The pioneer

Jerry’s plans had been laid with the utmost secrecy and care. It behooved him to be wary, for he knew that detection would mean death. Neither the Colonel nor Black Dan would have hesitated to shoot him like a dog if they had known what he contemplated, and working day by day in an office with these men, in a town the smallness and isolation of which rendered every human figure a segregated and important unit, it required all the shrewdness of which he was master to mature his design and arouse no suspicion.

The time had now come when everything was suddenly propitious. Had the Prince of Darkness been giving Jerry’s affairs his particular attention, circumstances could not have fallen together more conveniently for the furthering of his purpose.

In the office of the Cresta Plata it was arranged that every two weeks he should be given three or four days off to go to San Francisco and visit his wife. These holidays, which were grudgingly doled out by Black Dan, always included the Sunday, as the older man was determined his son-in-law should have as little immunity from work as possible. In the middle of the week Jerry was informed that he could leave for San Francisco on the following Saturday morning to report again at the office on Wednesday.

The granting of this five days’ leave of absence made the elopement easy of accomplishment, robbing it of the danger of detection that Jerry realized and shrank from. He and June could leave on Friday night and take the overland train eastward. They would have five days’ start before discovery was made, and in five days they would be so far on their journey that it would be easy for them to conceal themselves in some of the larger towns along the route. Mercedes, who was a bad correspondent, could be trusted not to write to her father, and Allen, according to June’s artless revelations, was gone for a much longer time than he wanted known. Finally the last and most serious obstacle was removed in the shape of the Colonel. Jerry being in the office knew that his enemy would not be back before Tuesday or Wednesday, as the work of inspecting the pumps had been slower than was anticipated.

Months of waiting and planning could not have arranged matters more satisfactorily. Luck, once again, was on his side, as it had been so often in the past.

Early on the Friday morning he went to the livery stable that he always patronized, and where he knew the finest team of roadsters in Nevada was for hire. Mining men of that day were particular about their horses. There were animals in the Virginia stables whose superiors could not be found west of New York. The especial pair that Jerry wanted were only leased to certain patrons of the stable, but Jerry, an expert on horseflesh, besides being Black Dan Gracey’s son-in-law, had no difficulty in securing them for that evening.

He had had some idea of driving into Reno himself and letting June come in on the train, but he had a fear that, left alone, she might weaken. To be sure of her he must be with her. Moreover, there was little risk in driving in together. They would not start until after dark and their place of rendezvous would be a ruined cabin some distance beyond the Utah hoisting works on the Geiger grade. The spot would be deserted at that hour, and even if it were not, the spectacle of a buggy and pair of horses was so common that it would be taken for that of some overworked superintendent driving into Reno on a sudden business call.

From the stable he returned to the office and alone there wrote a hasty letter to June. He had told her the outline of his plan, and that Friday would be the day, but he had given her no details of what their movements would be. Now he wrote telling her minutely of the time and place of departure and impressing upon her not to be late. He would, of course, be there before her, waiting in the buggy. There was a party of Eastern visitors to be taken over the mine in the afternoon, and it would be easy for him to get away from them, leaving them with Marsden, the foreman, change his clothes, and be at the place indicated before she was. He was still fearful that she might fail him. Now, as the hour approached, he was so haunted by the thought that he asked her to send at least a few words of answer by his messenger.

Half an hour later Black Dan entered the office and paused by his son-in-law’s desk to give him some instructions as to the Eastern visitors and the parts of the mine they were to be shown. They were people of importance from New York, the men being heavy shareholders in the Cresta Plata and the Con. Virginia. The ladies of the party were to be relegated to the care of Jerry and Marsden the foreman, and not to be taken below the thousand-foot level. Black Dan and Barney Sullivan would take the men farther down. Jerry was to be ready in the hoisting works at four o’clock.

As Black Dan was concluding his instructions Jerry’s messenger reëntered the office and handed the young man a small, pale gray envelope. It was obviously a feminine communication, and its recipient, under the darkly scrutinizing eye of his father-in-law, flushed slightly, but he gave no other sign of consciousness, and as Black Dan passed on to the inner office, he sat down and opened the letter.

It was only a few lines in June’s delicate hand-writing:

“I will be there. I go to my ruin, Jerry, for you. Will there be anything in our life together that will make me forget that? June.”

Jerry read it over several times. It certainly did not breathe an exalted gladness. Away from him she always seemed in this condition of fear and doubt. It was his presence, his hand upon her, that made her tremulously, submissively his. He would not be sure of her till she was beside him to-night in the buggy.

Would that hour ever come? He looked at the clock ticking on the wall. With every passing moment his exaltation seemed to grow stronger. It was difficult for him to be quiet, not to stop and talk to everybody that he encountered with a feverish loquacity. The slowly gathering pressure of the last month seemed to culminate on this day of mad rebellion. Within the past two weeks his stocks had increased largely in value. He was a rich man, and to-night with the woman he loved beside him he would be free. He and she, free in the great outside world, free to love and to live as they would. Would the day never pass and the night never come?

In San Francisco the Colonel was completing the business of the pumps as quickly as he could. He felt that he was getting to be a foolish old man, but he could not shake off his worry about June. Her words and appearance at their last interview kept recurring to him. Many times in the past year he had seen her looking pitifully fragile and known her to be unhappy, but he had never before felt the poignant anxiety about her that he now experienced.

Despite his desire to get back with as much speed as possible, unforeseen delays occurred, and instead of returning on Friday, as he had hoped, he saw that he would not be back before Wednesday. He wrote this to June in a letter full of the anxious solicitude he felt. To this he received no answer, and, his worry increasing, he was about to telegraph her when he received a piece of information that swept all minor matters from his mind.

On Thursday at midday he was lunching with a friend at the club, when, in the course of conversation, his companion asked him if he knew the whereabouts of Beauregard Allen. The words were accompanied with a searchingly significant look. The Colonel, answering that Allen was in Virginia, paused in his meal and became quietly attentive. He knew more than others of Allen’s situation. Of late he had scented catastrophe ahead of his one-time comrade. The man’s face opposite him struck an arrow of suspicion through his mind. He put down his wine glass and sat listening, his expression one of frowning concentration.

His friend was a merchant with a large shipping business between San Francisco and Australia. That morning he had been to the docks to see a ship about to sail, which carried a cargo of his own. The ship took few passengers, only two or three, he thought. While conversing with the captain he had seen distinctly in the doorway of an open cabin Beauregard Allen unpacking a valise. In answer to his question the captain had said it was one of his passengers taken on that morning. He had brought no trunks, only two valises, and given his name as John Montgomery.

“It was Beauregard Allen,” the Colonel’s informant continued. “The man’s no friend of mine, but I’ve seen him round here for years. He looked up and saw me and drew back quick, as if he did not want to be recognized.”

“He’d taken passage this morning, you say?” asked the Colonel.

“Yes, to Melbourne. There was only one other passenger, a drunken boy being sent on a long sea voyage by his parents. They’ll make a nice, interesting pair.”

The Colonel looked at his plate silently. He was sending his thoughts back over the last year, trying to collect data that might throw some light on what he had just heard.

“You’re certain it was Allen, not a chance likeness?” he said slowly.

“I’ll take my oath of it. Why, I’ve seen the man for the past four years dangling around here. I know his face as well as I know yours, and I had a good look at it before he saw me and jumped back. He’s got in too deep and skipped. Everybody has been wondering how he kept on his feet so long.”

“He’s in pretty deep, sure enough,” said the Colonel absently. “You said Melbourne was the port? When do they sail?”

“Midday to-day. They’re off by now. They’ll be outside the heads already with this breeze.”

The Colonel asked a few more questions and then rose and excused himself. His business was pressing.

His first action was to send a telegram to Rion Gracey, asking him if Allen had left Virginia and where June was. The answer was to be sent to the club. Then he went forth. His intention was to inquire at the hotels patronized by Allen on his frequent visits to the city. As he went from place to place the conviction that the man seen by his friend had been June’s father, and that he had fled, strengthened with every moment.

A feverish anxiety about June took possession of him. If her father had decamped leaving her alone, she would have to face his angry creditors. He thought of her as he had last seen her, exposed to such an experience, and his heart swelled with pity and rage. Possibly she knew, had guessed what was coming and had begged him to stay with her to protect and care for her in a position for which she was so little fitted. And he had left her—left her to face it alone!

He returned to the club, having heard no word of Allen, and found Rion’s answer to his telegram. It ran:

“Allen left for coast Wednesday morning. June here. What’s amiss?”

It seemed to the Colonel complete confirmation of his fears. Allen leaving Wednesday morning would reach San Francisco some time that night. Evidently his plans had been made beforehand, for the ship he had taken was one of the fastest merchantmen on the Pacific and was scheduled to leave at midday Thursday.

Nothing was suspected at Virginia yet, and June was there alone. At any moment now, the information being in the hands of more than one person, Allen’s flight might be made public, and she, his only representative, would become the victim of the rage of the petty creditors who would swarm about her. He was the one human being upon whom she could call. No duty or business would hold him from her. A thrill of something like joy passed through him when he realized that now, at last, he could stand between her and all trouble—a lion with its cub behind it.

He took the evening train for Virginia, hoping to reach Reno the next morning and catch the branch line into the mining town. But luck was against him. A snow-shed was down near the summit. Though it was only the latter half of September, a premature blizzard wrapped the mountain heights in a white mist. For eight hours the train lay blocked on an exposed ridge, and it was late afternoon when it finally set the Colonel down at Reno.

The delays had only accelerated his desire to be with June. During the long hours of waiting his imagination had been active, picturing her in various distressing positions, besieged by importunate creditors. He hired the fastest saddle horse in the Reno stables and rode the twenty-one miles into Virginia in an hour. It was dark when he reached there. The swift ride through the sharp autumnal air had braced his nerves. He was as anxious as ever to see her, but he thought that before he did so he would stop for a few moments at the Cresta Plata and see Rion, explain his early return, and learn if anything was known in Virginia of Allen’s flight.

The office was already lighted up and behind it the great bulk of hoisting works loomed into the night, its walls cut with the squares of illumined windows, its chimneys rising black and towering against the stars. A man who came forward to take his horse told him that the gentlemen were all in the mine with a party of visitors. The Colonel, hearing this, turned his steps from the office to the door of the hoisting works a few yards beyond.

The building, full of shadows despite the lanterns and gas jets ranged along its walls, looked vacant and enormous in its lofty spaciousness. The noise of machinery echoed through it, the vibration shaking it as if it were a shell built about the intricacies of wheels, bands, and sheaves that whirred and slid in complicated, humming swiftness against the ceiling. The light struck gleams from the car tracks that radiated from the black hole of the shaft mouth where it opened in the middle of the floor. It was divided into four compartments, and from these a thin column of steam arose and floated up to the roof. Here and there a few men were moving about, and aloft behind their engines were the four engineers. They were mute as statues, their eyes fixed on the dials in front of them which registered the movements of the cages underground; their ears on the alert to catch the notes of their bells, to them intelligible as the words of a spoken language. Near the shaft mouth sitting on an overturned box was Rion Gracey.

He saw the Colonel and rose to his feet with an exclamation of surprise and pleasure. The elder man, drawing him aside, told him the reason of his return and asked him news of June. Moving toward the door they conversed together in lowered voices. The Colonel, now convinced that no suspicion of the nature of Allen’s absence had yet reached Virginia, felt his anxieties diminished. He said that he might attend the dinner which Black Dan was giving that evening to the Easterners. Rion was now waiting for them to come up. Barclay and the women ought to be up at any moment; they had been underground nearly two hours, an unusual length of time, for even on the thousand-foot level the heat was intense.

His anxieties soothed, the Colonel left the building, his heart feeling lighter than it had felt for two weeks.

With a step of youthful buoyancy he mounted the steep cross-streets which connected by a series of stairs and terraces the few long thoroughfares of the town. He was out of breath when he saw the dark shape of the Murchison mansion standing high on its crest of ground against a deep blue, star-dotted sky. His approach was from the side, and that no lights appeared in any of the windows in that part of the house did not strike him as unusual. But when he reached the foot of the long stairway and looking up saw that there was not a gleam of light to be seen on the entire façade, his joy suddenly died, and in its place a dread, sharp and disturbing, seized him.

For a moment he stood motionless, staring up. The shrubs that grew along the sloping banks of the garden rustled dryly in the autumn night. There was something sinister in the high form of the house, mounted aloft on its terrace, no friendly pane gleaming with welcoming light, no sound near it but the low, occasional whispering of dying vegetation. As he ran up the steps, his footfall sounded singularly loud and seemed to be buffeted back from empty walls.

His first and second pull of the bell brought no response. Between them he listened and his ear caught nothing but the stillness of desertion. His third furious peal was answered by a distant footstep. He heard it come shuffling along the hall, pause, and then a light broke out through the glass fanlight above the portal. The door was opened a crack, and through this aperture a section of the Chinaman’s visage was revealed, lit by a warily inspecting eye.

The Colonel pushed the door violently in, sending the servant back with it against the wall. Kicking it to behind him he demanded between his panting breaths:

“Where’s Miss Allen?”

“She’s gone,” said the Chinaman, exceedingly startled by this violent entry. “All gone.”

“All gone! All gone where?”

“I no savvy. The boss he gone two, thlee days. Gone San Francisco. Miss Allen she go just now.”

“She’s only just gone? You mean she has just gone down town to buy something or see some one?”

“No. She go ’way. She say, ‘Sing, I go ’way.’ She take a bag.”

“She’s gone with a bag. Where the devil has she gone to? Don’t be such a damned fool! Where’d she go?”

“No savvy. She no tell me. She take bag and go just now. She give me letter for you. I get him. He tell you.”

“You’ve got a letter for me? Why didn’t you say that before? Go get it, and go quick.”

The Chinaman shuffled up the hall and turned into the dining-room. The Colonel, having caught his breath, leaned against the wall under the hall gas. He thought probably June had gone to Lake Tahoe to visit Mitty Sullivan. Considering the situation it was the best thing she could have done. As the servant reappeared with a letter in his hand he said:

“When did she leave this?”

“Now,” answered the laconic Oriental. “She give him to me and say, ‘Give him Colonel Pallish. He come back Tuesday, Wednesday mebbe. You give him letter sure; no forget.’ You come back before, I give him now.”

The Colonel had not listened to the last phrases. He moved closer to the gas and tore open the letter. To his surprise he saw that it was several pages in length, covered closely with June’s fine writing. His eye fell on the first sentence, and he uttered a sudden suppressed sound and his body stiffened. The words were:

“Dear, darling, Uncle Jim. I who love you more than anybody in the world am going to hurt you so much. Oh, so terribly! Will you ever forgive me? Will you ever again think of June without sorrow and pain?”

He stood motionless as a thing of stone, while his glance devoured the page. He did not read every word, but from the closely written lines sentences seemed to start out and strike his eyes. He turned the sheet and saw farther down a paragraph that told him everything:

“The future is all dark and terrible, but I am going. I am going with Jerry. I am going wherever he wants, I am what he wants to make me. It’s only death that can break the spell. Good-by, dearest, darlingest Uncle Jim. Oh, good-by! If I could only see you again for one minute! Even when you read this and realize what I have done I know that you will love me and make excuses for me, I who will be no longer worthy your love or your pity.”

The Colonel’s hand with the letter crushed in it dropped to his side. For a moment he stood rigid, his face gray in the gas light. It was too unexpected a blow to be grasped in the first paralyzing second. Then he turned furiously on the servant, shouting:

“Where did she go? Where did she go?”

The man cowered terrified against the wall, stammering in broken phrases,

“I no savvy! How I savvy? She go with a bag. She say, ‘Give him the letter’ and I give him. You read him. I no savvy any more.”

The Colonel’s hand on his chest forcing him back against the door-post cut short his words:

“When did she go? How long ago? Answer honestly, or, by God, I’ll kill you!”

His face added to the man’s terror, but it also steadied his shaking nerves:

“She go not one hour; thlee-quarters. She come to me with bag and say, ‘Good-by, Sing, I go for long time.’ She give me the letter and say give him to you Tuesday, Wednesday. Then she go.”

“Which way?”

“I don’t see. I don’t look. I go down stairs. I go sleep on my bed. I hear bell and wake. That’s all.”

The Colonel released him and turned to the door. The man evidently knew no more than he said. She had been gone less than an hour. That was all there was to tell.

As he ran down the long stairs he had no definite idea in his mind. She had left to run away with Jerry three-quarters of an hour earlier. That was all he thought of for the moment. Then the frosty sharpness of the night air began to act with tonic force upon him. His brain cleared and he remembered Rion’s words. Half an hour ago Barclay was still in the mine. There had evidently been some delay in his coming up. No trains left the town as late as that. June had gone somewhere to meet him, to some place of rendezvous whence they would probably drive into Reno. If Barclay had not yet left the mine he could be caught, and then——

With wild speed he ran along the streets, leaping down the short flights of steps that broke the ascending sidewalks. He thrust people aside and rushed on, gray-faced and fiery-eyed. For the second time in his life there was murder in his heart.

Through the darkness of his mind memories of her passed like slides across a magic lantern. A sudden picture of her that day long ago at the spring, when she had asked him to let her mother stay in his cottage, rose up clear and detached on his mental vision. He heard again the broken tones of her voice and saw her face with the tears on it, childish and trustful, as it had been before the influence of Jerry had blighted its youth and marred its innocence.

The fury that possessed him rose up in his throat. He could not have spoken. He could only run on, tearing his way through the crowds on C Street, across it to a smaller thoroughfare and down that to where the dark mass of the Cresta Plata buildings stood out against the night. He heard the distant hum of the machinery, and then, unexpected and startling, the roar of men. It was like the noise when the day shift came up and every ascending cage was packed solid with miners.

As he approached the door the men began to come out, streams of them, some running, others gathering in knots. Hundreds of men poured into the night, gesticulating, shouting, congesting in black groups, whence a broken clamor of voices rose. He realized the strangeness of it, that something was the matter, but it was all dim and of no importance to him. His mind held only one thought. Rushing past them he cried:

“Barclay! Is Barclay up yet? Do you know where Barclay is?”

An Irishman, who stumbled against him in the dark, paused long enough to shout to him:

“It’s Barclay that’s hurt. Hurry up, Colonel, they’ll be wanting you inside. It’s a doctor I’m after. God knows if he is where they say he is, there’s no life in him now.”