XIV
Paper Walls
We held our second war council shortly after Phineas Everton and hisdaughter had disappeared over the shoulder of the spur on their wayback to the Lawrenceburg. I gave my two partners the gist of theconversation with the assayer, briefly and without comment. Giffordoozed profanity; but Barrett laughed and said:
"Every little new thing we run up against merely urges us to let outone more notch in the speed of the hurry hoist. Everton's suspicion isan entirely natural one, and for my part, I only hope he and Blackwellwill hang on to it. If they should, there is an even chance that theywill watch their ore sheds a little closer and leave it to us to makethe first move in the imagined blackmailing scheme--all of which willgive us more time."
"That's all right; but we can't bet on the 'hang on,'" was Gifford'sdemurrer. "They may think they've got the straight of it now, butthere's no law against their changing their minds mighty suddenly.Suppose Everton shows up his bit of a sample, and they both take asecond whirl at the thing and pull down a guess that it isn't stolenLawrenceburg ore, after all? We've got to improve upon thispick-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 needand fell to discussing ways and means. There was already a fullwagon-load of the sacked ore hidden under the sleeping-shack, and atthe rate the lode was widening we could confidently figure on gettingout as much more every second day, or oftener. There was a good wagonroad to town from the Lawrenceburg plant, but of course we dared notuse it so long as we were making any attempt to maintain secrecy. Thealternative was a long haul down our own gulch, around the end of thespur, and across the slope of the mountain-side below. Even this, theonly other practicable route, would be in plain sight from theLawrenceburg workings, once the team should pass out upon the barelower hillside.
Moreover, we were obliged to consider the risk involved in taking atleast one other man--the driver of the team--into our confidence.Since the hauling would have to be done in the night, an honest manwould suspect crookedness, and the other kind would blackmail us to afinish. Gifford spoke of this, saying that it was a choice between thedevil and the deep blue sea.
None the less, we were all agreed that the wagon-hiring hazard wouldhave to be taken, and at the close of the talk Barrett went to town tomake the arrangement. It was after dark when he returned. His missionhad been miraculously successful: he had not only found a trustworthyteamster who was willing, for a good, round sum, to risk his horses onthe mountain at night; he had also interviewed the superintendent ofthe sampling works and concluded a deal by the terms of which thecompany--as a personal favor to Barrett--agreed to treat a limitedquantity of our highest-grade ore in wagon-load lots, making cashsettlements therefor.
It lacked only an hour of midnight when the team, making a wide detourto avoid being heard from the Lawrenceburg, reached our location on theslope of the spur. We all helped with the loading; and when all wasready, Gifford, whose turn it was to go to town, borrowed Barrett'sshot-gun and climbed to a seat beside the driver.
With every precaution taken--a dragging pine-tree coupled on behind theload to serve instead of the squealing brakes, and many injunctions tothe driver to take it easy and to do his swearing internally--theoutfit made more noise than a threshing-machine bumping down the gulch.We kept pace with it, Barrett and I, following along the crest of thespur with an apprehensive eye on the Lawrenceburg. But there was nounusual stir at the big plant on the other side of the ridge; merelythe never-ceasing clank and grind of the hoist and the pouring thunderof the ore as the skip dumped its load into the bins.
Having nothing to detain him in town, Gifford made a quick trip and waswith us again a little after four o'clock in the morning. At the crackof 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 sothat 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, atleast--only by the nights when it came my turn to ride to town on theload of ore. On both occasions I recall that I went fast asleep on thehigh seat before the wagon had gone twenty rods down the gulch; sleptsitting bolt upright, with the shot-gun across my knees, and wakingonly when the driver was gee-ing into the yard of the sampling works intown; lapses that I may confess here, though I was ashamed to confessthem to my two partners.
During this second week we heard nothing from Blackwell or from any ofthe 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 toilindefinitely, and that the discovery crisis was only postponed from dayto day, we yet took heart of grace. The purchase money for the ore waspouring in a steady stream into Barrett's bank to our credit; and withthe accounting for the third wagon-load we had upward of $80,000 in thefighting fund.
Gifford went in as wagon guard on the Monday night load, and getting anearly start from the mountain, he had a little time to spend on thestreets in town. On his return he brought news; the news we had allbeen expecting and waiting for.
"The big trouble's on the way," he reported. "Bennett Avenue's all litup with the news that there's been a new strike on Bull Mountain. Iheard about it mighty near everywhere I went. Up to date nobody seemsto know just where it is, or who has made it; but they've got hold ofthe main guy, all right. One fellow told me he had it straight fromthe sampling works. Some cuss on the inside, I reckon, who doesn'tknow enough to keep his blame' mouth shut, has gone and leaked."
"I'd like mighty well to see another eighty thousand in the bank beforewe have to shut our eyes and begin handing it out to the lawyers," saidBarrett. "Besides, when we get ready to build a shaft-house and put inmachinery, we'll have to have more ground room. After the news getsout, we'll just about have to blanket what land we buy withtwenty-dollar gold-pieces."
"With the Lawrenceburg hemming us in the way it does, we won't be ableto buy elbow room at any kind of a price, will we?" asked Gifford, whohad not gone into the topographies as minutely as Barrett and I had.
"There are the three corners of the original triangle which we weren'table to cover in our claim," Barrett explained. "And down yonder onthat gulch flat that we are using for a wagon road there is a claimcalled the 'Mary Mattock' which was taken up and worked and dropped ayear or so ago by a Nebraska syndicate. When I was in town last week Igave Benedict, of Benedict & Myers, the job of running down the owners,with the idea that we might possibly wish to buy the ground a littlelater on.
"Good work!" Gifford applauded. "I wouldn't have thought of anythingas foxy as that."
"I told Benedict we'd buy the Mary Mattock if we could get it at areasonable 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 threeshafts are full of water, and I'm told the Nebraskans spent fiftythousand dollars trying to pump them. But the minute the 'LittleClean-Up' gets into the newspapers, the Mary Mattock, being next doorto 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 honingfor, right now," he protested. "This tin-basin trot's sure getting onmy nerves, as the fella said. We'd ought to have the shaft-house andmachinery set up and going, this minute, and a good, husky bunch of menat work in that hole, digging out dollars where we're scratching forpennies."
"I don't want to be the shy man of this outfit," Barrett put itquickly. "We can have the machinery if you fellows think we dare usethe 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 whichwas 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 turnat the wagon guarding had come in regular course, that I was made tounderstand that no leaf in the book of a man's life can be so firmlypasted down that a mere chance thumbing of the pages by an alien handmay not flip it back again.
By imperceptible inchings we had been starting the wagon earlier andearlier on each successive trip; and on the evening in question it wasno later than ten o'clock when I turned the consignment of ore over tothe foreman at the reduction works. Ordinarily, I should have takenthe road back to the hills at once, intent only upon getting to campand between the blankets as speedily as possible. But on this night aspirit of restlessness got hold of me, and, leaving Barrett's shotgunin the sampling works office, I strolled up-town.
Inasmuch as a three-months' residence in a mining-camp is the fullequivalent of as many years spent in a region where introductionsprecede acquaintance, I was practically certain to meet somebody Iknew. The somebody in this instance proved to be one Patrick Carmody,formerly a hard-rock boss on the Midland branch construction, and nowthe working superintendent of a company which was driving a hugedrainage tunnel under a group of the big mines of the district.
The meeting-place was the lobby of the hotel, and at the Irishman'sinvitation I sat with him to smoke a comradely cigar. Carmody was notpointedly inquisitive as to my doings; was content to be told that Ihad been "prospecting around." Beyond that he was good-naturedlywilling to talk of the stupendous undertaking over which he waspresiding, 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 inthe comfortable lounging-chair, the cheerful surroundings, the stir andbustle of the human ebb and flow, and the first half-hour of realidleness I had enjoyed in many days.
It was after Carmody had been dragged away by some fellow hard-rockenthusiast that I had my paralyzing shock. Sitting in a chair lessthan a dozen feet distant, smoking quietly and reading a newspaper, wasa man whose face would have been familiar if I had seen it in thegolden streets of the New Jerusalem or in the deepest fire-chamber ofthe other place; a face with boring black eyes, and with a cruel mouthpartly hidden by freshly crimped black mustaches: the face, namely, ofmy sometime prison-mate, Kellow.
My shocked recognition of this man who tied me to my past annihilatedtime and distance as if they had never been. In a flash I was backagain in a great stone building in the home State, working over theprison books and glancing up now and then to the cracked mirror on theopposite wall of the prison office which showed me the haggard featuresand cropped hair of the convict Weyburn.
The memory shutter flicked, and I saw myself walking out through theprison gates with the State's cheap suit of clothes on my back and theState's five dollars in my pocket, a paroled man. Another click, and Ihad dragged through the six months of degradation and misery, and sawmyself sitting opposite Kellow in the back room of a slum saloon in agreat city, shivering with the cold, wretched and hungry. Once again Isaw his sneer and heard him say, "It's all the same to you now, whetheryou cracked the bank or didn't. You may think you can live the prisonsmell down, but you can't; it'll stick to you like your skin. Whereveryou go, you'll be a marked man."
It is a well-worn saying that life is full of paper walls. A look, aturn of the head, the recognition which would follow, and once more Ishould be facing a fate worse than death. Kellow knew that I hadbroken my parole. He would trade upon the knowledge, and if he couldnot use me he would betray me. I knew the man.
Five minutes earlier I had been facing the world a free man; free to goand come as I pleased, free to sit and smoke with a friend in the mostpublic place in the camp. But now I slid from my chair with my hatpulled over my eyes and crept to the door, watching Kellow every stepof the way, ready to bolt and run, or to turn and fight to kill, at theslightest rustling of the upheld newspaper. Once safely outside in thecool, clean night air of the streets I despised myself with a loathingtoo bitter to be set in words. But the fact remained.
It was like the strugglings of a man striving to throw off thebenumbing effects of an opium debauch--the effort to be at one againwith the present. The effort was no more than half successful when Istepped into a late-closing hardware store and bought a weapon--arepeating rifle with its appropriate ammunition. Barrett had saidsomething about the lack of weapons at the claim--we had only theshot-gun and Gifford's out-of-date revolver--and I made the purchaseautomatically in obedience to an underlying suggestion which wasscarcely more than half conscious.
But once more in the street, and with the means in my hands, a suddenand fierce impulse prompted me to go back to the hotel lobby and killthe man who held my fate between his finger and thumb. Take it as avirtue or a confession of weakness, as you will, but it was only thethought 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 tookthe long trail back under the summer stars to the hills, with the rifleand Barrett's shot-gun--the latter picked up in passing the samplingworks--nestling in the hollow of his arm. God or the devil could havegiven me no greater boon that night than the hap to meet Kellow on thelonesome climb. I am sure I should have shot him without the fainteststirring of irresolution. By the time I reached our gulch I was fumingover my foolishness in buying the rifle--a clumsy weapon that wouldeverywhere advertise my purpose. What I needed, I told myself, was apocket weapon, to be carried day and night; and the next time I shouldgo to town the lack should be supplied.
For by now all scruples were dead and I was assuring myself grittinglythat the entire Cripple Creek district was too narrow to hold the manwho knew, and the man who was afraid.
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