Part 11

Billy talked. He poured out his confidences. He told how great was Billy, how bright were Billy's prospects, how important were Billy's responsibilities. He was glad to show this young girl the town; it was Billy's town. He was pleased to tell her the names of the hills hereabouts; these hills concealed within their depths the veins of Billy's lodes. He delighted in giving the history of the men they met; for these men looked up to Billy as the architect of their future forties. He spoke enthusiastically of the prospects.

"Thar is a lode," said he earnestly, "over on the J.G. fraction that's shore th' purtiest bit of quartz lead you ever see. The walls is all of slate, running jest's slick side by side, with a clear vein between 'em, and she'll run 'way up, free millin'. I tell you what, Miss Molly, thar's big money in it, thar shorely is! When I get those Easte'n capitalists interested, and ready to put a little _salt_ in, and git up a few mills and necessary buildin's, you'll jest see things hummin' in this yar kentry."

Out of the darkness a silent little figure glided and fell in step with the girl.

"Hullo, bub," said Billy indifferently, and went on to tell what he was going to do. Billy had great plans.

Molly said nothing to the new member of their party, but she reached out her hand and patted the little cotton-covered shoulder. She looked about at the dark town and the hills, and drew a deep breath. This was real, tangible. She felt at home in it, and she was adequate to all that its conditions might bring forth. Above all, she was confident here. Graham and his ideas seemed to her at the moment quite nebulous and phantom-like.

"Let's go to the Little Nugget," she suggested suddenly.

They turned to retrace their steps. As they passed an open doorway, a big man darted out with unnatural agility and seized the Kid by the scruff of the neck.

"I beg your pardon, miss, whom I am overjoyed to meet. Standing as I do _in loco parentis_, the claims of the rising generation constrain me to postpone that more intimate acquaintance which your attractions demand of my desire. Come along here, you!" and he dragged the Kid, struggling and crying out, into the dark cabin.

"Ain't he great?" cried Billy, with real enthusiasm. "Ain't he just? They ain't a man in th' whole Northwest as can sling the langwidge that man can when he tries. You just ought to see him when he cuts loose, you just ought."

"Who is he?" asked Molly.

"Him? What, him? He's Moroney!"

His tone denied the need of further question. They entered the saloon.

The first half hour of Molly's evening in the Little Nugget was constrained. Up to this point she had met the men of the camp under extraordinary circumstances. Now she was called upon to face them in their time of relaxation and accustomed comfort. Such moments of leisure crystallize for us men everywhere our opinions of people. Anybody is welcome to sail with us, hunt with us, fish with us, ride with us, work with us, provided he is personally agreeable and understands the game. We are not so undiscriminating when it comes to a study fire and an easy chair. Translate the study fire and the easy chair to the Little Nugget and a quiet game, and you will see one reason for the constraint. No unkindness was intended. The situation was merely, but inevitably, awkward for everybody.

In such emergencies as this, where a creature of coarser fibre would fail, Molly's hereditary fineness of instinct stood her in good stead. She saw intuitively the attitude she should take. In the first place, she held herself in the background, left the lead to others, behaved as if she suspected herself of being an intruder; so that the men suddenly felt themselves very paternal and adoptive.

In the second place, she encouraged them to show off; which they did with the utmost heartiness. The first embarrassment wore away before long, and Molly took her place in the corner of the bar with the tacit approval of every man in the room.

The remainder of the evening was enjoyable. Some features of it would scarcely have impressed a refined Easterner favorably, for these were rough men, with crude tastes and passions. Once having accepted the girl as one of themselves, they lapsed to some extent, though not entirely, into their accustomed manner. It is a little difficult sometimes to interpret the West in terms of the East. An act which in the older country would be significant of too licensed freedom, on the frontier is a matter of course. Everything depends on the point of view and the attitude of mind.

Around Molly Lafond seethed a constantly changing group of men. They joked boisterously at one another and at her. The standard of wit was the saying of insulting things with a laugh that showed that the remark held in itself something of facetious sarcasm. Through thinner skins it would have bitten cruelly. Behind this lively group sat another, more silent, smoking the amused pipe of contemplation, all alert to the chances of conversational battle, ready to jump up and enter the lists whenever a bright idea suggested itself. In the corner just behind the bar, lurked Black Mike, keeping a sinister eye on Frosty's dispensations. The faro dealer called his cards imperturbably over his scantily patronized game. Occasionally someone, glowing with the good-natured excitement of jesting, would break away from the laughing group, and, standing the while, would stake a few red chips on a turn or so of the cards.

Peter, obsessed of some sudden and doggish affection, ceased his restless wanderings. He took up his position, resting on one hip, both hind legs to one side, directly beneath Molly's feet. There his shaggy head was of such a height that the girl could just reach it with the point of her shoe. From time to time, when the exigency demanded such a pose, she looked down prettily, and stirred the animal's button ears with her little foot. On such occasions Peter gravely rolled his eyes upward and wriggled his stump of a tail.

A young fellow by the name of Dave Kelly stood nearest her. He was a handsome young fellow, with a laughing boyish face. As time went on, he became more and more elated and sure of himself. Occasionally, when the press of men behind would push him forward, he would reach across the girl to regain his balance. Once he put his hand lightly on the point of her shoulder. He paused, with a strange delicious thrill at the feel of the round young arm under the loose stuff of the gown, which slipped beneath his grasp to emphasize the smoothness of the skin. Aware of the touch, she looked toward him for a minute, laughing. Somehow it gave him a strange feeling of intimacy with her, inexplicable, subtle. Without knowing why he did so, he felt his own shoulder underneath his loose flannel shirt. It gave the same impression, only rougher, coarser.

There suddenly sprang into his mind a sense of physical kinship between himself and her. He took frequent opportunities of repeating the contact, always lightly, always with the same delicious thrill. At each touch the girl turned to him for a vaguely smiling instant. She was absorbed in the men about her. The youth at her side had fallen silent, but her good nature extended to everybody.

Late in the evening somebody suggested that Frosty had been singularly unemployed. Glasses were filled. Molly's was handed to her.

"I don't want any," said she.

"It'll do y' good," "Try her," "Aw, come on!" urged a dozen voices.

She sipped a little. It tasted to her like liquid fire, with a strange gagging property as it reached the region of the epiglottis. She sputtered and choked.

"Ugh!" she shuddered. "Ugh! I couldn't get a glass of that stuff down if it killed me." She shut her eyes and shivered with a pretty disgust. "I simply can't," she repeated.

"Ain't ye got anything else, Frosty?" they cried reproachfully. "That stuff's purty rank fer a lady, that's right. Skirmish around thar, an' see what y' kin discover."

Frosty skirmished around, and finally bobbed up, red-faced, with a bottle of some light wine. Molly drank this slowly, with little more satisfaction. Some people never care for the taste of anything with alcohol in it, and the cheap wine had more than the suspicion of a wire edge. But she liked the warm glow that followed, and she found that in a moment or so she was much pleased with herself.

"Give me another of those," she smiled to Frosty, holding out the empty glass. The men chuckled. This was something like.

Molly drank the other glass. In a few minutes she felt sleepy. "I'm going to turn in," she said abruptly, and slid down on the unsuspecting Peter. They disentangled the trouble with merriment. Molly consoled Peter. The room was full of noise and light.

"May I take you over?" Kelly was asking in her ear. She nodded assent. The other men looked chagrined. It had not occurred to them.

Dave Kelly and Molly stepped gayly from the heated, garish saloon into the still night. The contrast made them feel yet gayer. They remarked on the stars and the moon, to do which it became necessary to look upward and slacken their steps. He was very close to her. He slipped his arm about her waist, his great hand resting firmly beneath her small bust, and they stumbled on together in breathless silence. He felt very bold and elated and happy.

Suddenly she looked down with an air of mock surprise. "What is this?" she cried, lifting one of Dave's fingers and letting it fall. "Why, it looks like your hand!"

"That's so!" grinned Dave.

"I wonder how that could have got there!"

Dave, finding himself unequal to persiflage, made no reply. She nestled up to him a little and sighed. She liked it. She had not the slightest idea that there was anything out of the way in it. Why should she? Morals, as we understand them, she had never been taught. They slowly approached the wagon, which during the day had been dragged to a less conspicuous but more distant locality.

Ah, Molly, Molly, those wings are very tired!

At the moment when Kelly first pressed the girl to him, he experienced a sudden lessening of her charm. It was not that she was less feminine, or that, in his eyes, she had lost any moral excellence by her easy surrender. Dave had probably as rudimentary ideas of the finer moralities as Molly herself. But one very definite element of her attraction had been given up--that of mystery, of remoteness, of difference between herself and him. She was no longer a creature of a wonderful and other sphere; she had become the female of his species.

All this was subtle and slight and quite unappreciated and unanalyzed by Dave himself. But the keen intuition of the girl discovered it. She felt the difference. Suddenly she became aware of the fact that whatever a woman gives to a man takes something from her attraction, and adds something to his. With the discovery, she resolutely put his hand away.

"That's enough of that," she said in the sensible voice which some women use so effectually.

Dave, unwilling to let the sensation go before he had drained it, attempted to seize her by force. She slipped away and ran like a deer to her wagon, gleaming white through the darkness. Dave sprang in pursuit. At the instant Peter, who had followed unperceived, leaped with a growl and fastened his teeth into Dave's cowhide boot. The miner paused a moment undecided, and then, his natural good nature coming to his rescue, he laughed. An answering laugh echoed from the direction of the wagon.

"That's a pretty trick," he called, trying to disengage Peter's jaws. Peter shook his head savagely and growled.

"You ought to learn to run," came the voice from the safety of the wagon.

"Run!" laughed Dave. "Run with a dawg hangin' to you? Call him and see if you can get him to leave go."

"Dog?" repeated the voice in puzzled tones.

"Yes, dog--this yere Peter. He seems to have took up with you-all. He's got me by th' laig!"

Molly reappeared cautiously. Then she saw Peter, and advanced boldly. The two young people looked at the eager and determined little dog, and laughed with great good nature. Their crisis had passed, fortunately without harm to either. Molly took Peter by the collar. Peter at once let go.

"Good night," said Molly decidedly to Dave.

"Good night," said Dave, and turned back.

Molly walked on to the wagon, closely followed by Peter. As she climbed in, she turned and caught sight of the little animal, eyeing her wistfully.

"Want to come in?" said she.

Peter jumped to the whiffletree, then upon the seat, then into the wagon. Molly followed.

"Peter," said she, "we won't do that any more. I don't believe it's a good scheme. What do you think, dog?"

Peter wagged his stump of a tail, but as it was quite dark, this expression of approval was lost. "I hope he won't say anything about it," she went on reflectively. "But if he does"--she tossed her head--"much good may it do any of them!" Then, after some time, "Peter, let's go to sleep."

Peter whined with content.

XIX

THE BROAD WHITE ROAD

Copper Creek had begun as a half-way house, and had ended as a camp. Thus the hotel was its oldest structure.

Situated about half way between Rockerville and Custer, on the old Spring Creek trail, it often happened that the stage running from Rapid to the last-named town would stop for the evening meal, or even for the night, at the little log structure which Bill Martin had been sagacious enough to erect there. The soil was good for potatoes, which was lucky, for Bill Martin could never have prospered as a hotel keeper pure and simple; because purity, simplicity, and temperance principles have nothing to do with a Western inn. Bill cooked, made beds, and raised potatoes. Then a fortuitous "grub staker" discovered the Great Snake lode. A town sprang up in the night, so Bill Martin hired Black Jack and built additions. And finally, since his food was good and cheap, it came to be the proper thing to eat late dinners at two dollars a week in the long dining-room of Bill Martin's new building. After the Little Nugget, a later but more enterprising venture, Bill Martin's Prairie Dog, with its small office, its big eating room, its little square bedrooms above the office, and its ancient and musty copies of distant journals, was acknowledged to be the most important institution of the place.

From the narrow, roofless stoop its proprietor looked out tranquilly on the growth of the camp. He was a tall, cadaverous, facetious individual, slightly stooped, with thin impassive face, deep eyes, and a beard that seemed always just two days old. He spoke with a drawl that was at first natural, but later, as the quaint old fellow grew to appreciate its humorous qualities, it took on a faint color of affectation. He adopted always the paternal attitude, as was clearly his right.

Bill Martin was probably the only man who could have told you the history of Copper Creek, for he had been, through all of its changes of population, the one stable character. First came the original "grub staker" and a score more like him--impecunious, giving, many of them, their labor and experience, in exchange for tools and provisions furnished them by a speculator in the towns. The speculator took half of what was found. These men were hardy, bold, enduring, skilful. They grubbed about in the hills with the keen restless instinct of ants over a mould of earth, moving rapidly, pausing often, lighting finally, with an accuracy that to the outsider would have seemed something preternatural, on the one quartz vein of the many, or the one significant lead in the multitude of systems that seamed the country in all directions. Thereupon they staked out claims with white pine posts, and blasted little troughs to show milk-white quartz or red ore filling. And finally they disappeared, like bats before daylight, leaving not an echo of themselves to recall their presence to the hills in which they had toiled.

Their places were taken by the speculator, the miner with a little money, the small capitalist willing to invest and not unwilling to work with his own hands. These men paid a certain modest amount to the first discoverers for the chance to take chances on the embryo mines. The prospector never had the patience to wait, or scheme, or develop, to the justification of a better price. The excitement of the chase was his. He was a master who sketched, in bold comprehensive strokes, the design of a work which men patient in the little details must fill in with color and value. Having thus outlined the lifetimes of men, the prosperity of the whole great industry that was to be, he was content to move on to where a new and virgin country offered a fresh canvas to his creative genius. He was always poor, but he never pitied himself.

The new owner, then, represented the investor. He expected no immediate returns. He was willing to wait. Meanwhile he spent as much time in going over the fifty thousand square yards of his one claim as his predecessor had in examining the whole twenty-five hundred square miles of the district. He carefully analyzed the lead, its tendencies, its virtues, its defects. When he had fully satisfied his mind, he sank neat, square-timbered shafts, from fifty to two hundred feet in depth, from which ramified tunnels, both across and along the drift. The debris he piled outside, without attempting to save its value. In this manner, gradually, he came to possess points of view from which the next purchaser of the claim could plainly see its worth and possibilities.

For this second proprietor never expected to make his profit from the ore. That accrued later, and to another man. When the country became a little known, the other man would happen along; he, in his turn, would be willing to invest; and the present holder of the property, the middleman in this queerly constructed industry, could measure the success of his undertaking by the difference between the price he had paid to the original "grub staker" and the price he now received from the future developer. Meanwhile, he worked hard with his hands.

Thus the camp presented the phenomenon of a community prospering on nothing more tangible than hope. When the cabins began to crowd thicker and thicker between the walls of the little gulch, Bill Martin had been forced to give up agriculture because of lack of room; so that Copper Creek produced absolutely nothing, not even potatoes. Every cent of its present and actual value came from outside, either with the men themselves, or with some investor who brought in the price of wages for a contemplated improvement. Only as long as there existed in men's minds the comparative certainty of a future stamp mill, by which the quartz could be made to give up its treasure, would the machinery of life run well. Hope depended on confidence.

The miners built themselves cabins in which to live, and so there came into being a town. It was a dusty, new little town; but venerable in its age--old air from the first. The cabins themselves were low and dark, flanking the street closely, a sort of monotone of brown, by which the stable, the saloon, and the hotel were thrown into stronger relief; the one by virtue of its wide-open door, the other two because of their porch and painted front respectively. These structures held the eye. One noticed the cane chairs on the stoop; the bench outside the saloon; the dumped down saddles, the hay dust, the lazy loafers about the stable. And always one drew aside instinctively to the edge of the broad, white, dusty street, as if to let pass a horse race, or a train of cars, or something equally swift and irresistible.

The camp lived on each side of that river of blinding white; never in it. Later, perhaps, when Copper Creek reached the industrial or producing stage, and became domestic, it would be a Rubicon over which contending armies of small boys would dispute the supremacy of the north and south side of the town. Now it wore a constant air of being quite empty. Perhaps nothing was more characteristic, struck the eye more forcibly, lingered longer in the memory as the dominant note in the impressionistic picture of the place, than this single silent road; not even the sombre cabins, or the great pine-clad hills, or the clear mountain air imparting a quality of its own to the very appearance of things, or the little singing brook that ran behind one row of cabins and the stable, or the eagles wheeling and screaming so far up in the blue Western sky. The town seemed to draw back on either side of the road to avoid spoiling its effect, over-awed by it, humbled by its dignified solemnity. Copper Creek would have been willing to have its history recounted by that road, which was primarily, indeed, the cause of its being.

And Bill Martin, in the cane chair of his stoop, the only man capable of recounting that history, owed most of his unique knowledge of events to the ancient thoroughfare. Men came from the lower gulch, abode their brief hour, and disappeared into the thin air of the upper curve. From one wing, across the white stage, out by the other wing, the actors changed; the setting remained always the same.

Now each morning early the old innkeeper saw defile before his windows the Optimist, intent on developing his dream. A motley crew, these Optimists, having little in common with one another but the inner spirit of hope. There was Old Mizzou, short, squat, grizzled, good-natured, with back-sloping, bald forehead, and a seven dollar suit of clothes, from which he suffered severely, because it was "store made." He owned a little claim over beyond Ragged Top, on which he made infinitesimal progress. No one seemed to believe it amounted to much, Old Mizzou least of all, but he was old, and he had lived the life, and so he liked to amuse himself still in playing at the game; contented to chip away a few slivers of rock in order to persuade himself that he was a miner, to sip a little whiskey so that men might honor him as a drinker, to talk so loudly from his warm corner in the Little Nugget that the sound of his voice might persuade him he was a bold bad man; although everyone knew that Old Mizzou had never harmed a fly.

And then again, there was Jack Graham, the Easterner, but never the tenderfoot. His selections of claims had been judicious. He was not afraid of work. He had the good sense of the timely word, so the men trusted and liked him, even though he was college-bred and quiet-mannered and a little aloof.

And again, there was Dave Kelly, who was red-cheeked, and blushed, but was a good man for all that; and Cheyenne Harry, who owned two claims and never did any work on them; and Houston, the strongest man in the camp; and, of course, the great Moroney. These, and a hundred like them, were actual miners, wielding sledge, drill and pick. Besides them were others--Frosty, and the faro man, and Bill Martin, and the stable boys, and the proprietor of the New York Emporium, all of whom lived in ministering to the wants of a prosperity that was still in the air.

Each morning the camp emptied itself into the hills. The claims were usually held in partnership; when they were not, two of the men "traded work," so that they could labor in pairs. At rude forges near the shafts they sharpened their heavy steel drills, resembling crowbars, beating the red-hot point out with the sledges. Then one held, while the other struck--crash! Turn, crash! Turn, crash! And so on, in unwearying succession, until the hole became so clogged with the powdered rock and the water poured in to cool the drill, that it had to be spooned out with a special T-shaped instrument.