Hard Money

by Short, Luke;

  Maizie chuckled at the sight. Sharon, behind her, laughed too, but a little shyly, and Seay turned to look at her.

  “In another hour the top will blow off. I’ve put a dozen sober men to guard the tunnel. All the warehouses are locked.” He looked out at the mob now, which was breaking for the beer wagon. “They can’t do much more than raze the bunkhouses.”

  Sharon was a little disgusted with the sight, and she turned away. Tober found Ben and the carriage, and Seay showed them to it.

  “We’ll have a little party tonight,” Sharon told Seay. “Can you come? Just Dad and you and Maizie and Abe and myself.” She felt her throat a little tight as she finished, but Seay said only, “Glad to.”

  But if Sharon hoped for a quiet intimate celebration of their good fortune, she did not get it. No sooner had the five of them sat down to dinner than the maid informed Bonal that neither the office nor the parlor would hold all the callers. Bonal, who knew his West and its ways, left at once. Without him, the dinner was pointless. Afterward, Sharon surrendered the suite, retired to her room and locked her door. And till far beyond midnight all the friends and acquaintances and a good many strangers called on Bonal to congratulate him and to drink his whisky and to make this a long night of hilarious revelry. Bonal, tired and exhilarated by all the drinks he acknowledged, laughed in his beard and occasionally looked over at Seay, who was bearing this same treatment with all the tolerance he could muster. Bonal knew who deserved the credit. And he took a grim and boyish delight in watching Seay suffer for success.

  Chapter Thirteen

  The meeting was called for evening and was held in Charles Bonal’s suite office. Most of those invited arrived promptly, decorously, and as soon as their hats were taken were shown into the large room which now held two large tables set together and flanked by seats for some twenty persons. A buffet loaded with liquors and ice was set against the inside wall. Two hanging kerosene lamps threw light on the table, which was bare save for several ash trays and two boxes of cigars.

  As far as Bonal could tell, they were all here—except Janeece, who was represented, of course, by Ames Herkenhoff, the Pacific Shares manager. It was a strange meeting, and only Hugh Mathias’ easy affability saved it from becoming embarrassing.

  Seay was fortunate in that he did not know these men, had met less than half of them, and therefore did not hold Charles Bonal’s contempt for them. Hugh introduced him, and these mining men regarded him with considerable interest. For weeks now, Seay had been driving the tunnel through, day and night, and not once had he left the camp. It was as they had guessed; the drilling was mostly over. All that remained was the mucking and some drilling. The hard part had been the timbering; in some places it had been like trying to tunnel through quicksand. The whole of Tronah had followed the work after the premature announcement of the tunnel’s completion, but the luck had held. These mining men had followed it, too, ready to admit that Seay was near to finishing a tough job neatly.

  Bonal called them to their seats finally and indicated to Seay to sit on his right. Seay did, covertly regarding the faces of these men around him. When Bonal rose the group became quiet.

  Bonal carefully placed his cigar in the tray before him, and began to speak. “I won’t pretend this is to be a friendly meeting, gentlemen,” he announced. “You’ve fought me too hard for me to hold any affection for you.”

  There was an uneasy muttering at this introduction.

  “I’m privileged to make this announcement in spite of you, so to speak,” he went on. “The announcement is no secret to any of you. The Bonal Tunnel is now reality, or soon will be—definitely.”

  The going was a little easier now, and Bonal picked up his cigar.

  “Hugh Mathias, of the Consolidated, tells me that the water in his main shaft has disappeared. Apparently”—and his voice took on an astringent quality—“my predictions were not as wild as you gentlemen were led to suppose.”

  A square-faced man in his fifties, with the jowls of a bulldog and the twisted hands of a one-time workman, cleared his throat and leaned forward on the table. This was Ames Herkenhoff, of the Pacific Shares.

  “We’re all eating humble pie, Bonal,” he said shortly. “Let’s get down to the proposition.”

  “Good,” Bonal said, iron creeping into his voice. “At one time in the history of this tunnel I offered you shares in it and a reasonable proposition for ridding your mines of water. You laughed at it. You won’t laugh at this, but you’ll take it.” He paused, eyeing them with a lazy insolence. “My original proposition was that you pay me two dollars for every ton of your ore that was drained of water by the Bonal Tunnel. My proposition now is exactly double that.”

  “Nonsense,” Herkenhoff blurted out.

  “It’s no nonsense, Herkenhoff,” Bonal said easily. “You’ll take it and like it, and I’ll tell why. You’ll do it because you can’t afford not to. If you don’t, you’ll hit borrasca in another month, and you know it.”

  Herkenhoff said quietly, “That remains to be seen.”

  Bonal said in all good humor, “If the rest of you gentlemen persist in sticking to this same absurdity, I’ll wait another month until the Pacific Shares, which has a deep shaft, is flooded. Perhaps you’ll see the light then.”

  There was a low murmur of protest. “Go on,” someone said.

  “I intend to. We’ll give Herkenhoff the right to dissent.” He looked around the faces watching him. “Maybe we’ll get through this sooner if you ask me questions. There’s a lot of ground to cover.”

  Waldman, the Golgotha manager, spoke up, his voice reasonable. “How do you intend to drain all our shafts, Bonal? The water won’t seep out.”

  “I’ll cut lateral drifts to them from the tunnel,” Bonal answered. “You’ll start your own drifts toward me. When we meet, your water problem is finished.”

  “That’s expensive,” someone objected.

  “Who said it wasn’t?” Bonal countered quickly. He eyed them steadily, waiting for someone to contradict him, and when they did not, he went on. “Gentlemen, the pumps you are now using will lift water two thousand feet, no more. Most of you are close to two thousand—and the ore gives no sign of pinching out. Is that right?

  They said it was.

  “Then provided I can handle the water from your shafts, you can install these same pumps at a depth of two thousand feet—at present, the bottom of your shafts. That will let you take out ore, free of any danger from water, for another two thousand feet. Four thousand in all.” He looked around him, and Seay saw the corners of his eyes wrinkle a little, as if he were smiling. “That ought to give you enough profits, gentlemen, to finance a lateral drift to my tunnel.”

  The company held a noncommittal silence.

  “That,” Bonal reterated, “is not a matter of choice for you. It’s necessity, as I’ve said before.”

  He lighted his cigar now and puffed it to life. Seay could see the sardonic delight in Bonal’s face. He was enjoying this to the last unrecorded word.

  “And now,” Bonal said presently, “there’s the matter”—he paused and looked at his chair and said to no one in particular—“there’s no reason why I can’t sit down to this.” He did so and then took up the conversation again. “There’s the matter of my reduction mill.”

  They were watching him again.

  “The mill which you gentlemen are going to finance for me,” he added smoothly.

  He waited until the storm of talk subsided a little, leaning back in his chair and cuddling the cigar in his mouth. Once he winked at Seay, who could not smother his grin of delight.

  Suddenly he pounded his flat hand on the table, demanding silence.

  “Yes, you’ll finance it,” he said grimly, “and again it will be because you have to. Do you want to know why? I’ll tell you, then. It’s because any man with a lick of sense—and you’ve all got that, only you’re modest about showing it—can see that it’s cheaper to hoist tons of ore a hundred
feet, put it in cars, haul it to my tunnel and let it roll out than it is to hoist it twenty-five hundred feet, put it in wagons and haul it five miles. There’s the proposition—so simple it’s idiotic.”

  “Why should we finance your mill for you, Bonal?” Bengler, of the Bucko Queen, asked hotly. “It’s your mill! It’s your profits!”

  “You’ll finance it because in the long run it will save you money!” Bonal said shortly. “You’ll get your loans back. How can you help it when it’s you that will give me my business? And my reduction costs will be a third less than Janeece charges you now. Figures don’t lie. The cost of getting the ore to me is negligible. My process is identical to Janeece’s. Then why in hell wouldn’t you finance my mill and give me your business?” he asked arrogantly. “The more money you save on milling, the more you make on your bullion!”

  His words fell on a wrathful silence. Hugh looked over at Seay and shook his head slightly, grinning around his cigar.

  “Bonal,” someone at the foot of the table said, “it strikes me that we pay you through the nose. You get a cut off every move we make.”

  “You’re damn right I do,” Bonal said grimly. “You’re getting off lucky, at that.”

  Herkenhoff rose and pulled his coat across his barrel chest. “Gentlemen,” he said, a wry expression ground into his face. “I, for one, refuse to pay tribute to a robber. Good night, all.”

  Bonal chuckled and said, “Anybody else?”

  “I’ll see this through,” someone said. “How do you propose to do this, Bonal? How do you propose to take our ore out?”

  “You’ll be levied according to the grade of your ore at present and your output,” Bonal said. “I’ll settle that with you separately. As for my methods, I’ll simply haul your ore through the laterals to the tunnel, dump it in cars and shoot it to my mill.”

  “What about the water, though?”

  “The water will run in a channel below the tracks. It’s being dug now.”

  Bonal settled back and peacefully sucked his cigar, his eyes on the faces of these men, taking quiet pleasure in their expressions.

  “You’ve overlooked one thing, Bonal,” Waldman said finally. “It’s this. You’ve got to put your laterals through our land. What do you intend to pay us for that right of way?”

  “Not a cent,” Bonal said cheerfully. “If the laterals don’t go through, if you don’t help to put them through, matching yard for yard of rock my crew takes out, then you’ll cut your own throats. You will have won, but you’ll also have bullheaded yourselves into borrasca.”

  He rose slowly and threw his cigar into the ash tray and said, “Think it over, gentlemen. There’s no hurry. The Dry Sierras is working right now on a dry shaft bottom. It’s only a matter of hours before their shaft and my tunnel meet. It’s simply a question of how fast the muckers can take the stuff out. Tomorrow—next day—come over and see how it works. It really”—his speech was thrusting, dry, cutting—“is so simple that I think you can understand it.”

  He dismissed them then with a nod that was a little contemptuous.

  Chapter Fourteen

  “But this is absurd, Hugh. It’s absolutely insane,” Sharon murmured.

  “Patience,” Hugh replied.

  They were both standing in the dark alleyway at the side of Dan Stole’s opera house and had been for some minutes. It was a dark well here, casting their voices in hollow echo to the very sky. A segment of the street was visible through a peephole, like spying. Two men left the sidewalk, stepped into the alley and passed a bottle between them, out of which they both drank, then went their way.

  Hugh laughed, and Sharon had the feeling that a murder might easily be committed here without the town discovering it.

  “What time did he say he would let you in, Hugh?”

  “It’s five minutes past that now.”

  Just then the exit door creaked open and fat Dan Stole appeared. He held up a warning hand and then greeted Sharon, who nodded indifferently.

  “Everything all right, Dan?” Hugh asked.

  “I think so. They’re calling for the performance now. You’ll have to hurry, Mr. Mathias—you and the lady.”

  “Lead off.”

  “This is absurd,” Sharon repeated, but she stepped in behind Dan Stole and entered the opera house. They were right by the gallery stairs, and Sharon climbed them impatiently, Hugh at her heels. There was a rhythmic clapping below, which seemed almost to shake the building. Raucous shouts and more raucous laughter rose over the clapping. Dan Stole led them down a corridor, opened a door, and they were in the smaller corridor onto which the boxes opened. The corridor was deserted. At one of the box doors Dan Stole paused and said to Hugh, “It’s dark in there, Mr. Mathias. You said no lights, remember.”

  “That’s right.” Hugh slipped him a gold piece and then opened the door, and he and Sharon slid inside. The house was dark, the curtain still lowered, and it was with difficulty that Sharon found a chair.

  When they were seated she said. “These are wretched seats, Hugh.”

  “Did you want to be seen?” Hugh countered.

  Sharon did not have time to reply before a man stepped out from the wings and raised both hands. He had the flashy, arrogant air of a professional entertainer, or a gambler, and he could not command silence for some minutes.

  “Gentlemen,” he began—and was roundly hissed. He laughed. Sharon looked bored.

  “Men of Tronah,” he shouted. There was wild applause. It rose wave on wave from the whisky-sodden air.

  “Men of Tronah,” he said again. “The first number on this evening’s olio will be Miss Margie Borden, the peerless—”

  He could get no further. A mighty roar of protest went up from the audience below. They hissed and booed and jeered and shouted for a full minute, until the master of ceremonies raised his hands to command silence again.

  “I am in the wrong, gentlemen,” he announced. “The first number on the evening’s olio will be the main attraction. Mr. Buck Hanighen, of Winnemucca and points north, will pit his bulldog against the wildcat owned by Shagnasty Will Durbin, of local fame.”

  A shout of applause drowned out the rest of his speech, and he subsided, waiting until there was comparative silence again.

  “The fight will be to the finish, gentlemen. There is a hundred-dollar side bet as a prize, between the owners of the principals. Place your bets, gentlemen!” he shouted and lowered his arms and went into one of the wings. His advice was unnecessary. Bets had been made for the past week, and the prospect of this bloody fight to the finish had been so well advertised that seats tonight were at a premium.

  There was a preliminary shiver of the curtain before it sailed up, revealing a stage bare except for a huge chickenwire pen some ten feet high.

  There was more applause, and then the audience started to stamp and clap.

  Mr. Buck Hanighen was first on the stage, and he was pulled onto it by a bulldog on the end of a leash. The dog was a squat, head-heavy brindle bull with a monstrously ugly head and face, so scarred it was laughable. Nose glued to the floor, bowed legs almost straight behind him with the exertion of pulling his master, he followed some invisible trail with implacable relish until he came to the footlights. The roar of the crowd made him look up, and he eyed it briefly with a good-natured cynicism before he resumed his sniffing. Master Buck Hanighen touched his derby hat and grinned.

  When Shagnasty Will Durbin entered with his protégé, there was a wild yelling. Shagnasty, bald as a rock and perspiring freely, had a good-sized wildcat by the scruff of the neck, and he lugged it in like a satchel, spitting and yowling and helpless, for its feet were strapped together. The bulldog showed no interest at first, but when Shagnasty Will approached the footlights the bulldog woke up. He gave one savage lunge, which almost pulled his master’s arm from its socket, and Shagnasty Will Durbin retreated.

  It took two men inside the ring to hold down the wildcat while Shagnasty unstrapped its feet. Th
en the dog was lifted in and held by two more men. At a given signal, the dog was unleashed, the cat freed, and the four men dived for the gate of the ring.

  Sharon gave a tiny cry of concern, and Hugh laughed.

  There had never been any doubt in the bulldog’s mind as to his purpose here, but there was evidently some in the mind of the cat. Ears flat back on its head, eyes wide and mouth wider, it bounded to one side, and the dog crashed into the gate, its legs working furiously on the slippery stage floor to check its momentum. And then came the rout. The cat ran round and round the circle, a great tawny streak of motion, the bulldog lunging vainly for its hindquarters and crashing into the wire netting. The miners roared with delight at the sight.

  At one of the collisions with the wire, the flimsy gate gave way, but no one seemed to notice it. Suddenly the cat did. It bounded through the gate and paused for one brief second while the bulldog proceeded to try to batter the cage down in snarling fury.

  There was a sudden silence in the house.

  Someone yelled, “Shagnasty, get that damned thing!”

  Then the cat moved. In one bound it cleared the footlights and landed on top of the piano in the orchestra pit. The dog by this time had stopped his assault on the wire and had got outside the cage by tracking the cat. Nose to the boards, he ran after her, crossed the footlights and tumbled off the stage. A crash among the orchestra chairs was plainly audible.

  And then pandemonium broke loose as the men in the first row realized that the scene of the fight would very likely be transferred to their laps.

  Sharon, eyes wide with excitement, half rose in her seat. “Hugh, they’re both loose!” she cried, but Hugh was at the edge of the box, looking down.

  Nothing is more contagious than panic, even good-natured panic. There was a wild scramble in the front rows for the protection of the rear, and in less than thirty seconds complete pandemonium let loose.

  A howling, shouting, laughing, fighting mob was clawing its way to the exits. Four men peered over the footlights, waving their arms frantically, while the bulldog, in a fury of frustration, was trying to climb up the piano to get at the cat. The cat stood this for a moment, then lazily leaped clear of the orchestra pit to land on the row of seats. Then crazily, slipping and falling, it picked its way across the now empty seats to one of the gallery pillars and started to climb it. The dog was hot after it, its savage snarls filling the house with terrible sound.