Chapter XVI: In the Open

Though there was between twenty and thirty thousand dollars' worth of high-grade ore lying unguarded in the broken-down wagon two miles below, we promptly forgot it. Losing no minute of the precious time, we hastened to restake our claim, marking the boundaries plainly and putting up "No Trespass" notices to let the coming invaders know that we were alive and on the job. We knew very well that our boundary lines would be disregarded; that in striving to cover every foot of the unclaimed fragments of the original triangle, the excited gold-seekers would overlap us in all directions. But we meant to have the law on our side.

Our next move was a hurried covering of the shaft mouth with planks provided for just such an emergency; this and a barricading of the shack against a possible rush to loot it. By working fast we were ready by the time the vanguard of the rush appeared as a line of toiling climbers at the foot of the gulch. Barrett glanced at his watch.

"The early trolley will be just about leaving Bennett Avenue with the day-shift for the Ohio," he announced. "One of us must catch that car back to town to start a string of freight teams up here with men and material. Minutes now are worth days next week. I'm the freshest one of the bunch, and I'll go, if you two fellows think you can hold your own against this mob that is coming. You won't have to do any fighting, unless it's to keep them out of our shaft. Let them drive their stakes wherever they like, only, if they get on our ground, make your legal protest--the two of you together, so you can swear straight when it comes into the courts."

We both said we would do or die, and Barrett struggled into his coat and fled for the trolley terminal a mile away. He was scarcely out of sight over the crest of the spur when the advance guard of the mob came boiling up out of the gulch. A squad of three outran the others, and its spokesman made scant show of ceremony.

"We want to see what you got in that shaft," he panted. "Yank them boards off and show us."

"I guess not," said Gifford, fingering the lock of Barrett's shot-gun. Then, suddenly taking the aggressive: "You fellers looking for a mine? Well, by cripes, you get off of our ground and stay off, or you'll find one startin' up inside of you in a holy minute! We mean business!"

The three men cursed us like pickpockets, but they backed away until they stood on the other side of our boundary, where they were presently joined by half a dozen others. We had one point in our favor. In such a rush it is every man for himself, with a broad invitation to the devil to take the hindmost. Somebody called the fellow who wanted to break into our shaft for the needful evidence a much-emphasized jackass, and pointed to the wagon-tracks leading straight to our shack.

"What more do you want than them tracks?" bellowed this caller of hard names. And then: "Anybody in this crowd got a map?"

Nobody had, as it seemed; whereupon the bellower turned upon us.

"You fellers 've got one, it stands to reason. If you've got any sportin' blood in you at all, you'll be sort o' half-way human and give us a squint at it."

Again Gifford took the words out of my mouth. "Not to-day," he refused coolly. "If you want to know right bad, I'll tell you straight that there isn't anything like a whole claim left in this gulch. Now go ahead and do your stakin' if you want to, but keep off of us. You can see all our lines; they're as plain as the nose on your ugly face. I've got only one thing to say, and that is, the man that stakes inside of 'em is goin' to stop a handful of blue whistlers."

Following this there was a jangling confab which was almost a riot. Two or three, and among them the man who wanted us to show our map, openly counseled violence. We were but two, and there were by this time a dozen against us, with more coming up the gulch. They could have rushed us easily--at some little cost of life, maybe--but again the every-man-for-himself idea broke the charm. Already a number of stragglers were dropping out to skirt our boundaries, and in another minute they were fighting among themselves, each man striving to be the first to get his stakes down parallel with ours.

In such a struggle there was necessarily much reckless crisscrossing and overlapping. Claims were stepped off on all sides of us and in every conceivable direction. The law requires only the driving of corner stakes and the posting of a notice prior to the preliminary entry; and as soon as a man got his stakes driven and his notice displayed, he became a vanishing point on the horizon, joining a mad race for town and the land office.

The assault upon the harmless mountain-side did not last as long as we both feared it might, and there was no occasion for gun-play. Gifford and I patrolled the boundaries of our claim and made due protest when it became evident that anybody was overlapping us. Before the sun was an hour high the last of the locators had tailed off in the town foot-race; and though there were more coming, the most of these laggards turned back at once at sight of the forest of new stakes.

It was not until after our guard duties had ceased to press upon us that we remembered the wagon-load of precious stuff left at the mercy of a robber world on the bare hillside two miles away. Gifford ran to the shoulder of the over-looking spur with Barrett's field-glass, and I could tell by his actions that the strain was off.

"Dixon is back with another wagon, and he and a helper are transferring the ore sacks," he reported when he came in. "I told him when he left that he might get help wherever he could; that it was no use trying to keep it dark any longer."

There being nothing to prevent it now, we cooked breakfast on the camp stove, sitting afterward to eat it on the shack door-step, with the weapons handy. I think Gifford had quite forgotten that he had raided the shack chuck-box at daybreak. Anyway, his appetite appeared undiminished. He seemed to think that the worst of our troubles were over, and I did not undeceive him. The later stragglers were still tramping over the ground and reading the lately posted notices. A few of them came up to ask questions, and one, a grizzled old fellow who might have posed as "One-eyed Ike" in Western melodramas, stopped to talk a while.

"You boys shore have struck it big," he commented. "How come?"

We explained briefly the finding of the unoccupied ground and the taking of the average Cripple Creek prospector's chance, and he nodded sagely.

"Jest lit down 'twixt two days and dug a hole and struck hit right there at grass-roots, did ye? That's tenderfoots' luck, ever' time. Vein runnin' bigger?"

Gifford admitted that it was, and the one-eyed man begged a bit of tobacco for the filling of his blackened corn-cob pipe.

"Here's hopin'," he said, with true Western magnanimity; then, with a jerk of his head toward the thin column of stack smoke rising on the still morning air from the Lawrenceburg: "I know this here ground, up one side and down the other. Them fellers down yander 'll be grabbin' fer ye, pronto, soon as they know you've struck pay."

"Why should they?" I asked, scenting a possible source of information.

"They own the ground on t' other side of ye, and ever'body allowed they owned this."

"But their vein runs the other way--southeast and northwest," Gifford interposed.

The old man winked his single eye.

"Ever been in their workin's?"

Gifford shook his head.

"N'r nobody else that could 'r would talk," said our ancient. "You can't tell nothin' about which-a-way a vein runs in this here hell's half-acre. Bart Blackwell's the whole show on the Lawrenceburg, and he's a hawg. He's the one that ran them Nebraska farmers off'm the Mary Mattock down yander: give 'em notice that he was goin' to sink on them upper claims o' his'n at the gulch head, and that his sump water'd have to be turned loose to go where it had a mind to--which'd be straight down the gulch, o' course. The farmers they allowed that'd swamp 'em worse'n they was already swamped--ez it would--so they up and quit. Blackwell, he's a cuss, with a snoot like a hawg. He don't want no neighbors."

I had been observing the old man's face as he talked. It was villainous only in its featurings.

"Which are you; a prospector or a miner?" I asked.

"A little b'ilin' o' both, I reckon," was his rejoinder. "I driv' the first tunnel in the Buckeye, and they made me boss on the two-hundred-foot level. I kin shoot rock with any of 'em's long as I kin make out to let the bug-juice alone."

"Are you out of work?"

"Sure thing."

I caught Gifford's eye and the carpenter nodded. We were going to need men and more men, and here was a chance to begin on a man who knew the Lawrenceburg, or at least some of the history of it.

"You're hired," I told him; and it was thus that we secured the most faithful and efficient henchman that ever drew pay; a man who knew nothing but loyalty, and who was, besides, a practical miner and a skilful master of men.

Hicks--we carried him thus on the pay-roll, though he himself spelled it "Hix," for short, as he said--left us to go back to town for his dunnage, and Gifford, knowing that I had been on watch all night, urged me to turn in. But that was a game that two could play at.

"I'm no shorter on sleep than you are," I told him. "You were up all night with the wagon."

We wrangled over it a bit and I finally yielded. But first I told Gifford about the Lawrenceburg threat for the day, omitting nothing but the source of my information.

"So they're going to jump us, are they?" he said. "All right; the quicker the sooner. Does Barrett know?"

"Not yet. I thought we'd all get together on it this morning. Tell him when he comes back; and if anything develops before he gets here, sing out for me." And with that I made a dive for the blankets.

Between the two of them, Gifford and Barrett let me sleep until the middle of the afternoon. I could scarcely believe the evidence of my senses when I turned out and saw the miracles that had been wrought in a few short hours. While I slept, the transformation of the Little Clean-Up from a three-man prospect hole to a full-fledged mine had taken giant strides. Machinery and material were arriving in a procession of teams laboring up the gulch; a score of carpenters were raising the frame of the shaft-house; masons were setting the foundations for the engine and hoist. I had slumbered peacefully through all the din and hammering and the coming and going of the teams; would doubtless have slept longer if the workmen had not put skids and rollers under the shack to move it out of their way.

Gifford, now thirty-odd hours beyond his latest sleep, was too busy to talk; but Barrett took time to bridge the progress gap for me.

"There was nothing you could do," he explained, at my protest for being left for so many hours out of the activities. "Gifford will have to knock off pretty soon, but the work will go on just the same. Take a look around, Jimmie, and pat yourself on the back. You are no longer a miner; you are a mine owner."

"Tell me," I said shortly.

"There isn't much to tell. I caught that first car to town this morning and got busy. You're seeing some of the results, and the ready money in bank is what produced them. But we've got to dig some more of it, and dig it quick. Blackwell has begun suit against us for trespassing upon Lawrenceburg property, and as you know, every foot of ground all around us was relocated by the early-morning mob that trailed up from our broken-down wagon."

"I ought to have told you about the Blackwell move this morning before you got away, but there was so much excitement that I lost sight of it," I cut in. "I knew about it last night."

"How was that?"

"Somebody who knew about it before I did came here and told me."

"In the night?"

"In the early part of the night; yes."

"Was it Everton?"

"Not on your life. It was some one who thinks a heap more of you than Phineas Everton does."

"You don't mean----"

"Yes; that's just who I do mean. She came over expecting to find you. She wanted to ask you if we had a sure-enough, fire-proof, legal right to be here. She asked me, when she found you were in bed and asleep. I told her we had, and succeeded in making her believe it. Then she told me what was coming to us--what Blackwell had up his sleeve."

"That explains what Gifford was trying to tell me, but he didn't tell me where it came from," said Barrett.

"He couldn't, because I didn't tell him. It's between you and Polly Everton, and it'll never go any farther. I shall forget it--I've already forgotten it."

In his own way Barrett was as scrupulous as an honest man ought to be. "I wish she hadn't done it, Jimmie. It doesn't ring just right, you know; while her father is still on the Lawrenceburg pay-rolls."

Right there and then is when I came the nearest to having a quarrel with Robert Barrett.

"You blind beetle!" I exploded. "Don't you see that she did it for you? But beyond that, she was perfectly right. She saw that an unjust thing was about to be done, and she tried to chock the wheels. The man doesn't live who can stand up and tell me that her motives are not always exactly what they ought to be. I know they are!"

Barrett was smiling good-naturedly before I got through. "I like your loyalty," said he; adding: "and I shan't quarrel with you over Miss Everton's motives; she is as good as she is pretty; and that is putting it as strong as even you could put it."

It was time to call a halt on this bandying of words about Mary Everton and her motives. I had already said enough to warrant a cross-fire of questions as to how I came to know so much about her.

"We're off the track," I threw in, by way of making a needed diversion. "You began to tell me about the Blackwell demonstration. I see we're still here."

"You bet we're here; and we're going to stay. It may take all the money we can dig out of that hole in the next six months to pay court costs, but just the same, we'll stay. Blackwell tried the bullying game first; came over here this forenoon with a bunch of his men and tried to scare Gifford out. Gifford stood the outfit off with the shotgun; was still standing it off when I came up with the first gang of workmen. I had bought a few Winchesters against just such an emergency, and I passed them out to the boys and told them to stand by. That settled it and Blackwell backed down, threatening us with the law--which he had already invoked."

"Can he get an injunction and hang us up?"

"It's a cinch that he'll try. But we have the best lawyers in Cripple Creek, and they're right on the job. There will be litigation a mile deep and two miles high, but we'll get delay--which is all we are playing for, right now. If the lawyers can stand things off until we have had one month's digging, we'll have money enough to fight a dozen Lawrenceburgs."

"We are going to be terribly crowded in this little space," I lamented, with a glance at the building chaos which was already overflowing our narrow limits.

Barrett slapped me on the back. "There was one time when your Uncle Bob had the right hunch," he bragged exultantly. "Our attorneys, Benedict & Myers, have succeeded in buying the Mary Mattock for us, which gives us room for the dump. It cost us twenty thousand dollars yesterday, when the deal was closed, and to-day it would cost a hundred thousand--or as much more as you like. To-morrow morning there will be a syndicate of farmers back in Nebraska reading their newspapers and kicking themselves all over the barnyard."

"Even the Mattock ground won't give us any too much room," I suggested.

"No; but we can acquire the outer corners of our triangle, sooner or later. We can buy of these new stakers after they find that they haven't room enough to swing a cat on their little garden patches. The big fight is going to be with the Lawrenceburg. Benedict has been digging into that, and he says we are up against a bunch that will fight to the last ditch. The mine is backed by Eastern capital, and the claim the owners will make is that their upper ground here in the gulch joins the original location, and that we are trespassers."

"Give me something to do," I begged. "I can't stand around here, looking on."

"Your job is waiting for you," Barrett rejoined tersely. "You have never told me much about yourself, Jimmie, but I know you are a business man, with a good bit of experience. Isn't that so?"

"It was, once," I admitted.

"All right. You're going to handle the money end of this job in town. When you're ready, pull your freight for the camp, open an office, organize your force, and get busy with the machinery people, the banks, and the smelters. We'll be shipping in car-load lots within a week."

Two hours later I boarded a car on the nearest trolley line. On the long, sweeping rush down the hills I put in the time trying, as any bewildered son of Adam might, to find myself and to rise in some measure to the stupendous demands of the new task which lay before me.

But at the car-stopping in Bennett Avenue it was the escaped convict, rather than the newly created business manager of the Little Clean-Up, who slipped into the nearest hardware shop and purchased a revolver.