Chapter 9

"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."