The Taming of Red Butte Western Page 18

  Judson knew the temper of the Timanyoni miners. To be seen crouching on the boss's doorstep would be to take the chance of making a target of himself for the first loiterer of the day shift who happened to look his way. Dismissing the risky expedient, he made a third circuit from moon-glare to shadow, this time upon hands and knees. To the lowly come the rewards of humility. Framed level upon stout log pillars on the down-hill side, the head-quarters warehouse and office sheltered a space beneath its floor which was roughly boarded up with slabs from the log-sawing. Slab by slab the ex-engineer sought for his rat-hole, trying each one softly in its turn. When there remained but three more to be tugged at, the loosened one was found. Judson swung it cautiously aside and wriggled through the narrow aperture left by its removal. A crawling minute later he was crouching beneath the loosely jointed floor of the lighted room, and the avenue of the ear had broadened into a fair highway.

  Almost at once he was able to verify his guess that there were only two men in the room above. At all events, there were only two speakers. They were talking in low tones, and Judson had no difficulty in identifying the rather high-pitched voice of the owner of the Wire-Silver mine. The man whose profile he had seen on the window-shade had the voice which belonged to the outlined features, but the listener under the floor had a vague impression that he was trying to disguise it. Judson knew nothing about the letter in which Flemister had promised to arrange for a meeting between Lidgerwood and the ranchman Grofield. What he did know was that he had followed Hallock almost to the door of Flemister's office, and that he had seen a shadowed face on the office window-shade which could be no other than the face of the chief clerk. It was in spite of all this that the impression that the second speaker was trying to disguise his voice persisted. But the ex-engineer of fast passenger-trains was able to banish the impression after the first few minutes of eavesdropping.

  Judson had scarcely found his breathing space between the floor timbers, and had not yet overheard enough to give him the drift of the low-toned talk, when the bell of the private-line telephone rang in the room above. It was Flemister who answered the bell-ringer.

  "Hello! Yes; this is Flemister.... Yes, I say; this is Flemister; you're talking to him.... What's that?—a message about Mr. Lidgerwood?... All right; fire away."

  "Who is it?" came the inquiry, in the grating voice which fitted, and yet did not fit, the man whom Judson had followed from his boarding of the train at Angels to Silver Switch, and from the gulch of the old spur to his disappearance on the wooded slope of Little Butte ridge.

  The listener heard the click of the telephone ear-piece replacement.

  "It's Goodloe, talking from his station office at Little Butte," replied the mine owner. "The despatcher has just called him up to say that Lidgerwood left Angels in his service-car, running special, at eight-forty, which would figure it here at about eleven, or a little later."

  "Who is running it?" inquired the other man rather anxiously, Judson decided.

  "Williams and Bradford. A fool for luck, every time. We might have had to écraser a couple of our friends."

  The French was beyond Judson, but the mine-owner's tone supplied the missing meaning, and the listener under the floor had a sensation like that which might be produced by a cold wind blowing up the nape of his neck.

  "There is no such thing as luck," rasped the other voice. "My time was damned short—after I found out that Lidgerwood wasn't coming on the passenger. But I managed to send word to Matthews and Lester, telling them to make sure of Williams and Bradford. We could spare both of them, if we have to."

  "Good!" said Flemister. "Then you had some such alternative in mind as that I have just been proposing?"

  "No," was the crusty rejoinder. "I was merely providing for the hundredth chance. I don't like your alternative."

  "Why don't you?"

  "Well, for one thing, it's needlessly bloody. We don't have to go at this thing like a bull at a gate. I've had my finger on the pulse of things ever since Lidgerwood took hold. The dope is working all right in a purely natural way. In the ordinary run of things, it will be only a few days or weeks before Lidgerwood will throw up his hands and quit, and when he goes out, I go in. That's straight goods this time."

  "You thought it was before," sneered Flemister, "and you got beautifully left." Then: "You're talking long on 'naturals' and the 'ordinary run of things,' but I notice you schemed with Bart Rufford to put him out of the fight with a pistol bullet!"

  Judson felt a sudden easing of strains. He had told McCloskey that he would be willing to swear to the voice of the man whom he had overheard plotting with Rufford in Cat Biggs's back room. Afterward, after he had sufficiently remembered that a whiskey certainty might easily lead up to a sober perjury, he had admitted the possible doubt. But now Flemister's taunt made assurance doubly sure. Moreover, the arch-plotter was not denying the fact of the conspiracy with "The Killer." "Rufford is a blood-thirsty devil—like yourself," the other man was saying calmly. "As I have told you before, I've discovered Lidgerwood's weakness—he can't call a sudden bluff. Rufford's play—the play I told him to make—was to get the drop on him, scare him up good, and chase him out of town—out of the country. He overran his orders—and went to jail for it."

  "Well?" said the mine-owner.

  "Your scheme, as you outlined it to me in your cipher wire this afternoon, was built on this same weakness of Lidgerwood's, and I agreed to it. As I understood it, you were to toll him up here with some lie about meeting Grofield, and then one of us was to put a pistol in his face and bluff him into throwing up his job. As I say, I agreed to it. He'll have to go when the fight with the men gets hot enough; but he might hold on too long for our comfort."

  "Well?" said Flemister again, this time more impatiently, Judson thought.

  "He queered your lay-out by carefully omitting to come on the passenger, and now you propose to fall back upon Rufford's method. I don't approve."

  Again the mine-owner said "Why don't you?" and the other voice took up the question argumentatively.

  "First, because it is unnecessary, as I have explained. Lidgerwood is officially dead, right now. When the grievance committees tell him what has been decided upon, he will put on his hat and go back to wherever it was that he came from."

  "And secondly?" suggested Flemister, still with the nagging sneer in his tone.

  There was a little pause, and Judson listened until the effort grew positively painful.

  "The secondly is a weakness of mine, you'll say, Flemister. I want his job; partly because it belongs to me, but chiefly because if I don't get it a bunch of us will wind up breaking stone for the State. But I haven't anything against the man himself. He trusts me; he has defended me when others have tried to put him wise; he has been damned white to me, Flemister."

  "Is that all?" queried the mine-owner, in the tone of the prosecuting attorney who gives the criminal his full length of the rope with which to hang himself.

  "All of that part of it—and you are saying to yourself that it is a good deal more than enough. Perhaps it is; but there is still another reason for thinking twice before burning all the bridges behind us. Lidgerwood is Ford's man; if he throws up his job of his own accord, I may be able to swing Ford into line to name me as his successor. On the other hand, if Lidgerwood is snuffed out and there is the faintest suspicion of foul play.... Flemister, I'm telling you right here and now that that man Ford will neither eat nor sleep until he has set the dogs on us!"

  There was another pause, and Judson shifted his weight cautiously from one elbow to the other. Then Flemister began, without heat and equally without compunction. The ex-engineer shivered, as if the measured words had been so many drops of ice-water dribbling through the cracks in the floor to fall upon his spine.

  "You say it is unnecessary; that Lidgerwood will be pushed out by the labor fight. My answer to that is that you don't know him quite as well as you think you do. If he's allowed to live, he'll stay—unl
ess somebody takes him unawares and scares him off, as I meant to do to-night when I wired you. If he continues to live, and stay, you know what will happen, sooner or later. He'll find you out for the double-faced cur that you are—and after that, the fireworks."

  At this the other voice took its turn at the savage sneering.

  "You can't put it all over me that way, Flemister; you can't, and, by God, you sha'n't! You're in the hole just as deep as I am, foot for foot!"

  "Oh, no, my friend," said the cooler voice. "I haven't been stealing in car-load lots from the company that hires me; I have merely been buying a little disused scrap from you. You may say that I have planned a few of the adverse happenings which have been running the loss-and-damage account of the road up into the pictures during the past few weeks—possibly I have; but you are the man who has been carrying out the plans, and you are the man the courts will recognize. But we're wasting time sitting here jawing at each other like a pair of old women. It's up to us to obliterate Lidgerwood; after which it will be up to you to get his job and cover up your tracks as you can. If he lives, he'll dig; and if he digs, he'll turn up things that neither of us can stand for. See how he hangs onto that building-and-loan ghost. He'll tree somebody on that before he's through, you mark my words! And it runs in my mind that the somebody will be you."

  "But this trap scheme of yours," protested the other man; "it's a frost, I tell you! You say the night passenger from Red Butte is late. I know it's late, now; but Cranford's running it, and it is all down-hill from Red Butte to the bridge. Cranford will make up his thirty minutes, and that will put his train right here in the thick of things. Call it off for to-night, Flemister. Meet Lidgerwood when he comes and tell him an easy lie about your not being able to hold Grofield for the right-of-way talk."

  Judson heard the creak and snap of a swing-chair suddenly righted, and the floor dust jarred through the cracks upon him when the mine-owner sprang to his feet.

  "Call it off and let you drop out of it? Not by a thousand miles, my cautious friend! Want to stay here and keep your feet warm while I go and do it? Not on your tintype, you yapping hound! I'm about ready to freeze you, anyway, for the second time—mark that, will you?—for the second time. No, keep your hands where I can see 'em, or I'll knife you right where you sit! You can bully and browbeat a lot of railroad buckies when you're playing the boss act, but I know you! You come with me or I'll give the whole snap away to Vice-President Ford. I'll tell him how you built a street of houses in Red Butte out of company material and with company labor. I'll prove to him that you've scrapped first one thing and then another—condemned them so you might sell them for your own pocket. I'll——"

  "Shut up!" shouted the other man hoarsely. And then, after a moment that Judson felt was crammed to the bursting point with murderous possibilities: "Get your tools and come on. We'll see who's got the yellows before we're through with this!"

  * * *

  XVII

  THE DIPSOMANIAC

  There are moments when the primal instincts assert themselves with a sort of blind ferocity, and to Judson, jammed under the floor timbers of Flemister's head-quarters office, came one of these moments when he heard the two men in the room above moving to depart, and found himself caught between the timbers so that he could not retreat.

  What had happened he was unable, in the first fierce struggle for freedom, fully to determine. It was as if a living hand had reached down to pin him fast in the tunnel-like space. Then he discovered that a huge splinter on one of the joists was thrust like a great barb into his coat. Ordinarily cool and collected in the face of emergencies, the ex-engineer lost his head for a second or so and fought like a trapped animal. Then the frenzy fit passed and the quick wit reasserted itself. Extending his arms over his head and digging his toes into the dry earth for a purchase, he backed, crab-wise, out of the entangled coat, freed the coat, and made for the narrow exit in a sweating panic of excitement.

  Notwithstanding the excitement, however, the recovered wit was taking note of the movements of the men who were leaving the room overhead. They were not going out by the direct way—out of the door facing the moonlight and the mining hamlet. They were passing out through the store-room in the rear. Also, there were other foot-falls—cautious treadings, these—as of some third person hastening to be first at the more distant door of egress.

  Judson was out of his dodge-hole and flitting from pine to pine on the upper hill-side in time to see a man leap from the loading platform at the warehouse end of the building and run for the sheltering shadows of the timbering at the mine entrance. Following closely upon the heels of their mysterious file leader came the two whose footsteps Judson had been timing, and these, too, crossed quickly to the tunnel mouth of the mine and disappeared within it.

  Judson pursued swiftly and without a moment's hesitation. Happily for him, the tunnel was lighted at intervals by electric incandescents, their tiny filaments glowing mistily against the wet and glistening tunnel roof. Going softly, he caught a glimpse of the two men as they passed under one of the lights in the receding tunnel depths, and a moment later he could have sworn that a third, doubtless the man who had leaped from the loading platform to run and hide in the shadows at the mine mouth, passed the same light, going in the same direction.

  A hundred yards deeper into the mountain there was a confirming repetition of the flash-light picture for the ex-engineer. The two men, walking rapidly now, one a step in advance of the other, passed under another of the overhead light bulbs, and this time Judson, watching for the third man, saw him quite plainly. The sight gave him a start. The third man was tall, and he wore a soft hat drawn low over his face.

  "Well, I'll be jiggered!" muttered the trailer, pulling his cap down to his ears and quickening his pace. "If I didn't know better, I'd swear that was Hallock again—or Hallock's shadder follerin' him at a good long range!"

  The chase was growing decidedly mysterious. The two men in the lead could be no others than Flemister and the chief clerk, presumably on their way to the carrying out of whatever plot they had agreed upon, with Lidgerwood for the potential victim. But since this plot evidently turned upon the nearing approach of Lidgerwood's special train, why were they plunging on blindly into the labyrinthine depths of the Wire-Silver mine? This was an even half of the mystery, and the other half was quite as puzzling. Who was the third man? Was he a confederate in the plot, or was he also following to spy upon the conspirators?

  Judson was puzzled, but he did not let his bewilderment tangle the feet of his principal purpose, which was to keep Flemister and his reluctant accomplice in sight. This purpose was presently defeated in a most singular manner. At the end of one of the longer tunnel levels, a black and dripping cavern, lighted only by a single incandescent shining like a star imprisoned in the dismal depths, the ex-engineer saw what appeared to be a wooden bulkhead built across the passage and effectively blocking it. When the two men came to this bulkhead they passed through it and disappeared, and the shock of the confined air in the tunnel told of a door slammed behind them.

  Judson broke into a stumbling run, and then stopped short in increasing bewilderment. At the slamming of the door the third man had darted forward out of the shadows to fling himself upon the wooden barrier, beating upon it with his fists and cursing like a madman. Judson saw, understood, and acted, all with the instinctive instantaneousness born of his trade of engine-driving. The two men in advance were merely taking the short cut through the mountain to the old workings on the eastern slope, and the door in the bulkhead, which was doubtless one of the airlocks in the ventilating system of the mine, had fastened itself automatically after Flemister had released it.

  Judson was a hundred yards down the tunnel, racing like a trained sprinter for the western exit, before he thought to ask himself why the third man was playing the madman before the locked door. But that was a matter negligible to him; his affair was to get out of the mine with the loss of the fewest possible seco
nds of time—to win out, to climb the ridge, and to descend the eastern slope to the old workings before the two plotters should disappear beyond the hope of rediscovery.

  He did his best, flying down the long tunnel reaches with little regard for the precarious footing, tripping over the cross-ties of the miniature tramway and colliding with the walls, now and then, between the widely separated electric bulbs. Far below, in the deeper levels, he could hear the drumming chatter of the power-drills and the purring of the compressed air, but the upper gangway was deserted, and it was not until he was stumbling through the timbered portal that a watchman rose up out of the shadows to confront and halt him. There was no time to spare for soft words or skilful evasions. With a savage upper-cut that caught the watchman on the point of the jaw and sent him crashing among the picks and shovels of the mine-mouth tool-room, Judson darted out into the moonlight. But as yet the fierce race was only fairly begun. Without stopping to look for a path, the ex-engineer flung himself at the steep hill-side, running, falling, clambering on hands and knees, bursting by main strength through the tangled thickets of young pines, and hurling himself blindly over loose-lying bowlders and the trunks of fallen trees. When, after what seemed like an eternity of lung-bursting struggles, he came out upon the bare summit of the ridge, his tongue was like a dry stick in his mouth, refusing to shape the curses that his soul was heaping upon the alcohol which had made him a wind-broken, gasping weakling in the prime of his manhood.

  For, after all the agonizing strivings, he was too late. It was a rough quarter-mile down to the shadowy group of buildings whence the humming of the dynamo and the quick exhausts of the high-speeded steam-engine rose on the still night air. Judson knew that the last lap was not in his trembling muscles or in the thumping heart and the wind-broken lungs. Moreover, the path, if any there were, was either to the right or the left of the point to which he had attained; fronting him there was a steep cliff, trifling enough as to real heights and depths, but an all-sufficient barrier for a spent runner.