Roy Norton - The Plunderer

In those days the house of Phillip Townsend had been a great name in New York. Now this was all that was left of it. Dissolution, death, and dust, and a half-interest in an abandoned mine! The harsh voice of Bully Presby aroused him from his thoughts.

“All right,” it said. “This seems sufficient, but if you’ve got the sense and judgment Sloan seems to think you have, you’ll come to the conclusion that there’s not much use in wasting any of his good, hard dollars on the Croix d’Or. It never has paid. It never will pay. I offered to buy it once, but I wouldn’t give a dollar for it now, beyond what the timber above ground is worth. It owns a full section of timberland, and that’s about all.”

He reached for a pen and wrote a note to the watchman, telling him that the bearer, Richard Townsend, had come to look over the property and that his orders must be accepted, and signed it with his hard-driven scrawl. He handed it up to Dick without rising from his seat, and said: “That’ll fix you up, I think.”

As if by an afterthought, he asked: “Have you any idea of the condition of the mine?”

“No,” Dick answered, as he folded the letter and put it into his pocket, together with the one from his late father’s partner.

“Well, then, I can tell you, it’s bad,” said Presby, fixing him with his cool, hard stare. “The Cross is spotted. Once in a while they had pay chutes. They never had a true ledge. There isn’t one there, as far as anybody that ever worked it knows. They wasted five hundred thousand dollars trying to find it, and drove ten thousand feet of drifts and tunnels. They went down more than six hundred feet. She’s under water, no one knows how deep. It might take twenty thousand to un-water the sinking shaft again, and at the bottom you’d find nothing. Take my advice. Let it alone. Good-day.”

Dick walked out, scarcely knowing whether to feel grateful for the churlish advice or to resume his wonted attitude of self-reliance and hold himself unprejudiced by Presby’s condemnation of the Croix d’Or. He wondered if Bully Presby suspected him of having been friendly with the mob of drunken ruffians at the road house, but he had been given no chance to explain.

At the bottom of the gulch he found Bill sprawled at length on his elbows almost under the forefeet of one of the burros which was nosing him over in a friendly caress. He called out as he approached, and the big prospector sat up, deftly snapped the cigarette he had been smoking into the creek with his thumb and forefinger, and got to his feet.

“Do we get permission to go on the claim?” he grinned, as Townsend reached him.

“Yes, I’ve got an order to the watchman. The old man doesn’t seem to think much of it. Says it’s spotted. Had rich pay chutes, but they pinched. No regular formation. Always been a loser. Thinks we’d be foolish to do anything with it.”

“Good of him, wasn’t it?”

Dick looked quickly at the hard, lined face of his companion.

“That’s the first thing I’ve heard that made me feel better,” declared the prospector, as he swung one of the burro’s heads back into the trail and hit the beast a friendly slap on the haunches to start it forward. “Whenever a man, like this old feller seems to be, gives me that kind of advice, I sit up and take notice.”

“Why–why, what do you know about him?” Dick asked, falling into the trail behind the pack animals, which had started forward with their slow jog trot, and ears swaying backward and forward as they went.

“While you was gone,” Mathews answered, “I had a long talk with a boy that came along and got friendly. You can believe boys, most of ’em. They know a heap more than men. They think out things that men don’t. Kids are always friends with me; you know that. I reckon, from what I gathered, that this Presby man is about as hard and grasping an old cuss as ever worked the last ounce of gold out of a waste dump. He makes the men save the fags of the candles and the drips, so’s he can melt ’em over again. He runs a company store, and if they don’t buy boots and grub from him, they have to tear out mighty quick. He fired a fireman because the safety-valve in the boiler-house let go one day twenty minutes before the noon shift went back to work. If he says, ‘Let the Cross alone,’ I think it’s because he wants it.”

“You couldn’t guess who he is,” Dick said, preparing to move.

“Why? Do I know him?”

“In a way. He’s the man we saw the mob tackle, back there at the road house.”

Bill gave a long whistle.

“So that’s the chap, eh? Bully Presby! Well, if we ever run foul of him, we’ve got our work cut out for us. Things are beginnin’ to get interestin’. ‘I like the place,’ as Daniel said when he went to sleep in the lion’s den.”

They opened the gate through the barricade without any formality, and were well started up the inclined road of the Croix d’Or before they encountered the watchman who had given them so much trouble. As he came toward them, frowning, they observed that he had buckled a pistol round him as if to resist any intrusion in case it should be attempted without instructions. Dick handed him Presby’s order, and the man read it through in surly silence; then his entire attitude underwent a swift change. He became almost obsequiously respectful.

“I’ll have to go down and have a talk with Mr. Presby,” he said, and would have ventured a further remark, but was cut short by the mine-owner.

“Yes, you’d better go and see him,” Dick said concisely. “And when you go, take all of your dunnage you can carry, then come back and get the rest. I shall not want you on the claim an hour longer than necessary for you to get your stuff away. You’re too good a man to have around here.”

The fellow gave a shrug of his shoulders, an evil grin, and turned back up the road to vanish in what had evidently been the superintendent’s cabin, and noisily began to whistle as he gathered his stuff together. The partners halted before the door, and Dick looked inside.

“I suppose you have the keys for everything, haven’t you?” he called.

The man impudently tossed a bundle at him without a word. Apparently his belongings were but few, which led the newcomers to believe that he had taken his meals at the Rattler, and perhaps slept there on many nights. They watched him as he rolled his blankets, and prepared to start down the trail.

“The rest of that plunder in there, the pots and the lamp, belong to the mine,” he said. And then, without other words, turned away.

“That may be the last of him, and maybe it won’t!” growled Bill, as he began throwing the hitches off the tired burros that stood panting outside the door. “Anyway, it’s the fag end of him to-night.”

They were amazed at the lavish expenditure of money that had been made in the superintendent’s quarters. There were a porcelain bathtub brought up into the heart of the wilderness, a mahogany desk whose edges had been burned by careless smokers, and a safe whose door swung open, exposing a litter of papers, mine drawings, and plans. The four rooms evidently included office and living quarters, and they betokened a reckless financial outlay for the purpose.

“Poor Dad!” said Dick, looking around him. “No wonder the Cross lost money if this is a sample of the way the management spent it.”

He stepped outside to where the cañon was beginning to sink into the dusk. The early moon, still behind the silhouette of the eastern fringe of peaks and forests, lighted up the yellow cross mark high above, and for some reason, in the stillness of the evening, he accepted it as a sign of promise.

It took seven days of exploration to reveal the condition of the Cross of Gold, and each night the task appeared more hopeless. The steel pipe line, leading down for three miles of sinuous, black length, from a reservoir high up in the hills, had been broken here and there maliciously by some one who had traversed its length and with a heavy pick driven holes into it that inflicted thousands of dollars of expense.