CHAPTER XVI
THE HEART OF A HALFBREED
Blue Pete glided in and tossed aside the blanket of his Indian disguise with a gesture of irritability. With a petulant kick his beaded moccasins struck the ceiling of the cave, and, sighing, he sank his feet into the more familiar high-heeled cowboy boots.
Mira, moving busily about the camp stove in a recess, noted it all without turning her head—noted, too, that there the usual routine of his return was interrupted. The great two-inch spurs, his individual twist to cowboy attire—great spiked wheels which he never used, but whose glitter and rattle seemed to satisfy him—were forgotten. Instead, he sank to the rocky floor and meditatively drew from his belt the beloved corncob pipe.
Troubled, Mira went about the preparation of their evening meal with a plaintive quietness. Juno, too, seemed oppressed, for after a tentative wriggle of her stump of a tail she settled back on her haunches, eyes fixed on her mistress.
Mira struggled to hold back the tears, struggled harder to hide them when they persisted. To celebrate their return to the old cave under the river bank she had spent hours that afternoon scouring woods and river bottom for wild flowers; and a dozen old tin cans rescued from the camp garbage heap gleamed confused colour in the candle light. For more hours she had been rasping her little hands with scrubbing the rude table and the blocks that served as seats; and over the table she had draped after much experiment a gaudy Indian blanket, thereby approaching more nearly the atmosphere of home they both craved so eagerly. About the wall depended picture papers, meaningless in story but heavy with pathetic longing.
Hitherto he had always noticed so quickly and eagerly her efforts toward their comfort. From the first it had been one of the rites of their association—he beaming wordlessly at the touches of decoration with which she busied herself about their wild homes, she glowing with vocal pleasure at the things he carved with his own hands—the chair back in the Cypress Hills cave, the shelves for her stores, the drawer in the table, the box for Juno to sleep in.
And now he did not seem to notice—and she had worked so hard.
Presently the odour of the cooking venison beat its way to his brain and he lifted his head from his chest. He saw then the flowers in the old tomato and butter tins, the Indian blanket hanging from the table, the fresh spruce boughs of their bed; and his neglect was to him akin to sacrilege. Rising, he made for the door and the darkness beyond.
Without turning she saw him leave, and in part she understood.
He was suffering—Blue Pete was suffering these days in mind as never in body. The accumulation of the intense longings since she had been torn from him down in the Hills to serve her sentence for rustling was struggling with other hopes and fears; and the fight was rending. Until only a few days ago he had been heading with certain and speedy success for the day when Mira might return with head held high to the 3-bar-Y, her own ranch. Only his guilt intervened, for she had already paid the penalty of her own rustling. It was the knowledge that she would never return without him that made the aim such a sacred one. To free her he must clear himself with the Police. And that could be only when every horse with whose stealing he had been connected was returned to its rightful owner. In his simplicity he imagined the law would be satisfied then.
So near had been the attainment of his one great ambition that his head sometimes whirled. Only two horses yet to recover! Then so many things had happened.
Throughout his engagement as a common bohunk Blue Pete had been happily unconscious of the embarrassing forces working subtly within him to thrust to the background his own redemption. He only knew he was uncomfortable, that strange processes were cropping to the surface in his once firmly fixed mind. It seemed treason to Mira—Mira, for whom everything was done—to delay a task so simple.
Yet he could not take the last two horses that alone, he imagined, stood between him and freedom, and relieve himself of new responsibilities.
Doubly miserable, he sank on the needle-strewn sand and sighed.
"Pete!"
Mira's gentle voice came to him through the darkness, filled with trembling entreaty. Conscience-stricken, he hurried back to the cave. She met him at the edge of the candle light and took his hand.
"Can't you tell me about it, Pete?"
With angry self-accusation he replied: "I cud 'a' got the horses, Mira, an'—an' we'd 'a' bin back in the Hills long before this. Thar was jes' a padlock to smash . . . an' I didn't smash it."
She smiled sadly and wound a small arm about his neck.
"I know," she whispered. "We can't help it. . . . There are so many reasons why we can't go yet."
She turned swiftly away to the stove that he might not see how it tore her. Never in his gloomiest suffering had Blue Pete longed as she had for a home. For he had never known home as she had. Her efforts to brighten up their days were the expression of a desire to plant in his inexperienced mind the picture of home that kept passing before her eyes. Her nights were but one long dream of a fireside, with Blue Pete in the other chair. And as the time of their penance seemed to be nearing an end the ugly ranch-house at the 3-bar-Y became to her a palace. Over and over again she planned the fresh home they would start—every chair and table and picture and rug had a place. Helen Mahon, the Sergeant's wife—her own educated cousin—would help her, would supply the art Mira herself, in her prairie upbringing, only groped for. She would make of the 3-bar-Y a home for the whole Cypress Hills district. Every day of delay was agony.
Yet she spoke cheerfully. "It wouldn't be just—just right to go till the trestle's done, Pete, dear."
He looked at her sharply. It was the conviction he had been fighting many a day—that it seemed to be only his own had made it so much harder for him. From the silence he had forced on himself of late he spoke fiercely:
"That damned Pole! We can't let him win. We got to lick them bohunks."
"And Mr. Torrance—after all, Pete, he's only a tenderfoot. . . . Then there's Tressa."
He nodded slowly. "Yes, there's Tressa." A chivalry he would never have acknowledged had been thrusting the girl more and more into the foreground. From the ordinary perils of isolation father and lover might defend her, but in the great calamity that Blue Pete knew was planned to overwhelm her two protectors she would inevitably fall.
"But yuh shudn't have to wait, Mira," he burst out. "An yuh wudn't," he added miserably, "if I wasn't jes' a common rustler."
She came to him with quick steps and ran her fingers through his coarse hair.
"I wasn't no better, Pete—me and my brothers." In her emotion she had dropped back into the old looseness of speech.
He seized her hand in both his own and crushed it to his lips so that it hurt pleasurably.
"I know why yuh stole them horses," he murmured. "Yuh cudn't bear to see the Sergeant thinkin' he loved yuh—an' yuh knew he cudn't love a rustler."
"I guess I knew I was going to love you, Pete."
He wrapped his arms about her and buried his face in her neck; and she could feel him trembling.
Presently she spoke again softly:
"And there's the Sergeant."
"God help me!" he groaned. "I think that's what's holdin' me."
From the moment of his leap through Torrance's window the half breed's mind had been disquieted. At any risk, until he could go to them with clean hands, he would not let the Police know he was still alive. He knew their relentlessness in the chase; and he must be free in order to redeem himself.
That very night, straight from eaves-dropping at the bohunks' meeting, he had crept back to Torrance's stable and found it locked. The padlock in itself was nothing, but it implied suspicion—possibly entangling precautions. And so he had slunk away.
A night's reflection had warned him how fortunate was the instinct that held his hand. As Mira lay sleeping heavily beside him on their bed of spruce, he had lived again the happy days of his unofficial Police duties with Sergeant Mahon—on the prairie, at the barracks and the Police post, but more vividly than all, in the fastnesses of the Cypress Hills. He saw once more the kindly eye, felt the friendly hand, heard the soft voice of the one man above his class who had treated him as equal and friend. He saw again the old tobacco pouch spilled on Inspector Barker's desk in the barracks at Medicine Hat.
He knew why Mahon had come north.
"I can't see him fail, Mira," he groaned. "He's did fer if he does.
We got to stay an' see him through."
"Perhaps he's after the horse-thief too."
Blue Pete started. Then his head sank in one arm. "We can't help him thar, Mira. We can't be caught—yet. . . . An' the Sergeant wudn't want to get us—yet."
"It'll be all over soon, Pete," she said more brightly. "Mr. Torrance has promised us the horses when he goes."
"God fergive me fer keepin' yuh waitin', Mira!" he breathed, trying to read in her face the forgiveness that meant more to him.
But she had turned away, and he did not see the tear on her lashes.
CHAPTER XVII
A PLOT DEFEATED
Torrance's pride was becoming a devastating thing; for the moment it had run away with his sense of proportion and obliterated every superstition. As he ran his eye expertly along the level of the steel rails and saw that the trestle did not sink so much as a hair's breadth, he wanted to shout it to the world. Had he not, at unguarded moments, been held down by momentary flashes of the old dreads he would have jumped on his little speeder and chugged away to the west to sing his satisfaction to the hundred and one contractors who were looking for him to open the way to their longest and heaviest trains of supplies, growing longer and heavier as grade crept into the mountains. He wanted to cry to them: "Run your trains—fifty cars at a time, if the rest of the line will bear 'em. As for the Tepee trestle, it's as steady as the mountains—and a blame sight bigger job."
He longed to talk it over with those who had intelligence to size up the task; he wanted to read its due in the great newspapers of the East.
"Some little jerk-water builder puts up a six-penny cement culvert down East and gets half a column. There ain't enough newspapers in the East to do justice to my trestle."
He was as frank in his self-appreciation as in his passions. Now, so far as Big Jim Torrance was concerned, there was not an obstacle in the line from Montreal to the Pacific. And he, Big Jim Torrance, had made the transcontinental possible where others had failed.
It irritated him that his audience was so small. Tressa's confidence was no new thing; she had always believed in him—no more now than before. Conrad still clung to his megrims—phantom fears that had all but faded from Torrance's mind. As for the five hundred brainless creatures to whom his great victory should be a matter of personal pride, it meant no more to them than last year's flowers.
And so Torrance, waving a boisterous hand from the low seat of his speeder to the young pair standing on the steps of the shack, threw open the gas and throbbed down the track to the end-of-steel village to add to his audience two Policemen and a train crew who were already crowing in anticipation of the end.
Adrian Conrad and Tressa saw him go without a worry in the world but that he would return too soon. Where only the three of them lived it was almost impossible for the two lovers to creep away by themselves. Even a sympathetic daddy becomes a burden in the springtime of youth.
As the older man vanished in a whirl of dust from the loose grade, Conrad puffed a long breath, turned to look deep into the girl's eyes, and without a word held out his hand. She took it, and they ran like children across the grade and into the forest.
Not by favour but by a brain to plan and a never-ceasing vigilance did Ignace Koppowski hold the position of local president of the outlaw organisation. His spies were everywhere—or everywhere that mattered, he thought. And spies spied on other spies; that was the vertebrae of the system on which the I.W.W. thrived.
With his own eyes he saw Torrance mount the speeder and drive away; and with a scowl he followed the laughing flight of the girl and her lover.
At last the trestle was unguarded!
A few hasty words to Heppel started him at a lumbering trot for the camp. Ten minutes later a score of men stood within their leader's shack.
Koppy knew he had time. The boss was gone for the evening; and he knew something of lovers' rambles. One gang he despatched into the forest after Tressa and Conrad. A second crawled in detachments through the woods to the powder cache near Conrad's shack. Heppel had charge of the first, Werner of the other. Werner, given his orders, demurred.
"Thanks, Koppy, but I don't think it's a thing I couldn't do without."
"Five men will do," said Koppy.
"Five men's six too many," grumbled Werner. "Why d'you pick yours truly for all the soft jobs?"
"You are honoured. Only three of you—"
"I'll give up my share of the honour to Morani's; he's fair bubbling for a chance to wipe out the miss he made with his dirk the other night. I'm not a bit resentful. I don't care if I never see the boss again. I resign in favour of Chico."
"I need Morani."
"Not half as bad as I do, pompous one. Look here, old chap, this is a big job, ain't it, a real big thing?"
"Perhaps the end of everything," agreed the underforeman solemnly.
"That's why I'm not hankering for it," said Werner under his breath. "And the fellow who carries it through is going to wear a bigger jewel in his crown, so to speak?" he asked aloud.
Koppy glowered.
"Then why not cop it yourself, old man? My crown's getting a bit top-heavy already. You got a finer sense of balance, and your neck's stronger. Them bolts I drew on the trestle pretty near gave me a headache—not to say as near as you came to it when the boss got swinging," he added with a leer. "Hugo Werner never was ambitious."
Koppy raised himself haughtily. "I order," he rapped.
"Too darn much for my skin," grumbled Werner. "It's a bad habit to get into—for the other fellow."
But he set about obeying, for therein lay the choice of two evils. Five experienced "rock-hogs" were put in his care, men with so little reverence for dynamite that they chewed the sticks, from bravado at first, later as a horrible habit.
"They're all away," Werner assured them, "and the girl. Puff!—and it's all over."
He ran up the slope to the grade and danced in the open door of the boss's shack; and, grinning at the convincing devil of it, they set about their task. Armed with fuse and dynamite they crept along underneath the bank toward the trestle. Werner, as an excuse to linger, carried the fuse; he almost envied the bohunk in the rear with the dynamite. With quick hard blows the "rock-hogs" attacked one of the main central piers with hammer and chisel. They wanted to get it over; the job was too much exposed to suit them.
Almost at the first blow a rock tumbled from the top of the trestle at their backs, and immediately a shower of gravel beat on and about them. Promptly they ran, Werner leading all the way.
From within his shack Koppy witnessed the foiling of his plans. Mouthing deep maledictions, he saw the Indian dance a few steps on the trestle, shouting derision at his fleeing followers. And presently the red-skin clambered down through the network of the trestle and picked up fuse, dynamite and tools, to carry them stolidly up the slope past Conrad's shack to the grade. Then in full view of the camp he seated himself on the grade, rifle across his knee, and began to whittle.
There Torrance, chugging noisily up from his evening dissipation at the end-of-steel village, found him. Even at a distance the absence of life about the shack struck the contractor, and the last half mile he covered with everything open. With the brakes still screeching, he tumbled off and ran to the door, calling to Tressa. The Indian slipped through behind him.
"Girl no here."
Torrance whirled, every nerve tingling, fresh fears tumbling through his brain.
"Out in woods with young brave," continued the Indian, shrugging. "No watch time."
The contractor struck a match and lit the lamp. The Indian closed the door and came close to him. In one hand he held several drills and hammers, in the other a length of fuse and two sticks of dynamite. Torrance's eyes protruded. He looked from the Indian's tell-tale hands to his stolid face.
"They drew them away and—and tried to blow up the trestle?" Self-contempt for the evening's noisy pride swept over Torrance. Then the trestle faded completely from his mind. Tressa—where was she?
"Stay here," he ordered, rushing to the door. "I'll bring the Police."
Like a toy he lifted the speeder about, and with a heave of powerful legs sent it away to a flying start.
But Torrance's reaction had carried him too far—just too far. Tressa was safe. Heppel and eight cruel companions, as directed by Koppy, had gone on the trail of the two lovers. But when it came the moment to strike, Adrian Conrad was their master. In the darkness they slunk away. And the two lovers, arms entwined, scarcely knew that darkness was falling.
In the shack the Indian listened to the fading exhaust of the speeder. His eyes were roving about the room. He was smiling. For the second time in a year he was within the walls of a home; for the first time free to look about. A curious pathetic longing twisted his face. He began to tip-toe about the room, laying a reverent finger everywhere. The covers of the coloured magazines he lifted and let fall, pressed the gaudy cushions that strewed the couch, touched the cheap ornaments Tressa had woven into the picture with happy hand, stared into the home-framed pictures. Over the vase of wild flowers he stooped with a reminiscent smile; and thoughtfully for several minutes he rocked Tressa's own chair.
"Mira shud have 'em all. . . . An' she's got nothin' but a hole in the ground with a halfbreed. . . . An' yet I ain't done nothin' . . . nothin'!"
Absorbed as he was in his dreams, he did not forget the open doorway with its view from the distant camp. Stooping beyond its range, he pushed through to the kitchen. It was pitch dark there, yet his eyes seemed to take in everything. A distant sound from far down the track sent him running to the stable door. It was locked. Inside he could hear the quiet munching of the two horses. His powerful fingers closed over the padlock. A mere twist and nothing lay between Mira and the home that should be hers. The chug of the returning speeder roared nearer.
Blue Pete put a hand to his head and turned away.
Up through the night came the beating car, everything wide open, and stopped before the door. Into the shaft of light from the open doorway Torrance and Sergeant Mahon ran.
"Chief, Chief, where are you?"
From out over the trestle a voice replied.
"Indian gone."
Torrance dashed out on the grade and tried in vain to pierce the darkness. "Here—here, you blithering idiot! The police want you."
No reply—not even a sound.
"You smug-faced redskin! I wonder how much you're mixed in this."
"Indian no come more." The voice drifted from far away in the darkness on the trestle.
Sergeant Mahon lifted his head like a hound on the scent, then with a perplexed smile re-entered the shack.
CHAPTER XVIII
THE CONSCIENCE OF A BOHUNK
Tressa Torrance's outlook on life was a comfortable one, born of her own sunny nature. Its foundation was love, the keystone of its arch peace. The blood of a gentle mother had effectually subdued in her the fierce impetuosity of her father—as in life the frail little wife had dominated the boisterous husband. Tressa wanted most to be loved. It was food to her self-respect, to her easy and appealing ways, even to the laugh bubbling so readily to her rosy lips. Most of all she wanted to be loved by Adrian Conrad; her father—well, his love was impervious to influence.
In her gentle love of peace the bickerings that surrounded her made her shrink within herself, wondering, staunch in her faith that her daddy and Adrian were right—without these blundering, uneducated foreigners being quite as bad as their masters thought.
Desiring to escape it all for a time, she crept away one late afternoon when Adrian and her father were in conference with the two Policemen. They did not seem to notice. Less than a week ahead was the commencement of the last operation on the trestle before handing over to the big contractors complete; and the anxiety of the moment spoke in the firmness of their tone and the grimness of their measures. Tressa stole away, troubled at heart.
In her favourite retreat, a cluster of slender birch trees deep in the forest, she seated herself on a fallen trunk and unrolled her crocheting. Through the thin foliage the sun filtered over her hair and spangled the ground at her feet. A breeze as gentle as herself whispered above her head in friendly commune with the great rustle of the forest. Secluded without being closed in from the light, she felt that she might untangle there more clearly the trifling problems of her sheltered life.
As she worked she hummed. Into the network of woven threads she was weaving the future—a month hence—a year—two years—five. And the pictures pleased her progressively. Adrian, laughing into her eyes after the season's hard struggle, was at her side . . . a happy husband then . . . a beaming and foolishly proud father; and little tots with their father's fair hair—
Something—more a feeling than a sound—arrested her. She flushed at the thought that some one was looking at the pictures of her imagination. Abashed, perhaps a trifle annoyed, but without a thought of fear, she lifted her eyes. But when she beheld Koppy, hat in hand, standing at the edge of her retreat with head bowed, his humility seemed to call only for the sympathy always denied him. With maidenly modesty she gathered her work to tighter compass, but no other restraint did she feel in the presence of the man her friends accused of unthinkable crimes. The inheritance of her femininity assured her that she was in no danger. Koppy had always liked her—she knew that also by virtue of that inheritance; and every woman loves the strong thing that bends to her—loves, but perhaps does not respect.
Unconscious of the challenging coyness of words and manner, she spoke:
"You didn't frighten me a bit, Koppy."
"I didn't want to," he replied in a low voice.
"I don't think I heard you. I guess I must have—felt you."
He moved swiftly in among the trees and stood before her, soiled hat turning in grimy hands.
"You—felt me?"
A vague and sudden sense of discomfort made her raise puzzled eyes to his, but she dismissed it firmly as born of her father's suspicions. Still she wished he would not stand so close, stooping over her, with that funny look in his eyes. Suggestively she glanced at the white trunk on which she was seated, and moved further along.
"I suppose it's an instinct," she said. "Animals must feel like that about things they can't see or hear. Haven't you often been conscious of being watched when you couldn't see the watcher?"
He smiled from a world of superior knowledge; the unseen watcher was the foundation of the big game he was ever playing. The smile ended in a short laugh, and somehow it startled her—she seemed so naked in thought before this strange foreigner.
"You know what I mean," she went on lamely. "I suppose a gopher peering from its hole in the ground would disturb me sooner or later."
"Don't explain," he almost pleaded, "don't try to explain." He seated himself far up the trunk.
Again her puzzled eyes were on him. In some indefinite way he was so different, so—so human and equal. Outwardly there was no evidence of the change—the same nondescript clothes, the same grimy hands and face, the same coarse boots and clumsiness.
He seemed to read her thoughts, for with a gesture of long-suppressed protest he threw out his hands.
"Yes," he cried, "they're gnarled and dirty, and these old overalls are the mark of my degradation." He flung his hat passionately on the ground. "But I'm not always this way. Back in Chicago I dress—sometimes. There I'm what I like to be, what I can be. Not often—it is not that way I rule."
Her eyes were wide with surprise. "You—you speak—"
He shrugged his shoulders. "I speak English as well as you or any one else. I think in English. But it pays me to look foreign, to fight outwardly the 'civilising' influences of the country of my adoption." A slight sneer twisted his lips. "I must look like a cut-throat, because in that way I've reached the height I've attained in my organisation. It shocks you, because you don't understand, because you've never had to plough the row I've toiled along. . . . I'm not as bad as I seem."
She picked up her work to cover the beating of her heart.
"If you're out of sympathy—"
"But I'm not out of sympathy," he interrupted earnestly. "I'm a Worker of the World, and always will be. I would prefer not to have to dress like this, but not because I deplore our aims. It is the misfortune of the class of men for whom I fight. Miss Torrance"—he slid abruptly down the trunk and leaned forward to look in her eyes—"I'm talking to you as I never talked before, as I scarcely dared to think. Any one else would hand me over to the Police. You won't. And to talk like this to a fellow-worker would mean a knife slid in here. No, you won't tell. I've known a lot of women, most of them bad ones because that's the only kind I have a chance to meet, but I never knew one to sell a man she did not hate . . . and a woman never hates till she first loves. You've never loved more than one."
"And not likely to," she put in quietly, even as she thrilled to the completeness of his trust.
He laughed harshly. "They all say that—that is, all but the kind any man can buy. But you know nothing of them—forgive me for mentioning them. . . . There aren't many women stick to their first love."
"Oh?" she said indifferently. "I haven't thought it worth discussing."
"No? Perhaps you're right. Many a time I've thought the same of woman, all women—until I learned that every woman, good or bad, is worth it."
His eyes had gone to the tree tops; they returned now so suddenly that she started. A curious smile moved his lips.
"Do you know, you've disturbed all my convictions of women? I really know so little of you that it may be foolish, but you've made me feel that woman in the singular may be so much more to a man than the whole mass of the sex. For you, or one of the very few like you, a man might give up every other ambition without regret . . . and I've had many—women and ambitions—in my day."
She was flushing, though she knew from the utter frankness of it that he was not making love, not even being impertinent. She had no fear of him, only of her inexperience in handling so strange a situation.
"You make a man feel there is everything in tossing aside all I've attained, merely to settle down as a respectable citizen." He was staring through the tree-tops again, hands clasped over one knee. "I could make a way for myself, a good way, without all this fever, with a woman like you to hold me straight. I know what I can do." A forlorn smile wrinkled his face not unpleasantly. "But there are two insuperable obstacles. The Workers wouldn't let me—and the woman wouldn't have me. . . . That's why I grow desperate sometimes, why I—"
She questioned with her eyes his continued silence. "I won't tell," she promised gently, "but perhaps you'd better say no more."
He did not seem to hear her, and she was cudgelling her inexperience for some smooth retreat, when he broke out explosively:
"I'm the product of over-sudden civilisation, like a thin-blooded man plunging into cold water. From the crude half-lights of my own country I leaped at one bound into the brilliance of civilisation's beam, as it is found in America. And I couldn't stand it—few of us can. We get numb to everything but our own discomfort. And knowing we're bound for life, we struggle and beat our wings against things as we find them, in a panic because they differ so from things we were born to. We're like a bird in a room. It may be a cosy, warm and friendly room, but the bird wants only to get out in the cold. . . . The human tide we're plunged in from the very first day ignores us, or tramples us, or drives us like cattle, forgetting that we are numb and bewildered, panic stricken, unable to think beyond primal emotions. . . .
"If we could only have a year's apprenticeship where sympathy holds our hands! If only we could enter the new state by a gradient instead of a plunge! But there is no isle between, no one to lead us gently to the light. . . . And few of us would pause to be led. And so we struggle, and in the struggling hurt ourselves or are hurt. We strike out—and are struck back by stronger force than ourselves. And so we tumble back to sullen silence, watching and planning to beat that force as we may. . . . And there I am."
The hopelessness of his tone held appealing hands to her. She longed to help him, yet knew not how. And suddenly it came to her that perhaps it lay within her power to build up the structure of dissatisfaction that he was exposing to her.
"You know how foolish it is," she said. "You have intelligence, you see where fighting leads. Why strike back? Go with the tide; it is not trying to overwhelm you, only to do you good. There'd be few knocks then."
"Ah," he cried bitterly, "but it's too late. The poison of resistance has flooded our veins, and as yet there is no antidote. Slowly it has been weaving itself into the very fibre of my character; I can't help it. At moments like this I see, for my mind still retains some of its sense of proportion . . . but part of the poison of it is that we do more with our hands, these hands you hate, than with our minds. Ten years it has been coursing through me. Can I alter my stature by a thought? As I talk to you I'm able to stand aside and watch the horrible thing, but gnawing always at me is the memory of those early days of panic."
She shook her head. "You'll never understand," she sighed. "I hoped you would."
"But I do understand. It's you can't, because you never stood on foreign shore—alone."
"Yet it is better than home, or you wouldn't come in your thousands."
"Better than home, yes, but worse than we hoped. Only those who flee the rude traditions, the heartless laws, the ignorance and comfortless life of worn-out Europe can see the pictures the very word 'America' rouses in us. I don't know whether it is not more the fault of our ignorance than of the boasts of those who have already gone, of those who would profit by our going, that we land with hopes nothing on earth could justify. And, not finding the milk and honey flow out to lave our ship, we start depressed and resentful. We land in a strange country with only a word of its language. No one greets us, no one holds our fumbling hands. By dirty ways we slink to dirty tenement houses to hide ourselves—where disloyalty is the air we breath, discomfort our bed, and robbery our experience—robbed by the very friends who preceded us. Half-cowed, lonely, cursing in silence the drudgery that faces us, we learn to live for ourselves alone. Helpless, we drift into the hands of our own kind, who wax rich on the sale of us in herds to work no one else would undertake. Sullen, keen to the injustice of things, but ignorant of the simplicity of redress, we fall victims to our own morbid hatreds, to anything that promises to feed our fury. . . .
"That is where the Independent Workers of the World gets its recruits. And once its clutches close on us—" He stopped suddenly and clambered to his feet. "Miss Torrance, you'd better go home. You shouldn't come here. Go—right away!" His fists were clenched, his under lip gripped between his teeth.
She had dropped from her seat and was staring at him, alarmed at last. Over his face, into his very clothes and manner, had passed something that tumbled her rudely back to the Koppy she knew best, the malignant, sneering, mesmeric, uncouth underforeman her father and Adrian suspected. He stooped and lifted his hat jerkily.
"Workers strong," he said in his broken English. "They see big things, they do them. I, a vice-president—just a Pole, but big man—I order. Go home!"
Yet he turned his back before she did, and even as she started away she knew he knew that he could not harm her. She ran as she had never run before, clutching her work in a grim little fist, not from fear of Koppy but of the strange thing she had seen.
Within sight of the grade she sank on the forest floor and lay looking up through tangled pictures, as through the woven ceiling of green leaves that sprinkled the sky. Then she sat up, smoothed her hair, wiped from her face every mark of agitation, and sauntered back to the shack.
"Where have you been?" Conrad called anxiously to her from the doorway.
"We were calling you."
"Just getting away from you cold-blooded schemers," she laughed. "There's peace in the woods tonight, anyway." And she went past him to the kitchen to boil the kettle.
CHAPTER XIX
THE BEAT OF A MOUNTED POLICEMAN
Sergeant Mahon was not happy in his new work. After a Police experience that knew only the ranching district he found the new conditions, the new crimes and criminals, irritating and a little bewildering. None of the trailing he loved, of horse and steer; no ranchers and cowboys and rustling gunmen any longer filled the horizon of his friendships and duties. He began to fear that a few months of it would wipe from his mind all he had ever learned. Even his horse was of little use, for the only path to ride, the three miles to the trestle, was quite as easy by foot or ballast train.
The limitations of his official horizon were stifling, a mere mile or two in radius. And within that circle were only a handful he could call friends, and a camp of bohunks. He hated the shadows of the forest, where life was scarcer than in the Hills, where even keen wits were wasted.
Here the guns of his former enemies were supplanted by knives and knuckle-dusters and clubs; and the men who wielded them were cowardly, slinking foreigners whose very appearance was repugnant. Sneaky, underground, despicable crime it was, running the gamut from petty annoyance to senseless murder. None of the open-handed, bold and reasoned intelligence of the prairie criminal. It revolted him. Senseless, insensate, formless, erratic, it only disgusted him with its sheer and unprofitable lawlessness. On the prairie crime meant double duty for him—to discover, then to catch the criminal; here there was no escape—once the criminal was discovered.
This offscouring of Europe was little more individual to him than a Chinaman; Mahon was doubtful that he could pick out a second time more than a few of the bohunks. With faces dull and brainless, voices drab and lifeless, they merged into a mass of slime.
For the first time since he had donned the uniform Mahon began to question his capacity for it. Knowing the history of the wide effort demanded of the Mounted Police, he began to wonder if he could throw himself into it with credit to the Force.
The only attractive feature of his new life was the friendship of the bluff, cantankerous, but kind-hearted contractor, his sunny daughter, the manly foreman, and the talkative Murphy. Of Tressa he had so many glowing things to write in his letters to his wife that Helen threatened to rush north in self-defence. Thereupon he crammed one letter from start to finish with Tressa Torrance's praises, and defied Helen to fulfil her threat.
In the course of his work the solitary part that intrigued him was the mystery of the Indian. He felt that there was more there than he knew of; he had more than a suspicion that Torrance was concealing from him essential facts. But there seemed no call for official action. Thus far the Indian was friendly; it was his nature to be silent and mysterious.
Failing use for his horse, Mahon spent much time in the forest. And after a time, the very shadows, and the secrecy breathed by the trees seemed to hint at revelations just round the corner. Down in the camp half a thousand bohunks, with brutal murder in their hearts, would, under Police eye, climb to their bunks as innocent in appearance as kittens. There in the woods, freed from observation, the bohunk was more apt to discard his mask of stupidity. Somewhere there his plans were laid, orders given and received.
What the Sergeant picked up little by little in the woods, small as it was and unsatisfying to his youthful impatience, sufficed to sustain his hopes. The constant meeting after work-hours with slinking bohunks who always avoided him, convinced him that something within the law was afoot, and repeated glimpses of distant groups which dribbled away when he came within sight induced him to alter his methods. More covertly he hunted, though it tried him sorely, and snatches of conversation untangled from the froth of their utterances did much to simplify his task and give more definition to his search.
Somehow his mind never quite freed itself of the haunting memory of his discoveries that early day down the slope of the river bank. Though the tracks were dim, he was satisfied that horses had passed that way at no distant date. Suspicious at first, doubtful as the marks advanced toward the river (largely on account of certain past memories roused by peculiarities he seemed to recognise), he had later decided that what he saw was no figment of an imagination rendered more lively by the revival of the story of Blue Pete. Certainty was added by the suspicion that efforts had been made by a master-hand to hide the tracks.
Where that led he could not even guess, though at that stage his mind kept reverting to the Indian.
The mysterious arrivals and disappearances of the redskin as Torrance saw them was interesting enough, but they were as nothing to Mahon compared with his own failure to meet the Indian face to face. That was epitomised in the incident of the voice from the darkness over the trestle the night he rushed to Torrance's assistance. There was little to connect Torrance's inexplicable Indian friend with the Indian bohunk who had dived that first day over the cliff to almost certain death, but Mahon had been living among inferences and deductions and a certain question was arising in his mind. Still it pointed nowhere.
Constable Williams had told him of isolated bands of Indians who had visited the camps during the previous summer, and Mahon conceived the idea that with one of these braves Torrance had had dealings which placed the redskin under obligation though the contractor himself might not suspect it. An Indian never forgets; that was the simplest explanation.
The secrecy of the Indian's movements might be accounted for by a natural reserve, and specially by a shyness before the uniform. But where was he hiding? That he was never far away was apparent. Mahon added to his other duties this new trail.
He realised the difficulty of his task after several distinct twinges of that strange sense developed in the wary at being under unseen eyes. It could not be a bohunk, for the workmen were not clever enough to trail him unseen. Also it was not an inimical inspection. Only the Indian could trail the trailer with such unerring confidence.
It was not unnatural, therefore, that as time went on the Indian assumed the proportions of a gripping mystery.
On the track of the new problem, Sergeant Mahon took to roaming the woods by night. His reward was unexpected and unsought—it had no connection whatever with the Indian. He discovered that the bohunks were meeting in their hundreds under cover of the darkness. To satisfy himself that an outside menace was not added to the perils surrounding the trestle, Mahon took to inspecting the camp from hiding whenever he came on one of these gatherings. The fact that they were composed of the ordinary bohunks of the camp, on some nights almost emptying it, relieved him.
He was turning his attention more directly to these meetings in the woods, when something happened to alter his plan.
CHAPTER XX
INDIAN OR POLICEMAN?
The tang of the northern evening drifted through the open door of the shack, within which the contractor lounged in his big arm chair, smoking hard but thinking harder. Near the table, bending to let the full light from window and door fall on her work, Tressa stitched at a rip in a disreputable old vest of her father's.
The days were getting noticeably shorter, and the advance breath of the long, tight winter was beginning to add a new snap to the air. The noises of the camp drifted up over the grade fitfully, dreamily; some new hunger that might have been called homesickness was urging a new tone into the evening sounds.
Torrance, the stability of his work assured, imagined that he was supremely happy. But life had lost a fraction of its zip, though he refused to acknowledge it.
But Tressa knew it. Idleness was worse than medicine to her father, and for days he had been fuming with impatience for the opening of the last operation, more than a little irritable. She knew it as she watched the smoke breathe more slowly from his lips and the pipe grow cold. Presently, without opening his eyes, he dropped the pipe on the table and nestled his head against the cushion. Tressa smiled, for she was happier than her father—and Adrian would be up shortly.
She heard the familiar whistle break out far down the sloping path beyond the grade. Higher and higher it mounted, and with hand held she listened with smiling eyes. She would keep on with her mending as if she had not heard; and the whistle would grow more impatient as it approached, calling her to reply.
Now he was half way up the slope—now only a few yards beyond the grade. She grabbed her mending and began to work industriously. Now he was on the grade—he would see her sitting there working as if she had forgotten there was an Adrian Conrad.
But just then the whistle ceased abruptly. That was not part of the formula, but she would not raise her eyes; he would break out in a moment more impatiently than ever, and she would look up as if she had just heard—
She looked up sooner than she reckoned, for the silence continued. Yet she anticipated only by a second Conrad's flying entrance, his face tense with a sudden alarm. Without a word he seized the rifle from its rack beside the door and dashed to the kitchen. Torrance blinked himself awake at the scurry.
"Wha-at-what—"
Conrad turned in the kitchen doorway and pressed finger to lip. They found him kneeling on the floor beside the kitchen window, the rifle pointing over the sill past the side of the stable.
Torrance, still blinking with sleep, looked along the rifle barrel. For several seconds he could see nothing but the dead grey grass. Then a dim movement focussed his eyes. A hundred yards away the Indian was creeping toward them.
At intervals the redskin raised his head to peer across the grade. Not until he was close to the stable did he appear to notice the three watchers, then he lifted a hand and disappeared behind the stable. As he wormed his way to cover Torrance spoke eagerly.
"Let him have it, Adrian. I've always had my suspicions. It's some devilish trick or he wouldn't sneak up that way. Soon as he saw us he scrambled to cover. Watch for him around the other side."
But Conrad shook his head and pushed aside Torrance's extended hand; but he did not lower the rifle.
The Indian came round the other side of the stable, as Torrance had predicted, but there was no attempt at secrecy, except that he continued to hug the ground. Torrance grunted. Tressa sighed. Conrad lowered the rifle. The Indian crawled over the back step and lifted himself to his feet. Torrance forgot every suspicion before that smile.
"You got a nerve taking a chance like that, Big Chief. If I'd 'a' had the gun you'd 'a' got your blanket full."
The Indian looked significantly at Conrad and shrugged his shoulders.
"Him no shoot Indian."
"You're too blamed sure," replied the contractor pettishly. "What's all the fuss about, anyway?"
"Bad paleface mebbe see." The Indian pointed toward the camp.
"Not likely! We could hardly see you ourselves. You better drop a postcard next time. I was just in the middle of a dream that the trestle was done and I was cashing the check in Winnipeg in thousand-dollar bills, after polishing off a few bohunks for a real bang-up finale. Then in booms Conrad here and grabs the rifle, and I wake up with the feeling them bohunks are doing the polishing on me. I was mighty near scared. By the way, we wanted you. The Police want you to identify the bohunks in that gang the other night that tried to blow up the trestle. If you'll come down to the camp with me and pick 'em out—"
"No good." The Indian shook his head. "You shoot. No save bridge that way. Others blow up. Job never done."
Torrance's admiration showed in his grin. "That's thinking, Big Chief. Of course the Police don't give a cuss about the trestle, if they can get some one to hang." His face sobered. "Just the same, when this thing's off my hands and there's nothing to blow up but a pile of dirt, I'm going through the camp with an arsenal on me, and I'll splash blood over the ugly place till it looks like a Chicago beef-cannery. It would save transportation expenses, too. When the last shovel's dumped and the Police gone home to supper I'm going to boil over and roast a dozen bohunks alive—"
"Daddy!" chided Tressa. "He'll believe you."
"Think so?" asked Torrance delightedly. "Then here goes: Say, I'll eat my last breakfast of bohunk livers, seasoned with bohunk brains—if there are any—and as an appetiser, bohunk tongues steeped in—"
"Heap big talk," broke in the Indian wearily.
"And that," snorted Torrance, "just about puts the blinkers on that. Even strangers don't believe me. But you put before me bohunk hearts stuffed with bohunk sweetbreads—"
The Indian turned up his eyes in disgust. Torrance chuckled.
"He knows the belly-ache it would give a fellow, and I bet he's et more men for breakfast than I ever dreamed of murdering. If your appetite's up to it, Big Chief, take a mouthful of that thug living up on the bank above the camp. He's got all the pizen of Russia in him, flavoured with the rankest sauces of Europe."
The Indian waited.
"Shouldn't wonder," ventured the contractor, "if he's got something in his system."
"If you'll let him get in a word edgeways," laughed Tressa.
"That's the way all yours get in," grumbled her father.
"Bohunk have big plans," grunted the Indian.
"We know that, but what's eating us is what they are."
"Indian find out."
"Then you'll do more than a squad of Police. But what's the charge?"
He eyed the Indian with suspicion. "They're laying for you, you know."
The Indian smiled scornfully.
"That shows you know the bohunk, friend. Because there's really no need to be afraid if they're afraid of you. It's the nature of the beasts. In three or four days I'll take the starch out of them by hard work, but in the meantime you can help us a lot—and earn enough cartwheels for yourself to keep you in fire-water the rest of your days. Look here"—he smiled magnanimously—"for every bohunk you give me an excuse to hang there's a dollar for you. That's five hundred dollars—and it's yours with my blessing."
"Aren't you extravagant?" asked Tressa slyly.
He regarded his daughter with an injured expression. "You take all the pleasure from my bargains, Tressa. Make it three dollars a day, Big Chief. It sort of makes a man reckless to have his own detective force."
The Indian waited patiently until the torrent of talk ceased.
"Indian take no pay," he said stolidly.
The contractor rubbed his chin. "What's the big idea? That's plumb crazy—it ain't human nature. I had an Indian working for me once—and come to think of it, it didn't take us long to strike much the same bargain—and he was the best man I ever had working for me. If there's a tribe like you and him, I'll engage the whole caboose on the spot—at the same price. And I'll give you the sweetest job an Indian ever had since the North-West Rebellion. All you need do is surround that mess of huts down there, make a noise like an apple pie, and shoot everything that comes out to take a bite—that is, after the trestle's done. If you can handle a spade and crowbar, and live on dessicated sawdust and tinned whale, you can take the shooting job on instanter. There's a good two weeks' work for you afterwards. Only start on Koppy. Eh, how's it look to you?"
"No pay Indian," repeated the Indian.
"There's a sting in the tail somewhere," Torrance muttered to his foreman. "Either he wants my calabash pipe, or he plans to land his whole family of papooses on my breakfast table while he's on the job. And their annual bath may be eleven months back. Go on, Chief, what's the answer?"
"Indian no work with P'lice."
"I don't ask you to—I don't want you to."
"Call off P'lice, then Indian find out everything."
"Mm-m! So that's the cue?" He turned his back to look meaningly at
Conrad. "You want the Police called off, eh?"
"Indian no can work with P'lice."
The redskin went through exaggerated motions of peering about, his moccasins scraping noisily on the floor. Torrance began to understand.
"I see. The Police give the show away by snooping too much?"
"P'lice lookin'—bohunk good," grunted the Indian. "Nothin' doin'.
Indian watchin'—bohunk not know."
"If I could I'd do what you want, but I'm not the Commissioner. Just the same, I'll put it to them. If they bother you, truss 'em up—only don't say I advised it, or leave me your widow to look after. By the way, where is she? Tressa wants to talk the latest prairie styles with her, and how to cure freckles. But come on into the sitting room and be comfortable."
He started for the front room, pushing the others ahead of him. Turning at the door to throw another banter at his guest, he faced an empty kitchen.
"By gad! There he goes again!" He went into the sitting room and sat down with a loud sigh. "That fellow can't even leave like a civilised being, and he don't come like one. He gets on my nerves. I don't know whether it's best to go down with the trestle with a knife in my gizzard, or to die of that spooky feeling nobody's ever invented a patent medicine for since Peruna."
Sergeant Mahon heard the Indian's curious demand with a calmness that surprised even himself. As for Torrance, he was completely bewildered.
"I suppose it sounded fishy to you," Mahon reflected. "I don't quite understand why it doesn't to me—except that we've found no reason yet to suspect him. . . . Wish I could talk with him."
"You kick around here for a day or two; he's sure to turn up down the chimney or through the keyhole."
Mahon shook his head. "He doesn't want to talk to the Police. It doesn't necessarily imply guilt in an Indian. He's watching us as closely as he is the bohunks. I'll wager he knows I'm here now. The Indians never liked the Police—like a boy under his dad's eye. I guess they know they've given us our hardest jobs. You should hear Inspector Barker's stories." He strolled to the door and looked over the river. "He's been guarding the trestle better than any of us," he mused.
Suddenly he swung about.
"Tell him he's got a clear course, unless something big threatens. I don't seem to be on the right track. We're only crossing and mussing trails by working separately. . . . If he won't work with me—tell him I'm trusting him."
CHAPTER XXI
BLUE PETE WORKS ALONE
Koppowski and his three friends climbed through the window of the shack on the top of the bank and were swallowed in the forest. And around them other shadows moved silently in the same direction.
They were on their way to the big meeting of the season. Except for a mere dozen of practised ubiquity the camp was empty; for that night, which was to seal the fate of the trestle—perhaps—Koppy was less concerned than usual that the three up on the grade should be deceived.
For days he had been polishing up the details of his plan. And of the two methods open to him for passing those details on to his followers, like a true leader he chose personal delivery. Eloquence was a never-failing inspiration of his in the face of crowds, and hysteria, his best ally, worked only at its highest pitch in the mob. Besides, there was a gratifying pomp in the meeting; the thrill he so readily imparted to his audience returned to him double-fold and opened the gates to further honours in the inner councils of the I.W.W.
Without underestimating the gravity of failure before such a gathering as he would face that night, self-confidence never deserted him; never yet had it let him down. As a born gambler he had no compunctions at staking everything on one throw.
Directly away from the grade he led deep into the woods, and all about them was movement, silent, individual, wrapped in the promise of the meeting. Presently Koppy made a peremptory motion of his hand.
"Wait!" He left them there, moving ponderously forward to the heart of a small clearing, where he paced up and down, chin in hand. The three followers watched from a distance.
"Nap—or was it Wellington—at Waterloo or somewhere!" jeered Werner in a low voice. "The mutt thinks the whole world is watching . . . and I ain't sure it ain't."
Koppy waved his hand, and they rejoined him.
Patches of darkness already filled the forest, but a late sun filtered through the tree tops in the thinner spaces and wove a pattern of colour on the brown leaves and dead green moss, the slender spruce needles and straight-standing trunks. Nature was in a gentle glow; the pure clear air of falling evening draped the earth in sweetness. Yet through it wound long lines of ghoulish men who felt it not, held to fiendish things by mistaken ambitions, by an unjustified bitterness that fed on its own helplessness. For, after all, the varying moods of nature are but constituents of a formula of which each man provides for himself the other half—else would the Eskimo be a paragon, the hunter a saint.
Koppy had explained it to Tressa in fiery words; the Independent Workers of the World had found tilled soil in the breasts of these unthinking men. By feeding their smouldering bitterness against conditions due largely to themselves it had won their unreasoning fidelity; like dogs they crept to heel. Here at last was a medium in which to express their wrath. That it could profit them nothing mattered not. All they read was that, under-dogs as they were doomed to be, they might make their masters suffer.
Werner, more sensitive to the silences, grumbled at his leader's back.
"Cheerful sport, this. A real hi-larious way to end a dull day."
Morani's lip curled.
"It's all right for you, Chico," muttered Werner. "All you got to do to get your blood running fresh is to slip that stiletto into somebody's ribs. They don't expect any better of a Dago. Me? They'd fasten a rope under my ears and wish me pleasant voyage."
The Italian expectorated noisily.
"I suppose," continued Werner, "you might's well do that as spit macaroni talk at me. You get me roused and I'll tear off chunks of German and throw them—"
Koppy's hand went up for silence. The men plodded on.
At the place of meeting not a man was in sight; a great silence seemed to have stifled life itself. But as Koppy raised himself on a slight eminence in the centre of the clearing and made a gesture with his expressive hands, throngs of his followers crowded about him with no sound but shuffling feet.
As Koppy looked about on their massed faces a disturbing memory of those strange moments with Tressa Torrance almost unnerved him. He understood these men; he knew the forces that had brought them down to railway work. And the flick of a still faintly breathing conscience made him pale. The daily sight of Tressa Torrance and her simple acceptance of him as a fellow-creature had roused within him thoughts he imagined he had long since stifled. There were times when he contemplated the possibility of carrying her away and leaving all else behind. Never before in America had a decent woman looked at him in such a kindly way. The many women he had known he had been willing to pay for, as was expected of him; here was one he could not buy, yet she was almost within reach for nothing.
Sometimes of late his mind had roved beyond a crude camp of logs, with filthy bunks in tiers, with filthy straw on which to lie. Carpeted rooms, with pictures on the walls, and shiny chairs and tables; smart clothes and clean hands; evenings of mental peace in a home of his own. And a woman to manage it and him. That was the bewildering part of it—he wanted a woman to order him about, some one gentle and sweet, to blot from his warped mind the hideous nightmare of strife and scheming amidst which he seemed always to have moved. He longed to have to change his clothes after the day's work, to wash and brush himself, to smile and converse in his best of English. He owed nothing to the I.W.W. that he had not repaid a hundredfold. He was a bit weary of his own passions and the direction of others.
But from beneath his shaggy brows, as he stood towering above his followers in the semi-darkness of the clearing, he read expectation—nay, even demand—in every upturned face. And the old surge of pride, the sordid memories that had kept him to his meanest tasks and sometimes convinced him of a divine mission, bent him back to his big plans. In long silence he returned their gaze, moving his head sharply from side to side to fix every eye. None knew better than he the value of silences, of the ponderous manner. Every art of the leader of mobs was his.
As if delving to their very hearts he stared into every face. And they recognised his leadership by stifled sighs and sudden breaths. Dull to reason, as to pain and pleasure, their nerves were denied the protective covering of sanity that comes with education. What they did not know was less than what they imagined. In such an atmosphere respect became reverence, irritation fury, fear panic, a sense of injustice justification for any crime. Before the piercing gaze of their leader their lips opened, their bloodshot eyes shifted, and breath came uncertainly. It was a form of mesmerism.
And when at last he burst out in an impassioned jargon that did duty as common language, they rose to him hysterically.
Truth to tell, he had called the meeting with no intention of spurring to immediate action. So much hung on the final decision that was to culminate their year's work that Koppy hesitated to give the order. The meeting had been conceived as nothing more than a preliminary test of their loyalty and determination; perhaps he might raise their ardour to the point where it would be safe to let them know the scheme in general. The details would reach them later through trusted mouthpieces. But most of all he wanted to feel their hands on his.
But when, in the mellow light of the setting sun, he read their mad recklessness he reacted to it. Carried from his feet, he spoke fiercely; passionately, as one inspired. The passive, underground resistance of the past few weeks swept swiftly in a few sentences to open rebellion. Hesitation looked cowardly then, caution tawdry, waiting an insult to their dignity.
Werner alone did not follow him. When five hundred fists thrust as many weapons into the air and cried for action, Werner felt the urge of action of his own. Slowly he slunk to the outskirts of the mob.
"This," he said to himself, "is where Hugo Werner takes to the tall timbers. I don't hypnotise worth a cent. All Koppy's eagle eye does to me is warn me I'm not bullet-proof. Me for the safe spots; they can get as maudlin as they like. I got a hunch this is no place for Hugo Werner."
Behind him the low murmur of excitement grew to hysteria. They demanded to do something, to destroy and smash and rend. Another two minutes and nothing could hold them back. To and fro swayed five hundred hot bodies, back and forward shook five hundred threatening hands.
Koppy knew that he was master of their very souls, that there before him five hundred men awaited his direct orders without question. Thrills tingled scalp. With fists uplifted he shrieked at them:
"Now, now is the time! We are five hundred; they are two. They are ours. These oppressors, who have for years ground our faces to the dust, are trembling before us. Let us strike—strike! We rush, five hundred of us; we smash and wreck. Then we are masters, not slaves. The trestle must go—now!"
"Me, too," murmured Werner from the shadows. "Damn glad I got a start.
Wonder how far it is to my next meal."
"Come closer, men, closer!" Koppy was holding out his arms to them.
"Let me feel your strong hands before we strike. It is almost time.
It is dark. From the crawling shadows five hundred—"
He had overdone it. Five hundred pairs of eyes tore themselves from their leader's face and shifted fearfully to the lurking, crawling shadows that closed them in.
And at the instant a dismal howl struck through the night, unplacable, all-pervading, unearthly. At the top of its most hideous note it crashed to silence.
Five hundred pairs of eyes sought each other with the blankness of terror-numbed minds. Five hundred bodies trembled. Transfixed, they waited.
It came again, louder, crushing menace in its tone. Two piercing whistles cut it short, and some huge, unearthly creature crashed out from the darkness toward the place where they stood. A roar of cannon seemed to tear their ear-drums—another—and another—everywhere about them. With one mind five hundred imaginative workmen dropped their weapons from nerveless hands and fled, bumping, tumbling, fighting each other. A voiceless flow of chaotic clamour marked their course toward the camp.
Koppy, teeth gnashing, threw up his hands and slunk into the darkness.
And from the shadows moved one solitary Indian and his squaw, one inoffensive little broncho, one great mongrel Russian wolf hound.
"Phew!" breathed the Indian, as he snapped his rifle shut and reached up to fondle the horse's ears.