The Helpers

From this point the competing railways parallel each other, and at the junction the trains on either line are within whistle call. To the engineer's question the telegraph operator nodded an affirmative.

"Yep; she's just gone by. That's her whistlin' for Emma now. What's the rush? – backed to beat her into Aspen?"

The engineer nodded in his turn, and signed the order for the right of way on the branch. A minute later the junction station was also a memory, and Jeffard was straining his eyes for a glimpse of the passenger train on the other line. A short distance to the southward the rival lines meet and cross, exchanging river banks for the remainder of the run to Aspen. The passenger train was first at the crossing, and Jeffard had his glimpse as the engine slackened speed. Not to lose a rail-length in the hard-fought race, Jeffard's man ran close to the crossing to await his turn, and the light engine came to a stand within pistol shot of the train, which was slowly clanking over the crossing-frogs. Jeffard slipped from his seat and went over to the engineer's gangway. It would be worth something if he could make sure that Garvin was on the train.

The espial was rewarded and punished in swift sequence. The trucks of the smoking-car were jolting over the crossing, and Jeffard saw the head and shoulders of the insane one filling an open window. It was conspicuously evident that Garvin had drained the bottle to the frenzy mark. He was yelling like a lost soul, and shaking impotent fists at the halted engine. Jeffard's eye measured the distance to the moving car. It was but down one embankment and up the other.

"That's my man," he said quickly to the engineer. "Do you suppose I could make it across?"

"Dead easy," was the reply; and Jeffard swung down to the step of the engine to drop off. The impulse saved his life. As he quitted his hold a hairy arm bared to the elbow was thrust out of the window next to the yelling maniac. There was a glint of sun-rays on polished metal, and a pistol ball bit out the corner of the cab under the engineer's arm-rest. Jeffard desisted, and climbed to his place when the moving train gathered headway.

"Damn a crazy loon, anyway," said the engineer, much as one might pass the time of day. "They'd ought to have sense enough to take his gun away from him."

Jeffard explained in a sentence. "It wasn't the crazy one; it was one of the two cut-throats who are kidnaping him – the fellows I'm trying to beat."

"The fellers you're goin' to beat," corrected the engineer. "We'll head 'em off now if the Ninety-seven goes in on three legs. The gall o' the cusses! – why, they might ha' shot somebody!"

From the crossing in the lower valley neither line encounters any special obstacle to speed; and under equal conditions a locomotive race up the Roaring Fork might be an affair of seconds and rail lengths for the victor. But the light engine with regardless orders speedily distanced the passenger train with stops to make; and when the smokes of the mountain-girt town at the head of the valley came in sight, the big engineer pulled his watch and shouted triumphant: —

"Eleven-forty, – and their time's twelve-five. We'll be twenty minutes to the good in spite o'" —

It is conceivable that he would have used a strong figure, but the depravity of things inanimate took the word out of his mouth. There was a tearing crash to the rear; a shock as if a huge projectile had overtaken them; and the flying locomotive came to earth like an eagle with a mangled wing. It was a broken axle under the tender; a tested steel shaft which had outlived the pounding race across the mountains only to fall apart in the last level mile of the home stretch. Jeffard clambered down with the enginemen, and saw defeat, crushing and definite, in the wreck under the tender. But the big engineer was a man for a crisis. One glance at the wreck sufficed, and the fireman got his orders in shot-like sentences.

"Up with you, Tom, and give her the water, – both injectors! Drop me the sledge, and get the pinch-bar under the head o' that couplin'-pin when I drive it up. Give her a scoop 'r two o' coal – 'nough to run in with. By cripes! we'll beat 'em yet!"

The minced oath came from beneath the engine, and was punctuated by mighty upward blows of the sledge hammer on the coupling-pin, whose head was rising by half-inch impulses from its seat in the footplate. Jeffard saw and understood. The engineer meant to cut loose from the wreck and finish the run without the tender.

"Use me if you can," he offered. "What shall I do?"

"Climb up there and help Tom with that bar. If we can pull this pin we're in it yet."

Jeffard laid hold with the fireman, and together they pried at the reluctant pin. It yielded at length, but when the engineer had disconnected the water and air hose and mounted to his place in the cab, the roar of the oncoming passenger train was ajar in the air.

"You stay with the wreck, Tom, and flag it!" was the final command; and then to Jeffard, as the engine shot away from its disabled member: "How much time have you got to have?"

"I don't know. It depends upon how much those fellows have found out, and how drunk my partner is. At the worst, a minute or two will serve."

It was still to be had, but in the very yard a thrown switch intervened, and the small margin vanished. The passenger train was in, and Jeffard saw defeat again; but he dropped from the locomotive and ran up the yard, forgetting in the heat of it that he had elided two meals in the twenty-four hours. The final dash brought its reward. He took the first vehicle that offered and reached the principal hotel in time to see Garvin and his keepers descend from a carriage at the entrance.

"Yes, sir; in one moment. Those three fellows who came in just now? They've gone up to their room. Be with us over night?"

Thus the hotel clerk in answer to Jeffard's gasping inquiry. To whom the proletary, fighting desperately for some semblance of equanimity: —

"I – I'll be here indefinitely; no, I have no baggage; I'll pay in advance. Can you give me the room next to these men? The crazy one is my partner, and I'll be responsible for him."

The clerk hesitated, but Jeffard won his cause without knowing it by the necessary parade of bank-notes in the pecuniary affair.

"Certainly, sir; the boy will show you up. You won't trouble him? All right; Number Nineteen – second floor, third door to the right. Dinner is served, when you're ready."

If Jeffard had forgotten his directions the uproar in Number Eighteen would have guided him. Garvin's voice, uplifted in alternate malediction and maudlin bathos, jarred upon the air of the corridor. Jeffard paused. The long chase was ended and only a pine door intervened between pursuer and pursued. He laid a hand on the doorknob. His breath came hard, and the veins in his forehead were like knotted whipcords. While he paused some broken babblings from within wrought a swift change in him. The knotted veins relaxed and he laughed, not mirthfully but with a cynical upcurve of the lip. His hand slipped from the doorknob, and he stole away, cat-like, to let himself noiselessly into the adjoining room.

There was a door of communication between the two rooms, bolted on Jeffard's side, and with the knob removed. He went on his knees to the square hole through the lock, but the angle of vision included no more than a blank patch of the opposite wall. Then he laid his ear to the aperture. Out of the jangling discord beyond the door came fragmentary lucidities pieceable together into a strand of sequence. Garvin had told all he knew, or all he could remember, and the robbery paused at the trivial detail of the most feasible route over the mountains from Aspen. But to make sure, and possibly to provide against the contingency of having to eliminate Garvin, some rude map was needed; and this one of the plunderers was evidently trying to draw under instructions from the witling. At the mention of a map, Jeffard rummaged his pockets without taking his ear from the door. From one of them he drew a crumpled bit of paper, thumbed and crease-broken. It was Garvin's map of the claim and the trail, passed over for inspection in the hollow of a certain lambent evening months before and never returned.

Who shall say what was behind the inscrutable darkling of the eyes of him when he returned the paper to his pocket and bent to listen with four senses lending their acuteness to the fifth? Was it a softening memory of the loving-kindnesses of one James Garvin to a man soul-sick and body-wasted, snatched as a charred brand out of a fire of his own kindling? Or was it the stirring of a ruthless devil of self; a devil never more than dormant in any heart insurgent; a fell demon of the pit whose arousing waits only upon opportunity, whose power is to transform pity into remorseless ingratitude and ruth into relentless greed? There was room for the alternative.

"Here; take another nip o' this and pull yourself together," – it was the voice of the hawk-faced one. "If you wasn't such a howlin' idiot you'd see that we're the only friends you've got. I keep a-tellin' you that that slick pardner o' yours was on that wild ingine, and if you don't sink a shaft on your wits he's a-goin' to do you up cold!"

The appeal brought blood as a blow. The crash of an overturned chair was followed by an explosion of cursings, the outcries of a soul in torment. And when the madman choked in the fullness of it, a voice said: "Pick up that chair, Pete, and pull him down. He'll be seein' things in a minute, and that'll settle the whole shootin'-match." There was a struggle short but violent, the jar of a forcible downsetting, and a sound as of one flinging his arms abroad upon the table. After which the tormented one became brokenly articulate. What he said is unrecordable. With maudlin oath and thick-tongued ravings he rehearsed his fancied wrongs and breathed forth promises of vengeance, calling down the wrath of the spheres upon one Henry Jeffard and his posterity to the third and fourth generation.

"That's all right; I'd kill him on sight, if I was you. But just now you're killin' time, instid. First you know, he'll be on his way acrost the range, and then where'll you be? You don't even know that he didn't locate that claim before you came out. Git down to business and tell us where that valley is, if you ever knowed. You said it was on a creek" —

Jeffard rose and went softly across the room to sit on the edge of the bed. The unfathomable light was still in his eyes, and his thought wrought itself into words.

"It's done; they'll wring it out of him, and then fling him aside like so much offal. I wonder if it is worth while to try to save it – for him. What good would it do him? – or, rather, what evil thing is there that it wouldn't make possible for him? What devil of curiosity led me to open this Pandora-box of responsibility? For I am responsible, first for the finding, and now for the keeping, and hereafter for what shall come of it. That is, if I save it – for him." He got upon his feet and tiptoed back to the door of communication, listening once more. The clamor had quieted down, and the scratching of a pen gnawed the silence. Then came the voice of the hawk-faced one.

"There she is; you sign your name right there and it'll be all right. It's the only way; you're too drunk to pull strings with that pardner o' yours, and we're goin' to stand by you, see? All we want is the authority."

Jeffard started back and made as if he would fling himself against the locked door. Then he thought better of it.

"That simplifies it," he mused, pacing up and down with noiseless steps. "He has signed away whatever right he had, and now it's my turn. If I pay the price I can checkmate them. But can I pay the price? Surely, if any man can; I, who have deliberately turned my back upon the world's approval for a much less thing. And in the end the money will atone."

A stir in the adjoining room admonished him that the time for action had come. He wheeled quickly and let himself into the corridor. A key was rattling in the lock of Number Eighteen as he passed, but he found the stair before the bolt was shot. In the lobby he stopped to ask a hurried question of a man who was opening his mail at the public writing-table. The question was answered curtly, but the man left his letters and went to the door to point the reply.

"I see it; thank you," said Jeffard; and went his way rapidly, with now and then a glance behind him as if to make sure that he was not followed.

In a few minutes he came back, walking slowly, with his head down and his hands in the pockets of the brown duck miner's coat. There was a knot of loungers in front of the hotel, gathered about the door and peering in; a group of curious ones, which grew by accretions from the by-passers. A disturbance of some sort was afoot in the lobby – two persuasive ones struggling peaceably with a drunken man, while the bystanders looked on with smiles pitying or cynical, each after his kind.

Jeffard pushed into the circle, and those who remarked him said that he seemed to see nothing but the struggling trio. Some of the onlookers were near enough to hear what he said to the two who were not drunk.

"The game is closed, gentlemen, and you are out of it. When you get on the ground you will find the claim located – in my name."

Two right hands made simultaneous backward dips, and two potential murderers apparently realized the folly of it at the same instant. But the drunken one spun around with his face ablaze, a fiercer madness than that of drink burning in his bloodshot eyes.

"You? You played the sneak an' located hit behind my back? In your name, d' ye say? – your name? Well, by God, you hain't got a name!"

A pistol cracked with the oath, and Jeffard put his hands to his head and pitched forward. The crowd fell back aghast, to surge inward again with a rush when the reaction came. Then a shout was raised at the door, and the haggard manslayer, cured now of all madness save that of fear, burst through the inpressing throng and disappeared.

CHAPTER XIX

Even in a Colorado mining town a shooting affray at midday in the lobby of the principal hotel creates more or less of a sensation, and it was fully fifteen minutes before the buzz of public comment subsided sufficiently to suffer Mr. Mark Denby to go back to his letters and telegrams. He had made one in the circle of onlookers; had seen and heard, and, now that the wounded man had been carried to his room and cared for, and the hunt was up and afield for the would-be murderer, was willing to forget. But a traveling salesman at the opposite blotting-pad must needs keep the pool astir.

"Say, wasn't that the most cold-blooded thing you ever saw? 'Y gad! I've heard that these Western towns were fearfully tough, but I had no idea a man wouldn't be safe to sit down and write his house in the lobby of a decent hotel. 'Pon my word, I actually heard the 'zip' of that bullet!"

Denby looked across at the hinderer of oblivion, and remembered that the salesman had been well to the rear of the battery in action. Wherefore he said, with a touch of the gravest irony: "You'll get used to it, after a bit. Suppose you take a spin around the block in the open air; that will doubtless steady your nerves so you can write the house without a quiver."

"Think it would? I believe I'll try it; I can't hold a pen still to save my life. But say, I might happen to run up against that fellow, and he might recognize me and think I was after him."

"In which case he would in all probability draw and quarter you and take your scalp for a memento. On second thought, I don't know but you're safer where you are."