The Plunderer

When the noon whistle shrieked its high, staccato note from the engine-house, they went up to the mess, and seated themselves at the head of the table. As a whole, the men were fairly satisfactory. Bill stared coldly down the table, and appeared to be mentally tabulating those who would draw but one pay-check, and that when their “time” was given them, but Dick’s mind persisted in wandering afield to the chance encounter of the morning.

The men had finished their hasty meal, in hasty miner’s fashion, silently, and tramped, with clumping feet, out of the mess-house to the shade of its northern side before Bill had ended his painful repast. Whiffs of tobacco smoke and voices came through the open windows, where the miners lounged and rested on a long bench while waiting for the whistle.

“Don’t you fool yourself about Bully Presby,” one of them was saying. “It’s true he’s a hard man, and out for the dust every minute of his life, but he’s got nerve, all right. He’ll bulldoze and fight and growl and gouge, but he’s there in other ways. I don’t like him, and we quit pretty sudden, yet I saw him do somethin’ once that beat me.”

“Did you work on the Rattler?” another voice queried.

“No,” the other went on, “I worked for him down on the Placer Belle in California. It was under the old system and was a small mine. Kept all the dynamite on the hundred-foot level in an old chamber. Every man went there to get it when it was time to load his holes. I was startin’ for mine one evenin’, whistlin’ along, when I smelled smoke. Stopped and sniffed, and about weakened. Knowed it was comin’ from the powder room down there. It wan’t more’n twenty feet from the shaft, and there was two or three tons of it in that hole. Ran back and gave the alarm bell to the engineer, then ducked my head and went toward the smoke to see if anything could be done before she blew up the whole works. On his hands and knees, with all that was left of his coat, was Bully. He’d got the fire nearly smothered out, and we coughed and spit, and drowned the rest of the sparks from the water barrel. He’d fought it to a finish all alone, and I had to drag him out to the cage that was slidin’ up and down as if the engineer was on a drunk, and every time it went up I could see the boys’ faces, kind of white, and worried, and hear the alarms bangin’ away like mad. But he’d put the fire out there with all that stuff around him. That took some nerve, I tell you!”

“What did he do for you?” asked another voice.

The narrator gave a heavy laugh, and chuckled.

“Do for me? When he got fresh air in him again, up in the hoist, he sat up and opened his hand. In it was a candlestick and a snipe, burned on the side till the wick looked about a foot long. ‘Who owns this candlestick?’ says he. No one spoke, but some of us knowed it belonged to old Deacon Wells, an absent-minded old cuss, but the deacon had a family of nigh on to ten kids. So nobody answered. ‘Some fool left this here,’ Bully bellowed, tearing around. ‘And that’s what started the fire. I’ll kick the man off the works that owns the stick.’ Still nobody said anything. He caught me grinnin’. ‘You know who it was,’ says he. ‘Sure I do,’ says I, ‘but I’m a little tongue-tied.’ Then he told me he’d fire me if I didn’t say who it was. ‘Give me my time-check,’ says I, and he gave it. He found out afterward I was the man that dragged him out, and sent a letter up to Colusa askin’ me to come back, but I didn’t go. Don’t s’pose he’d remember me now, and don’t know as I’d want him to. Any man that works for Bully comes about as near givin’ away his heart’s blood as any one could, and live.”

The voices went rumbling on, and Dick sat thinking of the strange, powerful man of the Rattler.

“Three of the millmen know their business,” mumbled Bill, as if all the time he had been mentally appraising his force. “Two are rumdums. The chips isn’t bad. He could carpenter anywhere, and if he’s as smart a timberman as he is millwright, will make good. The engineer that’s to relieve Bells ain’t so much, but I’ll leave it to Bells to cuss him into line. That goes. Two of the Burley men are all right, and I fired the third in the first hour because he didn’t know what was the nut and which the wrench. Smuts is a gem. He put the pigeon-blue temper on a bunch of drills as fast as any man could have done it.”

Dick did not answer, but concentrated his mind on the work ahead. The whistle blew, and he compelled Bill to submit to new bandages, following the doctor’s instructions, and smiled at his steady swearing as the wrappings were removed and the blisters redressed. They walked across to the hoist, entered the cage, and felt the sinking sensation as they were dropped, rather than lowered, to the six-hundred-foot level. The celerity of the descent almost robbed him of breath, but he thought of sturdy old Bells’ boast, that he had “never run a cage into the sheaves, nor dropped it to the sump, in forty years of steam.”

Lights glowed ahead of them, and they heard hammering. The suck of fresh air under pressure, vapored like steam, whirled around them in gusts, and the water oozed and rippled beside their feet as they went forward. The carpenter was putting in a new set of timbers, and his task was nearly finished, while beside him waited a drill man and a swamper with the cumbersome, spiderlike mechanism ready to set. The carpenter gave a few more blows to a key block, and methodically flung his hammer into his box and hurried back out through the tunnel toward the cage, intent on resuming his work at the mill.

Bill tentatively inspected the timbers, tapped the roof with a pick taken from the swamper’s hands, heard the true ring of live rock, and backed away. The drill was drawn up to the green face of ore.

“About there, I should say,” Dick directed, pointing an indicatory finger, and the drill runner nodded.

The swamper, who appeared to know his business, came forward with the coupling which fed compressed air to the machine, the runner gave a last inspection of his drill, turned his chuck screw, setting it against the rocky face, and signaled for the air. With a clatter like the discharge of a rapid-fire gun, the steel bit into the rock, and the Cross was really a mine again. Spattered with mud, and satisfied that the new drift was working in pay, the partner trudged back out.

They signaled for the cage, shot upward, and emerged to the yard near the blacksmith’s tunnel in time to see a huge bay horse, with a woman rider, come toiling up the slope. There was something familiar about the white hat, and as she neared them they recognized The Lily. Before they could assist her to dismount, she leaped from the saddle, landing lightly on her toes, and dropped the horse’s reins over his head.

“Good-day–never mind–he’ll stand,” she said, all in a breath, striding toward them with an extended hand.

Dick accepted it with a firm grip, and lifted his hat, while Bill merely shook hands and tried to smile. It was to him that she turned solicitously.

“I’m glad you are out,” she remarked, without lowering her eyes which swept over the bandages on his face. “You’re all right, are you?”

“Sure. But how’s that girl? It don’t matter much about an old cuss like me. Girls are a heap scarcer.”

The owner of the High Light looked troubled for a moment, and removed her gloves before answering.

“Doctor Mills says she will live,” she said quietly, “but she is terribly burned. She will be so disfigured that she can never work in a dance hall any more. It’s pretty rough luck.”

Dick recoiled and felt a chill at this hard, cold statement. The girl could never work in a dance hall any more! And this was accepted as a calamity! Accustomed as he was to the frontier, this matter-of-fact acceptance of a dance-hall occupation as something desirable impressed him with its cynicism. Not that he doubted the virtue of many of those forlorn ones who gayly tripped their feet over rough boards, and drank tea or ginger ale and filled their pockets with bar checks to make a living as best they might, but because the whole garish, rough, drink-laden, curse-begrimed atmosphere of a camp dance hall revolted him.

Mrs. Meredith had intuition, and read men as she read books, understandingly. She arose to the defense of her sex.

“Well,” she said, facing him, as if he had voiced his sentiment, “what would you have? Women are what men make them, no better, no worse.”

“I have made no criticism,” he retorted.

“No, but you thought one,” she asserted. “But, pshaw! I didn’t come here to argue. I came up to tell you that the dance-hall girl will recover and has friends who will see that she doesn’t starve, even if she no longer works in my place. Also, I came to see how Mister–what is your name, anyway?–is.”

“Mathews, ma’am. William Mathews. My friends call me Bill. I don’t allow the others to call me anything.”

The temporary and threatening cloud was dissipated by the miner’s rumbling laugh, and they sauntered across the yard, the bay horse looking after them, but standing as firmly as if the loosened reins were tied to a post instead of resting on the ground. A swamper, carrying a bundle of drills, trudged across the yard to the blacksmith shop, as they stood in its doorway.

“I sent you the best men I could pick up,” The Lily said. “You did me a good turn, and I did my best to pay it back. That blacksmith is all right. Some of the others I know, but I don’t know him. Never saw him before. You’d better watch him.”

She pointed at the swamper as coolly as if he were an inanimate object, and he glared at her in return, then dropped his eyes.

“I told you I didn’t run an employment agency,” she went on, “but if any of these fellows get fresh, let me know, and I’ll try to get you others. How does the Cross look, anyway?”

They turned away and accompanied her over the plant above ground, and heard her greet man after man on a level of comradeship, as if she were but a man among men. Her hard self-possession and competence impressed the younger man as a peculiar study. It seemed to him, as he walked beside her thoughtfully, that every womanly trait had been ground from her in the stern mills of circumstance. He had a vague desire to probe into her mind and learn whether or not there still dwelt within it the softness of her sex, but he dared not venture. He stood beside the bandaged veteran as she rode away, a graceful, independent figure.

“Is she all tiger, or part woman?” he said, turning to Mathews, whose eyes had a singularly thoughtful look.

The latter turned to him with a quick gesture, and threw up his unbandaged hand.

“My boy,” he said, “she’s not a half of anything. She’s all tiger, or all woman! God only knows!”

CHAPTER VII

THE WOMAN UNAFRAID

They were to have another opportunity to puzzle over the character of The Lily before a week passed, when, wishing to make out a new bill of supplies, they went down to the camp. The night was fragrant with the spring of the mountains, summer elsewhere–down in the levels where other occupations than mining held rule. The camp had the same dead level of squalor in appearance, the same twisting, wriggling, reckless life in its streets.

“Fine new lot of stuff in,” the trader said, pushing his goods in a brisk way. “Never been a finer lot of stuff brought into any camp than I’ve got here now. Canned tomatoes, canned corn, canned beans, canned meat, canned tripe, canned salmon. That’s a pretty big layout, eh? And I reckon there never was no better dried prunes and dried apricots ever thrown across a mule’s back than I got. Why, they taste as if you was eatin’ ’em right off the bushes! And Mexican beans! Hey, look at these! Talk about beans and sowbelly, how would these do?”

He plunged his grimy hand into a sack, and lifted a handful of beans aloft to let them sift through his fingers, clattering, on those below. The partners agreed that he had everything in the world that any one could crave in the way of delicacies, and gave him their orders; then, that hour’s task completed, sauntered out into the street.

Dick started toward the trail leading homeward, but Bill checked him, with a slow: “Hold on a minute.”

The younger man turned back, and waited for him to speak.

“I’d kind of like to go down to the High Light for a while,” the big man said awkwardly. “We ought to go round there and see Mrs. Meredith, and patronize her as far as a few soda pops, and such go, hadn’t we? Seein’ as how she’s been right good to us.”

Dick, nothing loath to a visit to The Lily, assented, although the High Light, with its camp garishness, was an old and familiar sight to any one who had passed seven years in outlying mining regions.

The proprietress was not in sight when they entered, but the bartenders greeted them in a more friendly way, and the Chinese, who seemed forever cleaning glasses, grinned them a welcome. They nodded to those they recognized, and walked back to the little railing.

“Lookin’ for Lily?” the man with the bangs asked, trying to show his friendliness. “She ain’t here now, but she’ll be here soon. She’s about due. Go on up and grab a box for yourselves. The house owes you fellers a drink, it seems to me. Can I send you up a bottle of Pumbry? The fizzy stuff’s none too good for you, I guess.”

He appeared disappointed when Dick told him to send up two lemonades, and turned back to lean across the bar and hail some new arrival. The partners went up and seated themselves in one of the cardboard stalls dignified by the name of boxes, and, leaning over the railing in front between the gilt-embroidered, red-denim curtains, looked down on the dancers. Two or three of their own men were there, grimly waltzing with girls who tried to appear cheerful and joyous.

Shrill laughter echoed now and then, and when the music changed a man with a voice like a megaphone shouted: “Gents! Git pardners for the square sets!” and the scene shifted into one of more regular pattern, where different individuals were more conspicuous. Some of the more hilarious cavorted, and tried clumsy shuffles on the corners when the raucous-voiced man howled: “Bala-a-ance all!” and others merely jigged up and down with stiff jerks and muscle-bound limbs, gravely, and with a desperate, earnest endeavor to enjoy themselves.

A glowering, pockmarked man, evidently seeking some one with no good intent, pulled open the curtains at the back of the box, and stared at them in half-drunken gravity; then discovering his mistake, with a clumsy “Beg pardon, gents,” let the draperies drop, and passed on down the row.