovel will last a heap longer than our fingers."

I may say, in passing, that this attitude was characteristic of our carpenter partner. He was a country boy from Southern Indiana; a natural-born mechanic, with only a common school education. But he had initiative and a good gift of horse sense and balance, and in the troublous times that followed he was always our level-headed stand-by.

Acting upon his most sensible suggestion, we took our time, spelling each other in shoveling out the debris. The two shots driven in opposite corners had deepened the shaft over two feet. When the new bottom of the hole was uncovered we nearly had a return of the frenzies. The discolored line of the vein had widened to four inches or more, and the last of the broken rock shoveled out was freely mixed with fragments of the bluish-brown gangue-matter.

A hasty estimate assured us that we had a sufficient quantity of the lode matter for a trial assay, and we spent the better part of the afternoon picking out pieces of the ore on the small dump and in chipping more of them from the exposed face of the seam. It was arranged that one of us should take the samples to town after dark, for the sake of secrecy, and we put in what daylight there was left after our sample was prepared drilling another set of holes—though we did not fire them.

Leaving Gifford to stand guard over what now might be something well worth guarding, I made my way down the mountain after supper with the two small sacks of selected samples. True to his promise, I found Barrett already established in a rather cheap boarding-house. He was surprised to see me so soon, and more than surprised when I showed him the specimens of bluish rock.

"Say—by George!" he exclaimed; "that sure does look like the real stuff, Jimmie; though of course you can't tell. Have you roasted any of it?"

I was so green a miner at that time that I did not know what "roasting" meant. Barrett had a tiny coal-stove in his room with a bit of fire in it. Even the June nights are sometimes chilly at the Cripple Creek altitude. Selecting a bit of the stone he put it upon the fire-shovel among the coals and while it was heating listened to my recounting of the short and exciting story of the "find."

When the piece of bluish stone had been roasted and cooled we did not need the magnifying-glass. It was covered with a dew of fine pin-point yellow globules. Barrett went up in the air as if his chair had exploded under him. "My God, Jimmie!" he choked, "it's—it's a bonanza!"

The next step was to have authoritative assays made, and together we took the two small sacks of ore to the sampling works, which, at that time, were running day and night. We waited in the office while the tests were being made. The result, which came to us well past midnight, was enough to upset the equanimity of a wooden Indian. Some of the selected samples carried values as high as twenty-five dollars in gold—not to the ton; oh, no; nothing like that: to the pound!

Barrett had the situation firmly by the neck when we left the sampling works.

"I have a sort of provisional arrangement with Mr. Conaughy, our president, and I can quit the bank without notice and explain afterward," he said. "I'm going right back with you to-night. Three of us will be none too many to handle this thing when the news gets out."

We went to his room first and loaded up with blankets, working clothes, a shot-gun and a generous supply of fixed ammunition. On the long tramp up the mountain, Barrett, who was older in the district than either Gifford or myself, told me what we might expect.

"You needn't think we are going to be allowed to dig that hole without the toughest kind of a fight, Jimmie," he predicted. "The minute the news gets loose, we shall be swamped with 'interferences,' relocations, law-suits, process servers and constables, to say nothing of the strong-hands and claim-jumpers. The Lawrenceburg people will doubtless claim that mistakes were made in their surveys, as perhaps there were. They've got a first-class fighting man for a superintendent; as I happen to know: a man who won't stick at anything to carry his end."

"But it's our strike," I urged.

"It's ours if we can hold it," was the sober reply. "Our best play is to keep the thing absolutely dark until we can dig out enough money to give us a fighting fund. That's where we're lame. Our bit of capital won't go anywhere when they drag us into the courts."

Our shortest way to the new claim led us in sight of the Lawrenceburg workings. They were running night shifts, and though it was now well along in the small hours, the plant was in full swing. Like most of the mines within trolley distance of the towns, it had no miners' village, the men going back and forth at the shift-changing hours. But the superintendent lived at the plant, and there were a few bunk houses and one other detached cottage.

There was a light in one room of this cottage as we passed, and Barrett called my attention to it.

"There's a man in that shack that I hope we may be able to get, if we ever grow big enough to hire him," he said. Then he added, quite irrelevantly: "He has a daughter, and I'm telling you right now, Jimmie, she's a peach."

I let the reference to the daughter go by default.

"Who is this gentleman that we ought to be able to hire?" I asked.

"He is the best, or at least one of the best, metallurgical chemists in the district, and it goes without saying that an honest assayer counts for everything in this mining game. Without one, the smelters will skin you alive."

I laughed. "I didn't ask what he was; I asked who he was—or is."

"He is a school-teacher, or college professor, and I'm told he has taught in High Schools and freshwater colleges all over the Middle West," said Barrett, as we topped the hill to our side of the mountain shoulder. And then I got my bucketing of cold water. "His name is Phineas Everton, and his daughter's name is Mary—though everybody calls her Polly."



XIII

For the Sinews of War

Gifford, sitting in the darkness with his back to the windlass and the big old-fashioned holster revolver across his knees, held us up promptly and peremptorily when we came over the spur. Seeing Barrett with me, he knew pretty well what the results of the assay were before we told him. At the edge of the shallow pit we held a council of war—the first of many. Gifford fully agreed with Barrett that the most profound secrecy was the first requisite. Though he was new to the business of gold-mining—as new as either the bank teller or myself—he could prefigure pretty accurately what was before us.

"Here's where we'll have to ride and tie on the snoozing act," was his drawling comment. "We mustn't leave her alone for a single minute, after this; and it's got to be one of us, at that. We couldn't afford to hire a watchman if we had a million dollars."

Under the ride-and-tie proposal I volunteered to stand watch for the remainder of the night; and after the other two had turned in I took Gifford's place, with the windlass for a back rest and Barrett's shot-gun for a weapon.

I was not sorry to have a little time to think; to try in some fashion to readjust the point of view so suddenly snatched from its anchorings in the commonplace and shot high into the empyrean. It was the night of the ninth of June. Three months earlier, to a day, I had been an outcast; a miserable tramp roaming the streets of a great city; broken in mind, body and heart; bitter, discouraged, and so nearly ready to fall in with Kellow's criminal suggestion as actually to let him give me the money which, if I had kept it or spent it as he directed, would have committed me irretrievably to a life of crime.

Looking back upon it from the vantage point gained by a few hours' toil on a bare Colorado mountain-side, that ninth of March seemed to have withdrawn into a fathomless past. I was no longer a hunted vagabond; I was breathing the free clean air of a new environment, and in the narrow pit beside me a fortune was waiting to be dug out; a fortune for the ex-convict no less than for the two who had never by hint or innuendo sought to inquire into their partner's past. It was too good to be true; and yet it was true, contingent, as I saw it, only upon our fortitude, discretion and manful courage.

Nevertheless, there was still one small disturbing note in the music of the spheres. Barrett's mention of Phineas Everton as one of our nearest neighbors disquieted me vaguely. It was quite in vain that I reasoned that in all human probability Everton would fail to identify the bearded man of twenty-eight with the schoolboy he had known ten or twelve years earlier. He had taught only one year in the Glendale High School, and I was not in any of his classes. Polly had known me much better. She had been in one of the grammar grades, and was just at an age to make a big-brother confidant of her teacher's brother—my sister being at that time a teacher in the grammar school.

Upon this I fell to wondering curiously how Polly, a plain-faced, eager-eyed little girl in short dresses, could have grown into anything meriting Barrett's enthusiastic description of her as a "peach." Also, I wondered how her bookish, studious father had ever contrived to break with the scholastic traditions sufficiently to become an assayer for a Western mine. But I might have saved myself this latter speculation. Cripple Creek, like other great mining-camps, served as a melting-pot for many strange and diverse elements.

At the earliest graying of dawn I roused my partners and took my turn with the blankets, too tired and drowsy to stay awake while Gifford cooked breakfast. I was sound asleep long before they fired the two holes Gifford and I had drilled the previous afternoon, and they let me alone until the noonday meal was ready on the rough plank table. Over the coffee and canned things Barrett brought our bonanza story up to date.

"It's no joke, Jimmie," he said soberly. "We've got the world by the ears, if we can only manage to hold on and go on digging. The lead has widened to over six inches, and we have two more sacks of the stuff picked out and ready to take to town."

"Any visitors?" I asked.

"Not a soul, as yet. But we'll have them soon enough; there's no doubt about that. If our guess is right—that the Lawrenceburg people meant to cover this hillside in their later locations—we'll hear from Bart Blackwell before we are many hours older."

"Blackwell is the superintendent you spoke of when we were coming up last night?"

"The same. I don't know why he hasn't been here before this time. They must surely hear the blasting."

We had our visitor that afternoon, while Barrett and I were working in the hole and Gifford was sleeping. Luckily for us, Barrett never for a single moment lost sight of the need for secrecy. We were drilling when Blackwell's shadow fell across the mouth of the pit, but we had taken the precaution to cover the gold-bearing vein with spalls and chippings of the porphyry, and to see to it that none of the gold-bearing material showed in the small dump at the pit mouth.

Blackwell was a short man but heavy-set, with a curly black beard and eyes that were curiously heavy-lidded. As he leaned over the windlass and looked down upon us he reminded me of one of the fairy-tale ogres.

"Hello, Bob," he said, speaking to Barrett, whom he knew. "Quit the banking business, have you?"

"Taking a bit of a lay-off," Barrett returned easily. "We all have to get out and dig in the ground, sooner or later."

Blackwell laughed good-naturedly.

"You'll get enough of it up here before you've gone very far," he predicted. "Just the same, you might have come by the office and asked permission before you began to work off your digging fit on Lawrenceburg property."

"We're not on Lawrenceburg," said Barrett cheerfully.

"Oh, yes, you are," was the equally cheerful rejoinder. "Our ground runs pretty well up to the head of the gulch. I'm not trying to run you off, you know. If you feel like digging a well, it's all right: it amuses you, and it doesn't hurt us any."

Barrett pulled himself up and sat on the edge of the hole.

"Let's get this thing straight, Blackwell," he argued. "You've got three claims in this gulch, but we are not on any one of them. Look at your maps when you go back to the office."

"I know the maps well enough. We cover everything up to the head of the gulch, just as I say, joining with the original Lawrenceburg locations on the other side of the spur." Then, suddenly: "Who's your friend?"

Barrett introduced me briefly as Jim Bertrand, late of the Colorado Midland construction force. Blackwell nodded and looked toward the shack.

"Any more of you?" he asked.

"One more; a fellow named Gifford. He's asleep just now."

Blackwell straightened up.

"It's all right, as I say, Bob. If you three tenderfoots want to come up here and play at digging a hole, it's no skin off of us. When you get tired we'll buy the lumber in your shack and what dynamite you happen to have left, just to save your hauling it away."

"Thanks," said Barrett; "we'll remember that. We haven't much money now, but we'll probably have more—or less—when we quit."

"Less it is," chuckled the square-shouldered boss of the Lawrenceburg. "Go to it and work off your little mining fever. But if you should happen to find anything—which you won't, up here—just remember that I've given you legal notice, with your partner here as a witness, that you're on Lawrenceburg ground."

Barrett's grin was a good match for Blackwell's chuckle.

"We're going to sink fifty feet; that's about as far as our present capital will carry us. As to the ownership of the ground, we needn't quarrel about that at this stage of the game. You've given us notice; and you've also given us permission to amuse ourselves if we want to. We'll call it a stand-off."

After the superintendent had gone I ventured to point out to my drill-mate that the matter of ownership had been left rather indefinite, after all.

"Diplomacy, Jimmie," was the quick reply. "The one thing we can't stand for is to be tied up in litigation before we have contrived to dig a few of the sinews of war out of this hole. Blackwell's little pop-call warns us to use about a thousand times as much care and caution as we have been using. I saw him scraping the dump around with his foot as he talked. He is one of the shrewdest miners in Colorado, and if he had got his sleepy eye on a piece of the vein matter as big as a marble, it would have been all over but the shouting. You can see where all this is pointing?"

"It means that we've got to make this hole look like a barren hole, and keep it looking that way—if we have to handle every piece of rock that comes out of it in our fingers," I said.

"Just that," Barrett asserted, and then we went on with the drilling.

We arranged our routine that evening over a supper of Gifford's preparing. We planned to take out each day as much ore as the watch on duty could dig, to sort it carefully, sacking the best of it and hiding the remainder under the shack. Then, during the night, one of us would carry what he could of the sacked ore down the mountain to the sampling works to be assayed and sold on the spot.

The sheer labor involved in this method of procedure was something appalling, but we could devise no alternative. To have a wagon haul the ore to town would, we were all agreed, be instantly fatal to secrecy; and at whatever cost we must have more money before we could dare face a legal fight with the Lawrenceburg people. Looking back upon it now, our plan seems almost childish; but the enthusiasm born of the miraculous discovery was accountable for the cheerful readiness with which we adopted it.

Gifford took the first turn at the ore-carrying while Barrett and I shared the night watch, two hours at a time for each of us. The carpenter came back just before daybreak, haggard and hollow-eyed, but profanely triumphant. There had been no questions asked at the sampling works, and his back-load of ore had been purchased on the strength of the assay—doubtless with a good, round profit to the buyers. He had limited his carry to seventy-five pounds, and he brought back the sampling company's check for $1355 as the result of the day's work!

Speaking for myself, I can say truly that I lived in the heart of a dream for the next few days—the dream of a galley-slave. We worked like dogs. Added to the drilling and shooting and digging, there was the all-night job of ore-carrying—at which we took turn and turn about—for one of us. Though I am not, and never have been, save in the parole starvation time, what one would call a weakling, my first trip to town with eighty-five pounds of ore on my back nearly killed me. A thousand times, it seemed to me, I had to stop and rest; and when I got down it was always an open question whether or not I could ever get up again with the back load in position.

As it came about, in the regular routine, mine was the third turn at the carrying, and by this time the superintendent of the sampling works was beginning to have his curiosity aroused.

"So there are three of you, are there?" he commented, when he had examined and recognized the sacked samples. "Any more?"

I shook my head. I was too nearly exhausted to talk.

"At first I thought you fellows were raiding somebody," he went on. "There is a mine not a thousand miles from where you're sitting that puts out exactly this same kind of ore, only it's not anywhere near as rich as these picked samples of yours."

"What made you change your mind?" I queried, willing to see how far he would go. "How do you know we are not raiding somebody's ore shed?"

"Because I know Bob Barrett," was the crisp reply. Then: "Why are you boys making this night play? Why don't you come out in the open like other folks—honest folks, I mean?"

"There are reasons," I asserted.

"Afraid somebody will catch on and swamp you with a rush of claim stakers?"

"Call it that, if you like."

"You're plumb foolish, and I told Bob Barrett so last night. You're carrying this stuff miles; I know by the way you come in here with your tongues hanging out. It's like trying to dip the ocean dry with a pint cup. One good wagon-load of your ore—if you've got that much—would count for more than you three could lug in a month of Sundays."

I knew this as well as he did, but I was not there to argue.

"I guess we'll have to handle it our own way," I answered evasively; and while he was sending my sack out to the testing room I fell sound asleep.

At the end of a week, after we had made two trips apiece, we had nearly $7,000 in bank. Figured as a return for our labor, killing as that was, it was magnificent. But as a war chest it was merely a drop in the bucket. Given plenty of time, we might have won out eventually by the sacked-sample route; but we knew we were not going to be given time. Blackwell had been up twice; and the second time, Gifford, who was acting as hammerman, had to sit in the bottom of the shaft, pretending to load the half-drilled hole. Otherwise, the heavy-lidded eyes, peering down over the barrel of the windlass would assuredly have seen the steadily widening ore body.

On the sixth day Everton came across the spur. I think I should have known him anywhere, but he did not recognize me, though I stood and talked with him at the shaft mouth. His visit, as I took it, was not a spying one. On the contrary it appeared to be merely neighborly. After beating about the bush for a little time, he came down to particulars. We must surely know, he said, that we were on Lawrenceburg ground, and it was too bad we were throwing away our hard work. To this he added a vague warning. Blackwell had been taking our amateur effort as a good joke on Barrett, whom he had known only as a bank clerk. But the edge of the joke was wearing off, and the superintendent, who, as it seemed, had been watching us more closely than we had supposed, was beginning to wonder why we kept at it so faithfully; and why our camp was always guarded at night.

The following day was Sunday, and Everton came again, this time accompanied by his daughter. Gifford was windlass winder at the moment, and he let himself down into the shaft, swearing, when he saw them coming over the shoulder of the spur.

I left our carpenter-man busily covering up the lode while I scrambled out to meet and divert the visitors. My first sight of Mary Everton, grown, made me gasp. There had been no promise of her womanly winsomeness and pulse-quickening beauty in the plain-faced little girl with large brown eyes—the little girl who used to thrust her hand into mine on the way home from school and tell me about the unforgivable meanness of the boy who "cribbed" for his examinations.

Everton introduced me as "Mr. Bertrand," and for a flitting instant I saw something at the back of the brown eyes that made cold chills run up and down my spine. And her first words increased rather than diminished the burden of sudden misgiving.

"I knew a Bertrand once," she said, shaking hands frankly after the manner of the West. "It was when I was a little girl in school. Only Bertrand was his Christian name."

Without knowing that he was doing it, her father came to my rescue. "We haven't any near neighbors, Mr. Bertrand, and Polly wanted to see your mine," he said. And then: "Do you realize that it is Sunday?"

I led the glorified Polly Everton of my school days to the mouth of the shallow shaft. "Our 'mine,' as your father is polite enough to call it, isn't very extensive, as yet," I pointed out. "You can see it at a glance."

She took my word for it and gave the windlass-straddled pit only a glance. Barrett had had his nap out and was showing himself at the door of the shack. My companion nodded brightly at him and he joined us at once. "We are quite old friends, Mr. Barrett and I," she hastened to say, when I would have introduced him; and this left me free to attach myself to her father.

Phineas Everton had changed very little with the passing years. I remembered him as a sort of cut-and-dried school-man, bookworm and scientist, and, as I afterward learned, he was still all three of these. Partly because I was telling myself that it was safer for me to keep my distance from the girl who remembered the boy Bertrand, and partly because I wished to draw the assayer away from our dump, I took Everton over to the shack and we sat together on the door-step. For some little time I couldn't make out what he was driving at in his talk, but finally it came out, by inference, at least. Somebody—Blackwell, perhaps—had started the story that we were planning a raid on the Lawrenceburg.

"How could that be?" I asked, remembering that, only the day before, Everton had asserted that we were already trespassers on Lawrenceburg property.

"It is an old trick," he commented, rather sorrowfully, I fancied. "In all the older locations there have been bits of ground missed in the criss-crossing of the claims. Some one of you three has been sharp enough to find one of those bits just here."

"Well; supposing we have—what then?" I asked.

He was silent for a half-minute or so. Barrett had led Mary Everton to the shoulder of the spur where the view of the distant town was unobstructed, and Gifford was still in the shaft.

"I don't know you, Mr. Bertrand," my seatmate began slowly, "and I shouldn't venture to set up any standard of right and wrong in your behalf. But that young man out yonder with my daughter: I've known him a long time, and I knew his people. It is a thousand pities to drag him into your undertaking."

"There has been no especial 'dragging' that I am aware of; and I don't know why you should be sorry for Barrett," I returned rather tartly.

"I am sorry because Robert Barrett has hitherto lived an upright and honest life. He had excellent prospects in the bank, and it seems a great pity that he has seen fit to throw them away."

By this time I was entirely at sea. "You will have to make it plainer—much plainer," I told him.

"I have been hoping you wouldn't force me to call it by its ugly name," was the sober rejoinder. "It is blackmail, Mr. Bertrand; criminal blackmail, as I think you must know."

"That is a pretty serious charge for you to make, isn't it?"

"Not more serious than the occasion warrants. You three have discovered this little scrap of unclaimed ground in the middle of the Lawrenceburg property. You are digging; and presently, when you are down far enough so that your operations cannot be observed from the shaft mouth, you will announce that you have struck the Lawrenceburg ore body. In that event, as you have doubtless foreseen, our company will have no recourse but to buy you off at your own figure."

"Well?" I challenged.

"Your announcement, when you make it, will be a lie," was the cold-voiced reply. "You are 'salting' the crevices as you go down—and with Lawrenceburg ore."

I sighed my relief. His guess was so far from the truth that I was more than willing to help it along. If the Lawrenceburg people could only be persuaded that our imaginary coup was to be postponed until the bottom of our shaft should be out of sight from the surface, we were measurably safe.

"We may ask you to prove your charge when the proper time comes, Mr. Everton," I suggested.

He took a small fragment of bluish-gray ore from his pocket and showed it to me, saying, quietly, "I can prove it now; this is Lawrenceburg ore: I handle and test it every day, and I am perfectly familiar with it. I picked this piece up a few minutes ago on your dump."

It is always the impact of the unexpected that sends a man scurrying into the armory of his past in search of the readiest weapon for the emergency. Recall, once again, if you will, the three years of association with criminals, and the fact that I was at that moment under the ban of the law as an escaped convict. I could think of nothing save the gaining of time, precious time, at whatever cost.

I shall always be thankful that the temptation did not reach the length of making me offer to buy Everton's silence. That, indeed, would have been suicidal. Yet the prompting suggestion came to me, in company with others still more ruthless. I was telling myself that the situation was sufficiently alarming to warrant almost any expedient. Though he was not yet aware of it, Everton had discovered our real secret; he knew we had ore, which—as yet—he thought we were stealing from the Lawrenceburg bins. If he should take one additional step. . . .

The thought-loom shuttled pretty rapidly for a few short-lived seconds. If Everton should show the bit of ore to Blackwell the superintendent might believe the charge that we were stealing the Lawrenceburg values for the "salting" purpose; in which case he would doubtless swear out warrants for us. Or he might see farther than Everton had seen and jump to the conclusion that we had actually made a strike of our own in the shallow pit. Either way there was sharp trouble ahead.

"You have us down pretty fine, haven't you?" I said, at the end of the reflective pause. "May I ask what use you are going to make of your discovery?"

"I purpose giving you three young men a chance to talk it over seriously among yourselves before I take any further steps. I suppose I should have gone direct to Barrett. I know him, and I know there is plenty of good in him to appeal to. But candidly, Mr. Bertrand, I didn't have the heart to—well, to let him know that I knew."

A bitter thought swept across me like a hot wind from the desert. Was there never to be any let-up? Were people always going to take it for granted that I was the criminal? I have known physical hunger and hunger intellectual, but they were as nothing compared with the moral famine that gripped me just then. I would have pawned my soul for a bare modicum of the commonplace, every-day respectability which is able to look the world squarely in the face without fear or favor—without asking any odds of it.

Everton was evidently waiting for his reply, and I gave it to him.

"Criminality is largely relative—like everything else in the world, don't you think?" I said, letting him feel the raw edge of the bitterness that was rasping at me. "In coming to me, as you have, you, yourself, are compounding a felony."

He shrugged his thin shoulders and looked away at the two on the bluff's edge.

"Properly speaking, Mr. Bertrand, I am only an interested onlooker; and I am interested chiefly on Barrett's account. What I may feel it my duty to do if you three remain obdurate will be purely without reference to your rather sophistical definition of criminality. In any event, Blackwell is the man you will have to reckon with. As I say, I am concerned only so far as the outcome may involve Robert Barrett."

"I'll tell the others what you have said," I agreed; and with this the matter rested.



XIV

Paper Walls

We held our second war council shortly after Phineas Everton and his daughter had disappeared over the shoulder of the spur on their way back to the Lawrenceburg. I gave my two partners the gist of the conversation with the assayer, briefly and without comment. Gifford oozed profanity; but Barrett laughed and said:

"Every little new thing we run up against merely urges us to let out one more notch in the speed of the hurry hoist. Everton's suspicion is an entirely natural one, and for my part, I only hope he and Blackwell will hang on to it. If they should, there is an even chance that they will watch their ore sheds a little closer and leave it to us to make the first move in the imagined blackmailing scheme—all of which will give us more time."

"That's all right; but we can't bet on the 'hang on,'" was Gifford's demurrer. "They may think they've got the straight of it now, but there's no law against their changing their minds mighty suddenly. Suppose Everton shows up his bit of a sample, and they both take a second whirl at the thing and pull down a guess that it isn't stolen Lawrenceburg ore, after all? We've got to improve upon this pick-a-back ore shipment of ours, some way, and do it mighty quick."

This was the biting fact; we all accepted it as our most pressing need and fell to discussing ways and means. There was already a full wagon-load of the sacked ore hidden under the sleeping-shack, and at the rate the lode was widening we could confidently figure on getting out as much more every second day, or oftener. There was a good wagon road to town from the Lawrenceburg plant, but of course we dared not use it so long as we were making any attempt to maintain secrecy. The alternative was a long haul down our own gulch, around the end of the spur, and across the slope of the mountain-side below. Even this, the only other practicable route, would be in plain sight from the Lawrenceburg workings, once the team should pass out upon the bare lower hillside.

Moreover, we were obliged to consider the risk involved in taking at least one other man—the driver of the team—into our confidence. Since the hauling would have to be done in the night, an honest man would suspect crookedness, and the other kind would blackmail us to a finish. Gifford spoke of this, saying that it was a choice between the devil and the deep blue sea.

None the less, we were all agreed that the wagon-hiring hazard would have to be taken, and at the close of the talk Barrett went to town to make the arrangement. It was after dark when he returned. His mission had been miraculously successful: he had not only found a trustworthy teamster who was willing, for a good, round sum, to risk his horses on the mountain at night; he had also interviewed the superintendent of the sampling works and concluded a deal by the terms of which the company—as a personal favor to Barrett—agreed to treat a limited quantity of our highest-grade ore in wagon-load lots, making cash settlements therefor.

It lacked only an hour of midnight when the team, making a wide detour to avoid being heard from the Lawrenceburg, reached our location on the slope of the spur. We all helped with the loading; and when all was ready, Gifford, whose turn it was to go to town, borrowed Barrett's shot-gun and climbed to a seat beside the driver.

With every precaution taken—a dragging pine-tree coupled on behind the load to serve instead of the squealing brakes, and many injunctions to the driver to take it easy and to do his swearing internally—the outfit made more noise than a threshing-machine bumping down the gulch. We kept pace with it, Barrett and I, following along the crest of the spur with an apprehensive eye on the Lawrenceburg. But there was no unusual stir at the big plant on the other side of the ridge; merely the never-ceasing clank and grind of the hoist and the pouring thunder of the ore as the skip dumped its load into the bins.

Having nothing to detain him in town, Gifford made a quick trip and was with us again a little after four o'clock in the morning. At the crack of dawn Barrett and I were in the shaft under a new division of time. Now that we had the team hauling for us, we chopped up the shifts so that there would be two of us in the hole continuously, day and night.

Again I have the memory of a week of grinding toil, broken—for me, at least—only by the nights when it came my turn to ride to town on the load of ore. On both occasions I recall that I went fast asleep on the high seat before the wagon had gone twenty rods down the gulch; slept sitting bolt upright, with the shot-gun across my knees, and waking only when the driver was gee-ing into the yard of the sampling works in town; lapses that I may confess here, though I was ashamed to confess them to my two partners.

During this second week we heard nothing from Blackwell or from any of the Lawrenceburg contingent. But several strangers had drifted along, stopping to peer down our shaft and to ask multitudinous questions. Knowing well enough that we could not keep up the killing toil indefinitely, and that the discovery crisis was only postponed from day to day, we yet took heart of grace. The purchase money for the ore was pouring in a steady stream into Barrett's bank to our credit; and with the accounting for the third wagon-load we had upward of $80,000 in the fighting fund.

Gifford went in as wagon guard on the Monday night load, and getting an early start from the mountain, he had a little time to spend on the streets in town. On his return he brought news; the news we had all been expecting and waiting for.

"The big trouble's on the way," he reported. "Bennett Avenue's all lit up with the news that there's been a new strike on Bull Mountain. I heard about it mighty near everywhere I went. Up to date nobody seems to know just where it is, or who has made it; but they've got hold of the main guy, all right. One fellow told me he had it straight from the sampling works. Some cuss on the inside, I reckon, who doesn't know enough to keep his blame' mouth shut, has gone and leaked."

"I'd like mighty well to see another eighty thousand in the bank before we have to shut our eyes and begin handing it out to the lawyers," said Barrett. "Besides, when we get ready to build a shaft-house and put in machinery, we'll have to have more ground room. After the news gets out, we'll just about have to blanket what land we buy with twenty-dollar gold-pieces."

"With the Lawrenceburg hemming us in the way it does, we won't be able to buy elbow room at any kind of a price, will we?" asked Gifford, who had not gone into the topographies as minutely as Barrett and I had.

"There are the three corners of the original triangle which we weren't able to cover in our claim," Barrett explained. "And down yonder on that gulch flat that we are using for a wagon road there is a claim called the 'Mary Mattock' which was taken up and worked and dropped a year or so ago by a Nebraska syndicate. When I was in town last week I gave Benedict, of Benedict & Myers, the job of running down the owners, with the idea that we might possibly wish to buy the ground a little later on.

"Good work!" Gifford applauded. "I wouldn't have thought of anything as foxy as that."

"I told Benedict we'd buy the Mary Mattock if we could get it at a reasonable figure, or lease it if we couldn't buy it," Barrett went on. "It is probably worthless to its present owners as it stands; its three shafts are full of water, and I'm told the Nebraskans spent fifty thousand dollars trying to pump them. But the minute the 'Little Clean-Up' gets into the newspapers, the Mary Mattock, being next door to us, will figure in the market as a bonanza, whether it is or isn't."

Gifford cut himself a chew of tobacco from his pocket-plug.

"I wish to gracious we had that other eighty thousand you're honing for, right now," he protested. "This tin-basin trot's sure getting on my nerves, as the fella said. We'd ought to have the shaft-house and machinery set up and going, this minute, and a good, husky bunch of men at work in that hole, digging out dollars where we're scratching for pennies."

"I don't want to be the shy man of this outfit," Barrett put it quickly. "We can have the machinery if you fellows think we dare use the money to buy it."

Gifford and I both said No, deferring to Barrett's better judgment. And since this talk was getting us nowhere and was wasting time which was worth ten dollars a minute, we broke it off and went to work.

It was in the latter part of this third week, on a night when my turn at the wagon guarding had come in regular course, that I was made to understand that no leaf in the book of a man's life can be so firmly pasted down that a mere chance thumbing of the pages by an alien hand may not flip it back again.

By imperceptible inchings we had been starting the wagon earlier and earlier on each successive trip; and on the evening in question it was no later than ten o'clock when I turned the consignment of ore over to the foreman at the reduction works. Ordinarily, I should have taken the road back to the hills at once, intent only upon getting to camp and between the blankets as speedily as possible. But on this night a spirit of restlessness got hold of me, and, leaving Barrett's shotgun in the sampling works office, I strolled up-town.

Inasmuch as a three-months' residence in a mining-camp is the full equivalent of as many years spent in a region where introductions precede acquaintance, I was practically certain to meet somebody I knew. The somebody in this instance proved to be one Patrick Carmody, formerly a hard-rock boss on the Midland branch construction, and now the working superintendent of a company which was driving a huge drainage tunnel under a group of the big mines of the district.

The meeting-place was the lobby of the hotel, and at the Irishman's invitation I sat with him to smoke a comradely cigar. Carmody was not pointedly inquisitive as to my doings; was content to be told that I had been "prospecting around." Beyond that he was good-naturedly willing to talk of the stupendous undertaking over which he was presiding, expatiating enthusiastically upon air-drill performance, porphyry shooting, the merits of various kinds of high explosives, deep-mine ventilation, and the like.

While he talked, I smoked on, luxuriating like a cat before a fire in the comfortable lounging-chair, the cheerful surroundings, the stir and bustle of the human ebb and flow, and the first half-hour of real idleness I had enjoyed in many days.

It was after Carmody had been dragged away by some fellow hard-rock enthusiast that I had my paralyzing shock. Sitting in a chair less than a dozen feet distant, smoking quietly and reading a newspaper, was a man whose face would have been familiar if I had seen it in the golden streets of the New Jerusalem or in the deepest fire-chamber of the other place; a face with boring black eyes, and with a cruel mouth partly hidden by freshly crimped black mustaches: the face, namely, of my sometime prison-mate, Kellow.

My shocked recognition of this man who tied me to my past annihilated time and distance as if they had never been. In a flash I was back again in a great stone building in the home State, working over the prison books and glancing up now and then to the cracked mirror on the opposite wall of the prison office which showed me the haggard features and cropped hair of the convict Weyburn.

The memory shutter flicked, and I saw myself walking out through the prison gates with the State's cheap suit of clothes on my back and the State's five dollars in my pocket, a paroled man. Another click, and I had dragged through the six months of degradation and misery, and saw myself sitting opposite Kellow in the back room of a slum saloon in a great city, shivering with the cold, wretched and hungry. Once again I saw his sneer and heard him say, "It's all the same to you now, whether you cracked the bank or didn't. You may think you can live the prison smell down, but you can't; it'll stick to you like your skin. Wherever you go, you'll be a marked man."

It is a well-worn saying that life is full of paper walls. A look, a turn of the head, the recognition which would follow, and once more I should be facing a fate worse than death. Kellow knew that I had broken my parole. He would trade upon the knowledge, and if he could not use me he would betray me. I knew the man.

Five minutes earlier I had been facing the world a free man; free to go and come as I pleased, free to sit and smoke with a friend in the most public place in the camp. But now I slid from my chair with my hat pulled over my eyes and crept to the door, watching Kellow every step of the way, ready to bolt and run, or to turn and fight to kill, at the slightest rustling of the upheld newspaper. Once safely outside in the cool, clean night air of the streets I despised myself with a loathing too bitter to be set in words. But the fact remained.

It was like the strugglings of a man striving to throw off the benumbing effects of an opium debauch—the effort to be at one again with the present. The effort was no more than half successful when I stepped into a late-closing hardware store and bought a weapon—a repeating rifle with its appropriate ammunition. Barrett had said something about the lack of weapons at the claim—we had only the shot-gun and Gifford's out-of-date revolver—and I made the purchase automatically in obedience to an underlying suggestion which was scarcely more than half conscious.

But once more in the street, and with the means in my hands, a sudden and fierce impulse prompted me to go back to the hotel lobby and kill the man who held my fate between his finger and thumb. Take it as a virtue or a confession of weakness, as you will, but it was only the thought of what I owed Barrett and Gifford that kept me from doing it.

So it was a potential murderer, at least in willing intention, who took the long trail back under the summer stars to the hills, with the rifle and Barrett's shot-gun—the latter picked up in passing the sampling works—nestling in the hollow of his arm. God or the devil could have given me no greater boon that night than the hap to meet Kellow on the lonesome climb. I am sure I should have shot him without the faintest stirring of irresolution. By the time I reached our gulch I was fuming over my foolishness in buying the rifle—a clumsy weapon that would everywhere advertise my purpose. What I needed, I told myself, was a pocket weapon, to be carried day and night; and the next time I should go to town the lack should be supplied.

For by now all scruples were dead and I was assuring myself grittingly that the entire Cripple Creek district was too narrow to hold the man who knew, and the man who was afraid.



XV

The Broken Wagon

The day following the Kellow incident being Sunday, the three of us snatched an hour or so in the early forenoon for a breathing space. Sitting around the plank table in the bunk shack we took account of stock, as a shopkeeper would say. It was apparent to all of us that the blazoning abroad of our secret could not now be long delayed. A new gold strike yielding ore worth anywhere from one to twenty-five dollars a pound was startling enough to make a stir even in the one and only Cripple Creek, and it seemed nothing short of a miracle that we had not already been traced and our location identified.

It was Barrett's gift to take the long look ahead. At his suggestion, Gifford, who was something of a rough-and-ready draftsman, sketched a plan for the necessary shaft-house and out-buildings, fitting the structures to our limited space. When the fight to retain possession should begin we meant to strike fast and hard; Barrett had already gone the length of bargaining, through a friend in town, for building material and machinery, which were to be rushed out to us in a hurry at the firing of the first gun in what we all knew would be a battle for existence.

During this Sunday morning talk I was little more than an abstracted listener. I could think of nothing but the raw hazard of the previous night and of the frightful moral abyss into which it had precipitated me. In addition there were ominous forebodings for the future. So long as Kellow remained in Cripple Creek, danger would lurk for me in every shadow. Since the calamity which was threatening me would also involve my partners, at least to the extent of handicapping them by the loss of a third of our fighting force, it seemed no less than a duty to warn them. But I doubt if I should have had the courage if Barrett had not opened the way.

"You're not saying much, Jimmie. Did the trip to town last night knock you out?" he asked.

It was my opportunity, and I mustered sufficient resolution to seize it.

"No; it didn't knock me out, but it showed me where I've been making a mistake. I never ought to have gone into this thing with you two fellows; but now that I am in, I ought to get out."

"What's that!" Gifford exploded; but Barrett merely caught my eye and said, very gently, "On your own account, or on ours, Jimmie?"

"On yours. There is no need of going into the particulars; it's a long story and a pretty dismal one; but when I tell you that last night I was on the point of killing a man in cold blood—that it's altogether probable that I shall yet have to kill him—you can see what I'm letting you in for if I stay with you."

Gifford leaned back against the shack wall and laughed. "Oh, if that's all," he said. But again it was Barrett who took the soberer view.

"You are one of us, Jimmie," he declared. "If you've got a blood quarrel with somebody, it's our quarrel, too: we're partners. Isn't that right, Gifford?"

"Right it is," nodded the carpenter.

"We are not partners to that extent," I objected. "If I should tell you all the circumstances, you might both agree with me that I may be obliged to kill this man; but on the other hand, you—or a jury—would call it first-degree murder; as it will be."

Barrett looked horrified, as he had a perfect right to.

"You couldn't do a thing like that!" he protested.

"Yesterday I should have been just as certain as you are that it was beyond the possibilities; but now, since last night, it's different. And that is why I say you ought to fire me. You can't afford to carry any handicaps; you need assets, not liabilities."

Gifford got up and went to sit on the doorstep, where he occupied himself in whittling thin shavings of tobacco from a bit of black plug and cramming them into his pipe. Barrett accepted this tacit implication that he was to speak for both.

"If you pull out, Jimmie, it will be because you want to; not because anything you have said cuts any figure with us. And whether you go or stay, there will be two of us here who will back you to the limit. That's about all there is to say, I guess; only, if I were you, I shouldn't be too sudden. Take a day to think it over. To-morrow morning, if you still think it's the wise thing to do—the only thing to do—we'll write you a check, Gifford and I, for your share in the bank account; and after we get going we'll make such a settlement with you for your third as will be fair and just all around."

This put an entirely new face upon the matter. I hadn't dreamed of such a thing as standing upon my rights in the partnership.

"Like the mischief, you will!" I retorted. "Do you think I'm that kind of a quitter?—that I'd take a single dollar out of the Little Clean-up's war chest? Why, man alive! my only object in getting out would be to relieve you two of a possible burden!"

Barrett's smile was altogether brotherly. "It's the only way you can escape us," he averred; and with that the dissolution proposal was suffered to go by default.

There were half a dozen stragglers to come lounging over the spur or up the gulch that Sunday afternoon, sharp-set, eager-eyed prospectors, every man of them, and each one, we guessed, searching meticulously for the mysterious bonanza about which everybody in town was gossiping. It was only the fact that the hills were fairly dotted with embryotic mines like our own—this and the other fact that our dump showed no signs of ore—that saved us.

Two of these prying visitors hung around for an hour or more, and one of the pair wanted to go down in the shaft, which was now deep enough to be quite safe from prying eyes at the surface. I was acting as windlass-man at the time, and I bluffed him, telling him that with two men working in the hole there wasn't room for a third—which was true enough. But beyond this fact there were by this time the best of reasons for keeping strangers out of our shaft. To name the biggest of them, our marvelous Golconda vein had widened steadily with the increasing depth until now we were sinking in solid ore.

It was Gifford's turn to guard the ore load that night, and after the team got away I persuaded Barrett to go to bed. He was showing the effects of the terrible toil worse than either the carpenter or myself, and I was afraid he might break when the fighting strain came. I had yet to learn what magnificent reserves there were in this clean-cut, high-strung young fellow who, when we began, looked as if he had never done a day's real labor in his life.

Since we had never yet left the shaft unguarded for a single hour of the day or night, I took my place at the pit mouth as soon as Barrett's candle went out. It was a fine night, warm for the altitude and brightly starlit, though there was no moon. In the stillness the subdued clamor of the Lawrenceburg's hoists floated up over the spur shoulder; and by listening intently I fancied I could hear the distant rumble of our ore wagon making its way down the mountain.

In the isolation and loneliness of the night watch it was inevitable that my thoughts should hark back to the near-meeting with Kellow, and to the moral lapse which it had provoked. Doubtless every man rediscovers himself many times in the course of a lifetime. In prison I had been sustained by a vindictive determination to win out and square accounts with Abel Geddis and Abner Withers. After my release another motive had displaced the vengeful prompting: the losing fight for reinstatement in the good opinion of the world seemed to be the only thing worth living for.

But now I was finding that there was a well-spring of action deeper than either of these, and the name of it was a degrading fear of consequences—of punishment. With a most hearty loathing for the lower depths of baseness uncovered by craven fear, one may be none the less a helpless victim of a certain ruthless and malign ferocity to which it is likely to give birth. Sitting with my back propped against the windlass and the newly purchased rifle across my knees, I found that cowardice, like other base passions, may suddenly develop an infection. With nerves twittering and muscles tensely set, I was ready to become a homicidal maniac at the snapping of a twig or the rolling of a pebble down the hillside.

In such crises the twig is predestined to snap, or the pebble to roll. Some slight movement on my part set a little cataract of broken stone tumbling into the shaft. Before I could recover from the prickling shock of alarm, I heard footsteps and a shadowy figure appeared in the path leading over the spur from the Lawrenceburg. Automatically the rifle flew to my shoulder, and a crooking forefinger was actually pressing the trigger when reason returned and I saw that the approaching intruder was a woman.

I was deeply grateful that it was too dark for Mary Everton to see with what teeth-chatterings and reactionary tremblings I was letting down the hammer of the rifle when she came up. For that matter, I think she did not see me at all until I laid the gun aside and stood up to speak to her. She had stopped as if irresolute; was evidently disconcerted at finding the claim shack dark and apparently deserted.

"Oh!" she gasped, with a little backward start, as I rose from the empty dynamite box upon which I had been sitting. Then she recognized me and explained. "I—I thought you would be working—you have been working nights, haven't you?—and I came over to—to speak to Mr. Barrett."

Under other conditions I might have been conventionally critical. My traditions were still somewhat hidebound. In Glendale a young woman would scarcely go alone at night in search of a man, even though the man might be her lover.

"Barrett has gone to bed: I'll call him," I said, limiting the rejoinder to the bare necessities.

"No; please don't do that," she interposed. "I am sure he must be needing his rest. I can come again—at some other time."

I was beginning to get a little better hold upon my nerves by this time and I laughed.

"Bob is needing the rest, all right, but he will murder me when he finds out that you've been here and I didn't call him. If you want to save my life, you'd better reconsider."

"No; don't call him," she insisted. "It isn't at all necessary, and—and perhaps you can tell me what I want to know—what I ought to know before I——" the sentence trailed off into nothing and she began again rather breathlessly: "Mr. Bertrand, can you—can you satisfy me in any way that you and your two friends have a legal right to this claim you are working? It's a perfect—impertinence in me, to ask, I know, but——"

"It is a fair question," I hastened to assure her; "one that any one might ask. With the proper means at hand—maps and records—I could very easily answer it."

"But—but there may have been mistakes made," she suggested.

"Doubtless there were; but we haven't made them. The Lawrenceburg Company owns the ground on two sides of us, and for some considerable distance beyond us toward the head of the gulch; but I can assure you that our title to the Little Clean-Up is perfectly good and legal in every way."

"It is going to be disputed," she broke in hurriedly. "Mr. Blackwell has talked about it—before me, just as if I didn't count. Telegrams have been passing back and forth, and the Lawrenceburg owners in the East have given Mr. Blackwell full authority to take such steps as he may think best. I—that is, Daddy and I—have known Mr. Barrett for a long time, and I couldn't let this thing happen without giving him just a little warning. Some kind of legal proceedings have already been begun, and you are to be driven off—to-morrow."

"Oh, I guess not; not so suddenly as all that," I ventured to say. There were many questions to come crowding in, but I could scarcely expect the assayer's daughter to answer them. Her father had plainly declared his belief that we were stealing Lawrenceburg ore and planning a blackmailing scheme: had he told Blackwell? The query practically answered itself. If Blackwell had been told that we were salting our claim with ore stolen from the Lawrenceburg sheds, the "legal proceedings" would have been a simple arrest-warrant and a search for stolen property. Had Everton told his daughter? This was blankly incredible. If he had told her that we were thieves, she would never have gone so far aside from her childhood hatred of duplicity and wrong-doing as to come and warn us.

"I was afraid you might not believe me," she said, with a little catch in her voice; and then: "I can't blame you; after what you have suf—after all that has happened."

If I hadn't been completely lost in admiration for her keen sense of justice, and more or less bewildered by her beauty and her nearness, I might have caught the significance of what she was trying to say. But I didn't.

"No; I didn't mean that," I denied warmly. "I do believe every word you have said. No one who knows you could disbelieve you for a moment."

"But you don't know me," she put in quickly.

I saw how near I had come to self-betrayal and tried to fend my little life-raft off the rocks.

"You will say that we have met only once before to-night, and then only casually. Will you permit a comparative stranger to say that that was enough? Your soul looks out through your eyes, Miss Everton, and it is an exceedingly honest soul. I know you must have strong reasons for coming to tell us what Blackwell is doing; and if I didn't quite understand the motive at first—with you your father's daughter, you know, and your father in the service of the——"