During the ensuing weeks the cabaret singer went often to see Betty at the hotel. They even rode together, for Joe Hurley suddenly became so busy at the Great Hope Mine that he was forced to excuse himself, so he said, from accompanying the Eastern girl on those pleasant jaunts which both had so enjoyed.
The two girls actually enjoyed each other’s society and found more than a riding habit in which to feel a mutual interest. The friendship grew out of a hunger in the hearts of both Nell and Betty.
The parson did not make a third in their rambles, nor was he often in sight when Nell called on Betty. The latter would not have encouraged any intimacy between the mining-camp girl and Hunt under any circumstances. She did not dream that her brother felt more than passing interest in the half-wild Nell.
The latter never attended the services held in Tolley’s old dance hall. But the Passonians in general came to accept the religious exercises as an institution and supported them fairly in point of contributions and attendance. There was yet, however, strong opposition to the parson and his work. Nor did it all center around Boss Tolley.
Nell, soon after the beginning of her acquaintance with Betty, stopped singing “This Is No Place for a Minister’s Son” and took up no other ditty aimed in any particular at the Reverend Willett Ford Hunt and his work.
As for Hunt himself, he went forward, accepting both praise and blame with equal equanimity. But he began to be worried secretly about Joe Hurley.
Hunt supplemented the morning preaching with a Sunday school in the afternoon and a general service in the evening, at which he usually gave a helpful talk on more secular lines than his morning sermon.
Hunt would have been glad to have had more and better singing; but although Rosabell Pickett did her best, the song service was far from satisfactory. The parson never passed Colorado Brown’s place in the evening and heard Nell’s sweet voice that he was not covetous. He would never be satisfied—but he whispered this not even to Betty—until he heard that voice leading his congregation in the meeting room.
The rougher element that had at first attended the meetings mainly out of curiosity soon drifted away.
Hunt was not, however, above carrying his work out into the highways and byways of the town. If the men would not come to his services, he carried a measure of his helpful efforts to them. He did more than visit the homes of Canyon Pass. He went, especially at the noon hour, to where the men were at work.
Hunt never made himself offensive. He did not join the workmen at the mines or washings as a parson, but as another man, interested in their labor and in themselves.
Once a mule-drawn ore wagon broke down on the road to the ore-crushers. It blocked the way of other teams. The parson took off his coat, helped raise the wagon-body so the axle could be blocked, and aided in getting on another wheel in place of the broken one.
A man working alone in a ditch some distance from the Oreode was so unfortunate as to bring a rock down and get caught by the leg. His shouts for help were first heard by Hunt, who was striding along the wagon track. Without other aid the parson pried up the rock and drew the man out from under it. Then he carried the fellow, with his lacerated leg, to his shack, where he lived with his partner; and between the partner and Hunt the injured man was nursed as long as he needed attention at all.
This incident was the spark that started the idea of the hospital for Canyon Pass in Hunt’s mind. He began to talk hospital to everybody, even to Slickpenny Norris. The banker threw up his hands and began to squeal at last.
“That’s just it! That’s just it!” he cried. “I knew one thing would lead to another if a parson come into this town. I told that crazy Joe Hurley so. He had no business ever to have brought you here.”
“What has my coming to Canyon Pass got to do with it?” Hunt asked mildly. “The need of a hospital—there are always accidents happening at the mines—was here long before I came. If a man is hurt badly he dies before help can get here. Doctor Peterby is no surgeon—and you know, Mr. Norris, he is not always to be trusted. This towns needs a place where an injured man can get surgical treatment and proper nursing.”
“I don’t see why,” muttered Norris. “We were getting along quite well enough before you butted in.”
Hurley, however, agreed with his friend. In spite of the fact that he seemed to have “fallen from grace” a good bit, the owner of the Great Hope was strong for all secular improvement of the town, whatever may have been his private emotions regarding the religion that Hunt represented. The movement for a hospital took form and grew.
It was not these things, however, that endeared Hunt to the hearts of the rougher element of Canyon Pass. And in time—and that before fall—some of the toughest hard-rock men and muckers working in the mines and at the Eureka Washings openly praised the Reverend Willett Ford Hunt.
Hunt one noon had given the men who gathered in a quiet place to eat their lunches a little talk on first aid to the injured. He had sent to Denver for several first-aid kits and was now going about from mine to mine explaining the more important uses of the articles in the box.
The men understood the helpfulness of this. Neglected wounds meant blood-poisoning, one of the most painful scourges a prospector or miner working far beyond the reach of surgeon and hospital, can have. It was well to know, too, how to make a proper tourniquet, and how to lay a bandage so that it would hold well.
The whistle blew and the great engine was started. The men drifted away to their several jobs. There were three pipes at work tearing down the bank on the upper bench at the Eureka Washings, and others below. The force of the water thrown from the nozzles of these pipes rocked the mighty hydraulic “guns” and caused the men astride of them to hold on with both hands. It took a husky fellow to guide that stream spouting from between his knees.
Hunt had returned the kit to the superintendent’s office and climbed to the upper bench, intending to go over the highland to the Great Hope Mine, which was nearer the West Fork River. Hi Brownell, who straddled the middle gun up here, risked waving a cordial hand at the parson when he saw the latter departing. The noise of the hurtling streams drowned Hi’s voice, of course.
Just as Hunt returned a smiling salute to the young fellow—one in whom the parson was deeply interested, for Hi was really a worth-while boy—the accident happened that was fated to mark this day as one long to be remembered at Canyon Pass. Incidentally the occasion, more than any other one thing, brought about the establishment of the new hospital.
The whine and splash of the streams of water drowned most other sounds. But of a sudden, as Hunt was turning his back on the scene, he heard a sharp crack—a sound that would have penetrated the thunderous rumble of a railroad train.
Hunt wheeled. He saw Hi Brownell thrown high into the air as though from a viciously bucking broncho, come down sprawling, and the savage stream from his pipe strike the man and carry him, as though he were a leaf on a torrent, into the cavity in the bank, against which the nozzle of the pipe was aimed.
The flapping limbs and struggling torso of Brownell were visible for a moment only; then down upon the spot roared soil, gravel, and larger stones, of which the bank’s strata were built.
Unguided, the shooting stream from the gun swept first one way along the bench, then the other. It corrugated the face of the bank deeply for yards in either direction. For a moment Hunt saw again the struggling body of the injured man at the edge of the fallen rubble. Then came another slide to cover it completely!
The broken hydraulic gun fell over on its side. The parting of some section of it was what had thrown Brownell into the air and into the path of its stream.
But before the other gunners on the bench who saw Brownell’s accident could shut off their streams, Hunt had acted. Some muckers tried to run in to seize Brownell or dig him out from under the gravel that had fallen, but the stream from the writhing pipe swept them aside like chips. Half a dozen were rolling in the mud of the bench.
Hunt sprang directly for the seat of the trouble. That hose-pipe had to be controlled before a thing could be done to help the buried Brownell. Precious moments were lost signaling to the engineer below to shut off power.
Hunt had not played football on his college team for nothing. He made an extremely low “tackle,” for he went down on his knees and then slid along through the mud to grapple with the writhing pipe that had broken away from its fastenings. He got hold of it and wrestled with it for a few seconds as two men might wrestle on the mat. When the other men came running from below Hunt had conquered the formidable thing, and the stream was shooting into the air, where all the harm it did was to shower some of the men as it fell back to earth.
For thirty seconds or more he held it so, until the stream was shut off below. The others ran for the pile that had overwhelmed Brownell. They dug into it with their bare hands, got hold of one leg, and dragged him forth like a wet rag out of a pan of dishwater!
He was alive; nor were there many bones broken. But he was a terrible sight, and they had to work over him for some minutes before he breathed again. Hunt went at this task, too, as coolly as did the superintendent. That first-aid kit came in very handily at this juncture.
The men stood around for a little while and watched and talked. The accident had come near being a tragedy.
“Believe me,” said one rough fellow, “that parson is a good deal of a man. I’m for him, strong!”
“You’d even go to church for him, would you, Jack?” chuckled his mate.
“Church? I’d go to a hotter place than that for him!” was the prompt and emphatic reply.
Joe Hurley had lost none of his admiration for his college friend whom he had encouraged to come West. He still believed the Reverend Willett Ford Hunt was the very man to find the heart of Canyon Pass. Nor did events as they developed disprove his pre-judgment of the result of Hunt’s coming.
But it must be confessed a sour note had come into the life of the owner of the Great Hope. He was a worker; he was energetic; he never under any circumstances neglected business—not even when he had been most attentive to Betty Hunt. But he now had little joy in his work and looked for recreation to a means he had eschewed for the most part since the Easterners had arrived.
Like most men of his class and upbringing, the ex-cow-puncher found satisfaction for a certain daring trait in his character at the gambling table. The coarser forms of pleasure in the honkytonks did not attract Joe Hurley. He danced occasionally with the better class of girls; he never drank more than he thought was good for him—and he carried his drink well; but when he “sat in” at a game of stud poker or went up against the wheel—roulette was popular with the Passonians—he admitted in his saner moments that he “didn’t know when he had enough.” The wild streak in the fellow showed through the veneer of repression as it had when he was in college.
Hunt could not feel as lenient now toward these escapades as he once had. Not alone had the Easterner’s outlook on life become more serious; but after five years Joe Hurley, he thought, should have “grown up.” He was, however, too wise to utter a single word in opposition to Joe’s renewed course in moral retrogression. He took Sam Tubbs to task when he met that old reprobate staggering home from the saloons and gave him a tongue-lashing that Sam admitted afterward made his wife’s nagging seem like a cradle lullaby. Hunt faced down Slickpenny Norris on the open street, to the delight of the bystanders, over the banker’s niggardliness in opposing the building and equipment of the hospital. The parson had been known to seize upon two well-grown young fellows fighting in a vacant lot to the delight of their fellows, knock their heads together resoundingly and send each home “with a flea in his ear.” But he had not a word of admonition it seemed for Joe Hurley.
Yet Hunt was troubled about his friend. He feared Betty knew something about the reason for the change in the mine owner. But here again he was silent. He knew his sister well—too well to try to gain her confidence on any matter which she would not give gratuitously.
Hunt had been much too busy at the time when Hurley began to withdraw from Betty’s companionship to notice the gradual drifting apart of the two. When the brother awoke to the fact that his friend and his sister seemed to be mere acquaintances again, Betty had found a close companion in Nell Blossom.
Under certain circumstances this latter fact might have encouraged Hunt to consider his own influence with Nell as increasing; but by this time he had gained more than a casual acquaintance with the cabaret singer’s character. Joe Hurley had not written too strongly about Nell’s stubbornness. Hunt had undertaken in several ways to break down the wall the girl had raised between them. She fought him off with all the vigor of a wildcat and without much more politeness than one of those felines would have shown.
He met her at Mother Tubbs’—not by intention; but he was rather frequently there to confer with the uncultured but very sensible old woman. Nell snubbed him, or scorned him, or was downright impudent to him, just as her mood chanced to be. He had to warn the old woman to pay no attention to the girl’s attitude or there would have been a flare-up between the two. And Hunt very well knew that while Nell lived with Mother Tubbs she was pretty safe.
He heartily approved, too, of her intimacy with Betty. He could not gauge the influence Betty was having on the self-willed girl; but he had confidence in his sister, and he knew Nell would only be helped by the association and that Betty would not be injured.
The opposition of Boss Tolley and his gang was the last thing to trouble the placidity of Parson Hunt’s soul. They snapped and barked, but had as yet come to no close-quarters since Tolley’s adventure with the pepper-besprinkled Bible. That tale had convulsed the Passonians with mirth, and even when weeks later it was retold, it brought ready laughs from the citizens.
It was now fall, a golden-and-red autumn that enthralled the visitors from the East when they looked abroad to the hills of a morning. Even Betty confessed that the glories of the Berkshires at the same season were surpassed by this sight. She had come now to appreciate the rude and bold lines of the mountains and the gaudy color schemes of frost-bitten shrubbery intermixed with the emerald of the Coniferæ.
The early brightening of the face of nature by these autumnal tints foretold for the natives of Canyon Pass an early winter. To make this assurance doubly sure, old Steve Siebert and Andy McCann came wandering back to the Pass weeks ahead of their scheduled time.
It was a fair enough day when the two old prospectors came in—McCann in the morning and Siebert along toward night. In all the time they had been absent, after getting out of the canyon itself, they had not been in sight of each other. One had prospected east of the Runaway, and the other west. Their activities in fact had been at least a hundred miles apart. But both had seen signs—unmistakable signs—of approaching winter.
They met as usual the amused inquiries of the Passonians regarding the “ten-strike” they had been expected to make. Was there due to be a stampede for the scene of the claims they had staked out? Had they brought in samples of the “real stuff” that would start a regular Cripple Creek boom somewhere out in the Topaz?
The two old men grinned, their watery eyes blinking, and “stood the gaff” as patiently as they always did. Why did they spend half the year in the ungodly loneliness of the desert places, and in the end bring nothing back with them? Not even an additional coating of tan, for their leathery faces and hands were already so darkened that the sun and wind had no effect upon them.
“You old duffers ain’t right in your minds,” said Judson to Andy McCann. “Just as loco as you can be. Ye never did make a strike and ye never will——”
“Lots you know about it, Bill,” grumbled McCann, his jaws moving stiffly.
“Well, you never did, did you?” demanded the storekeeper, with twinkling eyes.
“If you were yere twenty years ago——”
“You know derned well I was, Andy,” put in Judson. “Reckon I was. And before.”
“You recommember the flood then?”
“I ain’t lost my mem’ry,” muttered Judson.
“All right. Keep that in yer mind,” said Andy, shaking his head in senile fashion. “There was a discovery made that year that you—nor nobody else in Canyon Pass—knowed anything about. Talk about the mother lode! Well!”
“Is that so?” cried the storekeeper eagerly. “Then why wasn’t it worked? I knowed you and Steve brought in samples of the right stuff; but——”
“Steve,” snarled McCann, his whole manner changing. “That derned rat? Him? He didn’t have no more to do with findin’ that vein——Huh! Huh!” He coughed, fell silent, went out of the store, deaf to any further questions.
It was Joe Hurley, standing with Hunt on Main Street, who was first to welcome Steve Siebert as he came along, riding his lean mare and towing the burro that looked as though it might have been carved rudely out of desert rock.
“Well, old-timer, I certainly am glad to see you,” the mining man said. “What luck?”
“Oh, so-so,” croaked the prospector.
“Ain’t going to tell us you worked all summer just to get free air?” and Joe chuckled.
“Sumpin’ like it,” replied Siebert, and grinned toothlessly.
“You do beat my time! Goin’ to come over to the Great Hope? There’s a job for you.”
“Mighty nice of you, Joe. I’ll come,” said the old man, nodding.
“And not a darn thing to show for all your pickin’ and smellin’ about the Topaz since spring?”
“Not what you’d call a bonanza.”
“Youbetcha!” ejaculated Hurley. He turned with a grin to Hunt. “Meet Parson Hunt, Steve. We’ve done more in the Pass this summer than you have on the desert. We’ve got us a real parson, and we’re aimin’ to have a sure-enough church.”
“That’s a good word,” agreed Steve solemnly, leaning to shake Hunt’s hand. The old man’s palm was as dry and scaly as a lizard’s back. “There’s a heap o’ folks yere that need religion. I understand that derned Andy McCann’s got back.”
The gibe was obvious. Joe grinned with appreciation.
“Yep,” he said. “And he hasn’t got any more to show for his summer’s work than you have.”
“Him!” snarled Steve. “Of course he ain’t. That dumb-head wouldn’t find gold in the mint. No, sir! Never did find any——”
“I thought he did make a ten-strike once, but that the slide twenty years ago knocked his claim into a cocked-hat?”
“What? Him? Does he say so?” ejaculated Siebert, his wrinkled, tanned countenance flaming angrily.
“I heard tell,” and Joe chuckled.
“He’s a plumb liar. He didn’t find any such thing. If there was any such discovery made in them days, it was me that done it. Youbetcha! But him! Huh! Anyway, it’s all buried deeper ’n the Pit—take it from me,” and, grumbling, Steve Siebert rode on.
“Believe me, Willie,” said Hurley, “there’s a case for you. Try to get those two together.”
“These two old men are enemies?” asked Hunt quietly.
“That’s no name for it. They hate each other as only two fellers can who once were the closest friends. Old Steve and Andy were once as close as twins. But they tell me for twenty years they have been snarling at and back-biting each other something scandalous. If you want to introduce love and kindness into the hearts of Canyon Pass folks, Willie, just give those two old ruffians a whirl.”
He laughed—not the kind of laugh he would have uttered some weeks before. There was a sneering note in Joe Hurley’s voice now when he spoke of Hunt’s work and the better things of life. The parson noted it now as he had often noticed it of late, but he said nothing in comment at this time. He merely observed, before separating from Joe to return to the hotel for supper:
“Drop into the meeting room to-night, Joe. You haven’t shown much interest in the Men’s Club lately, and the work should have your approval. Besides, there are certain business matters that must be discussed at once.”
“Well,” said Joe gruffly.
He did not promise to attend. He did not attend.
“I wonder what kept Joe away?” Hunt ventured to Judson, as they, the last of the company, left the meeting room and the parson locked the door. That was never left unlocked since Nell Blossom’s trick with Mother Tubbs’ Bible. “I expected him to-night to give us his views on that matter.”
The old storekeeper turned to him and grinned. “Joe’s mighty busy, I reckon,” he said.
“In the evening?”
“This evening, youbetcha!”
“In just what way, Judson? What’s up your sleeve?”
“My funnybone,” chuckled the storekeeper. “And I have to laugh. Just about once in so often Joe seems to lose ev’ry mite of sense he was born with. He thinks he can beat the man that got the first patent out on stud poker.”
“Ah! I know Joe used to like cards. When he was East. But now——Is it as bad as you intimate, Judson?”
“Some worse, I’m free to say,” declared the old man. “Joe’s gone up against Colorado Brown’s dealer, Miguel, several times lately. They get up a round game of a few fellers—all friends. But Miguel is always playin’ for the house. He’s a wonder. ‘Last Card Mike’ they sometimes call him. He seems to be able to read clean through the backs of any pack o’ cards you put up to him. He’s a wizard—no mistake.”
“You mean that Joe is losing money in this game?” asked Hunt, with some apprehension.
“Me, I’d just as soon bet on flies with their shoes stuck in molasses as to play stud. Youbetcha!” returned Judson, with a chuckle.
Hunt separated from the storekeeper and walked slowly toward the Wild Rose. He passed Colorado’s place; then he turned back. It is a matter of much moment for one man to interfere in another’s private affairs, and no one realized this fact better than the Reverend Willett Ford Hunt. His office could not excuse any unasked advice or intervention in Hurley’s chosen course, no matter how much Hunt desired to restrain his friend.
He hesitated again when he faced the swinging doors. There was not much noise inside. This was not a Saturday night and the amusement places along Main Street were not crowded. Most of the Passonians who wasted their money in the several places of this character spent it all and spent it quick. The mid-week nights were lean for the dive keepers.
It was not lack of courage that restrained Mr. Hunt from preaching a general revival and a bitter war against the cohorts of the devil in this town. Merely, the time was not yet ripe. Sometimes he feared that it never would be ripe. Certainly he had not yet reached the heart of Canyon Pass. Since the first shack had been built here at the junction of the two forks, the enemy had been in power; and it was now well entrenched.
But to-night Hunt was impressed by the feeling that his friend needed him. Joe was slipping away from him. For some unexplained reason the very man who had brought him here to the Pass and coaxed the idea of a spiritual uplift of the place into germination, was backsliding.
The parson began to feel that he could not stand by and see this thing go on. He pushed through the flaps of the door. He had seldom entered this, or any of the other saloons, in the evening.
His entrance now, however, did not serve to startle any of the habitués. Brown himself came forward to shake hands with the parson. Some of the players at the green-covered tables nodded to Hunt. The three-piece orchestra in the dance hall at the back was droning out a fox-trot. Nell was not singing. The principal interest seemed to be about a corner table at which the parson saw Joe Hurley sitting.
After a word to Brown in greeting, the parson walked over to this corner table and joined the group standing about it. Hurley looked up, grinned, and said:
“Hullo, Willie! Want me?”
“I’ve something to ask you—by and by, when you are done.”
“Looks like an all-night session,” returned Hurley, immediately giving his attention to the cards again. “Mike, here, is trying to skin me alive and the sheep is bleatin’. Deal ’em, Mike.”
Hunt said nothing more; but he remained. By the grim set of Joe’s lips and the silence of the company about the table, he knew that the moment was unpropitious for any insistence on his part that his friend give him his attention. Yet he had the feeling that something was going to happen, that his place was here at this gambling table rather than at the hotel with Betty.
The event that he subconsciously expected, however, came from outside. There was a sudden clamor at the door, the flaps swung in sharply, and several men entered. Smithy, Judson’s gangling young clerk, was the most noticeable member of the new group. He had a cut over his right eye, a puff on his cheek-bone that could have been made by nothing but a heavy fist, and when he spoke a crimson gap in his upper jaw betrayed the absence of two teeth.
“What’s happened to you, Smithy?” demanded Colorado Brown, coming forward quickly. It would not be to the benefit of the house to have the gamblers disturbed at this moment. “Somebody punch you?”
“I’ll thay they did!” lisped Smithy. He was half sobbing, but he was mad clear through.
“They didn’t improve your looks none,” said Colorado.
“Never mind muh lookth,” said Smithy. “I want to know what you fellers think of this?”
“I just told you. Whoever done it didn’t make you any handsomer,” interposed the proprietor of the hall. “Now, if you’ve had a fight outside, don’t bring it in here. We’re plumb peaceable here to-night, we are.”
“Wait till you hear what the kid’s got to say, Colorado,” put in one of those that had entered with Smithy.
“Spit it out!” advised the proprietor.
“I want to know what Mr. Joe Hurley thinks of this?” Smithy managed to make plain. “What do you think they are saying about Nell Blossom?”
“Nell Blossom?”
Hurley’s voice did not join the general chorus which repeated the cabaret singer’s name. But he looked up, his gaze met that of the parson, and a lightning glance of understanding passed between them.
“What’s eatin’ on you, Smithy?” demanded Colorado Brown.
“Up in Tolley’s. I was just in there. I heard Tolley and Tom Hicks and some others of his gang talkin’. I couldn’t help hearin’ what was said, and when I went for ’em this—this is what I got.”
He almost choked on the words. Joe Hurley rose up as though a slow spring uncoiled beneath him.
“What did they say, Smithy?” he asked, and the tone of his voice seemed to quell all other sounds.
“Why, the skunks!” cried Smithy, “they said Nell Blossom shot Dick the Devil last spring and flung him over the wall of the canyon into Runaway River.”
The tense silence that followed Smithy’s half-sobbing speech marked the poignancy of the moment and the utter stupefaction of his hearers. To all but Joe Hurley and Hunt such an accusation as this aimed at Nell Blossom was entirely unlooked for. If the crowd understood anything at all, they understood that Boss Tolley, if he had started the scandal, courted annihilation!
Indeed the first question fired at Smithy following his statement was:
“Why didn’t you fill ’em with lead, Smithy?”
“I didn’t have no gun,” replied the grocery clerk. “And Tom Hicks downed me before I could get at Tolley.”
“Did he say it, Smithy?” demanded Colorado Brown.
“’Twas him says he knows all about it. Says that Nell killed Dick Beckworth.”
They talked. But it was Joe Hurley who acted. He threw down the hand of cards he held.
“Mike,” he said to the Mexican, Miguel Santos, “you know I ain’t in the habit of betraying cold feet. But I got some business to tend to. Colorado,” he added to the proprietor, “I’ll settle when I come in again. I’m in a hurry.”
With the quickness of a cat he slipped through the crowd about the table and Smithy and shot for the door. But the parson was at his elbow before he could get through the portal.
“You’d better keep out of this, Willie,” Hurley said between his teeth. “There’s goin’ to be the devil to pay in a minute.”
“It is as much my business as it is yours, Joe,” said Hunt, in step with his long stride on the side-walk where they headed toward the Grub Stake. “And we must do something before those fellows back there wake up.”
“What?” was Joe’s startled ejaculation.
“That stupid Smithy has started something. Some of those fellows will be out after us in a minute, and if they get to the Grub Stake before we straighten things out, there will be trouble.”
“Trouble? Youbetcha there’ll be trouble! And you’d better keep out of it, Willie.”
“I mean to stop it,” said Hunt softly.
But Joe Hurley did not hear him. He turned abruptly and burst into the main entrance of the Grub Stake. It did not take Joe Hurley’s trained glance to see that something had happened here. Hunt sensed, too, that if there had already been trouble, more of the same kind was expected.
The girl who usually presided at the door—the girl who parked your gun if you wanted to play, or your spurs if you wanted to dance and gave you checks in return for them—had got out of the way. Several of the gaming tables were empty. There was not a man standing in front of the bar, and Boss Tolley’s assistants behind the “rosewood” had “stepped out.”
Hunt knew at first glance that some of the toughest men in the camp were gathered here—either about the remaining tables or with Boss Tolley at the far end of the bar by the door of his tiny office where the safes stood. That office, Joe had told the parson, was an arsenal. There was a bodyguard around the dive keeper of at least six men.
Joe Hurley saw that all this group was armed. A flash of the several men at the gaming tables assured the mining man that they might be neutral, save perhaps the dealers for the house. But he realized that Tolley’s gang was primed for mischief. It was a wonder that Smithy, the poor fool, had got out of the place alive!
Hunt had pushed ahead of Joe the moment they stepped inside the door. They were both big men, and Joe’s advantage of height could not hide the parson’s bulk. In a flash, before a word was spoken, Joe took two long strides sideways and got behind the first table, which was empty. And he, by this act, left Hunt out of the line of any bullet aimed by the gang standing at the end of the bar at himself.
A gun had not yet been drawn, however, on either side. Nor had a word been spoken by either Tolley and his gang or by the two men who had entered so suddenly. Still, not a man in the barroom missed the significance of Joe Hurley’s strategic move.
Sam Tubbs, withered old scarecrow that he was, had been facing the door at a near-by table. It was evident that Steve Siebert, the returned desert rat, had been treating Tubbs to more liquor than was good for him. But Sam had some wit left.
Joe’s action forecast the popping of guns—instantly! Sam had seen too many such brawls to play the part of “innocent bystander” if he could help it. He let his feet slide out from under him, shot down in the chair on the small of his back, and passed out of sight under the table with all the celerity of an imp in a pantomime.
Steve Siebert, however, did not even remove his pipe from his lips, but wheeled in his chair and glared from Joe to Tolley and his bodyguard. The old man swung a heavy, old-style six-gun low on his hip. But he did not touch it—then.
Joe’s attitude was as wary as that of a puma about to spring. He crouched. By one quick motion he could overturn the table, drop behind it, and use it as a bulwark. But he must move quickly enough to escape, perhaps, seven bullets from as many guns.
It was Joe Hurley who first spoke.
“Tolley!” he said fiercely but clearly, “I warned you what I’d do if you repeated that lie about the girl. You remember, well enough, you hound! Stand out from those bootlickers of yours and take your medicine.”
The challenge got no response from Tolley but a grimace like that of a wolf in a trap. He did not make a motion to draw his own gun. He was too wise to do that in any event, for he knew he could not beat Joe to it! And then—what did he subsidize these gunmen for if not for such an emergency as this?
“Open your trap, you hound!” commanded Joe. “If you won’t fight, speak!”
“Wait a moment.”
The parson had actually not halted at all when he entered with Joe Hurley. He had merely slowed up. He was approaching Tolley and his men down the long length of the bar. But when he spoke Tom Hicks half drew his gun.
“Mr. Tolley,” Hunt said in the same clear but quiet voice, “will undoubtedly explain and apologize for what we understand he has said about the young woman in question. Come now, Mr. Tolley! you are ready to take back your words, aren’t you? You have no more proof, have you, of your—er—mis-statement than you had several weeks ago when you discussed the affair with Mr. Hurley in my hearing?”
“What are you butting in for?” returned Tolley with a threatening growl.
“For the sake of peace, Mr. Tolley,” explained the parson determinedly.
“Get back, Willie!” Joe ordered from the background.
He dared not draw his gun, for if he did Hunt would be right in the line of fire again. With a single motion Tom Hicks could get into action.
“You derned buttinsky!” spat out Tolley vengefully. “Mind what you are doing, or you’ll stop lead.”
“That will not make a lie the truth, Mr. Tolley,” rejoined Hunt, now squarely between the group of desperadoes and Joe Hurley’s position.
“You mean to say I’m a liar?” blustered Tolley.
“I mean to say that the story you have repeated about the young woman and the man you say has disappeared has no foundation in fact and that you have in your possession no proof to back your statement. If that is calling you a liar, Mr. Tolley, then consider yourself so called!”
There was a little stir among the listeners at the tables—a stir of approval, and one voice ejaculated:
“What’s it all about?”
Evidently not all of these men now present had been at hand when Smithy had taken offense at Tolley’s words earlier in the evening which precipitated this situation. Hunt, without raising his voice at all, continued:
“I take it that you have no new evidence of a crime having been committed? You did not see the man fall? You merely saw the young woman at the summit of the declivity? Later you recovered a saddle you recognized from the fallen rubbish? Am I right? Isn’t that the extent of your evidence?”
“Well! Look yere! I reckon I know what I am talkin’ about——”
“But you do not talk about what you know,” interposed Hunt. “To my personal knowledge—and that of Mr. Hurley—the missing man was not buried under that heap of rubbish with his horse.”
“Then he went into the river!” cried Tolley.
Here Joe Hurley put in a very pungent word:
“And that might easily be true. If you found his horse and removed the saddle, you might have found the man, too, Tolley, and removed some of his harness.”
“What’s that?” was the startled demand.
“From the first,” Joe said sternly, “I suspected you, Tolley. Your dust won’t hide what you have done. You are altogether too sure the man is dead—after first reporting that you had heard from him in Denver.
“In fact, you are too anxious to cast suspicion on another person. Your conscience—if you have such a thing—is troubling you, Tolley. At least, your fears have made you try to invent a lie that doesn’t work out just the way you expected it to.”
“I’ll show you——”
“You’ll show me nothing, Tolley!” retorted Hurley. “You’ll listen—and these other gentlemen. You got the man’s saddle. It is just as probable that you found his body, as well as that of the horse. And he was known to wear a money-belt around his waist. He was likewise known to be well-fixed when he left Canyon Pass. He’d been doing well here. You knew it, if anybody did. You confess that you rode after the man. And you confess that you got his saddle. Confess the rest of it, you dog. What else have you got in your safe that belonged to——”
Boss Tolley threw caution to the winds at this juncture. Hurley’s scathing denunciation pricked to life in him such personal courage as he possessed. He flung himself forward with a howl of rage and whipped the gun from the holster at his hip.
“Get down, Willie!” shouted Hurley and flung the table on its edge with a crash, dropping behind it.
An interruption—a voice as hoarse as the croak of a vulture—rose above the din of other voices:
“Tolley! You other fellers! Put ’em up! H’ist ’em!”
Tolley halted—it seemed in midflight. Even the gun hand of Tom Hicks relaxed. From the other side of the room old Steve Siebert commanded the situation—and the group of desperate men. The black muzzle of his gun gaped like the mouth of a cannon. Hunt did not stand between him and Tolley’s crowd. The old man steadied the barrel of his weapon on the edge of the table behind which he sat and covered the bunch perfectly.
“H’ist ’em!” he said again, and as Tolley’s gun clattered to the floor and Hicks thrust back his weapon into his sheath, he added: “I don’t aim to mix in what ain’t my business, as a usual thing. But when I see seven skunks goin’ after two boys—an’ one o’ them a parson and not ironed a-tall—I reckon on takin’ a hand. Put ’em up!”
The ruffians obeyed. Seven pairs of hands reached for the smoke-begrimed ceiling. Several startled faces appeared under the archway between the barroom and the dance hall. One was the desert-bitten countenance of Andy McCann. He would not have sat to drink in the same room with his one-time partner; but Steve Siebert’s voice had stung McCann to action. Steve saw him.
“Andy, you derned old rat!” Steve cried, “shut that office door and lock it. Then, just frisk them rustlers and remove their irons. There ain’t goin’ to be no shootin’. Whatever the row is, it’s goin’ to be settled plumb peaceful.”
McCann snarled at the other old pocket-hunter like a tiger cat; but he obeyed—and not without some enjoyment of the chagrin of Tolley and his gangsters.
“It takes us old sourdoughs to be slick,” he chuckled, when he had dumped an armful of guns on an empty table. “You boys ain’t dry behind the ears yet when it comes to shootin’ scrapes.”
“There ain’t goin’ to be no shootin’,” repeated Steve Siebert. “Not ’nless them fellers start it with their mouths,” and he grinned such a toothless grin that he almost lost his grip on the pipestem clamped in one corner of his mouth.
“Now, what’s it all about? What’s the row? What gal you talkin’ about? Who’s the feller that was killed? I’m sort o’ curious.”
Joe Hurley stood erect again. He laughed.
“Great saltpeter!” he exclaimed, “you certainly are a friend in need, old-timer.”
“Come on,” rejoined Steve. “Let’s have the pertic’lars.”
It was the Reverend Willett Ford Hunt who took upon himself the explanation.
“Nell Blossom!” cried Steve. “That leetle songbird? You mean to say all this row is over her?”
“Mr. Tolley has made the statement that Miss Blossom was the cause of this Beckworth’s death. His horse went over the cliff into the canyon. Whether or not the man went with it——”
“He did!” cried Andy McCann, smiting his thigh resoundingly with his palm. “By gravy! Is that what’s eatin’ all you fellers?”
“Say! Who’s runnin’ this court, I’d like to know?” demanded Steve Siebert angrily.
“Aw, shut up—you old lizard,” said McCann, flaming at him. “’Tain’t no court. It ain’t nothin’ like it. Put up your gun. It’s all off. Dick the Devil ain’t dead at all. At least he wasn’t killed that time he went over the cliff. He’s Dick the Devil sure ’nough, and he’s got more luck than a hanged man.”
“Just what do you mean?” Hunt asked.
“Why, we seen him—me and that old rat sittin’ there with his gun, makin’ goo-goo eyes. Sure! And me and him pulled Dick out of the river. He went clean over his horse’s head and landed in the river—same’s a bird. He might have been drowned if me and that ground owl there hadn’t got him out. But he never said one word about Nell Blossom bein’ with him or havin’ anything to do with his comin’ down that cliff. No, sir!”
“Nary a word,” agreed the surprised Siebert. “Nary a word.”
“What—what became of him?” stammered Hunt, a great weight lifted from his heart.
“He went along with me to the edge of the desert,” said Siebert slowly. “He dried out at my fire that night. Next morning he lit out to hit the Lamberton trail. That’s all I know about Dick.”
“And it’s more than I knowed,” grunted Andy McCann. “That old rat there might have garroted Dick for his money. But it sure wasn’t Nell Blossom that croaked Dick the Devil—if he’s dead at all.”
Here Hunt stepped between the two old prospectors. It looked as though somebody had to separate them or there might have been a shooting, after all!
But it was Joe Hurley who had the last word. He set up the overturned table and walked over to the bar.
“To show that there’s no hard feelings,” he drawled, “this’ll be on me. Get busy, Tolley, on the right side of this bar. And hereafter, you think twice before you say anything you’re not dead sure of about Nell Blossom. Somebody’d better drag Sam Tubbs out from under that table. He don’t want to miss this.”
There sounded a sudden rush of heavily shod feet outside the barroom door. As Hunt had expected, an angry crowd from Colorado Brown’s burst in.
“Just in season, boys,” Hurley continued. “All a mistake about our Nell. Tolley just proved himself to be as careless with the truth as he always is. Isn’t that so, Tolley?”
Tolley grunted.
The winter weather forecast by the return of Steve Siebert and Andy McCann from the desert held off the next morning when Betty Hunt and Nell started on their usual ride into the hills.
Nell had heard a garbled report but few of the particulars of the incident which the night before had threatened bloodshed at the Grub Stake. She knew that the parson had again done something that was sure to endear him to the Passonians in general. And his courageous act had been in her cause. But she had failed to learn of the disproval of Dick Beckworth’s reported death.
She said nothing to Betty about the incident. She had begun to shrink from discussing the rougher side of the life of Canyon Pass with the parson’s sister. As Joe Hurley would have expressed it, Nell Blossom was becoming “right gentled” through her association with Betty Hunt.
Betty herself, in Nell’s company, managed to put aside those more serious thoughts and anxieties of mind that ruffled her natural composure at other times. Since the day, weeks before, when she had been forced to wreck Joe Hurley’s hope of happiness, the cloud of despondency that overshadowed her life seemed at times greater than she could live under.
Nor could the Eastern girl put aside such thoughts of the Westerner as at first amazed and startled, then revealed to the honest soul of Betty Hunt that the unfortunate circumstance in her past life that made it impossible for her to make Joe happy, likewise barred her own heart from happiness.
Wicked as her strict upbringing made the fact seem, she had to admit that she had fallen under the spell of Joe Hurley’s generous character, that she loved him. She could not deny this discovery, although it filled her mind with confusion. Wedded to a man she hated and in love with a man she could not wed!
In any event, this was a secret—like the other that so disturbed her—which under no circumstances could she confide to either her brother or any friend. At first she felt the discovery a degrading one. Brought up as she had been under the grim puritanism of her Aunt Prudence Mason, the idea of a married woman admitting that she loved a man other than the one she was married to was a sin. The idea of divorce was as foreign to her religious training as was the thought of fratricide.
She was cheerful on the surface at least when she and Nell rode out of Canyon Pass and through the East Fork. They climbed the canyon wall on that side by a tortuous path on which only a burro or a very sure-footed pony was safe. It was Nell, when they were once on the summit, who discovered the threat of a weather change.
The air was very keen. Many of the bushes by the way had shriveled during the night as though before a furnace blast.
“Black frost,” said the younger girl. “Old Steve and Andy know their little book. Sam says Steve told him there was a blizzard coming. We won’t ride far to-day, Betty.”
“A blizzard? Only fancy,” murmured the Eastern girl.
She was not much impressed. She had no experience—even of New England winter storms—to enable her to judge the nature of a storm in these Western mountains.
But Nell should have known better than to lead the way into a gulch which quite shut them in from sight of the surrounding country. A blizzard is a chancy thing; and often the first storm of a Western winter is the worst of all.
They rode to a spring at which deer drank; they saw many tracks, but there were none of the pretty creatures in sight. Birds fluttered through the chaparral with strange cries, and the rabbits ran back and forth as though much disturbed by domestic happenings.
“I never saw them jacks so queer acting,” said Nell thoughtfully. “We’d better ride home, Betty.”
“Why?” asked the other girl gayly. “You are not afraid they will attack us, are you?”
“Not that,” and the Western-born young woman smiled. “But there’s something comin’, I reckon—just as Steve and Andy say.”
Before they rode up out of the gulch they heard something slashing like a multitude of knives through the dead leaves overhead. When they rode out into the open they beheld the thick cloud that had almost reached the zenith, and out of that cloud came not snow, but ice!
Fine particles of the sharpest crystal were driven in a thick haze through the singing air. Nell instantly whipped off her neckcloth and tied it across her nose and mouth, warning Betty to follow her example.
“Get this in your lungs, Betty, and you’ll have pneumonia as sure as sure!” she shouted.
Frightened, they urged their ponies on to the beginning of the rough path down the canyon wall. Although they were soon somewhat sheltered from the driving ice-storm there were bare places where the two girls suffered the full force of the gale.
“I know a place!” cried Nell in a muffled voice. “We got to hole up till this stops. Come on!”
It had grown dark of a sudden. Nell pulled her pony off the path, and he picked his way daintily to a cavity in the wall. Here an overhanging rock offered some shelter. At least, the girls were out of the steady beat of the storm.
They dismounted and got behind the ponies, between their warm bodies and the rock itself. If Betty was the more frightened of the two, she showed it no more than did Nell Blossom.
The air became thicker and the whine of the wind rose to a shriek which all but drowned their voices when they tried to communicate with each other. It was such a manifestation of the storm king as Betty Hunt had never seen before.
They were but a little way off the path. Suddenly both girls, in spite of the wind, heard the clatter of shod hoofs. Another horse was coming down the path. In a moment they dimly saw the looming figure of a man leading the animal.
“Who is it?” gasped Betty, but if Nell heard the question she did not answer.
Nell clutched Betty’s wrist for silence. The girls stared at the man beating his way downward. He wore a broad-brimmed hat, but they could see the long, black, curling hair flowing from beneath it. He turned his face toward them, and Betty beheld the keen face and heavy mustache of the stranger she had seen hiding from the sheriff and his posse weeks before near the trail to Hoskins!
The man progressed so slowly, and he was so near, that the Eastern girl could study his features now with more certainty. There was something in the contour of his face that reminded her of Andy Wilkenson!
Could it be he? Was it possible that this fugitive—the man the officers had accused of a crime—was the debonair Andy who had so enthralled her girlish mind and heart back there at Grandhampton Hall?
She had not forgotten Wilkenson’s observations about Crescent City. Betty had never ceased to fear that he might appear to her in this part of the great West. But here—now—and in this dramatic manner?
Much shaken, she turned to look at Nell Blossom. She suddenly realized that the other girl was sagging against her shoulder very strangely. She glanced down into Nell’s muffled face.
The younger girl’s eyes were closed. She was as pallid as death itself. Nell Blossom had fainted!
Some men can escape their duty if they choose to—can ignore it, flout it, even deny its very existence—but not one who is called to be a leader of men toward a higher plane of daily existence. The greatest sophism with which the race has ever been cursed is that hoary one of the lazy preacher: “Do as I say, not as I do.”
Religious precept is utterly worthless if the preceptor does not follow his own expounded faith with a living example. The Reverend Willett Ford Hunt had come to that pass where he could no longer ignore the fact that his friend, Joe Hurley, was on the down grade. When the parson cooled down after the exciting events of that evening, both in Colorado Brown’s place and at the Grub Stake, he saw more clearly that he had fallen into error.
If he was to be the spiritual guide and mentor of his congregation at Canyon Pass, he must be the same to one member of it as he was to another. He had not been slow to admonish others of his parishioners; but the man who had brought him here—the one whom he really looked upon as being his chief supporter in the work he was striving to do—was slipping away from him and into flagrantly evil ways.
If Hunt’s character has been revealed at all in this narrative, moral and physical courage have not seemed to be its lack. Then why had the young parson failed to go after Joe Hurley as he did after Judson, the storekeeper, Sam Tubbs, Hi Brownell, Smithy, and other men who were wont to “kick over the traces”?
There was just one clear and cogent reason why Hunt had not taken Joe to task for his failings, as he already had many another man in Canyon Pass. His old friendship for Joe had nothing to do with this neglect. And certainly he did not fear making the good cause in which he was so interested a powerful enemy. There was nothing in Joe Hurley’s generous character that would suggest that for a moment.
It was, in short, the fact that Hunt believed that he and Joe were in love with the same girl.
Although, as far as Hunt had observed, Nell Blossom displayed no particular fondness for Joe Hurley, the latter believed the mining man “understood” the cabaret singer. At least, Nell revealed no such disdain for Joe Hurley as she had publicly for Hunt.
When the latter reviewed the late incidents as they related to Joe, while he tossed on his mattress that night, he admitted he was taking the wrong course with his friend. He had seemed tacitly to overlook sins of commission on Joe’s part that he would have pilloried in another.
Had Hurley not been heated by drink and his passion for gambling, he would not have pursued that unwise course in going to the Grub Stake in a mood which had all but precipitated tragedy. Joe’s recklessness had been unleashed, and Hunt had been obliged to stand by after the unexpected conclusion of the scene and see his friend drink with the very men who, a few minutes before, had been ready to take Joe’s life.
He arose with a new determination. He saw his sister and Nell Blossom ride away from the Wild Rose Hotel. Then he made his way directly to the Great Hope Mine.
Hurley had an office—a small shack—off at one side. The parson found him alone in it, his boots cocked on his battered desk, his pipe drawing well. His grin was as infectious as ever.
“Well, Willie! some time that last night, eh?” was Joe’s greeting. “When I get in a tight corner again, I’ll never wish for a better side-partner than you, old sobersides!”
“Joe,” returned Hunt with a directness that seemed brutal, “if you had been your sober self last night—quite the same man you are wont to be—there would have been no tight corner.”
“Huh?” The other’s boots came to the floor with emphasis. His brown eyes sparked. The muscles of his jaws set grimly. “You’ve got a crust, Willie, to talk to me like that.”
“You need talking to, Joe; and I’m going to do the talking. No! Sit right where you are and listen. You’ve got it coming to you; and, if you are the man I have always thought you, you’ll stand the gaff.”
“Aw, shucks! A drink or two isn’t going to kill Joe Hurley.”
“A drink or two kills his moral sense, and kills his usefulness as a good citizen,” returned Hunt. “Then, you have been gambling steadily.”
“Great saltpeter! isn’t a feller to have any fun at all? I haven’t lost much to Miguel.”
“It is your example to the rest. And what you have lost would help the fund for our church building. And we must have a church, Joe.”
Joe uttered something under his breath.
“What makes you so reckless, Joe?”
“Shucks, Willie! Maybe I have slipped a few cogs. A lone bachelor like me can’t help it sometimes, can he?” asked Hurley, with a smile that tried to be whimsical rather than bitter. “Remember, Willie, I haven’t got a sister to keep me well balanced. It’s womenfolks and—and an interest in one that makes a man a sobersides.”
“Is it!” returned Hunt, with scorn. “If a man hasn’t the stamina to stay straight, no girl will ever keep him in the narrow path—believe me!”
“You belittle Miss Betty’s powers of persuasion,” returned Joe, with a sly glance.
“If that is your belief,” Hunt said, with sharpness and a rising color, “I should think you would keep straight for Nell’s sake.”
“Nell Blossom?”
“Yes. You are interested in her, aren’t you?”
“Surest thing you know, Willie.”
“Then, for her sake——”
“Hold on!” ejaculated Hurley, sudden suspicion in his gaze. “Do you think I’m soft on Nell?”
“Well—er—aren’t you?” demanded his friend rather faintly.
“I’m free to confess I was,” said Joe slowly, watching Hunt now with growing understanding in his eyes. “But that little skeesicks showed me where I got off long ago. And I tell you fair, Willie, she is not the girl who is bothering me.”
“Then, there is a girl? Joe! You and Betty——”
Hurley put up his hand, turning his face away. “No use, Willie. Betty’s given me my congé, too. I reckon I am an ‘also-ran’ with the ladies.”
“My dear Joe!” Hunt grabbed his hand. “I’m sorry. I don’t understand Betty.”
Hurley went to the door suddenly, opened it, and looked out. A cold blast from the hills ruffled the papers on the desk. The sun was suddenly dimmed. In the distance the coming wind whined like a sick dog.
“Say! we’re going to get it,” he muttered.
“A storm coming?” asked Hunt absently. His own heart sang. A foolish happiness swept over him. He went to look out over Hurley’s shoulder. “Does it look bad to you?”
“Youbetcha! It’s coming faster than you ever saw a storm move, I reckon, Willie. Those old has-beens, Steve and Andy, can’t be fooled. They got in from the desert just ahead of it.”
“A blizzard, Joe?” cried the parson with sudden anxiety. “The girls!”
“What about them? What girls?”
“Betty and Nell. They’ve gone out on horseback.”
“You don’t mean it? Er—Well, Nell must have seen it coming and turned back. She knows this country as well as a man. But, come on! Let’s go down to Tim’s corral and see if the ponies are in again. It wouldn’t do——”
He slammed the office door, shouted to his manager, and strode away. Hunt had to put his best foot forward to keep up with him. Women and children were already scuttling to shelter when they went down through the town. Bill Judson waved a hand at them from his door, shouting:
“Them old desert rats knowed their biz, didn’t they? I’d set my clock by them, I would.”
At the corral the two young men saw at a glance that the girls’ ponies had not been returned by Cholo Sam. They went on toward the hotel in silence. Now the first needles of the ice-storm cut their faces. It was nothing like any storm Hunt had ever seen. And how fast it grew in volume and strength!
Cholo Sam and Maria were at the door of the hotel, looking down the street eagerly and anxiously.
“Which way did they go?” shouted Hurley, without any preamble.
“Oh, Señor Hurley!” cried Sam. “To the East. T’roo the East Fork.”
Already sight of the rugged path up the heights on that side of the canyon was blotted out by the driving ice particles.
“Shall we get horses and go after them?” panted Hunt.
“Horses won’t live in this. Maybe we can stir up some of the boys to go with us. Wish I had my roughnecks here.”
But there was not time to go back to the mine. The storm had come on so suddenly that the workers above the town might hole in until the first force of the blizzard was over.
Hunt ran up to his room to get his heavier coat and a couple of blankets. As he descended the stairs, Cholo Sam came from the barroom with a filled flask in his hand.
“Some of the best brandy, Señor Hunt,” he said. “It is for the seekness only that comes with the cold. Ah thees ice in the lungs is death, señor—death!”
The parson took it without hesitation and slipped it into his pocket. He ran out to see Joe Hurley coming out of Colorado Brown’s place with Jib Collins and Cale Mack behind him. In another few seconds, so rapidly did the driving ice thicken the air, Hunt lost sight of the trio and they fairly bumped into him when they reached the spot where he stood.
“That you, Willie?” shouted Hurley. “We’ll get a rope and tie ourselves together. Tie mufflers over our faces. Say, there may be some more fellers in the Grub Stake who will help.”
He turned that way, finding his direction more by sense than by sight. They stumbled up the steps and in at the door of the Grub Stake.
At that very moment a half-frozen man, leading a storm-battered horse, had fallen at Tolley’s rear door. The dive keeper was dragging him into the place like a log as Hurley, Hunt, and their companions strode into the barroom.