Chapter 23

"No wonder she wanted to skip out," jeered Steve Jarrold, his great bony hand locked about Gloria's shrinking shoulder. His ill-featured face, the small, pig eyes, always jeering, the black bristle of beard, not unlike a hog's bristles, were thrust close to her face. "Where's King all this time?" he demanded. "Up in the other cave, maybe?"

"No," she said dismally, seeking to jerk away from his evil glance and whiskey-laden breath. "He has gone----"

"That's good; let him go. We don't care, do we? Eh, girlie?" But again his hand tightened until the hard fingers hurt her. "But gone where?"

"We were short of food--he is hunting--maybe he has gone for help----"

"And you showed Gratton where he hid his gold? That's a nice little she-trick, ain't it? Well, while the showing's good, lead us to the rest of it."

"That's the eye, Steve," said Brodie. He stepped forward, shoved his rifle-muzzle against Gratton's body, and commanded: "You, too. Go ahead, you and her, and show us the way. And no monkey business, either of you, or I'll blow a hole square through you."

Gratton, grown nimble, darted ahead with Brodie always close at his heels. Gloria, forced on by Jarrold, came next, and after them the others. Benny was the last; he had taken time to put the gold back into the sack and set it aside among the shadows. For Benny believed in making sure of what they had, even while they quested better things. Then he caught up his rifle, the only other gun besides Brodie's, and came hurrying after them.

They went up the cliff in a long file, clawing their way, cursing the steepness, now and then one or another of them fumbling uncertainly, close to a slip and a fall. It was clear that, with the possible exception of Swen Brodie, not a man of them was entirely sober. But they made the climb safely and hastened into the upper cave eagerly.

"It's somewhere back there," said Gratton.

"More fire," shouted Brodie. His voice exulted; his blood would be running now with the gold fever. He tossed on an armful of dry wood; the flames caught and roared; shadows quivered and danced. Already Benny was at the far end of the cave; the others ran after him. Even Jarrold relinquished Gloria's arm, eager to be in at the finding. But he called to her as he went:

"You stick where you are. I'm not forgetting you this time."

Fascinated, she watched them. They ran like blood-lusting dogs that had briefly lost their quarry, that were seeking everywhere, in every cranny, with slavering jaws. They turned aside into side-pockets of the main cavern; they got torches and looked high and low; they went back and forth, up and down; they stumbled against one another and cursed angrily; they caught up bits of stone, ran back to the fire to see if the fragments were shot with gold; cursed and hurled the useless things from them, and ran back again, to jostle and seek and be first; they were not so much like dogs now as human hogs, fighting to get first into the trough.

But they did not forget Gratton, and they did not forget Gloria. All the time both Brodie and Benny kept their guns in their hands; two significant looks had been all that was needed to keep their two prisoners in mind of the fact that no escape now was possible.

To Gloria it seemed inevitable that in this quest which overlooked nothing, and which as time wore on grew less frenzied and more systematic, they would find what King had found before them. She tried to think consecutively; she recalled all that King had told her of these men, all that Gratton had hinted at. She recalled with a shudder the look in the moist eyes of Steve Jarrold. It seemed to her that her only slim chance for safety lay in their finding the gold. For only gold, gold unlimited, could cause them to forget her.

For an hour they sought tirelessly. It appeared that there were many fingers to the further end of the cave, narrow, irregular channels into which they pressed. Their faggots burned out; the smoke choked them; they coughed and cursed, came out for fresh air, dived into the dark again. The short day was passing; the entering light, where they had torn the canvas aside, grew dimmer. And still they searched.

At last Brodie returned and stood looking from Gloria to Gratton.

"One of you knows," he said shortly. "Which one?"

"I swear to God----" began Gratton.

"Shut up! Then it's you?" The little, shiny blue eyes, never so coldly evil, drew her own frightened eyes, fascinated and held them. "You know"

"I don't know! All I know----"

"Don't lie to me! It'll do you no good." He lifted a hand and held it over her, the enormous fingers apart and rigid. "I'll make you tell!"

"Listen to me," she managed to cry out. "I don't know, I tell you. But I know where it might be. In a place you would never think of looking. Not in a thousand years----"

Blue fire sprang up in the gleaming eyes. The other men, drawn close, watched and listened, their eyes alive with many lights.

"What you know I'll know. I'll choke it out of you----"

"I'll tell you--if you will keep your hands off me! I'll make a bargain with you. I'll show you the place; if there's gold there, I don't care what happens to it--if you'll only agree to let me alone--to let me go----"

Brodie laughed at her. But Benny cried out:

"Of course we'll let you go! What do you suppose we want of you? Once we get our hands on it she can go, Brodie. Tell her so, you big----"

"Sure," said Brodie, with a wide grin. "It ain't women we're after this trick; it's something better. And--and it would be very nice of you to show us--Miss Gaynor." He treated her to a grinning mock respect, so obviously spurious that her fear of him rose higher, choking her. "Very nice, ain't it, boys?"

"I--I am not sure what you'll find," whispered Gloria. "I only know that----Oh, dear God, I hope you find all the gold in the world!"

Hastily she ran by Brodie toward the dark end of the cave. Then she stopped and tried to think; how many paces had King said? She came back to the fire; thirty, thirty-five? She began counting as she walked while they watched her wondering and following slowly after her. She found several boulders in her path; but she had not gone far enough. She kept on; thirty, thirty-two, thirty-three----She could hardly see about her. She stumbled against a rock in her way.

"Try here," she said. Already Brodie and Steve Jarrold were at her side. "This rock. See if it will move----"

They thrust her roughly aside. Brodie set down his rifle, laid his big hands on the boulder, and as if it had weighed only ten pounds, tossed it out of the way. He knelt, feeling along the ground. A sudden shout burst from him:

"Down here! There's a big hole; there's a dark cave underneath. That's where it is?"

They brought faggots; at the edge of the hole they hastily built another fire. They crowded round, peering down. Brodie tossed a brand through; it dropped a short distance, a few feet only, struck, and began to roll; it caught against a rock, smoked and smouldered, and went out. Brodie set his legs over the opening, called to the Italian to grab his rifle and keep an eye on Gloria and Gratton, and went down. The others crowded about the hole, waiting impatiently for him to go through, and then began piling down after him. Gloria could see their figures dimly; they went down and down along a long, steep, slanting passage-way; they had smoking torches and looked like so many fiends in the bottomless pit. She heard them calling back and forth excitedly; they went on, still downward; she heard their grinding boot-heels, but could no longer see them. Suddenly they were silent. Then there were swift mutterings. And then a great, triumphant, many-voiced shout. In Gus Ingle's treasure-cache they had at last come to Gus Ingle's treasure. And, among other things, to the skeleton of Gus Ingle himself, sprawling here for sixty years in the dark over a great heap of gold.

_Chapter XXIX_

Swen Brodie, whose will had at all times directed, was now absolute dictator. Big and brutal and fearless, drunken with gold, he loomed above his companions, driving them, commanding them, swearing violently that they would do what he told them to do or he'd dash their brains out.

"I led you to it," he reminded them in a great shouting voice. "But for me never a man of you would of smelled it. There's enough here to make a thousand men rich, and that's lucky for you! But we've got to hold what we got, and we got to get out of here with it--somehow. That somehow is for me to figure out. And, being as one man's got to run any job and the rest has got to take orders and take 'em on the jump, you're doing what I say! If any man jack of you don't like that, let him open his head right now!"

"There's no sense scrappin'," muttered Benny. "An' we're all satisfied, I'd say. But there's no call to start wavin' a red flag."

"We're going down to the lower cave," said Brodie. "Everything we can pry loose is going down with us. We'll pitch the loose chunks of gold over the cliff and we'll stow 'em away somewhere else--where King, if things break some way we don't look for, won't find 'em! We start right now, while there's daylight. What's more, we move our camp from down the canon to the cave below. Steve Jarrold, you and Tony are elected to that job, and you'd better get a move on. Bring up what grub's left, and the blankets and stuff. The rest of us will start in firing gold overboard and putting it somewhere more safe--all that's loose. And at that, think of the great, big, wide, yellow, rotten-soft seam of it down below!"

"Where are you goin' to put it?" demanded Jarrold.

"Not hiding it from you and Tony, Steve," cried Brodie sharply. "Put your suspicious ways in your pocket. And, if you're on the jump, you'll have our camp truck moved before we're done. Look alive, will you? A man never knows what's going to happen."

"Why not leave it here until we know----?"

"For one thing, because Mark King knows this place. Now, move! Come ahead, you other fellows. You, too, Gratton; we ain't forgot you." An uglier note crept into the harsh voice. "You can help. And so can you," whirling on Gloria. "Woman or no woman, you got hands and feet."

* * * * *

Night, pitch-black, had come when they had done. Gloria, scarcely able to stand from exhaustion, her body bruised, her hands and arms wounded from many a jagged rock as she had gone back and forth carrying heavy loads, went with the others into the lowest cave in which already the gold had been stowed away. She sank down wearily; she closed her eyes rather than watch the men about their fire, eating noisily, drinking noisily from the bottles which Steve and Tony had brought from their other camp. Trying to remain unnoticed in the shadows was Gratton. Brodie, having commanded that a rude rock wall like King's be built across the mouth of the cave to shut out the cold, and having laboured with the others at the task, came back to the fire. He took a long pull at a bottle, emptying it and smashing it to tinkling fragments as he hurled it behind him. He caught up a big piece of dried beef and gnawed at it like a dog; though Gloria kept her eyes away from him she could hear the tearing and grinding of the monstrous teeth.

"It's been a day's work, at that," he said with a full mouth. "But we ain't done. I noticed how no man has said a word about how we split what we found."

"There's five of us," said Benny quickly. "We split it five ways, even, like pardners."

Brodie turned on him slowly, still rending at his meat, still clutching his rifle and holding it so that no man might forget that he held it.

"Think so, Benny?" he said ponderously. "Being as I've worked on this lay a long time, since I let you others in on it, since I led you to it--think that's the fair way to split it? Now suppose you listen to me. You boys ain't mentioned a split because it was none of your say and you knew it. Say, in round numbers--but there's ten times that--that there's a million dollars tucked away here. Why, there's mines all through these mountains that never thought of stopping at a million; that was just a fair start! Well, to get going, say there's an even million. I get just half that; that leaves half a million, don't it? Now, shut up a minute!" he commanded truculently as more than one man stirred. "Listen to me. That's five hundred thousand to split between four of you; that's over a hundred thousand for every man jack of you. And that's what I call a fair split."

They growled in their throats at that, but no man took it upon himself to speak out definitely, though they glanced sidewise among themselves. Benny, who always had a thought of his own, said quietly:

"What are you doin' about Gratton? He'll claim his share, won't he? And, if you say him no, he'll shoot his face off, won't he?"

"No," said Brodie. "He won't." He paused, swallowed the last of his beef, caught up a bottle from Benny's side, and drank deeply. Benny, afraid that this bottle, too, still nearly full, would be broken, hastily snatched it back when Brodie had done.

"No," said Brodie heavily. "Gratton won't talk." He grew suddenly quick-spoken--he broke into a volley of accusation; his tongue lent itself to such a rush of vileness that Gloria, shrinking back, covered her ears with her hands. "Gratton stole grub. When grub-stealing was the same as slitting a man's throat. And what next does he plan? Why, to make trouble; to swear that Benny killed a man; that we was all in it; to get us all hung, if he can, or in the pen; then to grab what's ours. Look at him. You can see it in his frog eyes! He's done, that's what he is!" With a swift gesture his gun was at his shoulder.

Gratton scrambled to his feet with a choking cry. Gloria, too, had sprung up, sick with horror. She looked from Brodie to Gratton, who was not two feet from her. She saw that he was panic-stricken; his fear was choking him, stopping his heart, paralysing his muscles. He wanted to run and could not; he tried to speak but now not even a whisper came from between his writhing lips.

Slowly, an unshaken, senseless piece of machinery, Brodie raised his rifle. Now Gratton's voice returned to him; a strangling cry broke from his agonized soul. A hand, wildly outthrown, caught at Gloria's sleeve.

"You, there," called Brodie, "stand aside. Unless you're wanting yours too!"

Her own heart was stopping, her feet were leaded. She understood what he said--she knew that it was to her that he spoke--but she wouldn't believe, couldn't believe that he meant--_that_!

Gratton was pressing tight to Gloria, seeking futilely to get behind her. He began to articulate--to beg--to promise----

Brodie fired. A great reverberating roar filled the cavern. Gloria, her brain gone suddenly numb, felt the grip on her arm tighten convulsively. Then it relaxed--slowly. Gratton, his eyes bulging, his mouth wide open, was sinking----

Gloria put her hands over her eyes and screamed. Again and again her scream broke from her. She tried to draw back, to run. But all her strength was gone. She crumpled and settled down almost as Gratton had done, and so close to him that she brushed him with her knee. She felt the body twitch. She leaped to her feet and ran blindly, screaming. She struck against the rock wall and sank down again.

The wonder was that she did not swoon outright. As it was, her soul seemed to float dizzily out of her body and through an utter dark. She thought that she was dying. As though across a vast distance she heard voices.

"Well?" It was the man who had done the shooting, his voice truculent. "Anybody got anything to say? Say it quick, if you have."

There was a silence. Then a shuffling of feet. Then an answering voice, thin and querulous. It was Benny; he, too, had killed his man.

"He had it coming," he said eagerly. "Any judge would say so. Stole every bit of grub when stealing grub is the same as cutting a man's throat, just like you said, Brodie. He had it coming. You done right."

"You, Jarrold," demanded Brodie. "Got anything to say?"

Again silence. Then again a voice, Jarrold's, saying hurriedly:

"No. Benny's right. He had it coming. Damn fool."

"And you, Brail? And you, Tony? Got anything to say? Talk lively!"

Brail and Tony, like the others before them, were quick to excuse Brodie's act. They spoke briefly and relapsed into silence. Then, beginning far away and coming closer with the speed of an onrushing hurricane, Gloria heard heavy feet crunching in the dirt and gravel. A hard hand gripped her shoulder, jerking her to her feet.

"You, friend," said Brodie. "What have you got to say about it?"

She hung limp in his powerful hand, speechless.

He dragged her closer to the firelight, peering at her with his red-flecked eyes.

"Don't forget who she is," another voice was saying. Steve Jarrold's. "Remember what I told you."

It was as though he prided himself on the fact that he alone knew her for Gaynor's daughter, and from it derived a sort of ownership of her; for while the others had never caught a glimpse of her until now, he had filled his eyes with her before. "We got to think this out. She came along with King. Got enough of him and switched to Gratton. That's like a woman."

Brodie let her slip down and turned away from her. His mood was not so soon for a woman.

"See she keeps her mouth shut," he said threateningly. "If she ain't got sense enough for that she ain't got sense to go on living."

Benny stooped and feasted his eyes on her. Then, straightening up, he turned to Jarrold with nodding approval.

"She skins anything _I_ ever saw," he admitted.

In some strange way it seemed to Gloria that both Benny and Brodie had consigned her to Jarrold as though they admitted his prior claim; as though, among these three, she was looked upon as the property of one. She struggled to her feet.

"Don't let her go," said Brodie. "That's all I got to say about her right now."

She made an uncertain step toward the mouth of the cave. Jarrold moved at her side. She went faster. He put his hand on her.

"Didn't you hear what he said?" he asked.

She tried to break away and run. He held her One clear thought and only one formed in her mind. As she had never longed for anything in her life, she yearned for Mark King.

"Mark!" she screamed, "Mark King! Save me."

Jarrold clapped a big dirty hand over her mouth. He put a wiry arm about her and lifted her and carried her back to the fireside.

"None of that," he growled in her ear. She shrank away as she felt the tensing of his arm and was conscious of the contact of his rag-clothed body. She grew silent, cowering. She heard a sound of something dragging and could not hide her fascinated eyes. Thus she watched as Brodie gripped the slack of Gratton's coat shoulders and shoved the body out into the snow. She even marked how the living man spat after the dead.

"Go to the coyotes," he muttered. "They're your kind."

Gloria knew that if she took a step Jarrold would clutch her again. So she stood very still. Brodie came back and threw some wood on the fire and squatted down over the provisions, seeming to be taking stock of them. Perhaps he was but strengthening his heart, digesting the evidence of the case, assuring himself again after the accomplished fact that the deed was just. Still squatting, he drank again, this time from the bottle which had been Gratton's. As he tilted it up she saw that it was two-thirds full. When he put it down with a long sigh and wiped his wet mouth it was not over half-full. He brooded over the fire, he gave no sign of noticing her.

"Let me go," she said to Jarrold. "I am sick. I'd die here. Please let me go."

Jarrold shifted and looked to his companions. Benny shook his head.

"There ain't no hurry," he stated judicially. "What sort is she, Steve?"

"She come up to Gaynor's place along with Gratton," answered Jarrold as though he knew all about her. "He was crazy gone on her, crazy enough to want to marry her, even. Sent me for the judge. Then Mark King showed up. She fell for him and gave Gratton the go-by. Then she comes into the mountains with King, I guess. Next she gets tired of him and goes back to Gratton."

"'Frisco woman?" asked Benny.

Jarrold nodded. Benny clacked his tongue. Brodie still brooded at his fire, his eyes sullen upon the fitful flame and red embers.

"Where is King?" asked Brodie.

"Where is King?" repeated Jarrold to Gloria.

"I don't know," she answered, speaking with difficulty. "I ... Oh, for God's sake, let me go. I won't say anything about what I saw; I promise. If you will only let me go."

"They promise easy and break promises easier," said Jarrold.

Benny came up and touched Brodie on the shoulder. The squatting man started and scowled. Benny stooped and whispered. Brodie got up heavily and together the two withdrew, going further back in the cave. They talked, but Gloria could not catch the words. She saw the flare of one match after the other as they fell to smoking; the smell of strong tobacco came to her. She looked appealingly to Jarrold. He sidled closer, standing between her and the open.

"I'll pay you a thousand dollars when I get back to San Francisco," she whispered eagerly. "Ten thousand! If you'll let me go now."

Jarrold pondered, his stupid little eyes steady and unwinking on her.

"A thousand dollars," he returned slowly, "wouldn't do me any good if I never got it: as I wouldn't if none of us got clear of this damn' snow; neither would ten I And it wouldn't do me any good if Benny and Brodie shot me full of lead. And it wouldn't be much, anyhow, if we got away with what we found to-day! Everything being as it is, I ain't half as strong for a thousand dollars, nor yet ten, right now as I am for you! And you know it, don't you?"

He tried to ogle her, and her sick dread nearly overwhelmed her.

"And you got sense, too," went on Jarrold, leering meaningly. "It won't be bad to have a man stuck on you that's got all kind of kale, will it, girlie?"

As he poured out his wretched insinuations she was trembling; in her heart she thought that she had spoken truly and would die if they kept her here.

"I am married. To Mr. King," she said as steadily as she could. "I want to go to him. You have no right to keep me here."

"But you don't even know where he is," Jarrold reminded her slyly.

Brodie and Benny had given over their whispering and came back to the fire, where Brail and the Italian looked up at them sharply. Here was another guarded conference among the four; Gloria, though she could watch them, was unable to hear what they were saying. Jarrold began to grow uneasy, so soon is distrust bred amongst those who have found treasure.

Brodie made a last remark and laughed; the others laughed after him, and the four looked toward Jarrold and Gloria. Brodie, leaning back, caught up a bottle and drank, and thereafter passed the bottle to the man nearest him. Gloria was quick to see that he had set his rifle away somewhere against the rock wall in the shadows. Only Brail still clung to his gun; if he should set it aside--if there should come a moment when she could slip to the cave's mouth--in the outside dark, despite the deep snow, she would at least have a chance to escape from them. Even though she had nowhere to go, she longed wildly to be away from them. When their eyes roved toward her she thought that she would rather be dead, out in the clean, white snow, than here.