by Short, Luke;
“Come in, Sharon, away from that old fool,” she said bluffly.
Sharon was smiling as Ben, grinning sheepishly, helped her down. A monstrous fortune dug from the Tronah field had not changed Maizie Comber from the rough and good-natured wife of a rough and good-natured freighter. She was as plain as in the days when she used to water her husband’s freight teams at the stage stop west of Placerville.
Following Maizie, Sharon walked through the foyer and into the wide hall that ran almost the length of the house. Inside was a kind of opulence that was breathtaking. Through the great double doors to the right the oak parquetry floors stretched through three big rooms, the first a salon, and was brought up against the far wall of the third room where a great fireplace, flanked by tall fluted pillars of Carrara marble, rose almost ceiling high. This room was the library, where ordered rows of books, some of them collectors’ items, filled three big walls. They were dusted weekly and never opened, for neither Abe nor Maizie Comber liked reading. The big salon held a great bronze piano with mother-of-pearl keys. On the far wall was a Romney portrait, untastefully flanked by two huge tapestries, one depicting the story of the prodigal son, the other the siege of Troy. Frail gilded chairs were grouped about the wall. A vast mirror, edges a gilded writhing of rosebuds, covered the wall opposite the piano. The windows, of French plate glass, were hung with Venetian lace and blinds. Overhead twin crystal chandeliers glittered, while yards of oriental rugs underfoot almost subdued their elegance.
The other rooms were like these, rich, expensive—and tasteless. Maizie padded down the corridor, oblivious to it all, and opened a door, which let onto a small corner room. Sharon caught sight of a woman just rising out of a chair in front of a table holding a silver tea service.
“Beulah, pick up them tea traps and clear out,” Maizie said. “Bring some more.” The servant rose and started to clear the table, and Sharon glanced obliquely at Maizie. But Maizie was unashamed of the fact that she had been discovered taking tea with her servant, and Sharon loved her for it. This room was as simple as Maizie’s simple tastes could make it. The chairs were old, comfortable, and the mahogany secretaire in the corner was scuffed and unpolished. The rug was plain and worn, and the only pictures in the room were photographs of the old Petersburg mine where Abe Comber had made his money. Moreover, the room had the air of being lived in, held the smell of food, of perfume, of tobacco and of dust.
“Sit down, honey,” Maizie said, waving Sharon to a chair.
“Ben said Abe got back last night,” Sharon observed.
“Drunk,” Maizie said laconically. “Somebody sold the old fool a lumber business out on the coast, too.”
“Dad will be sorry he missed him.”
Maizie sniffed. “He will not. Nobody’s sorry when they miss Abe Comber drunk.”
“Maizie, you know that isn’t true,” Sharon protested. “He drinks too much, but then all our men do.”
“It’s not the drinkin’, it’s the wakin’ up,” Maizie growled. “He’s too old to carry on like that, Sharon. A body can’t live with him. This mornin’ he faunched around like a crazy man until I drove him out of the house.”
Sharon laughed in spite of herself, but Maizie ignored her.
“That’s what I called you over about.”
“What?”
“Sharon, I’ve got to send my orders for next week’s party off on tonight’s stage. I talked it over with Abe at breakfast. Everything went along fine until I asked him how much champagne to get. Then he was mad.” Maizie got up, threw out her chest and took long strides across the floor, talking in a deep, gruff voice that mimicked her husband’s. “‘Woman, champagne is a damn swill made for Frenchmen. No self-respectin’ American would drink it, and I won’t have it served in this house. The only liquor I serve here is whisky, good American whisky, rye preferred. If it’s good enough for me to drink, it’s good enough for my guests.’”
Maizie paused and glared at Sharon, her kind old eyes angry, and then she suddenly smiled. Sharon laughed outright.
“Whisky for women,” Maizie observed grimly. “A foreign opera star as the guest of honor, and I’m to serve her a hooker of rye whisky.” She crossed the room and sat down and called, “Beulah!”
There was a rustling behind the door, and the knob turned and the servant entered, placing a tray of tea things on the table.
Maizie poured two cups of tea, gave one to Sharon, poured her own into the saucer, took it up in both hands and blew on it.
“What do you want me to do, Aunt Maizie?” Sharon asked.
“What do you like in this house?” Maizie countered.
Sharon frowned. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, what gadgets in this house do you like? Any rugs? Any of those gimcracks out in front? Do you like any of ’em?”
“Of course. Why?”
“Then I’ll sell any of ’em to you. In return, I want two thousand dollars.” She murmured in to her saucer, “I’ll show that old fool!”
“Is it money you want, Aunt Maizie?”
Maizie nodded. “We fought. I told him I’d order champagne, and he said I wouldn’t. He said he wouldn’t give me any money, and that he was ordering the rye this morning.”
Sharon set down her cup of tea and laughed until tears were in her eyes. Towards the end Maizie laughed too, but her grim old fighter’s face had not surrendered one jot of conviction.
“I’ll lend you the money, Aunt Maizie, but there’s no use of selling any of your belongings.” She wiped her eyes with her handkerchief. “Besides, Abe will have forgotten it in two days.”
“Of course he will, but it’ll be too late to get the champagne here. Then he’ll be mad because we haven’t anything to drink except that hogwash that he’ll be able to pick up at the saloons. I know him.”
“Can I have Ben for a couple of hours?” Sharon asked.
Maizie again yelled, “Beulah!” and when the servant appeared, said, “Tell Ben to come here.”
Sharon borrowed pen and paper and wrote a note: “Will you please give bearer two thousand dollars immediately. Sharon Bonal.”
When Ben appeared she gave it to him and said, “Do you know Phil Seay?”
Ben’s wary face broke into a smile. He said warmly, “Hell yes. Who don’t?”
“Ben!” Maizie said sharply.
“Yes, Miz Bonal,” Ben said humbly.
“Will you take this to him over at the tunnel, Ben? Wait until he gives you a package and bring it back to me here.”
“And you’ll ride a saddle horse,” Maizie put in.
Ben took the note and went out. Two hours later he was back at the Comber mansion and was shown into the dining room, where Maizie and Sharon were eating from solid silver service.
He gave Sharon the note, and she opened it, frowning a little as she noticed that the note was the only thing Ben carried.
The note said: “I will not. Phil Seay.”
Chapter Three
Ben had been gone an hour. Phil Seay shoved his plate away from him and reached for his pipe. Suddenly the heat of this tiny mess hall was too much for him, and he rose, stepped over the bench and went outside to lean against the doorjamb. The thin cotton shirt he wore was even too much for this heat, and the high boots he was wearing were hot and uncomfortable.
The rocks still held the heat of the day, but a faint breeze stirred off the slope hard to the east. Dusk was just lowering, blurring the hard shape of the mountains into a more kindly form. From his position in the door, he could hear the hammering clatter of pots and pans in the cookshack just off the small mess room, and as a counter point to this din, there was the roar of the big mess hall on the other side where the hundred workmen were eating now.
He raised his gaze up the slope a little. There, already lighted by a dozen kerosene flares, was the entrance to the tunnel, and he could see into its depths a way until the angle shut off sight. As he watched, four mules emerged from the tunnel, dragging a string of
loaded ore cars behind them. Their pace quickened as they came down the slope and took the slight run up the dump heap where the dump crew blocked the wheels of the cars and dumped them. The lanterns hung on the collars of the mules winked dimly in the dusk. As the cars passed the tunnel mouth, a team of mules dragging a string of empties had cut in from the spur track and disappeared plodding into the tunnel mouth. The night was silent then, except for the steady hammering thud of the compressor pumping air into the receiving tank for the drills of the tunnel head. Down by the dry stream bed in a huge corral, a fight started among the mules and then stopped, and Seay had a swift picture of the beasts eating after the day’s work, impatient with the heat and the work.
It lay spread before him, all the machinery of this complicated mechanism, and it was his to drive. Over across from the mess hall, he knew the exhausted men would be dragging to the bunkhouse to tumble in their beds, worn out from working at the tunnel heading in one hundred degrees of heat. Somehow, this camp had a sodden air of stubbornness, but only that. The fight, the drive, was lacking. He knew the feeling well; it was a feeling bred by hopelessness, when men work only for wages and not for a goal. Already, in the minds of these workmen, the tunnel was abandoned. It was only a matter of time until they would be laid off. This was the thing he had to fight. All this day he had watched these men as he pried silently into every corner of this sprawling outfit. He had asked questions whose answers he did not comment upon, and each man had eyed him, not with hostility exactly, but taking his measure. A new man Bonal brought out to break, he could almost hear them say.
Beyond him, he heard a man rise and leave the table, and the sound of footsteps paused behind him. He looked around. It was Reed Tober, the assistant superintendent.
“We’ll pull this shift off at midnight,” Seay said.
There was no answer, and it irritated him. Tober, he knew, was not yet through sizing him up, and although he admitted to himself that in Tober’s place he would have kept his silence until he knew his man, still this passive and noncommittal submissiveness angered him.
“You hear?” he asked almost sharply.
“Why?”
Seay glanced up at the man. Framed in the doorway, the light behind him, Tober might have been stamped out of leather. His face was burned blacker than his dark hair, so that the whites of his eyes gave him a perpetually staring look. Slight of build, not so tall as Seay, he had that leaned-down, long-muscled grace of a race horse. His face was a Texas face, with thin, tight muscles stretched under the skin of it. It was bony without being cadaverous, intent without being fanatic, and held that quick, febrile intelligence seen sometimes in a good bird dog. To disguise the possibilities of that face, Tober moved with a lazy indolence that held the explosive threat of a coiled spring. To a man not acute of perception, Reed Tober was as unreadable as the back of a playing card. Right now, he was studying Seay with calculating, questioning intensity, and Seay knew that he was going to break this man’s reticence tonight. For Reed Tober, assistant to a round half-dozen harried and bedeviled superintendents, had outlasted them all. He would outlast Seay, or so his tone implied.
“I’m laying a double track down before the morning shift,” Seay said. “There’s room in the tunnel, isn’t there?”
“Not much to spare.”
“Equipment? Track?”
Tober turned and said quietly, “Kelly.” A stocky man with a longhorn mustache and the brawny arms of a mine worker came to Tober’s side.
“Pull this crew off the head at midnight. Rip up that spur track and measure it, and measure the dump track, too. Check the track in the warehouse. If you’re short, roust out a crew of teamsters and go freight some rails from the Golgotha. If the watchman won’t give it to you, go round to Miss Vannie Shore’s place and tell her you’re from Bonal. I want enough to make a double track that will clear the tunnel mouth by a hundred feet. I want it in by six—and working.”
Kelly stepped out past Seay and was gone into the night.
Seay said to Tober, “Why wasn’t that done before?”
“Money,” was Tober’s laconic answer.
“About this upcast,” Seay went on coldly. “You’ve got two from the slope down to the tunnel already, but it’s not enough ventilation. You’re past due putting one in now. Those men are working in close to a hundred degrees of heat. Where’s your next upcast?”
“I’ll put a crew on it tomorrow.”
“Why isn’t it in there now?”
“Money,” was Tober’s answer again.
Seay removed the pipe from his mouth with an impatient gesture. “Money, hell. You’re working six shifts of four hours each in the tunnel head now. Put an upcast in there and you could work three eight-hour ones. Isn’t it cheaper?”
“Labor’s cheap. Drills and powder and rigging cost money—or so Barnes thought.”
“Barnes is gone. I’m boss here now. Put the upcast in. Order a couple of Root blowers from the coast tomorrow.”
Tober only nodded. It went on like this. With a brutal disregard for the other man’s feelings, Seay ticked off the changes, never failing to ask why they hadn’t been done before. He found that Tober had planned most of them, knew how to make them, knew their costs; and the reason they hadn’t been done was always the same: money. Cruickshank, the engineer, Peters, freighting super, and Hardiston, the gray little bookkeeper, all left the mess hall, walking between Seay and Tober, and not once did Seay stop. He could feel the edge mounting in Tober’s voice, could feel the cold rage of the man, and it pleased him.
Finished, he was silent. His pipe had died. He struck a match, lit up, then said pleasantly, “All right. I’ve told you what’s got to be done. Now tell me how much money I have to do it with.”
“None,” Tober said quietly, then amended this “or close to none.”
“Let’s see the books.”
Together, they skirted the mess hall and came out into the rough street on which the half-dozen buildings fronted. Tober tramped silently past the bunkhouse and stopped at a rough slab shack at its end. He unlocked the door, lighted a lamp, and Seay looked around him. In one corner was a high desk littered with draftsmen’s tools, in the other the high desk of the bookkeeper. Two deal chairs were against the wall. Tober opened the door in the far wall and, with lamp in hand, entered. This room was almost as spare as the first. It had a low desk against the wall, and a wreck of a swivel chair was pulled against it. A squat square safe huddled against the far wall. There were two other chairs in the room, a calendar and a run-down clock.
Putting the lamp on the desk, Tober knelt before the safe and opened it. He drew out a ledger, which he laid on the desk, looking evenly at Seay as he did so. There was good-humored malice in his eyes.
Seay swung a leg onto the desk. “Sit down, Tober.”
Tober pulled out the swivel chair and sat down. Seay ran a musing hand over the ledger, his gray eyes speculative.
“I’ve had this job less than twenty-four hours, Tober. I’ve been pretty rough tonight, haven’t I?”
Tober only nodded.
“I’ve been in this town less than two weeks. I’ve picked up gossip, a lot of it bad, about Bonal. I talked to him last night for three hours. I didn’t find out much.” He looked up at Tober. “How does Bonal stand now?”
“He’s strapped.”
“I know that. But what’s he fighting besides lack of money? Who are his enemies, and how do they fight?” He paused. “I know what’s got to be done here. I want to know what’s got to be done away from here.”
Tober relaxed a little. He cuffed his Stetson off his forehead and reached for a thin cigar in his shirt pocket and lighted it, then exhaled slowly.
“Know how this tunnel started?”
“No.”
Tober told him how Bonal had conceived the idea, and how he had put it before all the mine owners. Bonal’s scheme was to start his tunnel on the other side of the Pintwaters, dig straight into them, and touch th
e mine shafts when they had reached a depth of some two thousand feet. He was to drain these shafts of the water that was flooding them, and in turn, would collect two dollars for every ton of ore that the mines raised from ground drained by his tunnel.
“But he needed cash to swing it,” Tober went on. “So he went around to all the mines and got them to subscribe to part of the cost of the tunnel.”
“Then he’s already spent their money?”
“He never got any. They signed up to subscribe, and then broke their contracts.” He studied his cigar thoughtfully. “You can buy any jury in this district, you know. The court claimed the contracts weren’t legal.”
Seay was curious now, watching Tober’s face. He knew all this was preliminary to answering his first question, as to who was fighting Bonal. He said then, “But the tunnel is sense. Couldn’t these mine owners see that?”
“Ever hear of Janeece?” Tober countered.
Seay nodded. “He owns a couple of reduction mills here.”
“He owns them all,” Tober corrected him. “He’s the man that killed the tunnel.”
Seay scowled. “How did he?”
“Laughed it to death,” Tober said curtly. “Janeece understood one thing about this tunnel, I reckon—that when it went through his business was finished. These mines, instead of hoistin’ their ore a thousand or so feet and then freighting it five miles to his reduction mills, would shoot it through Bonal’s tunnel and down to the reduction mill Bonal aims to build yonder on the river bank. Janeece saw if the tunnel went through he was done for, and he tried to kill it.”
“But how?”
“Janeece’s mills are backed by the Pacific-coast banks—to begin with. Of course, they wouldn’t loan Bonal any money. Then Janeece, to boot, bought into several mines in the Tronah field and started the rumor the tunnel couldn’t be put through. He got engineers to swear to it. Herkenhoff—he’s the manager of the Pacific Shares mine—is an agent of Janeece’s. He broke his contract with Bonal. The rest did the same. And Bonal didn’t get a cent from them.” Tober shook his head slowly and dropped his cigar on the floor. “Bonal’s a fighter, but even a fighter’s got to eat.”
