The Plunderer

“He’s below,” the engineer answered, throwing over an arm, and watching the cage ascend with a car of ore.

It trundled away, and Dick stepped into the cage. The man appeared irresolute, and embarrassed.

“He’ll be up pretty soon, I think,” he ventured.

“Well, I’ll not wait for him,” Dick said. “Lower away.”

The man still stood, irresolute.

“Let her go, I said,” Dick called sharply, his usual patience of temper having gone.

“But–but–” halted the engineer. “Bill said to me, when he went down, says he: ‘You don’t let any one come below. Understand? I don’t care if it’s Townsend himself. Nobody comes down. You hold the cage, because I’ll send the shift up, and ‘tend to the firing myself.’”

For an instant Dick was enraged by this stubbornness, and turned with a threat, and said: “Who’s running this mine? I don’t care what he said. You haven’t understood him. Lower away there, I say, and be quick about it!”

The rails and engine room slid away from him. The cage slipped downward on its oiled bearings, as if reluctant, and the light above faded away to a small pin-point below, and then died in obscurity, as if the world had been blotted out. Only the sense of falling told him that he was going down, down, to the seven-hundred-foot level, and then he remembered that he had no candle. The cage came to a halt, and he fumbled for the guard bar, lifted it, and stepped out.

Straight ahead of him he saw a dim glow of light. With one hand on the wall he started toward it, approached it, and then, in the hollow of illumination saw something that struck him like a blow in the face. The hard, resounding clash of his heels on the rock underfoot stopped. His hands fell to his sides, as if fixed in an attitude of astonishment. Standing in the light beyond him stood Joan, with her hands raised, palms outward.

“Stop!” she commanded. “Stop! Stay where you are a moment!”

Amazed and bewildered, he obeyed mechanically, and comprehended rather than saw that, crouched on the floor of the drift beyond, his partner knelt with a watch in his hand, and in a listening attitude. Suddenly, as if all had been waiting for this moment, a dull tremor ran through the depths of the Croix d’Or. A muffled, beating, rending sound seemed to tear its way, vibrant, through the solid ledge. He leaped forward, understanding all at once, as if in a flash of illumination, what the woman he loved and his partner had been waiting for. It was the sound of the five-o’clock blasts from the Rattler, as it stole the ore from beneath their feet. It was the audible proof of Bully Presby’s theft.

“Joan! My Joan!” he said, leaping forward. “I should have spared you this!”

But she did not answer. She was leaning back against the wall of the tunnel, her hands outstretched in semblance of that cross whose name was the name of the mine–as if crucified on its cross of gold. The flaring lights of the candles in the sticks, thrust into the crevices around, lighted her pale, haggard face, and her white hands that clenched themselves in distress. She looked down at the giant who was slowly lifting himself from his knees, with his clear-cut face upturned; and the hollows, vibrant with silence, caught her whispered words and multiplied the sound to a sibilant wail.

“It’s true!” she said. “It’s true! You didn’t lie! You told the truth! My father–my father is a thief, and may God help him and me!”

CHAPTER XVIII

THE BULLY MEETS HIS MASTER

The ache and pain in her whole being was no greater than the colossal desire Dick had to comfort and shield her. He rushed toward her with his arms reached out to infold, but she pushed him back, and said hoarsely: “No! No! I sha’n’t let you! It would be an insult now!”

Her eyes were filled with a light he had never seen in them before, a commanding flame that held him in check and stupefied him, as he tried to reason why his love at that moment would be an insult. It did not dawn on him that he was putting himself in the position of one who was proffering silence for affection. All he knew was that everything in the world seemed against him, and, overstrained to the breaking point, he was a mere madman.

“You brought her here?” he hoarsely questioned Bill.

“I did.”

“And told her that her father was under us?”

“Yes.”

“And that I was to be kept above ground?”

“Of course, and I had a reason, because–”

He did not finish the sentence. The younger man shouted a furious curse, and lunged forward and struck at the same time. His feet, turning under a fragment of rock, twisted the directness of his blow so that it lost force; but its heavy spat on the patient face before him was like the crack of a pistol in that underground chamber.

Bill’s hands lifted impulsively, and then dropped back to his sides, hanging widely open. The flickering candlelight showed a slow red stream emerging slowly from one of his nostrils, and running down across the firm chin, and the pain-distorted lips. In his eyes was a hurt agony of reproach, as if the knife of a friend had been unexpectedly thrust into his heart. Dick’s arm, tensed by the insane anger of his mind, was drawn back to deal another blow, and seemed to stop half-way, impotent to strike that defenseless face before him.

“Why don’t you hit again, boy? I’ll not strike back! I have loved you too much for that!”

There was a world of misery and reproach in the quiet voice of the giant, whose tremendous physical power was such that he could have caught the younger man’s arm, and with one wrench twisted it to splintered bone. Before its echoes had died away another voice broke in, suffused with anguish, the shadows waving on the walls of gray rock twisted, and Joan’s hands were on his arm.

“Dick! Dick! Are you mad? Do you know what you are doing?”

He shook her hands from his arm, reeled against the wall, and raised his forearm across his eyes, and brushed it across, as if dazed and blinded by a rush of blood which he would sweep away. He had not noticed that in that staggering progress he had fallen full against a candlestick, and that it fell to the floor and lay there between them, with its flame slowly increasing as it formed a pool of grease. For the first time since he had spoken, the huge miner moved. He stepped forward, and ground the flame underfoot.

“There might be a stray cap around here somewhere,” he said.

His voice appeared to rouse the younger man, and bring him to himself. He stepped forward, with his hands behind him and his face still set, wild and drawn, and said brokenly: “Bill! Bill! Strike back! Do something! Old friend!”

“I cain’t,” came the reply, in a helpless monotone. “You know if it were any other man I’d kill him! But you don’t understand yet, and–”

“I made him bring me here,” Joan said, coming closer, until the shadows of the three were almost together. Her voice had a strange hopelessness in it, and yet a calm firmness. “He came to talk it over with me, on your account. Pleading your cause–begging me that, no matter what happened, I should not change my attitude toward you. Toward you, I say! He said your sense of honesty and loyalty to Sloan would drive you to demanding restitution even though it broke your heart. He said he loved you more than anything on earth, and begged me to help him find some way to spare–not me, or my father–but you!”

Dick tried to speak, but his throat restricted until he clutched it with his fingers, and his lips were white and hard.

“I did not believe that what he said was true,” the voice went on, coming as from depths of desolation and misery, and with dead levels dulled by grief beyond emotion. “I have believed in my father! I thought there must be some mistake. I demanded of your partner that he lay off his own shift, and bring me here where we might listen. Oh, it was true–it was true!”

She suddenly turned and caught the steel handle of a candlestick in her hand, and tore its long steel point from the crevice.

“But I’ve found the way,” she said. “I’ve found the way. You must come with me–now! Right now, I say. We shall have this over with, and then–and then–I shall go away from here; for always!”

“Not that,” Dick said, holding his hands toward her. “Not that, Joan! What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to my father. He, too, must be spared. He must give it back. It must never be known. I must save him disgrace. It must be done to-night–now!”

She started down the drift toward the cage, walking determinedly, and Dick’s lips opened again to beg her to come back; but Bill’s hand was on his shoulder, and his grave and kindly voice in his ear.

“Go with her, boy. She’s right. It’s the only way. Have it over with to-night. If you don’t you’ll break her heart, as well as your own.”

They followed her to the cage, and the big miner gave the hoisting bell. The cage floated upward, and into the pale twilight. Heedless of anything around, they walked across the yard, and turned into the roadway leading down the gulch.

“Will you come?” she asked, turning toward Bill.

“No,” he said slowly. “I’m not needed. Besides, I couldn’t stand another blow to-day!”

It was the only reference he ever made to it, but it went through Dick with more pain than he had administered. Almost sullenly he followed her down the road, wordless, bewildered, and despairing. Unable to spare her, unable to shield her, unable to comfort her, and unable to be other than true to his benefactor, he plodded after her into the deeper shadows of the lower gulch, across the log bridge spanning the brawling mountain stream, and up into the Rattler camp. Her steps never faltered as she advanced straight to the office door, and stepped inside.

The bookkeepers were gone, and the inner door ajar. She threw it open, walked in, and closed it after Dick, who sustained a deadly anger against the man who sat at his desk, and as they entered looked up with a sharp stare of surprise.

Something in the attitude of the two appeared to render him more alert, more hard, more uncompromising and he frowned, as Dick had seen him frown before when angry men made way for him and his dominant mastery. His daughter had stopped in front of the closed door, and eyed him with eyes no less determined than his own.

“Your men are working under the Croix d’Or,” she said coldly, without wasting words in preliminary.