by Zane Grey
“Hey,” he called, “I’m invitin’ myself to supper.”
“Come in, you life-savin’ hombre,” called Dick, gladly.
“Oh, it’s Kal,” cried a high treble voice, in wild welcome. And Kalispel found himself being leaped upon and kissed by what appeared to be a lovely, little, rosy-faced, golden-haired boy in blue jeans. “Where have you been for so long?”
“Folks, I’ve been plottin’ murder,” replied Kalispel, with a voice and smile that made him a prevaricator.
“We been hearin’ things. I was goin’ to hunt you up tonight. But thet d——new sheriff dropped in yes terday afternoon. He was darned nice to me an’ Ruth, but he shook his buzzard head doubtful about you.”
“Kal, we hated him for that,” added Nugget, who was clinging to his vest and gazing up with troubled, appealing eyes. “Have they put him against you?”
“Say—dog-gone! You look just like peaches an’ cream,” rejoined Kalispel, suddenly realizing the girl’s wonderful improvement. Her face had lost its pallor; the hollow cheeks had filled out; the red lips that had been bitter were now sweet; the blue eyes no more the windows of havoc. She was happy. It seemed incredible. But Kalispel accepted what his keen scrutiny revealed.
“Nugget, you always was pretty, but, gosh!—Why, now you’re lovely!”
“Not Nugget any more, not even to you. Ruth.”
“All right, then it’s Ruth. Dog-gone! if I’d had a hunch you was goin’ to turn out happy an’ beautiful like this, I’d shore grabbed you for myself.”
“Kal!” cried the girl, startled.
“I shore love you heaps, Ruth.”
“Hey, stop makin’ up to my girl,” ordered Sloan, gayly. “She likes you too darn much already. An’ we’re not married yet.”
“I shall always—love him, Dick,” she said, earnestly.
“Wal, don’t be scared my heart will break again,” rejoined Kalispel, with pathos.
“Kalispel, how is it with you and Sydney?” she asked, presently, watching him with a woman’s eyes.
“It’s not atall.”
“I’m going to call on that girl some day,” declared Ruth, with a spirit that boded trouble for Miss Blair.
“I see her with Leavitt,” interposed Dick, gravely. “Doesn’t strike me right.”
“It’s rotten, if you ask me,” burst out Ruth. “Won’t somebody tell her the truth about Rand Leavitt?”
“That’s up to one of us. Nobody but you an’ me an’ Kal know. An’ tellin’ her what Leavitt really is—if she believes—will be damn serious for us. He an’ Borden have gotten thick.”
“Don’t you kids worry any more. Sydney Blair will find out some day, probably too late,” returned Kalispel, darkly.
“Kal, Cliff Borden has been here to see me twice, while Dick was out on his claim,” said Ruth.
“Ah-huh. Wal, what of it?”
“First time he tried being persuasive. He wanted me back. Made me extravagant offers. Seemed to be struck with the change in me. Tried to make love to me—He laughed when I told him Dick and I were not living together. And he got sore when I told him I intended to marry Dick. He stamped out, saying he’d see me soon. Day before yesterday he came again. He was different. He threatened me. I called him every bad name I ever heard and drove him out. But I am worried, Kalispel.”
“What’ll we do?” queried Sloan, anxiously. “If my claim wasn’t pannin’ out so rich I’d take Ruth an’ rustle away. But that’d be throwin’ away money enough to start us for life.”
“I reckon you better leave it to me,” replied Kalispel.
“Then I won’t worry,” declared Ruth. “This Thunder City is not the bloodiest camp I ever saw, by far. But it’s low-down and mean. I can’t cope with these men. Neither can Dick. But you can, Kalispel. And I, who haven’t prayed since I was little, am thanking God for you. That’s all. You talk with Dick while I get supper.”
Kalispel went outside with Sloan, where they walked up and down.
“Ruth saw through Masters,” said Sloan. “He’s not as unfriendly toward you as he wants it to look.”
“Dick, that Texan is a man to tie to. I should smile he is not unfriendly. But you an’ Nug—Ruth keep this to yourselves. Masters wants me to make a bluff at bein’ drunk, an’ go round flushed with gold—which he staked me to—an’ get some of these bandits to hold me up.”
“You don’t say!” exclaimed Sloan, amazed and concerned. “Will you risk it?”
“Shore looks good to me.”
“I’ll bet none of these two-bit robbers will hold you up in a hurry. Whoever they are, they are miners, work-in’ claims or prospectin’, an’ they know you.”
“Wal, it won’t hurt to try ”
“It’ll hurt you with Sydney Blair.”
“I couldn’t be hurt no worse with her.”
“Ruth seems to think you’ve got a chance there. Don’t ruin it by becomin’ a rowdy.”
“Sort of tickles me. She’s goin’ to be the fooledest girl some day.”
“Kal, you can’t let her marry that cheat of a Leavitt,” declared Sloan, hotly. “Even if you didn’t love her! Ruth told me. An’ if I was a shootin’-man, believe me, I’d go after Leavitt.”
“Take care you don’t shoot off your chin,” advised Kalispel. “Ruth knows too much an’ talks too much. She’s got nerve. But Borden an’ Leavitt have a strange hold on this camp. They can ruin you. An’ if I kill them before I can show them up, two-thirds of the diggin’s will rise up to hang me. An’ I’ll lose my chance to find out if Leavitt really made ’way with Sam.”
“You bet he did,” cracked out Dick. “Ruth told me. She swears it.”
“Hell you say!”
“Yes, the hell I say. She knows, but she can’t prove it.”
“How could she know an’ not be able to prove it?”
“She says it’s a little of what she heard an’ a lot that she felt.”
“Wal, that wouldn’t go far in a court, unless what she heard was important.”
“We take her word. I’ll bet Masters would, too. But nobody else would take stock in what a dance-hall girl swore to. That’s the weakness of the case.”
Kalispel admitted it. Leavitt had Boise mining-men interested in the quartz lode. To get possession of the property by force seemed impossible; and any other way began to loom as a forlorn hope. Kalispel divined that the day was not far distant when he would abandon that hope. In this event all he wanted was a short pregnant meeting with Rand Leavitt.
That night Kalispel went on his pretended spree. He staggered into every saloon on the street, smelling of rum, inviting all idlers to drink with him, yet contriving not to drink himself. Everywhere he displayed a big bag of gold nuggets. The invitations to gamble were as numerous as the gamblers.
“Ump-umm. No time—gamble,” he would reply. “Wanta drink—an’ shoot thish town up. I’m bad hombre—I am—an’ lookin’ fer trouble. Gonna shoot daylights outa dansh-shall fellar—an’ lousy claim-jumper.”
He created a sensation everywhere. Word flew from lip to lip. “Kalispel Emerson on the rampage!” The roar subsided when he entered, pale-faced, maudlin, staggering, with a bag of gold in his left hand; the chairs scraped or fell over or the players left them; the crowded bars turned a sea of faces; the throng split to let him through; and mixed together again to follow him out into the street. He broke up the dance at Borden’s hall and shot out the lights. Lastly he weaved from side to side up the center of the street, singing a range drinking-song, and thus on outside of town. But that night the ruse did not work, and he arrived at his cabin tired out and disgusted.
Next morning he saw the sunrise from the rim of the south slope.
Kalispel’s bad moods might start out with him, or like giants stalk behind him on the trail, but they never lasted. When, on this day, he gained real solitude, his morbid thoughts began, one by one, to drop away like scales. The labor of climbing high, the smell of pine and fir, the intimacy of
the old gray cliffs, the melancholy twittering of birds on their way south, and the low song of insects bewailing the death of summer, the color and wildness of the ledges, the freedom of the heights, the wild life that ranged before his gaze—these and all the phases of nature, increasingly more satisfying as the days multiplied, began to soften defeat and heartbreak, and the evil of the sordid greedy camp below.
The valley was now a hideous blot in the wilderness, a checkered hive of toiling bees, an evidence of how white men despoiled nature in their madness for gold.
From Kalispel’s lookout he could see the whole of the mountain that loomed over the mining camp. In bulk it dwarfed the area of the valley. He never gazed at this mile-long slant of denuded, soft earth that he did not feel its forbidding aspect, it hung there precariously. The faint rumble that resembled thunder and which sounded at infrequent times, the gloomy face of the great slide, its ghastly, naked, mobile nature—these to a mountaineer were fraught with catastrophe.
But in other directions the views were superb, a sea of choppy jagged waves of rock, peaked and curled and frosted, suggesting the purple depths of canyons between, and the brawling streams deep down.
Kalispel led his pack burros back to the edge of the basin, where he hunted, and tying them to saplings, he began his stalk.
CHAPTER
* * *
10
LATE that night in the fitful flare of Kalispel’s camp fire, Blair appeared like a man who was afraid of his shadow.
“Say, Blair, it’s right dangerous to come sneakin’ up on me,” warned Kalispel. “I can’t tell for shore who my friends are in the dark. An’ Lord knows my enemies multiply.”
“Never thought—of that. Excuse me—Kal,” panted Blair, finding a seat. He was sober, but apparently laboring under great stress. “Leavitt and Sydney—have been haranguing me. Made my life—hell—lately. I didn’t want them to see me—coming here—so waited till dark.”
“It’s long after dark, old scout,” replied Kalispel, scrutinizing the other’s haggard face. “I got in late. Had a heavy pack of meat....What’s on your chest?”
“I’m a ruined man.”
“Wal, that’s nothin’. I’ve been ruined a lot of times.”
“You’re young and you don’t care a damn for anything or anybody.”
“Shore. But you can do like me. Get up an’ go on!”
“I can’t. This gold-digging was all right for me when I had some results and didn’t work too hard. But that’s finished. The gambling is worse. I’m a fool. I had twenty thousand dollars when we got here. All gone!”
“Whew!—Twenty thousand? My Gawd! man, you have drank an’ gambled all that away?”
“No, not by any means. I bought two claims, you know. Then I had ten thousand hidden in the cabin.... The rest went for our living, and my——”
“Wal, that’s different,” interrupted Kalispel. “You’re not ruined if you’ve got ten thousand.”
“I haven’t got it. Stolen out of the cabin! It was in a big leather wallet, hidden in a chink between two logs, high up where I thought nobody could locate it. But somebody did. Sydney left the cabin open. She went downtown with Leavitt. That was the night you got drunk and went raving around town.”
“Yeah, I did sort of slop over,” drawled Kalispel. “If Sydney went downtown I reckon she saw me.”
“Did she?—Well, I guess she did. She quarreled with Leavitt. And later with me she was in a passion. It struck me she was madder about your break than she was at the loss of our money.”
“Humph!” ejaculated Kalispel, in a quandary. “I reckon you’re barkin’ up the wrong tree, Blair.”
“I always have done that,” returned the older man, plaintively. “But I still have ears. I can hear. And I heard Sydney lacing it into Leavitt about you. Evidently he had been blackguarding you, and she, like a woman, roasted him for it when it was true. Later she did the same to me. I haven’t any tact. I’m testy, anyway, these days. And when I said: ‘If you cared so much about Kal, why in hell did you let him go to the dogs?’ I thought she was going to tear my hair out.”
“Wal, I’m a son-of-a-gun!” exclaimed Kalispel, utterly floored.
“Sydney ended it by swearing she despised you—that if I ever spoke to you again she’d leave me—and that for her you were dead.”
Kalispel sat mute. His consciousness could not get beyond the query—“Did she care so much for me?”
“But to come back to the money,” went on Blair. “I didn’t dare mention to Sydney that I wouldn’t put it beyond Leavitt to steal. I haven’t a leg to stand on, Kal. And I ought to be ashamed. All the same, I’ll be damned if I don’t believe he might have stolen it. No one else has been there—at least indoors.”
“Wal, there are two more men in camp who’d back you up. Jake an’ me,” declared Kalispel. “But that’s farfetched, Blair.”
“Maybe. I’m finding out a good deal....Leavitt has only a quarter share in that quartz mine. He had to give the other shares to mining-men of Boise to back the deal. He told Sydney that they had taken out about three hundred thousand dollars. Also that lately the vein panned out on solid granite. The engineer who was here claimed they’d strike the quartz again, but it would be necessary to pack in and install a hundred-ton stamp-mill. At enormous expense. Leavitt doesn’t believe the mine is worth it. And he confided further to Sydney that he’d be leaving Thunder City by spring. Wants her to go out with him and marry him....All of which he asked her to keep strictly secret.”
“Queer deal from the start,” muttered Kalispel, as if he were alone. “But Leavitt is a deep lyin’ hombre.”
“Why would he want it kept secret? That about the quartz vein failing in solid granite is bound to leak out.”
“I reckon these minin’-men are all close-mouthed. Maybe Leavitt has other irons in the fire here. For instance, he’s a pardner of Borden in that saloon an’ dance-hall.”
“That’s news indeed. Wonder what Sydney will say.”
“Aw, she won’t believe it if she’s hipped about the fellow.”
“She’s strange these days. I’m afraid coming here has ruined her as well as it has me.”
“Blair, if that isn’t shore yet, it soon will be, unless I can find some good reason to kill Leavitt.”
“I should think you have reason enough.”
“Ump-umm! If I could force him to an even break where we had witnesses—that’d be fine. I’ll try it next time I meet him. But if he can’t dodge the meetin’ he’ll shore dodge the fight. An’ you see, if I kill him anyway, this gang of his will hang me.”
“Well, it’s a sickening mess. I have failed, my girl is drifting, and you have gone back to your old habits.
You’ll break out presently and get shot or hanged. Then we won’t have a friend.”
“Wal, you could count on Leavitt,” replied Kalispel, with a sarcasm he was far from feeling.
“I’ve fallen low enough without accepting charity from him.”
“Hell, man! He sold you worthless claims—planted claims—at enormous price. Borrow from him.”
“You said that about planted claims before. You mean he had gold dust stuffed in the sand and gravel so that it’d look like a natural deposit?”
“Shore, that trick is as old as minin’ gold.”
“There have been several other claims which panned out the same way, and every single one of them was bought by men who didn’t get here early in the stampede.”
“More damnin’ evidence.”
“Then—there’s no redress,” said Blair, with finality.
“Nothin’ but red blood,” replied Kalispel.
Blair got up to slink away, bent and plodding, like a man overburdened.
“Tell Sydney I’ll be droppin’ in on you pronto,” called Kalispel. “An’ don’t you be surprised at anythin’.”
“Better not come. Sydney will—And what do you mean?”
“Wal, wait an’ see. An’, Blair, if y
ou got any sense atall try to figure things out.”
Blair went on mumbling to himself. Then Kalispel set about making himself as dishevelled and drunken-looking as was possible, in accordance with the part he had to act. He meant to make the best of it, and thought that if he did get to see Sydney, it would be an adventure.
“Dog-gone!” he soliloquized, as he started out. “I been this way so often that actin’ it is just sorta natural. Gotta be extra good for Sydney!”
The porch of the Blair cabin was dark and the door was closed. Kalispel espied a crack of light, and stumbled up the steps, puffing like a porpoise, and staggered to the door.
“Ushed be—door round someplash,” he grumbled. After fumbling around he knocked loudly. The door opened swiftly enough to make him suspicious that Sydney, who opened it, had heard him before he knocked. She looked like an outraged queen, yet intensely curious. Kalispel lunged in, pushing her aside. The room was bright with lamp and fire, very colorful and cosy. Blair sat staring at this intruder in astonishment.
“Howdee, Blair,” said Kalispel, wiping his nose sheepishly. “Where is that lovely dotter of yours?”
“She let you in,” replied Blair, and suddenly he averted his face to hide a smile.
“Ish that you, Syd?” asked Kalispel, turning to the girl.
“Get out of here,” she ordered, anger, disgust, and sorrow expressive in face and voice.
“Jush wanta tell you—ain’t gonna drink no more ... turnin’ over new leaf....An’ I’m cornin’ back to you.”
“You are not.”
“Aw, Syd, be reasonable,” he begged, reaching for her with unsteady hands. She avoided him, as if his person was contaminated. “You ushed to be—tumble fond of me.”
“Yes, to my shame and regret,” she retorted, hotly. Yet he fascinated her.
Suddenly Kalispel ventured a dramatic transformation.
“Say, girl... this talk buzzin’ round....You ain’t lettin’ this fellar Leavitt make up to you?”
“That’s none of your business, Mr. Emerson. But I am.