Chapter IX: Part 9

A slow minute was lost; then a second and a third. The man in the corded sombrero and laced buckskins touched his horse's flank with a spur and crept forward at a walk, keeping his eyes fixed upon the point where the quarry ought to come in sight again. When three more minutes passed and the farther shore was still a deserted blank, the Mexican dug both rowels into his mustang and galloped down to the river, muttering curses in the _patois_ of his native Sonora.

Apparently the closing in had been delayed too long. There were fresh hoof-prints in the marl of the hither approach to the shallow ford, but none to match them on the farther side. The Mexican crossed hastily and searched for the outcoming hoof-marks. The rocky bar which formed the northern bank of the stream told him nothing.

Now it is only in the imagination of the word-smith that the villain in the play is gifted with supernatural powers of discernment. Ruiz Gregorio Maria y Alvarez Mattacheco, familiarly and less cumbrously known as "Mexican George," was a mere murderer, with a quick eye for gun-sights and a ready and itching trigger finger. But he was no Vidoeq, to know by instinct which of the two trails, the canyon passage or the longer route over the hills, Ford had chosen.

Having two guesses he made the wrong one first, urging his mustang toward the canyon trail. A stumbling half-mile up the narrow cleft of the river's path revealing nothing, he began to reconsider. Drawing a second blank of the same dimensions, he turned back to the ford and tried the hill trail. At the end of the first hundred yards on the new scent he came again upon the fresh hoof-prints, and took off the brow-cramping hat to swear the easier.

Two courses were now open to him; to press hard upon the roundabout hill trail in the hope of overtaking the engineer before he could reach the Horse Creek camp, or to pass by the shorter route to the upper ford to head him off at the river crossing. The Mexican gave another glance at the dull red spot in the western sky and played for safety. The waylaying alternative commended itself on several counts. The canyon trail was the shorter and it could be traversed leisurely and in daylight. Pressing his livery hack as he could, Ford would scarcely reach the crossing at the mouth of Horse Creek before dusk. Moreover, it would be easier to wait and to smoke than to chase the quarry over the hills, wearing one's pinto to the bone.

Ruiz Gregorio Maria set his horse once more at the task of picking a path among the canyon boulders, riding loosely in the saddle, first in one stirrup and then in the other, and smoking an unbroken succession of the corn-husk cigarettes.

One small cloud flecked the sky of satisfaction. His instructions had been explicit. If Ford should resign, quit, wash his hands of the Pacific Southwestern, he might be suffered to escape. If not--there was only one condition attached to the alternative: what was done must be done neatly, with despatch, and at a sufficient distance from any of the MacMorrogh camps to avert even the shadow of suspicion.

Now the upper crossing of waylayings was within a stone's throw of the end-of-track yards; nay, within an amateur's pistol-shot of the commissary buildings. But Ruiz Gregorio, weighing all the possibilities, found them elastic enough to serve the purpose. A well-calculated shot from behind a sheltering boulder, the heaving of the body into the swift torrent of the Pannikin, and the thing was done. What damning evidence might afterward come to the light of day, if, indeed, it should ever come to light, would be fished out of the stream far enough from any of the MacMorrogh camps.

Thus Ruiz Gregorio Maria y Alvarez, lolling lazily in his saddle while the hard-breathing mustang picked a toilsome path among the strewn boulders and through the sliding shale beds. He went even further: an alibi might not be needful, but it would be easy to provide one. Young Jack Benson, if no other, would know that Ford had taken one of the shorter trails from Copah to the camp at Horse Creek. _Bueno!_ He, Ruiz Gregorio, could slip across the river in the dusk when the thing was done, skirt the headquarters camp unseen, and present himself a little later at Señor Frisbie's camp of the track-layers, coming, as it were, direct from Copah, almost upon the heels of Señor Benson. After that, who could connect him with the dead body of a man fished out of a river twenty, fifty, a hundred miles away?

There was a weak link in the chain. Ruiz Gregorio's child-like plot turned upon one pivot of hazard--hazard most likely to be ignored by so good a marksman as the "man-killer." One shot he might permit himself, with little danger of drawing a crowd from the mess tent and the sleeping shanties in the Horse Creek camp. Two would bring the men to their doors. Any greater number would be taken as the signal of a free fight needing spectators. Hence the first shot must suffice.

The Mexican bore this in mind when, arriving at his post opposite the camp in the early dusk, he chose his ambushing boulder so near the descending hill trail that a stout club might have been substituted for the pistol. The weather promise was for a starless night, but the electric arc-lights were already scintillating at their mastheads in the headquarters railroad yard across the Pannikin. Later, when the daylight was quite gone and the electrics were hollowing out a bowl of stark whiteness in the night, Ruiz Gregorio wished he had chosen otherwise. The camp lights shone full upon him and on the mustang standing with drooped head at his elbow, and the trail on the other side of the boulder was in shadow.

He was about to take the risk of moving farther up the hill-path to a less exposed lurking place, was hesitating only because his indolent soul rebelled at the thought of having to drag Ford's body so many added steps to its burial in the river, when the clink of shod hoofs upon stone warned him that the time for scene-shifting had passed. Pushing the mustang out of the line of sight from the trail, he flattened himself against the great rock and waited.

Ford rode down the last declivity cautiously, for his horse's sake. The trail came out of the hills abruptly, dropping into the rock-strewn river valley within hailing distance of the camp. Well within the sweep of the masthead lights across the stream, the boulder-strewn flat was as light as day, save where the sentinel rocks flung their shadows; and promptly at the first facing of the bright electrics, Ford's horse stumbled aside from the path and began to take short cuts between the thick-standing boulders for the river. This was how the Mexican, instead of having his victim at a complete disadvantage, found himself suddenly uncovered by the flank, exposed, recognized, and hailed in no uncertain tones.

"Hello, Mattacheco! what are you doing here?" Ford had a flash-light picture of the horse standing with his muzzle to the ground; of the man flattened against the rock. Then he saw the dull gleam of the lights upon blued metal. "You devil!" he shouted; and unarmed as he was, spurred his tired beast at the assassin.

Here, then, was the weak link in Ruiz Gregorio's chain twisted to the breaking point at the very outset. Instead of taking a deliberate pot-shot at an unsuspecting victim, he was obliged to face about, to fire hastily at a charging enemy, and to spring nimbly aside to save himself from being ridden down. The saving jump was an awkward one: it brought him into breath-taking collision with the upjerking head of the mustang. When he had recovered his feet and his presence of mind, the charging whirlwind had dashed through the shallows of the Pannikin, and a riderless horse was clattering across the tracks in the railroad yard.

The Mexican waited prudently to see what the camp would say to the single shot. It said nothing; it might have been deserted for all the indications there were of life in it. Ruiz Gregorio snapped the empty shell from his weapon, replacing it with a loaded one, and mounted and rode slowly through the ford. The riderless horse disappearing across the tracks gave him good hope that the hasty shot had accomplished all that a deliberate one might have.

There was no dead man tumbled in a heap in the railroad yard, as he had hoped to find. Silence, the silence of desertion, brooded over the masthead arcs. Painfully the Mexican searched, at the verge of the river, in the black shadows cast by the crowding material cars. Finally he crossed over to the straggling street of the camp, walking now and leading the spent mustang. Silence here, too, broken only by the sputtering sizzle of the electrics. The huge mess tent was dark; there were no lights, save in the closed commissary and in the president's car: no lights, and not a man of the camp's crowding labor army to be seen.

At a less strenuous moment the man-killer would have been puzzled by the unusual stillness and the air of desertion. As it was, he was alertly probing the far-flung shadows. The engineer, if only wounded, would doubtless try to hide in the shadows in the railroad yard.

The Mexican left his horse in the camp street and made an instant search between and under the material cars, coming out now and again to stare suspiciously at the president's private car, standing alone on the siding directly opposite the commissary. The Nadia was occupied. It was lighted within, and the window shades were drawn down. Ruiz Gregorio could never get far from the lighted car without being irresistibly drawn back to it, and finally he darted back in time to see a man rise up out of the shadow of the nearest box-car, spring to the platform of the Nadia and kick lustily at the locked door. The door was opened immediately by some one within, and the fugitive plunged to cover--but not before the Mexican's revolver had barked five times with the rapid staccato of a machine gun.

When Ruiz Gregorio, dropping the smoking weapon into its holster, would have mounted to put into instant action the plan of the well-considered alibi, a barrel-bodied figure launched itself from the commissary porch, and a vigorous hand dragged horse and man into the shadow of the stables.

"Off wid you now, you blunderin' dago divvle!" gritted the MacMorrogh savagely. "It's all av our necks ye've put into a rope, this time, damn you!"

The Mexican had dismounted and was calmly reloading his pistol.

"You t'ink-a he's not-a sufficiently kill? I go over to da car and bring-a you da proof, _si_?"

"You'll come wid me," raved the big contractor. "'Tis out av your clumsy hands, now, ye black-hearted blunderin' cross betune a Digger Indian and a Mexican naygur! Come on, I say!"

The back room of the commissary to which the MacMorrogh led the way held three men; Eckstein, and the two younger members of the contracting firm. They had heard the fusillade in the camp street and were waiting for news. Brian MacMorrogh gave it, garnished with many oaths.

"The pin-brained omadhaun av a Mexican has twishted a rope for all av us! He's let Ford come back, alive; let him get to the very dure av the prisident's car! Then, begorra! he must mades show himself under the electhrics and open fire on the man who was kicking at the dure and looking sthraight at him!"

Eckstein asked a single question.

"Did he get him? If he's dead he can't very well tell who shot him."

"That's the hell av it!" raged the big man. "Who's to know?"

Eckstein spat out the extinct cigar stump he was chewing.

"We are to know--beyond a question of doubt, this time. Who is in the Nadia, besides Ford?"

"The two naygurs."

"No one else?"

MacMorrogh shook his head. "No wan."

"You are sure Mr. Adair and Brissac are out of the way?"

"They got Gallagher to push them up to Frisbie's track camp in Misther North's car an hour before dark."

"None of your men are likely to drift in from the other way up the line?"

"Not unless somebody carries the news av the gold sthrike--and there's nobody going that way to carry it. The camp's empty but for us."

Eckstein rose and buttoned his coat.

"You have held your own strikers--the men you can depend upon: how many do we count, all told?"

"Thirteen, counting the five av us here, and the felly that runs the electhric light plant."

"H'm; it's a hell of a risk: thirteen men knowing what only one should know--and what that one should hurry to forget. But your butter-fingered Mexican has left us no choice. Ford knows enough now to send some of us over the road for life. If he got into that car alive, he must never come out of it alive."

Brian MacMorrogh had unlocked a cupboard in the corner of the room. It was a well-filled gun-rack, and he was passing the Winchesters out to his brothers.

"'Tis so," he said briefly. Then: "There's the two naygurs in the car: what av thim, Misther Eckstein?"

Eckstein took one of the guns and emptied the magazine to make sure of the loading.

"We are thirteen to one; the negroes don't count," he replied coldly. "Call in your men and we'll go and do what's got to be done."

XXV

THE SIEGE OF THE NADIA

With a horse that could have been handled Ford would not have run away when the charge upon the Mexican failed of its purpose. So far from it, he tried to wheel and charge again while the man was reeling from his collision with the rearing mustang.

But the bronco from the Copah stable, with the flash and crash of the pistol-shot to madden it, took the bit between its teeth and bolted--safely through the shallows of the stream crossing and up to the level of the railroad yard beyond, but swerving aside at the first of the car shadows to fling its rider out of the saddle. Ford gathered himself quickly and rolled under a car. His right arm had no feeling in it, whether from the shot or the fall he could not determine.

The numbness had become a prickling agony when he heard the Mexican splashing through the river to begin his search. Ford's field of vision was limited by the car trucks, but he kept the man in sight as he could. It filled him with sudden and fiery rage to be hunted thus like a defenseless animal, and more than once he was tempted to make a dash for the engineers' quarters on the hillside above the commissary--a rifle being the thing for which he hungered and thirsted.

But to show himself under the lights was to invite the fate he had so narrowly escaped. He knew Mattacheco's skill as a marksman: the Mexican would not be rattled twice in the same half-hour. Ford gripped the benumbed arm in impotent writhings.

"Now, by recognizing him, I've fixed it so that he is obliged to kill me," he muttered. "It's my life, or his neck for a halter, and he knows it. The blood-thirsty devil! If I could only get to Brissac's bunk-shanty and lay my hands on a gun ..."

There seemed to be no chance of doing that most desirable thing. The Mexican was now afoot and coursing the railroad yard like a baffled hound. Ford saw that it was only a question of minutes until his impromptu hiding-place would be discovered, and he began to look for another. The Nadia was but a short distance away, and the lighted deck transoms beckoned him.

It was instinct rather than intention that made him duck and plunge headlong through the suddenly opened door of the private car at the glimpse of his pursuer standing beside his horse in the open camp street. This was why the pistol barked harmlessly. Springing to his feet, and leaving the frightened negro who had admitted him trying to barricade the door with cushions from the smoking-room seats, Ford burst into the lighted central compartment.

It was not empty, as he had expected to find it. Two men, startled by the shots and the crash of breaking glass, were prepared to grapple him. It was Brissac, the invalided assistant, who cried, "Hold on, Mr. Adair--it's Ford, and he's hurt!"

Ford met the involuntary rush, gathered the two in his uncrippled arm and dragged them to the floor.

"That's in case my assassin takes a notion to turn loose on the windows," he panted. Then he gasped out his story while Brissac got the aching right arm out of its sleeve and looked for the injury.

Adair listened to the story of the attempted murder awe-struck, as one from the civilized East had a right to be.

"By Jove!" he commented; "I thought I had bumped into all the different varieties of deviltry since I left Denver yesterday morning, but this tops 'em. Actually tried to kill you in cold blood? But what for, Stuart?--for heaven's sake, what for?"

"Because he was hired to: because his masters, the MacMorroghs, and their master, North, have staked their roll on this last turn of the cards. I know too much, Adair. The president was sent over here to get rid of me. That failing, word was passed down the line that I was to be effaced. A few hours ago this Mexican overheard me telling your sister what I proposed to do to North and the MacMorroghs. That's why he--Ouch! Roy; that is my arm you're trying to twist out of joint, man!"

"It's all right," laughed the Louisianian; "it is only a crazy-bone bump that you got when the bronc' threw you. Say, Ford; I thought you claimed to know how to ride a horse!"

Adair was feeling in his pockets for the inevitable cigarette case.

"What he overheard you telling Alicia?" he mused. "I'm evidently two or three chapters behind. But no matter; this is the now; the very immediate now. Will your assassin keep on feeling for you?"

Ford shook his head. "Not any more just at present, I guess. He has waited too long. That fusillade of his will have turned the entire camp out by this time, and the Macs don't want any inconvenient witnesses."

"Witnesses?" echoed Adair. "Then you don't know--Say, Stuart; there isn't a white man in this camp besides us three--unless you count the MacMorroghs and their commissary garrison as white men. News of the great gold strike got here about three o'clock, and every laborer within hearing of it shouldered pick and shovel and lined out up the new track for Copah."

"What!" shouted Ford. "And these dash-_dashed_ MacMorroghs didn't try to hold them?"

"I don't know about that. I had Mr. Brissac, here, over in the '01'--I came across the mountain in North's car, you know--dosing him with things out of Doctor Van Bruce's traveling case, and trying to get him in shape to show me the way to Copah. After the stampede, which took all the four-legged horses as well as the two-legged asses, I persuaded your man Gallagher to hitch his engine to our car to drag us up to Frisbie's camp at the front. I thought Frisbie would probably be in communication with you. Gallagher's intentions were good, but about three miles up Horse Creek he ditched the car so thoroughly that we couldn't inhabit it; so we got out and walked back."

"All of which brings on more talk," said Ford gravely. "From what you say, I gather that the MacMorroghs are still here. Did any one see you come back?"

"I don't know. It was after dark when we straggled in, and we didn't ring any bells or blow any whistles."

Ford stood up.

"Does either one of you happen to have anything bigger than a pocket-knife in the way of a weapon?" he asked.

"Why? what are you going to do?" Adair demanded.

"I am going to separate you two from my highly dangerous presence," said Ford definitely. "The MacMorroghs' outfit of a dozen or fifteen cutthroat scoundrels, captained, for the moment, by Eckstein, North's right-hand man, are doubtless just across the way in the back room of the commissary. You say the camp is otherwise deserted: the MacMorroghs don't know that you are here; and they do know that I am, dead or alive. Moreover, Mattacheco has doubtless told them by this time that I saw and recognized him. Wherefore, it's up to them to see that I never get a chance to go before a grand jury."

"You sit down on the floor," said Adair. He had found a cigarette and was crimping the end of it. "Have you a fraction of an idea that we are going to allow you to make a Jonah of yourself for us? Sit down, I say! Who's got a gun?"

Brissac had crept to a window and was reconnoitering the deserted camp street and the commissary through a peephole in the drawn shade. As Adair spoke, he sprang back, tripped Ford and fell with him, crying:

"Down! both of you!"

At the cry there was a shot from without, and a window on the exposed side of the Nadia fell in shivers. There were yells of terror from the cook's pantry, and the two negroes came crawling through the side vestibule, their eyes like saucers and their teeth chattering. Ford jumped up and turned off the Pintsch lights; and he was barely down again when another shot broke a second window.

"Wouldn't that jolt you?" said Adair. "They are feeling for you with both hands. What a heaven's pity it is that we haven't so much as a potato popgun among us to talk back with. What did you see, Mr. Brissac?"

"A crowd of them bunched on the commissary porch. One of them was sighting a Winchester at the car when I got busy."

Adair was again lamenting the lack of arms when the negro porter produced a pocket bulldog pistol of the cheap and uncertain sort. "Y-y-y-yah you is, Mistuh Charles," he stuttered.

"Ah, Williams--concealed weapons? That is fifty dollars fine in your native Tennessee, isn't it?" Then to Brissac: "Please go to the farther window and mark down for me, Mr. Brissac. I don't like to have those fellows do all the bluffing."

While the assistant was complying, a third bullet from the commissary porch tore high through the car, smashing one of the gas globes. Adair crawled to a broken window and the cheap revolver roared like an overloaded musket.

"Good shot!" said Brissac, from his marking post. "You got one of them: he's down and they're dragging him inside. Now they have all ducked to cover."

"That settles any notion of a palaver and the pipe of peace, I guess," said Adair, as indifferently as if he had just brought down a clay pigeon. "Prophesy, Stuart: what comes next?"

Ford shook his head.

"They can't quit now till they are sure I am permanently obliterated; they have gone too far. They'll credit me with that shot of yours, and they will take it as a pretty emphatic proof that I still live. Hence, more war."

"Well, what do we do? You are the captain."

"Picket the car and keep a sharp lookout for the next move. Brissac, you take the forward end, and I'll take the rear platform. Adair, post your Africans in here where they'll do the most good, and see that they don't go to sleep on their jobs."

The disposition of forces was quickly made, after which suspense set in. Silence and the solitude of the deserted camp reigned unbroken; yet the watchers knew that the shadows held determined enemies, alertly besieging the private car. To prove it, Adair pulled down a portière, gave it bulk with a stuffing of berth pillows, and dropped the bundle from one of the shattered windows. Three jets of fire belched from the nearest shadow, and the dummy was riddled. Adair fired at one of the flashes, resting the short-barreled pistol across the window ledge, and the retaliatory shot brought Ford hurrying in from his post.

"For heaven's sake, don't waste your ammunition!" he whispered. "One of them has gone up to the powder-house after dynamite. I heard the creaking of the iron door."

Adair whistled softly. "Dynamite! That will bring things to a focus beautifully, won't it? When they have blown us up, I wonder how they will account to Uncle Sidney for the loss of his car?"

Brissac had come running in at the sound of the firing. He missed the grim humor in Adair's query.

"Car, nothing!" he retorted. "Better say the entire camp and everything in it! There's a whole box-car load of dynamite and caps out here in the yard--sub-contractors' supplies waiting for the freighters' teams from the west end. If they smash us, the chances are ten to one that there'll be a sympathetic explosion out yonder in the yard somewhere that will leave nothing but a hole in the ground!"

"No," said Ford. "I gave orders myself to have that car set down below the junction when the Nadia came in."

"So you did; and so it was," Brissac cut in. "But afterward it got mixed in the shifting, and it's back in the yard--I don't know just where."

Adair turned to the cowering porter.

"Have you any more cartridges for this cannon of yours, Williams?" he asked.

"N-n-no, sah."

"Then we have three more chances in the hat. Much obliged for the dynamite hint, Stuart. I'll herd these three cartridges pretty carefully. Back to your sentry-boxes, you two, and make a noise if you need the artillery."

Another interval of suspense followed, thickly scored with pricklings of anxiety for the besieged. Then an attempt was made from the rear. Ford saw a dodging shadow working its way from car to car in the yard and signaled softly to Adair.

"Hold low on him," he cautioned, when the New Yorker was at his elbow, "those cheap guns jump like a scared cow-pony." Then he added: "And pray God you don't hit what he's carrying."

Adair held low and bided his time. There was another musket-like roar, and an instant though harmless reply from two rifles on the other side of the Nadia. But the dodging shadow was no longer advancing.

"I've stopped him for the time being, anyhow," said Adair, exulting like a boy. "If we only had a decent weapon we could get them all, one at a time."

"This was crude," Ford commented. "Eckstein will think up something better for the next attempt."

It was a prophecy which found its fulfilment after another sweating interval of watchfulness. This time it was Brissac who made the discovery, from the forward end of the Nadia. The nearest of the material cars was a box, lying broadside to the private car on the next side-track but one. From behind the trucks of the box-car a slender pole, headed with what appeared to be an empty oyster tin, and trailing a black line of fuse, was projecting itself along the ground by slow inchings, creeping across the lighted space between the two cars. Brissac promptly gave the alarm.

"This is where we lose out, pointedly and definitely," predicted Adair, still cheerful. "Anybody want to try a run for it?"

It was Ford who thought of the two negroes.

"Tell them, Roy," he said to Brissac. "Perhaps they would rather risk the rifles."

Brissac crept back to the central compartment, and the two watchers marked the progress of the inching pole, with its dynamite head and the ominous black thread of communication trailing like a grotesque horn behind it. At the crossing of the intervening track it paused, moving back and forth along the steel like a living thing seeking a passage. Finally the metallic head of it appeared above the rail, hesitated, and came on slowly. At that moment there was a shout, and the two negroes, hands held high, tumbled from the opposite step of the Nadia and ran toward the commissary stables. Three shots bit into the silence, and the fat cook ran on, stumbling and shrieking. But the man Williams stopped short and fell on his face, rolling over a moment later to lie with arms and legs outspread.

"God!" said Ford, between his set teeth; "they saw who they were--they couldn't help seeing! And there was no excuse for killing those poor devils!"

But there was no time for reprisals, if any could have been made. When Brissac rejoined the two in the forward vestibule, the stiff-bodied snake with its tin head and trailing horn was crossing the second rail of the intervening siding.

"We've got to think pretty swiftly," suggested Adair, still cool and unruffled. "I might be able to hit that tin thing at this short distance, but I suppose that would only precipitate matters. What do you say?"

Ford could not say, and Brissac seemed to have become suddenly petrified with horror. He was staring at the lettering on the box-car opposite--the one under whose trucks the dynamiters were hiding.

"Look!" he gasped; "it's the car of explosives, and they don't know it!" Then he darted back into the Nadia's kitchen, returning quickly with a huge carving-knife rummaged from the pantry shelves. "Stand back and give me room," he begged; and they saw him lean out to send the carving-knife whistling through the air: saw it sever the head from the stiff-bodied snake--the head and the trailing horn as well.

"Good man!" applauded Adair, dragging the assistant engineer back to safety before any of the sharpshooters had marked him down. "Where did you learn that trick?"

"It is my one little accomplishment," confessed the Louisianian. "An old Chickasaw chief taught me when I was a boy in the bayou country."

The peril was over for the moment. The severed pole was withdrawn, and for what seemed like an endless interval the attack paused. The three besieged men kept watch as they might, creeping from window to window. Out under the blue glare of the commissary arc-light the body of the negro porter lay as it had fallen. Once, Ford thought he heard groans from the black shadow where the fat cook had disappeared, but he could not be sure. On the other side of the private car, and half-way between it and the forty-thousand-pound load of high explosives, the petard oyster-tin lay undisturbed, with the carving-knife sticking in the sand beside it.

"What will they try next?" queried Adair, when the suspense was again growing intolerable.

"It is simple enough, if they happen to think of it," was Ford's rejoinder. "A few sticks of dynamite in a plugged gas-pipe: cut your fuse long enough, light it, and throw the thing under the car. That would settle it."

Adair yawned sleepily.

"Well, they've got all night for the inventive part of it. There's no rescue for us unless somebody--a good husky army of somebodies--just happens along."

"The army is less than eight miles away--over at Frisbie's camp," said Ford. "With Dick to lead them, the track-layers would sack this place in about five minutes. If I could only get to the wire!"

Brissac heard the "if."

"Let me try to run their picket line, Ford," he said eagerly. "If I can get around to our quarters and into the telegraph tent--"

"You couldn't do it, Roy. There is the proof of it," pointing to the body of the slain negro. "But I have been thinking of another scheme. The track-camp wire is bracketed across the yard on the light-poles. I have my pocket relay. I wonder if we could manage to cut in on that wire?"

"Wait a minute," Brissac interrupted. He was gone but a moment, and when he returned he brought hope with him.

"The wire is down and lying across the front vestibule," he announced excitedly. "They must have cut it up yonder by the telegraph tent and the slack has sagged down this way."

"Which gives us a dead wire without any batteries," said Ford gloomily; and then: "Hold on--aren't there electric call-bells in this car, Adair?"

"Yes, several of them; one in each state-room."

"Good! that means batteries of some sort," said Ford. "Rummage for them, Brissac, while I get that wire in here."

The wire was successfully pulled in through the front vestibule without giving the alarm. Ford twisted it in two when he had enough of it to reach the central compartment. Adair did sentry duty while the two technicians wrought swiftly. The bell battery was found, the ground connection made with a bit of copper wire stripped from one of the state-rooms, and Ford quickly adjusted the delicate spring of the tiny field relay.

What he feared most was that the few dry-cells of the bell battery would not supply the current for the eight miles of line up Horse Creek. For a time, which lengthened to dragging minutes, the anxious experimenters hung over the tiny field instrument. The sensitive magnet seemed wholly dead. Then, suddenly, it began to tick hesitantly in response to Ford's tapping of the key.

"Thank God, the battery is strong enough," he exclaimed. "Now, if there is somebody within hearing at Frisbie's end of the line ..."

He was clicking persistently and patiently, "E-T," "E-T," "E-T," alternating now and then with the Horse Creek call and his own private code letter, when Adair came up from his post at one of the rear windows. The golden youth was the bearer of tidings, but Ford held up his hand for silence: some one was breaking in to reply from Frisbie's--Frisbie, himself, as the minimized tickings speedily announced.

Ford snipped out his call for help in the fewest possible words:

Arm M'Grath's gang and bring it by train to Horse Creek, quick.
MacMorroghs are trying to dynamite us in the Nadia. FORD.

Almost without a break in the insect-like tickings the reply came:

Stand them off; help coming.

The thing done, the master workman in Ford snatched at the helm.

Did you catch and hold the pick-and-shovel men from this camp?

he clicked anxiously.

Got them all herded here and ready to go back to work--for more
pay,

answered Frisbie; and Ford ticked one more word, "Hurry," and closed the key with a sigh of relief. Then, and not until then, Adair said: "Is that all, for the present? If it is, I'm sorry to have to report that the beggars outside have hit upon your gas-pipe scheme. They are rolling a round, black thing with a string attached down upon us from the commissary. The slant of the hill is just enough to keep it coming where the ground is smooth."

From sheer force of habit, Ford disconnected his field telegraph, cased and pocketed it. Then there was an instant adjournment to the rear windows on the camp side. Happily, the rolling bomb was as yet only on the way. Pebbles and roughnesses intervened here and there to stop or to turn it aside, and since it was out of reach of their longest pole, the dynamiters would start it on again by throwing stones at it.

Hereupon ensued a struggle which, under other conditions, would have figured as horse-play. One after another the three men in the car heaved cushions, pillows, obstructions of any sort, in the path of the rolling menace. And behind the commissary barricade the dynamiters patiently twitched the bomb by the firmly fastened fuse this way and that to avoid the obstacles, or sent it forward under the impact of well-directed missiles.

Ford was the first of the three to recognize the futility of the cushion barricades.

"They'll beat us--they'll drop it in the ditch right here under us in spite of fate!" he juried. "Brissac: go and break the glass in the accident tool-case and bring me the ax, quickly!" And when he had it; "Now get me a piece of that telegraph wire and bend a hook on the end of it--jump for it; you'll have to twist it off with your fingers!"

With an energy that made no account of the lamed arm, Ford tore up the carpet and fell to work fiercely, cutting a hole through the car floor; while Brissac broke a piece from the wire and bent a finger-shaped hook on the end of it. Adair, with his eye at a hole in a window shade, gave his attention to the attack.

"They are getting it here, slowly but surely," he reported. "It is going to roll under us just about where you are.... Now it has gone past my line of sight." And a moment later, in the same drawling monotone: "They have lighted the fuse, but there is a good long string of it to burn through. Take your time--" then, with a sudden failure in the monotone: "No, by Jove! you can't take your time! The fire is jumping across the road to beat the band!"

The hole was opened through the floor, and Ford was on his stomach with his face and an arm in the aperture, fishing desperately for the loop in the fuse. It was his success, his sudden drawing of the loop up into the car, that had shocked Adair out of his pose. Brissac was ready with the ax, and the instant the loop appeared it was severed, the burning end cast off, and the other end, with the bomb attached, was safely drawn up into the car.

The perspiration was running from Ford's face in streams when he had the engine of death securely in his hands.

"Take it, Roy," he gasped. "Drop it into the water-cooler. That will be the safest place for it if they fall back on the gun-play."

As if his word had evoked it, a storm of rifle bullets swept through the car, smashing windows, breaking the remaining gas globes and splintering the wood-work. Again and again the flashes leaped out of the surrounding shadows and the air was sibilant with whining missiles.

Brissac had the infernal machine: at first he fell upon it and covered it with his body; afterward he crawled with it into the nearest state-room and muffled it in a roll of berth mattresses.

When the storm ceased, as suddenly as it had begun, they crept together in the vestibule farthest from the commissary lead-hurling volcano to count the casualties.

There was none; not even a bullet score or a splinter-wound to show for the hot bombardment, though the side of the Nadia facing the commissary was riddled.

"I'm believing all I've ever read about its taking a hundred pounds of lead to kill one man in a war battle," said the New Yorker, grimly humorous to the last. "How do you two C. E.'s account for it?"

"We don't," said Ford shortly. "We're merely thankful that all humankind habitually shoots high when it's excited or in a hurry."

Then he sprang afoot, secured his ax, and sent Brissac to the pantry to rummage for other weapons. "A rush is the next thing in order," he suggested; and they prepared as they could to meet it.

But the rush did not come. Instead of it, one man, carrying what appeared to be a bundle of dripping rags, came cautiously into the open and approached the shattered car. The night wind sweeping down from the upper valley was with him, and the pungent odor of kerosene was wafted to and through the broken windows.

"Oho!" said Adair. "Having safely shot you dead or disabled, they are now going to give you Christian burial, Ford. Also, they will comfortably obliterate all the marks and scars of this pleasant evening's diversion. How near shall I let him come before I squander one of the two remaining cartridges on him?"

"Wait," said Brissac in a half-whisper. In his second pantry rummaging he had found nothing more promising than a cast-iron skillet--promising because it had weight and a handle to wield it by. The intending incendiary was no more than a few yards from his goal when Brissac rose up opposite the nearest shattered window and hurled the skillet like a clumsy discus. His aim was true to a hand's-breadth: a bullet from Adair's pistol could have done no more. With a cry that was fairly shogged out of him by the impact of the iron missile, the man flung away his burden, dropped in his tracks and lay groaning.

They looked for another storm of lead to follow this, and hugged the floor in readiness for it. When it did not come, Ford crept to the hole in the car floor and listened long and intently. Half an hour he had given Frisbie to get his track-layers together, and to cover the eight miles of rough-laid rails with the construction train. What was delaying him?

"You said Gallagher ditched your car: did it block the track?" he asked of Adair.

"It did, didn't it, Brissac?" was the answer, and the assistant confirmed it.

"Then that is why Frisbie can't get to us. Was Gallagher's engine still on the rails?"

"It was."

Ford sat up and nursed his knees. "Dick will make a way if he can't find one ready made. But it may take hours. Meanwhile, if these devils have scouts out--"

"Yes?" said Adair.

"They'll bring the warning, and there won't be much more time wasted in experiments. They can do us up, if they get right down to business."

"What are they doing now?" Adair asked of Brissac, who was on watch on the commissary side.

"I'll be hanged if I know. It looks like a young cannon, and it's pointed this way. By George! it's coming--coming by its all alone, too!"

By this time they were all watching the new menace. Brissac's description fitted it accurately; a cylindrical object mounted upon a pair of small wheels taken from the commissary store-room truck. It came toward the Nadia by curious surges--a rush forward and a pause--trailing what appeared to be a long iron rod behind it.

Ford hit upon the explanation. The cylindrical thing was another gas-pipe bomb; the iron tail was a smaller pipe containing and armoring the fuse, and serving also as the means of propulsion. They were coupling on additional lengths of the fuse-carrying pipe as they were needed; hence the jerking advances and pauses.

Adair's low laugh was as care-free as ever.

"A practical illustration of the tail wagging the dog," he remarked. "But the dog will wag us good and plenty when they get him where they want him. You can't fish that thing up through the hole with your wire--or crop the tail."

"No; it's a run for it, this time," said Ford, rising and stripping his coat.

But Brissac was pointing to three or four men dodging from shadow to shadow under the masthead lights and circling wide to tighten the line of circumvallation.

"We shan't run very far," he commented.

It seemed a hair-graying age to the watchers at the Nadia's windows before the men behind the commissary barricade got their infernal machine placed to their liking. They stared at it, all three of them, fascinated, deaf and blind to all else. A minimized shudder as of drumming wheels or escaping steam was in the air when they saw the flare of the match that betokened the firing of the fuse, but no one of the three heard it.

It was when the sputtering line of fire had buried itself in its tube that they became suddenly alive to the unbelievable fact that a locomotive was thundering down the yard on the Nadia's track. A rifle cracked; then another and a third; but the engine came on as if its driver bore a charmed life.

Surely Michael Gallagher must have prayed to the saints that night. He did not know that the very seconds had become priceless: he knew only that Frisbie had sent him on ahead to snake the president's car out of the Horse Creek yard as quickly as possible. Yet if he could have seen the bomb and the sputtering fuse, he could not have slowed more deftly to let the automatic couplers clutch each other, nor, at the touch and clamp, could he have reversed and gathered headway with greater skill.

The three occupants of the Nadia staggered to their feet as the private car lunged ahead in the grasp of the big engine, increasing speed with every wheel-turn. Mechanically, and as one man, they rushed to the rear platform. The mock cannon stood where it had been thrust; but in the camp street a handful of men were wrestling madly with the pipe fuse-carrier, breaking it, wrenching it in pieces, and stamping futilely upon the snake-like thing hissing and spitting under their feet.

"Look!" sobbed Adair. "They know--they've discovered that box-car! Oh, why in the name of the pitiful Christ don't they drop it and run?"

This from the man who had laughed, and aimed and fired and laughed again, in the heat of battle. But Ford's rejoinder was the bitter malediction of the defeated industry captain. "Damn their worthless lives!" he stormed. "In the next half-minute the Pacific Southwestern stands to lose a quarter of a million dollars!"

It was but a vanishing glimpse that they had of the handful of madmen stamping and dancing under the masthead light in front of the commissary; a glimpse withdrawing swiftly into a dim perspective as the Nadia was whisked around the curve and up the Horse Creek grade.

It was after Gallagher had picked up the lights of the waiting train of armed track-layers, and was whistling to announce his success, that the end came. For the three watchers on the rear platform of the president's car the little constellation of arc-stars in the valley below was suddenly blotted out in a skyward belching of gray flame; a huge volcano-burst of momentarily illuminated dust. Instinctively they braced themselves for the concussion that followed,--a bellowing thunderclap and a rending of earth and air that shook the surrounding hills and drowned the shriek of Gallagher's whistle.

A blast of air, down-drawn from the heights to fill the dreadful vacuum, was still rocking the stopped car when Frisbie climbed nimbly to the railed rear platform and swung his lantern to light the faces of the three men braced in the doorway.

"A close call, gentlemen," was his only comment; and then he appealed briefly to Ford for orders.

"Back us down slowly," said Ford shortly, "and follow with your train. We may need the men."

Frisbie went forward through the wrecked private car, returning presently to flag Gallagher along with the lantern swung over the railing. Down in the valley of the Pannikin the heavy, sickening fumes of the burned explosives hung in the air, and when the car swung in on the straight line the red glare of a wrecked and burning oil tank lighted the scene.

The camp site was blankly unrecognizable. Where the ten-tracked yard had been there was a vast depression, half-filled with distorted steel and débris indescribable, twisted iron and splintered wood, with the water from the river pouring into it. The commissary buildings and the surrounding bunk-shanties were gone, swept away as with the stroke of a mighty broom; and the trees on the hill-sides above were scorched and shriveled as if a forest fire had blasted them.

Frisbie was the first to speak after he had flagged Gallagher to a stand on the farthermost edge of the devastation.

"Any use to turn out the crew and hunt for them?" he asked.

Ford shook his head.

"No. Leave M'Grath and a few others to stand guard and to flag the incoming steel trains, and let's get out of this. I'm sick; and so is Mr. Adair."

XXVI

THE STAR OF EMPIRE

A week, the most strenuous week in Copah's history, had passed, and still the president's party delayed its return to what Miss Priscilla Van Bruce constantly referred to as "civilization"; though the Farthest West has always been slow to admit the derogatory comparison which the word implies.

During the strenuous week much had happened, and much more was scheduled to happen. For one twenty-four-hour day the ex-speculator in Mr. Colbrith held out against the sharp attacks of the reawakened lust of conquest. Then, from Jack's Canyon on the Transcontinental, from men-clustered construction trains on the extension, over the passes from Summit Lakes, and across the brown plains from Green Butte, poured the army of gold-seekers, and the president was swept away and into the very vortex of the stock-jobbing whirlpool.

It was not until the third day of the week that Adair came ambling into Copah, riding a cart mule from Frisbie's camp. To his sister and his aunt the young man told everything; to his uncle nothing. Between gasps in the speculative frenzy Mr. Colbrith found time to complain bitterly to his nephew of Ford's defection.

"It was dastardly!" he shrilled. "We had some words; I don't deny that we had some words. But he was most unreasonable. He should have gone about his business and let me have time to consider. Here are thousands of people pouring into this place, everything at famine prices, no supplies for our miners, no railroad to bring them. What's this I hear about an accident at Horse Creek? Why isn't Ford on the ground attending to his railroad building and straightening things out? Have I got to forfeit the money-making chance of a lifetime and go and drag that track into Copah with my own hands?"

Adair seemed suddenly to have lost his tongue, which was certainly glib enough ordinarily. All he would say was that the engineering department was still at work, he believed; that the track was approaching Copah, slowly, perhaps, but pretty surely.

"But without a head!" snapped the irate president. "Ford is a traitor to the company. Tell him so from me, sir, if you know where he is skulking."

Adair did tell Ford, circumstantially, when he rode the cart mule out of town the next morning and met the young engineer at the head of a tremendously augmented track force, rushing the rails around the swelling hills on the approach to the mining-camp-city.

"Oh, he's still up in the air," laughed the director, when he had repeated the president's wrathful outburst. "Frantic because the road isn't finished; frantic because he can't get in on all the ground-floors in all the mining deals; frantic some more because he has to live in a shack hotel while he has a private car and a good cook, as he thinks, only a few miles away. Which reminds me: the '01' has a pretty good cook, and the incomparible Johnson,--don't let them escape. Have you sent the Nadia back to Denver for repairs?"

"Yes; Frisbie went over in it this morning."

"Frisbie?"

"Yes, I had to let him go. Word came from Leckhard as soon as we got the wire reestablished, which was late last night. North was taken suddenly ill the day after the explosion. He resigned at once by wire to the executive committee in New York, and two days later he took a steamer from Galveston for nobody knows where; health trip--doctor's orders--Leckhard said. I sent Frisbie over to be acting manager of the system, pending the president's--er--recovery from _his_ sudden illness. Leckhard says the New York people are burning the wires trying to get word to Mr. Colbrith."

"They may go on burning them," said Adair calmly. "Uncle Sidney isn't going to quit until he owns a good half of the Copah district--or gets his armature burned out. And if he were ready to quit, we shouldn't let him. But how are things working out on the extension?--that is what interests me."

"Bully!" was the enthusiastic reply. "We're spending money like water; paying anything that's asked; and even then the men come and go like a torchlight procession. But we are keeping the surfacing gangs neck-full the entire length of the line, and Leckhard has already organized his regular train service over the first hundred miles. That puts us on an even footing with the Transcontinental at Jack's Canyon, and the tide is fairly turned our way. When we lay the rails into Copah,--which will be the day after to-morrow, if nothing pulls in two,--the first through passenger train, with the '01' in tow, will be right behind us. Does the report satisfy you?"

"Your word fits it: it's bully."

"Then I want my reward. When am I to be allowed to chase in and pay my respects to your--er--aunt, and--and Miss Alicia?"

Adair laughed.

"My--er--aunt!" he mocked. "Much you care about Aunt Hetty. And I've a thing or two to say about Alicia. Who gave you leave to fall in love with my little sister, I'd like to know?"

"She did," retorted Ford brazenly. "Don't tell me you are going to try to kick it over at this late day. You can't, you know."