Roy Norton

“ Dick tore his hat off, threw it in the air, and shouted, and raced down the hill. From now on it must be work; unless they met with great success––then––he dared not stop to think of what then.
He hastened on down to the mill and entered the door. Everything about it, from the dumping of the cars sixty feet above, the wrench of the crushers breaking the ore into smaller fragments, the clash of the screens as it came on down to the stamps, and their terrific “jiggety-jig-jig,” roared, throbbed, and trembled. ”

“ Bill walked with slow deliberation, stopping every three or four feet and scanning the ground around him with his brilliant, keen eyes. The stoker worked like a pointer dog, methodically, and examining each bush clump for broken twigs.
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But it was Rogers the millman, whose method was more like Bill’s, who gave the gathering call. On a patch of earth, close by the side of the rampart and where the moisture had percolated sufficiently to soften the ground, was the plain imprint of a man’s foot, shod in miner’s brogans, and half-soled. ”

“ Under this granite sleeps Bells Park, an engineer. Murdered in defense of his employers. Faithful when living, and faithful when dead, to the Croix d’Or and all those principles which make a worthy man.
A sudden, overwhelming sadness seemed to descend upon them. Bill turned abruptly, and stepped across toward the boiler-house. The whistle sent out a long-drawn, booming call––the alarm signal for the mine. In all the stress of the Croix d’Or it was the first time that note had ever been used save in drill. The bells of the hoist arose into a jangling clamor. ”

“ Again Dick endured the rumbling of trains through long hours, the change from one to another at small junctions, the day and night in a stage coach whose springs seemed to have lost resiliency, and the discourse of two drummers, Hebraic, the chill aloofness of a supercilious mining expert new to the district, and the heated discussions of two drill runners, veterans, off to a new field, and celebrating the journey with a demijohn. The latter were union men, and long after he was tired of their babel they broached a conversation which brought Dick to a point of eager listening. ”

“ The peak of the cross, lifting a needle point high above them, as if keeping watch over the Blue Mountains, the far-distant Idaho hills, the near-by forests of Oregon, and the puny, man-made structures at its feet, appeared to have a lofty disdain of them and the burrowings into its mammoth sides, as if all ravagers were mere parasites, mad to uncover its secrets of gold, and futile, if successful, to wreak the slightest damage on its aged heart. ”

“ Dimly in the faintly thrown light of the candle beams, they could see it, the dusky gray mass where hope had pictured a continuing blackness. The wall leered at them as they stood there panting, despairing, desperate as trapped animals. Their imaginations told them the end.
“Well, old man”––Bill’s voice sounded with exceptional softness––“they didn’t extend this drift any farther. All we can do now is to go up and sit down at the foot of it, and––wait!”
“But it won’t take long, Bill,” Dick replied. “The air, you know. It can’t last forever.” ”

“ The steadfast mountain above him was a cynical monster, and dimly, in the shadow of the high landmark, he discerned a change, sinister, gloating, and leering on him and his misery. The soft voices of the men of the day shift returning from their voluntary task, the staccato exhaust of the hoisting engine bringing up a load of ore from the refound lead, the clash of a car dumping its load of waste, and the roar of the Rattler’s stamps, softened by distance, blended into discordance. ”

“ He tried to forget his sorrow and bodily pains by checking over his old assay slips, while Bill wandered, like a bruised and melancholy survivor of a battle, from the mill to the hoist, from cabin to cabin, and mess-house to bunk-house, stopping now and then to stare upward at the peak, as if still thinking of that fresh and fragrant earth piled in a mound above Bells Park. ”

“ Men came rushing forward, almost falling over one another, but arrived too late to assist in the capture. Lying under and pinned to the earth by the huge blacksmith, struggling for release, and cursing between shut teeth, was the man who had been the watchman at the Croix d’Or when its new proprietor arrived, the man Wolff, whose past had been exposed by The Lily in the presence of some of those who were now his captors. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ Dick’s shout arose above the shouts of men and the screams of dance-hall women. He had barely time to observe, in a flash, that Bill had picked the limp form of Thompson up, and heavy as it was, lifted it high above his head and thrown it violently into a vacant corner back of the table in a crumpled heap, when he was almost felled to the floor by a blow from behind, and turned to fight his own battle with one of the Denver bullies. ”

“ And then, as if the blow had fallen equally on all, the men of the Cross stormed and raved, and clambered over the ruins and anathematized their unknown enemy; all but one known as Jack Rogers, the boss millman, who silently, as if his business had rendered him mute as well as deaf, stood looking up and down the gulch. While the others continued their inspection of the damage, he drifted farther and farther away, intent on the ground about him, and the edge of the stream. ”

“ Bill turned to greet her, holding out his hand, and his broad shoulders shut out the view of Bacchanalia.
“The bartender says you drink nothing stronger than lemonade,” she said, looking up at the giant, “and I am glad to hear it. It is a pleasure to meet men like you once in a while. It keeps one from losing faith in all.”
She sat down in one of the chairs––a trifle wearily, Dick thought, and he noticed that there were lines under the eyebrows, melancholy, pensive, that he had not observed before in the few times they had met her. ”

“ Dick could infer nothing of its reception. He could not tell whether Presby was inclined to accept it as sufficient authority, or to question it. Outside were the sounds of the Rattler’s activity and production, the heavy, thunderous roar of the stamp mill, the clash of cars of ore dumped into the maws of the grizzly to be hammered into smaller fragments in their journey to the crusher, and thence downward to end their journeys over the thumping stamps, and out, disintegrated, across the wet and shaking tables. ”

“ He knew what it was as he drove along in all that clamor of sound which issues from a great and hurrying city. It was New York, and he was in the young New York of the North-west, with great skeleton structures uprearing and the turmoil of building. Only here was a difference, for side by side on the streets walked men clad in the latest fashion, and men bound to or coming from the arctic fields of gold-bound Alaska. ”

“ They stood tensed and anxious until the pebbles stopped falling and a silence like that of a tomb, so profound as to seem thick and dense, invaded the hollows; then Dick started out into the shaft. He felt a restraining hand on his arm.
“Wait a minute, boy,” the elder man said. “You’re the owner here. It’s dangerous. I ought to be the one to go first and find out what’s happened. You wait inside the drift.”
But Dick shook his hand off and stepped out to look upward. A dense blackness filled what should have been a space of light. ”

“ A white-headed, scowling man, clean shaven, and with close-shut, thin, hard lips, looked up over a pile of letters and accounts laid before him on a cheap, flat-topped desk.
Dick’s eyes opened a trifle wider. He was looking at the man who had defied the mob at the road house, and at this close range studied his appearance more keenly.
There was hard, insolent mastery in his every line. His face had the sternness of granite. His hands, poised when interrupted in their task, were firm and wrinkled as if by years of reaching ”

“ Joan said, speaking to the two men beside her, “the ugliness of some of it has gone. There is nothing left but the good and the beautiful. Ah, how I love it––all! All!”
Dick’s arm slipped round her, and drew her close, and unresisting, to his side.
“And but for you and Bill,” he said softly, “it might never have ended this way.”
“Humph!” drawled the deep voice of the grizzled old miner. “Things is just the way they have to be. Nobody can change ’em. The Lord Almighty fixes ’em, and I expect they have to work out about as He wants ’em to. ”

“ The green lead was not as rich as they had believed.
“It won’t pay more than fifty cents a ton with the best milling we can do,” he said to Bill, who came eagerly into the assay office.
“But you know the old idea––that she gets richer as we go down?” his partner asserted. “If it pays fifty cents a ton at the mill plates, we’ll open up the face of the ledge and put on a day and night shift. We can handle a heap of ore with this plant. It begins to look to me as if the Cross is all to the good. Come on. Let’s go down to the power-house and see how things look down there when we’re working.” ”

“ So I shall explain to these men of Goldpan who you are, Gus Wolff! You were in Butte five years ago. You induced a poor, silly little fool named Rose Trevor to leave the dance hall where she worked, 125 and go with you. You were one of those who believe that women are made to be brutalized. But good as most of them are, and bad as some of them are, there is none, living or dead, that you are or were fit to consort with. You murdered her. Don’t you dare to deny it! They found her dead outside of your cabin. ”

“ That I’d back Dick Townsend on the Croix d’Or as long as he wanted me to, and that when he gave that up, I’d still back him on any other mine he said was good!’ That’s what I said!”
He had lost his calm, club poise, and was again the virulent business man of that Wall Street battle, waged daily, where men must have force or fail to survive. Dick saw in him the man who was, the man who at times had shaken the financial world with his desperate bravery and daring, back in the days when giants fought for the beginnings 252 of supremacy. ”

“ Dick had heard no more from the owner of the Rattler, save indirectly, nor met him since the strained passage of the bridge; but mess-house gossip, creeping through old Bells, who recognized no superiors, and calmly clumped into the owner’s quarters whenever he felt inclined, said that the neighboring mine was prodigiously prosperous.
“I heard down in Goldpan,” he squeaked one night, “that Wells Fargo takes out five or six bars of bullion for him every mill clean-up. And you can bet none of it ever gets away from that old stiff.” ”

“ There were those among the men on the street who had seen the desperate, melancholy conclusions, when hope, flaming ever more feebly, guttered out as a burned candle and died. There were those among them who had been in those black holes of despair and been rescued, to carry scars of the body for life, but recklessly forget the scars of the mind, the horrors of despair. Comparative strangers to the camp as 139 were the two men of the Cross, they appreciated the full meaning of the blow ”

“ 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, 90 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?” ”

“ Under criminal procedure men had served long terms behind bars for less offenses than Presby’s. Others had made reparation through payment of money, and slunk away into the shadows of disgrace to avoid handcuffs. And the fall of Presby of the Rattler, as a plunderer, was one that would echo widely in the mining world where he had moved, a stalwart, unbending king. Not until then had Dick realized how high that figure towered. ”

“ Men stood in groups, thoughtfully, with hands in pockets, their harsh, strong faces rendered soft by the light. They talked together with a quiet and sad sympathy, as if in that hour they were all of one family up there in the heart of the mountains from which they tore their hard livelihood. ”