The Plunderer

The applicant said no more until after he had gone into the cabin and eaten his fill, after which he insisted on clearing away the dishes, and then rejoined them in a less-tired mood. He squatted down on the edge of the porch, where they sat staring at the shadows of the glorious night, and appeared to be thoughtful for a time, while they were silently amused.

“You’re thinkin’ it’s no good, are you?” he suddenly asked, brandishing his pipe at Dick. “Well, I said you were a fool. Take it kindly, young feller. I’m an old man, but I know. You’ve been good to me. I didn’t come here to butt my nose in, but I know her better than you do. Say!” He pivoted on his hips, and tapped an emphatic forefinger on the warped planks beneath in punctuation. “There never was a set of owners shell-gamed like them that had the Croix d’Or! There never was a good property so badly handled. Two superintendents are retired and livin’ on the money they stole from her. One millman’s bought himself a hotel in Seattle with what he got away with. There was enough ore packed off in dinner-pails from the Bonanza Chute to heel half the men who tapped it. They were always lookin’ for more of ’em. They passed through a lead of ore that would have paid expenses, on the six-hundred-foot level, and lagged it rather than hoist it out. I know! I’ve seen the cars come up out of the shaft with a man standin’ on the hundred foot to slush ’em over with muddy sump water so the gold wouldn’t show until the car men could swipe the stuff and dump it out of the tram to be picked up at night. It ain’t the rich streaks that pays. It’s the four-foot ledge that runs profit from two bits to a couple of dollars a ton. That’s what showed on the six-hundred level. Get it?”

The partners by this time were leaning eagerly forward, half-inclined to believe all that had been told them, yet willing to discount the gabbling of the old man and find content. Until bedtime he went on, and they listened to him the next morning, when the slow dawn crept up, and decided to take the plunge. And so it was that Dick wrote a long statement of the findings to his backer in New York and told him that he was going to chance it and open the Croix d’Or again until he was satisfied, either that it would not pay to work, or would merit larger expenditure.

Once again the smoke belched from the hoisting house of the Cross, and the throb of the pumps came, hollow and clanking, from the shaft below. A stream of discolored water swirled into the creek from the waste pipes, and the rainbow trout, affrighted and disgusted, forsook its reaches and sought the pools of the river into which it emptied.

Slowly they gained on its depths, and each day the murk swam lower, and the newly oiled cage waited for its freshly stretched cable, one which had happened to be coiled in the store-house. The compressor shivered and vibrated as the pistons drove clean, sweet air through the long-disused pipes, and at last the partners knew they could reach the anticipated six-hundred-foot level and form their own conclusions.

“Well, here goes,” said Bill, grinning from under his sou’wester as they entered the cage with lamps in hand. “We’ll see how she looks if the air pipes aren’t broken.”

They saw the slimy black sides of the shaft slip past them as Bells Park dropped them into the depths, and felt the cage slow down as he saw his pointer above the drum indicate the approach of the six-hundred-foot level. They stepped out cautiously, whiffed the air, and knew that the pipes, which had been protected by the water, were intact, and that they had no need to fear foul air. The rusted rails, slime-covered, beneath their rubber boots, glowed a vivid red as they inspected the timbering above, and saw that the sparse stulls, caps, and columns were still holding their own, and that the heavy porphyritic formation would scarcely have given had the timbers rotted away. Dank, glistening walls and a tremulous waving blackness were ahead of them as they cautiously invaded the long-deserted precincts, scraping and striking here and there with their prospector’s picks in search of the lost lead.

“About two hundred feet from the shaft, Bells said,” Dick commented. “And this must be about the place where they cut through pay ore in search of another lobe of the Bonanza Chute. What thieves they were!”

He suddenly became aware that his companion was not with him, and whirled round. Back of him shone a tiny spark of flaring light, striving to illumine the solid blackness. He paused expectantly, and a voice came bellowing through the dark:

“Here it is. The old man’s right, I think. This looks like ore to me.”

Dick hastened back, and assisted while they broke away the looser pieces of green rock, glowing dully, and filled their sample sacks.

Three hours later they stood over the scales in the log assay-house above, and congratulated each other.

“It’ll pay!” Dick declared gleefully. “Not much, but enough to justify going on with the work. I am glad I wrote Sloan that I should draw on him, and now we’ll go ahead and hire a small gang to set the mill and the Cross in shape.”

They were like boys when they crossed to the engine house and told the news to the hard-worked engineer, who chuckeled softly and asserted that he had “told them so.”

“Now, the best way for you to get a gang around here,” he said, “is to go down to Goldpan and tell ‘The Lily’ you want her to pass the word, or stick a sign up in her place saying what men, and how many, you want.”

“Sounds like a nice name,” Mathews commented.

“The Lily?” questioned Dick, anxious as to who this camp character could be.

“Sure,” the engineer rasped, as if annoyed by their ignorance. “Ain’t you never heard of her? Well, her right name, so they tell, is Lily Meredith. She owns the place called the High Light. Everybody knows her. She’s square, even if she does run a dance hall and rents a gamblin’ joint. She don’t stand for nothin’ crooked, Lily don’t. She pays her way, and asks no favors. Go down and tell her you want men. They all go there, some time or another.”

He stooped over to inspect the fire under the small boiler he was working, and straightened up before he went on. Through the black coating on his face, he appeared thoughtful.

“Best time to see The Lily and get action is at night. All the day-shift men hang around the camp then, and, besides that, they’ve got a new batch of placer ground about a mile and a half over the other side, and lots of them fellers come over. Want to go to-day?”

The partners looked at each other, as if consulting, and then Dick said: “Yes. I think the sooner the better.”

Bells Park pulled the visor of his greasy little cap lower over his eyes, and stepped to the door.

“Come out here onto the yard,” he said, and they followed. “Go down to the Rattler, then bear off to the right. The trail starts in back of the last shanty on the right-hand side. You see that gap up yonder? Not the big one, but the narrow one.” He pointed with a grimy hand. “Well, you go right through that and drop down, and you’ll see the camp below you. It’s a stiff climb, but the trail’s good, and it’s just about two miles over there. It’s so plain you can make it home by moonlight.”

Without further ceremony or advice, he returned into the boiler-room, and the partners, after but slight preparations, began their journey.

It was a stiff climb! The sun had set, and the long twilight was giving way to darkness when they came down the trail into the upper end of the camp. Some embryo artist was painfully overworking an accordion, while a dog rendered melancholy by the unmusical noise, occasionally accompanied him with prolonged howls. A belated ore trailer, with the front wagon creaking under the whine of the brakes and the chains of the six horses clanking, lurched down from a road on the far side of the long, straggling street, and passed them, the horses’ heads hanging as if overwork had robbed them of all stable-going spirit of eagerness.

The steady, booming “clumpety-clump! clumpety-clump!” of a stamp-mill on a shoulder of a hill high above the camp, drowned the whir and chirp of night insects, and from the second story of a house they passed they heard the crude banging of a piano, and a woman’s strident voice wailing, “She may have seen better da-a-ys,” with a mighty effort to be pathetic.

“Seems right homelike! Don’t it?” Bill grinned and chuckled. “That’s one right nice thing about minin’. You can go from Dawson to Chiapas, and a camp’s a camp! Always the same. I reckon if you went up the street far enough you’d find a Miner’s Home Saloon, maybe a Northern Light or two, and you can bet on there bein’ a First Class.”

The High Light proved to be the most pretentious resort in Goldpan. For one thing it had plate-glass windows and a gorgeous sign painted thereon. Its double doors were wide, and at the front was a bar with a brass rail that, by its very brightness, told only too plainly that the evening’s trade had not commenced. Two bartenders, one with a huge crest of hair waved back, and the other with his parted in the middle, plastered low and curled at the ends, betokened diverse taste in barbering. A Chinese was giving the last polish to a huge pile of glasses, thick and heavy.

On the other side of the room, behind a roulette wheel, a man who looked more like a country parson than a gambler sat reading a thumbed copy of Taine’s “English Literature.” Three faro layouts stretched themselves in line as if watching for newcomers, and in the rear a man was lighting the coal-oil lamps of the dance hall. It was separated from the front part of the house by an iron rail, and had boxes completely around an upper tier and supported by log pillars beneath, and a tiny stage with a badly worn drop curtain.

“Is the boss here?” Bill asked, pausing in front of the man with a wave.

“Who do you mean–Lily?” was the familiar reply.

“Yes.”

“I think she’s over helpin’ nurse the Widder Flannery’s sick kids this afternoon. They’ve got chicken pox. Might go over there and see her if you’re in a rush.”

“We didn’t say we wanted to borrow money,” Bill retorted to the jocular latter part of the bartender’s speech. “What time will she be here?”

“About ten, I guess,” was the more courteous reply.

The partners walked out and past the row of buildings until they came to a general store, where they occupied themselves in making out an order for supplies and arranging for their delivery on the following day. The trader was a loquacious individual with the unmistakable “Yankee” twang and nasal whine of the man from that important speck of the United States called New England.

When they again turned into the street, the long twilight had been replaced by night, and on the tops of the high peaks to the westward the light of the full moon was beginning to paint the chill white with a shining glow. The street was filled with men, most of them scorning the narrow board walks and traversing the roadway. A pandemonium of sound was robbing the night of peace through music, of assorted character, which boiled forth from open doors in discordant business rivalry, but underneath it all was the steady, dull monotone of the stamp-mill, remorselessly beating the ore as if in eternal industry.

“Hardly know the place now, eh?” Bill said, as they entered the open doors of the High Light. “It certainly keeps gettin’ more homelike. Camp must be makin’ money, eh?”

Dick did not answer. He was staring at a woman who stood at the lower end of the bar outside, and talking to a man with a medicine case in his hand. He surmised that she must be The Lily, and was astonished. He had expected the customary brazen appearance of other camp women he had known in his years of wandering; the hard-faced, combatative type produced by greed. Instead, he saw a woman of perhaps thirty years of age, or in that vague boundary between thirty and thirty-five.

She was dressed in a short skirt, wore a spotless shirt waist over an exceptionally graceful pair of shoulders, and her hair, neatly coiled in heavy bronze folds, was surmounted by a white hat of the frontier type, dented in regulation form with four hollows.

From the hat to the high tan boots, she was neat and womanly; yet it was not this that attracted him so much as her profile. From the straight brow, down over the high, fine nose and the firm lips to the firmer chin, the face was perfect.

As if sensing his inspection, she turned toward him, and met his wondering eyes. Her appraisement was calm, repressed, and cold. Her face gave him the impression that she had forgotten how to smile. Townsend advanced toward her, certain that she must be the proprietress of the High Light.

“You are Miss Meredith?” he interrogated, as he halted in front of her.

“Mrs. Meredith,” she corrected, still unbending, and looking at him a question as to his business.

A forgotten courtesy impelled him to remove his hat as he introduced himself, but Mathews did not follow it when he was introduced, and reached out and caught her competent hand with a hard grip. Dick explained his errand, feeling, all the time under that steady look, that he was being measured.

“Oh, yes, they’ll be all right by to-morrow, Lily,” the doctor interrupted. “Excuse me for being so abrupt, but I must go now. Good-night.”

“Good-night,” she answered, and then: “I’ll be up there at three o’clock to-morrow afternoon. Ah, you were saying you wanted–”

She had turned to the partners again with her unfinished question leading them on to state their mission.

“Men. Here’s a list,” Dick answered, handing her a memorandum calling for go many millmen, so many drill runners, swampers, car handlers, and so forth; in all, a list of twenty odd.

“Who told you to come here?” She exploded the question as if it were vital.