Part 25 (1/2)
Blindeye Bozeman and Taylor Bill were two of them. The others were Squint and Maurice Rodaine!
CHAPTER XVII
Had it been any one else, Fairchild would have shouted for happiness and joined the parade. As it was, he stood far at one side, a silent, grim figure, watching the miners and townspeople pa.s.sing before him, leaping about in their happiness, calling to him the news that he did not want to hear:
The Silver Queen had ”hit.” The faith of Squint Rodaine, maintained through the years, had shown his perspicacity. It was there; he always had said it was there, and now the strike had been made at last, lead-silver ore, running as high as two hundred dollars a ton. And just like Squint--so some one informed Fairchild--he had kept it a secret until the a.s.says all had been made and the first s.h.i.+pments started to Denver. It meant everything for Ohadi; it meant that mining would boom now, that soon the hills would be cl.u.s.tered with prospectors, and that the little town would blossom as a result of possessing one of the rich silver mines of the State. Some one tossed to Fairchild a small piece of ore which had been taken from a car at the mouth of the mine; and even to his uninitiated eyes it was apparent,--the heavy lead, bearing in spots the thin filagree of white metal--and silver ore must be more than rich to make a showing in any kind of sample.
He felt cheap. He felt defeated. He felt small and mean not to be able to join the celebration. Squint and Maurice Rodaine possessed the Silver Queen; that they, of all persons, should be the fortunate ones was bitter and hard to accept. Why should they, of every one in Ohadi, be the lucky men to find a silver bonanza, that they might flaunt it before him, that they might increase their standing in the community, that they might raise themselves to a pedestal in the eyes of every one and thereby rally about them the whole town in any difficulty which might arise in the future? It hurt Fairchild, it sickened him. He saw now that his enemies were more powerful than ever. And for a moment he almost wished that he had yielded down there in Denver, that he had not given the ultimatum to the greasy Barnham, that he had accepted the offer made him,--and gone on, out of the fight forever.
Anita! What would it mean to her? Already engaged, already having given her answer to Maurice Rodaine, this now would be an added incentive for her to follow her promise. It would mean a possibility of further argument with her father, already too weak from illness to find the means of evading the insidious pleas of the two men who had taken his money and made him virtually their slave. Could they not demonstrate to him now that they always had worked for his best interests? And could not that plea go even farther--to Anita herself--to persuade her that they were always laboring for her, that they had striven for this thing that it might mean happiness for her and for her father? And then, could they not content themselves with promises, holding before her a rainbow of the far-away, to lead her into their power, just as they had led the stricken, bedridden man she called ”father”? The future looked black for Robert Fairchild. Slowly he walked past the happy, shouting crowd and turned up Kentucky Gulch toward the ill-fated Blue Poppy.
The tunnel opening looked more forlorn than ever when he sighted it, a bleak, staring, single eye which seemed to brood over its own misfortunes, a dead, hopeless thing which never had brought anything but disappointment. A choking came into Fairchild's throat. He entered the tunnel slowly, ploddingly; with lagging muscles he hauled up the bucket which told of Harry's presence below, then slowly lowered himself into the recesses of the shaft and to the drift leading to the stope, where only a few days before they had found that gaunt, whitened, haunting thing which had brought with it a new misfortune.
A light gleamed ahead, and the sound of a single jack hammering on the end of a drill could be heard. Fairchild called and went forward, to find Harry, grimy and sweating, pounding away at a narrow streak of black formation which centered in the top of the stope.
”It's the vein,” he announced, after he had greeted Fairchild, ”and it don't look like it's going to amount to much!”
”No?”
Harry withdrew the drill from the hole he was making and mopped his forehead.
”It ain't a world-beater,” came disconsolately. ”I doubt whether it 'll run more 'n twenty dollars to the ton, the wye smelting prices 'ave gone up! And there ain't much money in that. What 'appened in Denver?”
”Another frame-up by the Rodaines to get the mine away from us. It was a lawyer. He stalled that the offer had been made to us by Miss Richmond.”
”How much?”
”Two hundred thousand dollars and us to get out of all the troubles we are in.”
”And you took it, of course?”
”I did not!”
”No?” Harry mopped his forehead again. ”Well, maybe you 're right.
Maybe you 're wrong. But whatever you did--well, that's just the thing I would 'ave done.”
”Thanks, Harry.”
”Only--” and Harry was staring lugubriously at the vein above him, ”it's going to take us a long time to get two hundred thousand dollars out of things the wye they stand now.”
”But--”
”I know what you're thinking--that there's silver 'ere and that we 're going to find it. Maybe so. I know your father wrote some pretty glowing accounts back to Beamish in St. Louis. It looked awful good then. Then it started to pinch out, and now--well, it don't look so good.”
”But this is the same vein, is n't it?”
”I don't know. I guess it is. But it's pinching fast. It was about this wye when we first started on it. It was n't worth much and it was n't very wide. Then, all of a sudden, it broadened out, and there was a lot more silver in it. We thought we 'd found a bonanza. But it narrowed down again, and the old standard came back. I don't know what it's going to do now--it may quit altogether.”