"I'm having some hauled to relieve the glut. The railroad will be operating inside of six weeks. We'll keep Number Three capped till then and go on drilling in other locations. Burns is spudding in a new well to-day."
The clerk took their order and departed. They were quite alone, not within hearing of anybody. Joyce took her fear by the throat and plunged in.
"You mad at me, Mr. Sanders?" she asked jauntily.
"You know I'm not."
"How do I know it?" she asked innocently. "You say as little to me as you can, and get away from me as quick as you can. Yesterday, for instance, you'd hardly say 'Good-morning.'"
"I didn't mean to be rude. I was busy." Dave felt acutely uncomfortable.
"I'm sorry if I didn't seem sociable."
"So was Mr. Hart busy, but he had time to stop and say a pleasant word."
The brown eyes challenged their vis-à-vis steadily.
The young man found nothing to say. He could not explain that he had not lingered because he was giving Bob a chance to see her alone, nor could he tell her that he felt it better for his peace of mind to keep away from her as much as possible.
"I'm not in the habit of inviting young men to invite me to take a soda, Mr. Sanders," she went on. "This is my first offense. I never did it before, and I never expect to again…. I do hope the new well will come in a good one." The last sentence was for the benefit of the clerk returning with the ice-cream.
"Looks good," said Dave, playing up. "Smut's showing, and you know that's a first-class sign."
"Bob said it was expected in to-day or to-morrow…. I asked you because I've something to say to you, something I think one of your friends ought to say, and—and I'm going to do it," she concluded in a voice modulated just to reach him.
The clerk had left the glasses and the check. He was back at the fountain polishing the counter.
Sanders waited in silence. He had learned to let the burden of conversation rest on his opponent, and he knew that Joyce just now was in that class.
She hesitated, uncertain of her opening. Then, "You're disappointing your friends, Mr. Sanders," she said lightly.
He did not know what an effort it took to keep her voice from quavering, her hand from trembling as it rested on the onyx top of the table.
"I'm sorry," he said a second time.
"Perhaps it's our fault. Perhaps we haven't been … friendly enough."
The lifted eyes went straight into his.
He found an answer unexpectedly difficult. "No man ever had more generous friends," he said at last brusquely, his face set hard.
The girl guessed at the tense feeling back of his words.
"Let's walk," she replied, and he noticed that the eyes and mouth had softened to a tender smile. "I can't talk here, Dave."
They made a pretense of finishing their sodas, then walked out of the town into the golden autumn sunlight of the foothills. Neither of them spoke. She carried herself buoyantly, chin up, her face a flushed cameo of loveliness. As she took the uphill trail a small breath of wind wrapped the white skirt about her slender limbs. He found in her a new note, one of unaccustomed shyness.
The silence grew at last too significant. She was driven to break it.
"I suppose I'm foolish," she began haltingly. "But I had been expecting—all of us had—that when you came home from—from Denver—the first time, I mean—you would be the old Dave Sanders we all knew and liked. We wanted our friendship to—to help make up to you for what you must have suffered. We didn't think you'd hold us off like this."
His eyes narrowed. He looked away at the cedars on the hills painted in lustrous blues and greens and purples, and at the slopes below burnt to exquisite color lights by the fires of fall. But what he saw was a gray prison wall with armed men in the towers.
"If I could tell you!" He said it in a whisper, to himself, but she just caught the words.
"Won't you try?" she said, ever so gently.
He could not sully her innocence by telling of the furtive whisperings that had fouled the prison life, made of it an experience degrading and corrosive. He told her, instead, of the externals of that existence, of how he had risen, dressed, eaten, worked, exercised, and slept under orders. He described to her the cells, four by seven by seven, barred, built in tiers, faced by narrow iron balconies, each containing a stool, a chair, a shelf, a bunk. In his effort to show her the chasm that separated him from her he did not spare himself at all. Dryly and in clean-cut strokes he showed her the sordidness of which he had been the victim and left her to judge for herself of its evil effect on his character.
When he had finished he knew that he had failed. She wept for pity and murmured, "You poor boy…. You poor boy!"
He tried again, and this time he drew the moral. "Don't you see, I'm a marked man—marked for life." He hesitated, then pushed on. "You're fine and clean and generous—what a good father and mother, and all this have made you." He swept his hand round in a wide gesture to include the sun and the hills and all the brave life of the open. "If I come too near you, don't you see I taint you? I'm a man who was shut up because—"
"Fiddlesticks! You're a man who has been done a wrong. You mustn't grow morbid over it. After all, you've been found innocent."
"That isn't what counts. I've been in the penitentiary. Nothing can wipe that out. The stain of it's on me and can't be washed away."
She turned on him with a little burst of feminine ferocity. "How dare you talk that way, Dave Sanders! I want to be proud of you. We all do. But how can we be if you give up like a quitter? Don't we all have to keep beginning our lives over and over again? Aren't we all forever getting into trouble and getting out of it? A man is as good as he makes himself. It doesn't matter what outside thing has happened to him. Do you dare tell me that my dad wouldn't be worth loving if he'd been in prison forty times?"
The color crept into his face. "I'm not quitting. I'm going through. The point is whether I'm to ask my friends to carry my load for me."
"What are your friends for?" she demanded, and her eyes were like stars in a field of snow. "Don't you see it's an insult to assume they don't want to stand with you in your trouble? You've been warped. You're eaten up with vain pride." Joyce bit her lip to choke back a swelling in her throat. "The Dave we used to know wasn't like that. He was friendly and sweet. When folks were kind to him he was kind to them. He wasn't like—like an old poker." She fell back helplessly on the simile she had used with her father.
"I don't blame you for feeling that way," he said gently. "When I first came out I did think I'd play a lone hand. I was hard and bitter and defiant. But when I met you-all again—and found you were just like home folks—all of you so kind and good, far beyond any claims I had on you—why, Miss Joyce, my heart went out to my old friends with a rush. It sure did. Maybe I had to be stiff to keep from being mushy."
"Oh, if that's it!" Her eager face, flushed and tender, nodded approval.
"But you've got to look at this my way too," he urged. "I can't repay your father's kindness—yes, and yours too—by letting folks couple your name, even in friendship, with a man who—"
She turned on him, glowing with color. "Now that's absurd, Dave Sanders. I'm not a—a nice little china doll. I'm a flesh-and-blood girl. And I'm not a statue on a pedestal. I've got to live just like other people. The trouble with you is that you want to be generous, but you don't want to give other folks a chance to be. Let's stop this foolishness and be sure-enough friends—Dave."
He took her outstretched hand in his brown palm, smiling down at her.
"All right. I know when I'm beaten."
She beamed. "That's the first honest-to-goodness smile I've seen on your face since you came back."
"I've got millions of 'em in my system," he promised. "I've been hoarding them up for years."
"Don't hoard them any more. Spend them," she urged.
"I'll take that prescription, Doctor Joyce." And he spent one as evidence of good faith.<
br />
The soft and shining oval of her face rippled with gladness as a mountain lake sparkles with sunshine in a light summer breeze. "I've found again that Dave boy I lost," she told him.
"You won't lose him again," he answered, pushing into the hinterland of his mind the reflection that a man cannot change the color of his thinking in an hour.
"We thought he'd gone away for good. I'm so glad he hasn't."
"No. He's been here all the time, but he's been obeying the orders of a man who told him he had no business to be alive."
He looked at her with deep, inscrutable eyes. As a boy he had been shy but impulsive. The fires of discipline had given him remarkable self-restraint. She could not tell he was finding in her face the quality to inspire in a painter a great picture, the expression of that brave young faith which made her a touchstone to find the gold in his soul.
Yet in his gravity was something that disturbed her blood. Was she fanning to flame banked fires better dormant?
She felt a compunction for what she had done. Maybe she had been unwomanly. It is a penalty impulsive people have to pay that later they must consider whether they have been bold and presumptuous. Her spirits began to droop when she should logically have been celebrating her success.
But Dave walked on mountain-tops tipped with mellow gold. He threw off the weight that had oppressed his spirits for years and was for the hour a boy again. She had exorcised the gloom in which he walked. He looked down on a magnificent flaming desert, and it was good. To-day was his. To-morrow was his. All the to-morrows of the world were in his hand. He refused to analyze the causes of his joy. It was enough that beside him moved with charming diffidence the woman of his dreams, that with her soft hands she had torn down the barrier between them.
"And now I don't know whether I've done right," she said ruefully. "Dad warned me I'd better be careful. But of course I always know best. I 'rush in.'"
"You've done me a million dollars' worth of good. I needed some good friend to tell me just what you have. Please don't regret it."
"Well, I won't." She added, in a hesitant murmur, "You won't—misunderstand?"
His look turned aside the long-lashed eyes and brought a faint flush of pink to her cheeks.
"No, I'll not do that," he said.
CHAPTER XXXII
DAVE BECOMES AN OFFICE MAN
From Graham came a wire a week after the return of the oil expert to
Denver. It read:
Report satisfactory. Can you come at once and arrange with me plan of organization?
Sanders was on the next train. He was still much needed at Malapi to look after getting supplies and machinery and to arrange for a wagon train of oil teams, but he dropped or delegated this work for the more important call that had just come.
His contact with Graham uncovered a new side of the state builder, one that was to impress him in all the big business men he met. They might be pleasant socially and bear him a friendly good-will, but when they met to arrange details of a financial plan they always wanted their pound of flesh. Graham drove a hard bargain with him. He tied the company fast by legal control of its affairs until his debt was satisfied. He exacted a bonus in the form of stock that fairly took the breath of the young man with whom he was negotiating. Dave fought him round by round and found the great man smooth and impervious as polished agate.
Yet Dave liked him. When they met at lunch, as they did more than once, the grizzled Westerner who had driven a line of steel across almost impassable mountain passes was simple and frank in talk. He had taken a fancy to this young fellow, and he let him know it. Perhaps he found something of his own engaging, dogged youth in the strong-jawed range-rider.
"Does a financier always hogtie a proposition before he backs it?" Dave asked him once with a sardonic gleam in his eye.
"Always."
"No matter how much he trusts the people he's doing business with?"
"He binds them hard and fast just the same. It's the only way to do. Give away as much money as you want to, but when you loan money look after your security like a hawk."
"Even when you're dealing with friends?"
"Especially when you're dealing with friends," corrected the older man.
"Otherwise you're likely not to have your friends long."
"Don't believe I want to be a financier," decided Sanders.
"It takes the hot blood out of you," admitted Graham. "I'm not sure, if I had my life to live over again, knowing what I know now, that I wouldn't choose the outdoors like West and Crawford."
Sanders was very sure which choice he would like to make. He was at present embarked on the business of making money through oil, but some day he meant to go back to the serenity of a ranch. There were times when he left the conferences with Graham or his lieutenants sick at heart because of the uphill battle he must fight to protect his associates.
From Denver he went East to negotiate for some oil tanks and material with which to construct reservoirs. His trip was a flying one. He entrained for Malapi once more to look after the loose ends that had been accumulating locally in his absence. A road had to be built across the desert. Contracts must be let for hauling away the crude oil. A hundred details waited his attention.
He worked day and night. Often he slept only a few hours. He grew lean in body and curt of speech. Lines came into his face that had not been there before. But at his work apparently he was tireless as steel springs.
Meanwhile Brad Steelman moled to undermine the company. Dave's men finished building a bridge across a gulch late one day. It was blown up into kindling wood by dynamite that night. Wagons broke down unexpectedly. Shipments of supplies failed to arrive. Engines were mysteriously smashed.
The sabotage was skillful. Steelman's agents left no evidence that could be used against them. More than one of them, Hart and Sanders agreed, were spies who had found employment with the Jackpot. One or two men were discharged on suspicion, even though complete evidence against them was lacking.
The responsibility that had been thrust on Dave brought out in him unsuspected business capacity. During his prison days there had developed in him a quality of leadership. He had been more than once in charge of a road-building gang of convicts and had found that men naturally turned to him for guidance. But not until Crawford shifted to his shoulders the burdens of the Jackpot did he know that he had it in him to grapple with organization on a fairly large scale.
He worked without nerves, day in, day out, concentrating in a way that brought results. He never let himself get impatient with details. Thoroughness had long since become the habit of his life. To this he added a sane common sense.
Jackpot Number Four came in a good well, though not a phenomenal one like its predecessor. Number Five was already halfway down to the sands. Meanwhile the railroad crept nearer. Malapi was already talking of its big celebration when the first engine should come to town. Its council had voted to change the name of the place to Bonanza.
The tide was turning against Steelman. He was still a very rich man, but he seemed no longer to be a lucky one. He brought in a dry well. On another location the cable had pulled out of the socket and a forty-foot auger stem and bit lay at the bottom of a hole fifteen hundred feet deep. His best producer was beginning to cough a weak and intermittent flow even under steady pumping. And, to add to his troubles, a quiet little man had dropped into town to investigate one of his companies. He was a Government agent, and the rumor was that he was gathering evidence.
Sanders met Thomas on the street. He had not seen him since the prospector had made his wild ride for safety with the two outlaws hard on his heels.
"Glad you made it, Mr. Thomas," said Dave. "Good bit of strategy. When they reached the notch, Shorty and Doble never once looked to see if we were around. They lit out after you on the jump. Did they come close to getting you?"
"It looked like bullets would be flyin'. I won't say who would 'a' got who if they had," he said modestly. "But I wasn't l
ookin' for no trouble. I don't aim to be one of these here fire-eaters, but I'll fight like a wildcat when I got to." The prospector looked defiantly at Sanders, bristling like a bantam which has been challenged.
"We certainly owe you something for the way you drew the outlaws off our trail," Dave said gravely.
"Say, have you heard how the Government is gettin' after Steelman? He's a wily bird, old Brad is, but he slipped up when he sent out his advertisin' for the Great Mogul. A photographer faked a gusher for him and they sent it out on the circulars."
Sanders nodded, without comment.
"Steelman can make 'em flow, on paper anyhow," Thomas chortled. "But he's sure in a kettle of hot water this time."
"Mr. Steelman is enterprising," Dave admitted dryly.
"Say, Mr. Sanders, have you heard what's become of Shorty and Doble?" the prospector asked, lapsing to ill-concealed anxiety. "I see the sheriff has got a handbill out offerin' a reward for their arrest and conviction. You don't reckon those fellows would bear me any grudge, do you?"
"No. But I wouldn't travel in the hills alone if I were you. If you happened to meet them they might make things unpleasant."
"They're both killers. I'm a peaceable citizen, as the fellow says. O' course if they crowd me to the wall—"
"They won't," Dave assured him.
He knew that the outlaws, if the chance ever came for them, would strike at higher game than Thomas. They would try to get either Crawford or Sanders himself. The treasurer of the Jackpot did not fool himself with any false promises of safety. The two men in the hills were desperate characters, game as any in the country, gun-fighters, and they owed both him and Crawford a debt they would spare no pains to settle in full. Some day there would come an hour of accounting.
CHAPTER XXXIII
ON THE DODGE
Up in the hills back of Bear Cañon two men were camping. They breakfasted on slow elk, coffee, and flour-and-water biscuits. When they had finished, they washed their tin dishes with sand in the running brook.
Gunsight Pass Page 18
