Anna Barbour - The Award of Justice; Or, Told in the Rockies - A Pen Picture of the West

“How kind!” exclaimed Miss Gladden, “I don’t wonder that you consider him your friend. Is he here now?”

“Yes,” replied Lyle, “he has been away for a few days, but he came back last night, and I went down to his cabin to see him. He brought me some beautiful books, but I keep them at his cabin most of the time, so no one at the house will get hold of them.”

“Does he live alone?” asked Miss Gladden.

“No, an Irishman, who has a pretty good education, lives with him most of the time; he is quite a musician and is teaching me to play the violin. ‘Mike’ they call the Irishman, and my friend is ‘Jack’; the other miners nicknamed him ‘Lone Jack,’ but nobody, I suppose, knows what their real names are.”

“Why, how interesting!” exclaimed Miss Gladden. “Why haven’t you ever told me before? It sounds like a story with a deep-laid plot, and a typical villain lurking somewhere.”

“There are plots enough, and villains enough, but Jack is not one of them,” quietly replied the girl, with a curious expression.

“Would he let me come and see him?” inquired Miss Gladden.

“He might, if I asked him, but you would find him very uncommunicative. He does not care for strangers. He was telling me last night about a comical, dudish looking fellow whom he saw on the train, and who got off at Silver City, and he said he was coming up here into the mountains in company with another young gentleman; he thought I would be likely to see them, and I think they are the new boarders.”

“Why, have you seen them?” asked Miss Gladden, in surprise.

“Yes,” laughed Lyle, “one of them, from my post of observation behind the kitchen door, and he did appear so ridiculous with his gold eye-glasses, looking as solemn as an owl, and glancing around with that expression of supercilious curiosity, as though he expected to find us all wild Indians, or something of the sort.”

“Ah, that accounts for the little tirade against western pleasure tourists I heard when you first came up. Evidently the eye-glasses did not produce a very favorable impression on you.”

“Well,” retorted Lyle, “see him yourself, and see what impressions you will receive.”

“Well, my dear,” said Miss Gladden, “as it is nearly dinner time, I would suggest that we adjourn to the house, alleviate these pangs of hunger, take an observation of the gold eye-glasses and report our impressions later.”

“Agreed,” said Lyle merrily, and the two began to descend the mountain.

Houston and Rutherford were promptly at the depot, as agreed, to take the early morning train to the mines.

Mr. Blaisdell met them with a great show of cordiality, his thin lips contracted into a smile which was doubtless intended to be very agreeable, but which produced a sensation exactly the reverse.

“Well,” Rutherford began, with his peculiar drawl, when he and Houston were seated together in the car, with Mr. Blaisdell safely engaged in conversation at a little distance, “I can’t say that I’m any more favorably impressed with Mr. Buncombe, or whatever his name is, than I was with old Boomerang yesterday. That fellow looked like a silly, pompous, old fool, and this one like a sly, old villain. I wish he’d stop that confounded, wolfish grin of his, it makes me feel uncomfortable, he looks as if he knew he had his prey just dead easy, and his chops were watering in anticipation. I say, old fellow, I don’t think much of this Buncombe-Boomerang combination of yours, and I guess it’s a good thing I’m along with you till we find out what sort of a trap we’re getting into.”

Houston smiled; Rutherford had expressed his own opinion a great deal nearer than he cared to admit. He had seen enough of the men with whom he was to be associated to convince him that they were villains, cowardly villains too, the very sort of men that would be most desperate and dangerous when cornered; but he was fast laying his plans, and now the only drawback seemed that he would have no assistant, and he felt the time would come when he would need one, and some one familiar with mining. An expert from the east would not do, he would be suspected; and a detective would not possess the necessary information regarding mining in general, and these mines in particular. At times, a vague idea of taking Rutherford into his confidence came into his mind, but he was not ready to do this yet, if at all.

All this flashed through Houston’s mind as Rutherford made the above remark, and he answered:

“I don’t apprehend any particular danger at present, but I am glad you are with me.”

“The question with me is,” continued Rutherford, “how I’ll amuse myself during your office hours in such a region as this; I don’t imagine I’ll find a great many congenial companions.”

“You seem to have forgotten the school teacher,” Houston remarked, with a quiet smile.

“Oh, bother the school ma’am! I had forgotten her. I suppose she’ll be as graceful as a scalene triangle, and about as entertaining as a mummy. They’re mostly that kind, or else the gushing, adoring sort, that can’t talk of anything but Browning, or Emerson, or theosophy, or something of that kind; and the most conceited lot of creatures that ever lived.”

Meanwhile, the train wound in and out among the mountains, stopping for a few moments at a small town where huge smelters were pouring forth their clouds of dense smoke, darkening the air until it seemed more like night than day; then on a few miles farther, to the little station known as the “Y,” so-called on account of the form of the spur tracks owned by the mining company, by which the ore was brought down from the mines above.

At the station was a store containing general mining supplies, with the post-office in one front window, a boarding and lodging house, and three or four saloons and gambling houses, these last designed to catch the wages of the miners from the surrounding camps.

Mr. Blaisdell having found one of the superintendents who had come down with a team for supplies, they were soon on their way up the gulch, and in the course of an hour were left at the office buildings, while the team went on to the mines.

Here Rutherford waited in the outer room of the little unpainted, frame building, while Mr. Blaisdell took Houston into the further room, and introduced him to Morgan, the general superintendent, and to his work, at the same time. Then, having seen Houston duly installed at his post of duty, perched on a wabbly stool, before a rickety, ink-bespattered desk, beside a window gray with the dust and smoke of ages, through which a few straggling sunbeams fell, Mr. Blaisdell sailed complacently forth to escort Rutherford to Jim Maverick’s boarding house, whither the baggage had already been taken by the team; then, all necessary arrangements for rooms and board having been completed, he went out to the mines, leaving Rutherford alone in the camp of the Philistines. He found no one, however, more formidable than Mrs. Maverick, an old woman bent nearly double, with white hair and hollow, deep-sunken eyes, so faded it was impossible to tell what their original color might have been, and the “help,” a stout, red-cheeked, coarse-featured girl of fifteen, whom Mrs. Maverick called “Minty,” but who rejoiced in the euphonious name of Araminta Bixby, and who ogled and grinned at Rutherford until he found the task of preserving his dignity more difficult than ever.

In the course of an hour he sauntered down to the office to meet Houston, and a little later the two sat in the porch of the low, wide-spreading house, partly frame and partly of logs, the roof of the porch supported by the trunks of slender trees, unhewn, from which even the bark had not been removed.