Ironheart

They sat on opposite sides of a table, the food and dishes not yet cleared away after their supper. A cheap kerosene lamp lit the room insufficiently. The smoke from a ragged wick had entirely blackened one side of the glass chimney. One of the men had cunningly utilized this to throw the face of his companion into the light while his own remained in shadow. His bleached eyes watched the emotions come and go as they registered on the twisted, wolfish countenance of this criminal on the dodge. He was playing on his evil instincts as a musician does upon the strings of a violin.

“Me, I said right away, soon as I seen you, ‘This Cig’s no quitter; he’ll go through.’ So I tied up with you. Game, an’ no mollycoddle. Tha’s how I sized you up.”

“You got me right, Prowers. I’ll say so.”

The little man with the leathery face watched his victim. In the back of his mind a dreadful thought had lodged and become fixed. He would use for his purpose this vain and shallow crook, then blot him out of life before he turned upon him.

“Don’t I know it? Cig ain’t roostin’ up here for his health, I says to myself. Not none, by jiminy by jinks. He’s got business.”

“Business is right,” agreed the New Yorker. “An’ soon as it’s done, I ain’t stickin’ around dis dump no more. I’m duckin’ for ’Frisco. But get it straight, Prowers. I taken all de chances I’m gonna take alone. See? An’ it’ll cost you two hundred iron men for my share of de job.”

“Not that much, Cig. We’ve both got our reasons for wantin’ to pull this off. Clint Reed an’ his foreman ain’t exactly friends of yours. You got yore own account to settle. But I’ll dig up a hundred. That’ll take you to ’Frisco.”

Cig looked at his mild vis-à-vis sullenly. This harmless-looking old fellow was his master in villainy, more thorough, more ruthless. There were times when his bleached eyes became ice-coated, when the New Yorker had sensed back of them the crouched threat of the coiled rattlesnake. If he had known what Prowers was thinking now, he would have shuddered.

“Some generous guy, youse are,” he sneered. “An’ how do I know youse won’t rap on me—t’row me down when de rubes make de big holler after de job?”

The old cattleman was at his suave mildest. No malignity showed in his smile. “I don’t reckon I can give no written guarantee, Cig, but I never sawed off trouble yet on a fellow takin’ the trail with me. Those who have rode with me could tell you that.”

The crook from the East was uneasy. He did not know why. His restlessness drove him to the door of the cabin from which he looked out upon a cynical moon riding high above the tops of the pines. He shivered. This bleak world of white appalled his city-cramped spirit. It had been bad enough in summer. Now it was infinitely worse.

“Looks like there’s a hoodoo on me,” he growled. “It’s de Gawd-forsaken country that puts a jinx on me. I’m losin’ me noive. Every job I tackle is a flivver. After dis one, it’s me for de bright lights.”

“That’s right. A getaway for you, pronto.”

“When do we get busy?”

“To-night,” Prowers answered. “Merrick has left two watchmen at the dam. One of ’em lives at Wild Horse. His wife’s sick. He got a call half an hour ago sayin’ she was worse. He’s hittin’ the trail for town.”

“Leavin’ one guy on de job. Do we bump him off?”

“Not necessary. A quart of bootleg whiskey reached him this afternoon. Time we get there, he’ll be dead to the world.”

“You sent de booze?”

“Merrick didn’t,” Prowers answered, with his impish grin.

“Sure he ain’t on de wagon?”

“Dead sure. He can’t leave it alone.”

“Looks like a lead pipe,” Cig admitted. “But de jinx on me—When I gunned dat Tug Hollister I’d ’a’ swore I got him good. Nothin’ works.”

Jake could not quite forbear sarcasm. “You’d ought to take one o’ these here correspondence courses in efficiency. It’ll be different to-night, though. I ain’t used to fallin’ down on anything I go after.”

“Meanin’ that I do?” Cig demanded sourly out of the corner of a drooping mouth.

“Meanin’ you ain’t been lucky lately. Let it go at that.”

Prowers moved about making his preparations. The dynamite and the fuses already made ready were put in a gunny-sack. The tools were packed. Beneath his coat Jake put on a gaberdine vest, for it was possible that the weather might turn cold.

Presently both men were ready. The cattleman blew out the light and they passed from the cabin into the starry night.

They did not go direct to the dam. Prowers had in him too much of the fox for that. He would not leave tracks in the snow that might later take him to the penitentiary. Their footsteps followed the beaten trail that ran from the cabin to a road meandering down into Paradise Valley by the line of least resistance.

Half a mile from the point where they struck it, another road deflected from this one, leading to Merrick’s camp at the Sweetwater Dam. Into this they turned. The snow had been beaten down by scores of passing feet. The top crust did not break beneath their weights, so that no evidence would be left written there as to who had made this midnight trip of destruction.

Cig’s eye took in the ghostly white hills and he shivered. “Gawd, what a dump!” he groaned. His vocabulary was as limited as his emotions. He could never get used to the barren grandeur of the Rockies. They awed and oppressed him. They were too stark and clean for him. He struggled with a sense of doom. In cities he never thought of death, but premonitions of it had several times shaken his ratlike courage since he had been here. Twice he had dreamed that he was being buried in these hills and had wakened in a cold sweat of horror. He made up his mind to “beat it” for the Pacific coast at once.

They came down into the bowl where the dam was, skirting the edge of the timber to attract as little attention as possible in case a watchman should be on his beat. No sign of life disturbed the stillness. They crept to the tents and made a hurried survey. In one of them a man lay on a cot asleep. He was fully dressed. His arms were outflung and he was breathing stertorously. A bottle, one third full, stood on a small table close to the cot.

“Like I said, dead to the world,” Prowers commented.

He turned away. Cig swiftly snatched the bottle and slipped it inside his coat. He wanted a drink or two pretty badly, and, like enough, Prowers wouldn’t let him have them if he knew.

The two men crossed the dam-head to the gates.

“It’ll be here,” the cowman said as he put down the gunny-sack.

Before they set to work, Cig concealed his bottle, but in the course of the hours that followed he made frequent visits to the spot where he had hidden it. Since Prowers was neither blind nor a fool he became aware of what the other was trying to keep from him. He said nothing. The bulk of the work fell on him. No complaint came from his lips. There was a curious smile on them, ironic, cruel, and unhuman.

Cig was in turn gay, talkative, maudlin, and drowsy. His boastings died away. He propped himself against the cement wall close to the gates and swayed sleepily. Once or twice he cat-napped for a few moments.

The old man continued to prepare the charges. Once, watching his accomplice, he broke into a cackle of mocking mirth, so sinister that Cig would have shuddered if he had been alive to impressions.

The tramp slid down to a sitting posture.

“Done up. Shleep a li’l’ ’f you don’ min’,” he murmured.

Presently he was in a drunken slumber.

Prowers finished his work and lit the fuses. He looked at the weak and vicious instrument he had been using, a horrible grin on his leathery, wrinkled face.

“You comin’ or stayin’?” he asked squeakily.

The doomed man snored.

“Suit yoreself,” the little devil-man said. “Well, if I don’t see you again, good-bye. I got to be hittin’ the trail right lively.”

He moved briskly along the great wall of the dam, climbed the steps at the far end, and followed the road leading out of the basin. Once he turned to look at the deep lake lying placidly behind the rampart Merrick had built to hold it.

A great flash and roar filled the night. Even where Prowers stood, he felt the shake of the earth. Masses of torn concrete, of rock and sand, were flung into the air. The echoes of the explosion died, but another sound reached the anarchist on the hillside. He listened, with the diabolical grin on his lips, to a murmur of rushing waters.

The Sweetwater Dam was going out.

“The Flat Tops are liable to be irrigated good an’ plenty, looks like,” he murmured. “Well, this is no place for sight-seers.”

He shuffled along the trail, the Satanic smile still on his leathery face.

It would have vanished promptly if he had known that a pair of eyes were looking down on him from the shadow of a pine above the road.