Dead Man's Gold/Chapter 1
CHAPTER I
Skyfields
THE quartet, standing together at the far end of the bar, close to the entrance to the dance hall that adjoined it, was a striking one; not so much from any one of them differing widely from the mixed types of the busy mining camp, as in the fact that they made up an unusual combination. Mining, as war, maketh for strange company, but it was seldom that four men, so varying in age, in temperament, appearance, and experience, chummed together.
"The Foursome," Stone had dubbed the shaft that they were slowly sinking in the stubborn dyke of purple porphyry under which, said Skyfields, ran continuously the rich vein of sylvanite, the discovery of which had caused the rush to Skyfields and changed that jumble of jagged peaks into so many human antheaps of never-flagging industry and never-failing hope. And "The Foursome" the camp had dubbed the partners though they had separate names for them as individuals.
There was Jim Stone—dreamer, waster, chased into the higher hills by the results of his own dissipations; dressed in Bedford-cord riding breeches. Cordovan puttees and shoes, and a gray flannel shirt, all the worse for wear, but fitting him with a perfection that was aggressive even in poverty. Jim was blond and blue-eyed amid his tan. His broad shoulders should have been straighter and his chest should have shown more development. His good chin made one wonder why he was receiving monthly checks from New York, until you saw how stubborn it was, and reflected that all remittances are not necessarily those of charity or tolerance. As a matter of fact, Jim's checks came from the only portion of his inheritance that he could not lay his prodigal fingers upon in its entirety, but as he never discussed his private affairs with anybody, nor showed interest in theirs, he was classed as one of those who are paid to stay away from the family rooftree. His camp sobriquet was "The Dude."
There was Wat Lyman, whose white beard fanned wide and low across his faded blue shirt and whose time- and weather-beaten face, like a carving in mahogany, was seamed like the payrock he had spent his life in seeking—Wat Lyman, prospector, and the only miner of the four of them, a giant whose eyes were a little dim and whose muscles were a little lacking in fibrin, but whose word was his bond and whose courage never faltered.
There was the man who called himself Frank Healy, whose dark eyes were too close together, too small, too shifty, and whose hands suggested that he handled a deck of cards far better than a drill. A soft-fleshed man, with high cheekbones and the nose of a hawk, thin-lipped and sneery, watchful, chary of speech, careful of his liquor. A gambler who had lost his stake-money, was the general opinion of Skyfields regarding Healy, and private judgment referred to him as "The Con Man."
And there was "Lefty" Larkin, squat but strong, undersized, undeveloped in every way, save in a certain cunning sharpened by experience that often beat superior wits which did not work quickly enough along certain lines. He had a face not unlike an English pug dog, had Lefty, with his bashed-in nose, deep-set, pale-blue eyes, and heavy lines from mouth corners to nose angles. There was a certain rugged honesty suggested in his plainness that helped Lefty to get by. You had a feeling that he was square with his pals. He was a battered specimen and it was hard to arrive at his age. He was a migrated Cockney from Seven Dials, London, his early upbringing grafted on to later education in the Bowery. Soldier, sailor, tinker, thief, fifth-rate pugilist, and general drifter—that was Lefty Larkin. Skyfields called him "The Bruiser."
Stone figured that Lefty had hurriedly jumped a train for somewhere, for some reason, and that his choice of Skyfields was not all his own, save that it fitted a present desire for retirement. He did not care what Lefty had done. The grown-up gamin amused him and, after the first hand-out and a general talk, he had offered Lefty a job on the claim. No wages, unless there was some spare money at the end of a month after the grub and explosives had been bought, but a share of the shack and what it held, of the shaft and what they might find at the bottom. Stone did not expect to find a fortune there. Wat Lyman was the one who leavened the Foursome with faith in their prospect.
Jim Stone had located the claim and, mainly because he did not know how to go about its development, he took in as his first partner Lyman, back from one of his perennial pilgrimages and looking for a grubstake. Frank Healy, happening along, offered some money at a time when the monthly checks had failed suddenly, owing to a prostrate market and an undeclared dividend. So drifted together the Foursome, and thus the embryo mine was named by Stone.
Stone held the drill and spooned the muck at the bottom of the hole. Lyman pounded and set the charges of dynamite. Healy cooked, and cooked well; there was no one in Skyfields who fared as well as the "Foursome." Lefty handled the little forge and the resharpening of the drills and kept the shack in shape. It was a peculiar twist of Lefty's make-up that the little cabin was as neat and clean as if some precisian of an old maid had presided over its keeping, rather than a wandering Cockney of low mental and moral calibre.
For the last week Stone had been taking occasional turns at the sledge to relieve Lyman, for the porphyry was hard as cement. Lyman was easily twice his age, with a few years thrown in, and Stone was ashamed of himself for letting an old man do all the hard work. He had his reward. He began to feel that he was developing some back muscles and others in his arms. For the first time in years he was filling his lungs at each breath. It was beginning to be a real pleasure to bring down the hammerhead with a sounding swang on the mushroomed top of the drill, to feel the steel grind and bite into the rock, and note Lyman, with a grunt, turn the point slightly for the next driving blow while he poured a little water from a can into the hole. But the prospect was only a pit in the solid stone, a long way from being a mine, or even looking like one.
"You see," said Lyman, encouragingly, as he shoved the bottle up to Healy and Lefty, who were nearest the dance hall, with Stone on the right of Lyman, nearest the door, "you can't tell a thing 'bout the dyke. Trenton made his strike a'most at grass roots. Up on Split Peak they found high-grade after eighty foot."
"Gawd!" ejaculated Lefty. "And us honly down heighteen! That rock's 'arder than the 'eart of a petrified miser. Fair turns the edge of the drills like they was pewter, 'stead of steel."
"The porphyry don't seem to foller the natural dip," went on Lyman. "Seems to have found a reg'lar level, like it had been poured in liquid."
"If that rock was ever liquid," broke in Lefty, "then the bloomin' pyramids was built of mush."
"No sayin' how fur we may have to go," continued Lyman, placidly, used to Lefty's comments. "You can see it's thick by the lay of the land. Others saw that, that's why we got a claim on it at all. But the gold's at the bottom of it, that's the main thing."
He stopped suddenly. Jim Stone, watching his face, saw the kindlier wrinkles about eyes and mouth vanish while sterner lines, more deeply bitten, asserted themselves. The gray eyes flashed and hardened. Even the white beard seemed to bristle, like a mane. Lyman had suddenly thrown off years like a cloak. His actions, generally deliberate, were faster than the eye could record, coördinate, purposeful.
He swept aside Stone with one strong hand while the other swooped down to the holster of the heavy six-gun at his right hip. Stone, over his shoulder, saw the other men in the barroom flattening themselves against bar and wall, rising hurriedly from their seats. The bartender had disappeared. The door had opened and, in its frame, silhouetted against the golden glow of the sunset, stood the figure of a man; sinister, menacing, a triangle of light swiftly enlarging between his crooked elbow and his body, like the shutter of a camera, then closing. From the black bulk of his body there came a burst of red fire, a split-second before Lyman's gun spat out its bullet. The two reports blended, roaring in the low-ceilinged room. Stone never lost the fancy that he heard the actual thup of the missile that struck Wat Lyman's breast and sent him staggering back against his partner, clutching at the bevel of the bar. Then there was a dull thud followed by a sharper sound. The man in the doorway had fallen and his revolver had flown from his hand.
The slight mist of exploded gases, acrid with the reek of the discharge, cleared, and showed the new-comer lying prostrate, pitched forward on his face, with outspread arms and drawn-up legs, looking ludicrously like a swimmer stranded by a suddenly retreating wave in the very act of propulsion. From underneath his face a dark stream was slowly reaching out, feeling a blunted way along the dusty floor, like a flattened worm.
As the crash of the double explosion thundered, reverberated, and was silent, a brief silence followed. Then from the dance hall poured a ruck of miners and women. The men who had flattened themselves jumped out to the centre of the room, gazing toward the body in the doorway. Calm and unashamed, the bartender rose from behind his barricade. The sound of running feet clattered on the wooden walk outside the saloon and the marshal of Skyfields, with one quick, shrewd glance at the dead man, stepped across the corpse and entered, alert, questioning, taking in instantly the little group at the far end of the bar where Stone supported Lyman. The latter had set back his gun into its holster and placed his right hand on his chest, hidden by his beard. He straightened up as the marshal came toward him.
"He drew first, Mara," said Lyman, his voice sounding as if he had been climbing hard and fast. "He knew I'd been lookin' for him for twelve years, an' I reckon he figgered I'd kill him on sight. He was wrong thar. I wanted to talk to him first. But he had the drop on me. The boys saw it, I reckon."
Half-a-dozen men corroborated. The bartender spoke authoritatively.
"That's straight, Mara. Lyman, here, was talking to his partners when the door opened and I see this chap givin' the crowd the once over. He drew his gun an', seein' the muzzle was gen'ally p'inted this way, an' I didn't know how good or bad a shot he was nor who he was aimin' at, for certain, I took no chances."
"You wouldn't," said the marshal, crisply but without malice.
"No, I wouldn't. But the guy pulled before Lyman even saw him. An' the old-timer nearly beat him to it at that."
The marshal nodded. He walked over to the body, stooped, took hold of an elbow, and turned it over. The level beams of the sunset flamed on the still features, a high-bridged nose, black brows, and a black beard and moustache. Fairly in the centre of the forehead was a dark pit where Lyman's bullet had targeted and from which the thick blood slowly oozed.
"Dead as a skinned woodchuck," said Mara. "Better get him out of the road, boys, and chuck a cloth over him."
Two loungers, swapping odd jobs about the saloon for occasional drinks, dragged the dead man out of the doorway by the boots and laid him on the floor under the window. One of them took the dust-cloth from the roulette wheel and covered the still form.
"You gals get back into the dance hall an' take yore pardners with you," suggested Mara, his eyes emphasizing the command. "Hurt any, Lyman?" he asked, scanning the features of the prospector which were turning a queer gray underneath the bronze. Already he had whispered to Stone to "get out of this soon's we can."
"I'm still standin', ain't I?" he answered. "We're all goin' up to the cabin, Mara, 'case you want me. The name of that skunk was Sam Lowe. What was between him an' me was personal. He got what was comin' to him. He was assayer by business, an' as crooked in that as in everything. Come along, boys. If that's all right, marshal?"
Mara nodded. He was a man of few words. Mining camp law was primitive. To shoot in self-defence was justifiable. The onus rested with the aggressor. The man who had pulled first was dead and that ended the episode so far as justice was concerned. He strolled over to the bar and took the drink the bartender had poured out for him.
Stone tucked his arm into that of Lyman's, sensing that the prospector was more badly hurt than he acknowledged. Healy and Lefty followed.
At the door Lyman paused.
"I want to look at him," he said to Stone. Stone lifted the cloth from the face of the dead man and Lyman stooped, with an effort, peering at the waxen face in the shadow.
"It's him all right," he said. "I wanted to be sure. Come on, boys. Hold on a minute. Lefty, you get a pint of whisky and bring it along. I'm goin' to need it."
As they stepped out into the cold, clear twilight, where the peaks showed sharp against the golden olive of the fading sky, Lyman staggered. Healy caught at his other arm.
"Reckon you'll have to carry me, boys," said Lyman, and his voice wheezed. "I'm leaking air like a ripped bellows. Got me in the lungs. Bleeding's internal. I c'ud make it to the cabin but I want to save my strength. Got a lot to tell ye. Give me a swig o' that whisky 'fore we start, Lefty."
Stone grasped his left wrist with his right hand and Healy followed his example. Between them they made an interwoven seat for Lyman. It wasn't far to their cabin and it was downhill all the way.
Behind then the raucous orchestrion in the dance hall started up again and the dancers glided and shuffled over the floor. The bartender, busy with a rush of orders, sent out for a helper before the other's watch was on. Save for the dwindling talk of the witnesses, the incident was closed, the stiffening form under the roulette table's dust cloth forgotten until two Mexicans, commandeered by Mara, came up the hill to take it away.