The Golden Woman

by Cullum, Ridgwell

  To want the realities with their simple, unrestrained passions, and the means of obtaining them at their disposal, was to demand them. To demand them was to have them. They wanted a saloon. They wanted an organized means of gambling, they wanted a town, with all its means of satisfying appetites that had all too long hungered for what they regarded as the necessary pleasures of life. They wanted a means of spending the accumulations gleaned from the ample purse of mother Nature. And, in a moment, they set about the work of possessing these things.

  As is always the case the means was not far to seek. It needed but one mind, keener in self-interest than the rest, and that mind was to hand. Beasley Melford, at no time a man who cared for the physical hardships of the life of these people, saw his opportunity and snatched it. He saw in it a far greater gold-mine than his own claim could ever yield him, and he promptly laid his plans.

  He set to work without any noise, any fuss. He was too foxy to shout until his purpose was beyond all possibility of failure. He simply disappeared from the camp for a week. His absence was noted, but no one cared. They were too full of their own affairs. The only people who thought on the matter were the Padre and Buck. Nor did they speak of it until he had been missing four days. Then it was, one evening as they were returning from their traps, the Padre gave some inkling of what had been busy in his thoughts all day.

  “It’s queer about Beasley,” he said, pausing to look back over a great valley out of which they had just climbed, and beyond which the westering sun was shining upon the distant snow-fields.

  Buck turned sharply at the sound of his companion’s voice. They were not given to talking much out on these hills.

  “He’s been away nigh four days,” he said, and took the opportunity of shifting his burden of six freshly-taken fox pelts and lighting his pipe.

  The Padre nodded.

  “I think he’ll be back soon,” he said. Then he added slowly: “It seems a pity.”

  “His coming back?” Buck eyed his companion quickly.

  “Yes.”

  “Wher’ d’you reckon he’s gone?”

  The elder man raised a pair of astonished brows.

  “Why, to Leeson Butte,” he said decidedly. Then he went on quietly, but with neither doubt nor hesitation: “There’s a real big change coming here—when Beasley gets back. These men want drink, they are getting restless for high play. They are hankering for—for the flesh-pots they think their gold entitles them to. Beasley will give them all those things when he comes back. It’s a pity.”

  Buck thought for some moments before he answered. He was viewing the prospect from the standpoint of his years.

  “They must sure have had ’em anyway,” he said at last.

  “Ye—es.”

  The Padre understood what was in the other’s mind.

  “You see,” he went on presently, “I wasn’t thinking of that so much. It’s—well, it amounts to this. These poor devils are just working to fill Beasley’s pockets. Beasley’s the man who’ll benefit by this ‘strike.’ In a few months the others will be on the road again, going through all—that they’ve gone through before.”

  “I guess they will,” Buck agreed. His point of view had changed. He was seeing through the older eyes. After that they moved on toward their home lost in the thoughts which their brief talk had inspired.

  In a few days the Padre’s prophecy was fulfilled. Beasley returned from Leeson Butte at the head of a small convoy. He had contrived his negotiations with a wonderful skill and foresight. His whole object had been secrecy, and this had been difficult. To shout the wealth of the camp in Leeson Butte would have been to bring instantly an avalanche of adventurers and speculators to the banks of Yellow Creek. His capital was limited to the small amount he had secretly hoarded while his comrades were starving, and the gold he had taken from his claim. The latter was his chief asset not from its amount, but its nature. Therefore he had been forced to take the leading merchant in the little prairie city into his confidence, and to suggest a partnership. This he had done, and a plausible tongue, and the sight of the wonderful raw gold, had had the effect he desired. The partnership was arranged, the immediate finance was forthcoming, and, for the time at least, Leeson Butte was left in utter ignorance of its neighboring Eldorado.

  Once he had made his deal with Silas McGinnis, Beasley promptly opened his heart in characteristic fashion.

  “They’re all sheep, every one of ’em,” he beamed upon his confederate. “They’ll be so easy fleecin’ it seems hardly worth while. All they need is liquor, and cards, and dice. Yes, an’ a few women hangin’ around. You can leave the rest to themselves. We’ll get the gilt, and to hell with the dough under it. Gee, it’s an elegant proposition!” And he rubbed his hands gleefully. “But ther’ must be no delay. We must get busy right away before folks get wind of the luck. I’ll need marquees an’ things until I can get a reg’lar shanty set up. Have you got a wood spoiler you can trust?”

  McGinnis nodded.

  “Then weight him down with money so we don’t need to trust him too much, and ship him out with the lumber so he can begin right away. We’re goin’ to make an elegant pile.”

  In his final remark lay the key-note of his purpose. But the truth of it would have been infinitely more sure had the pronoun been singular.

  Never was so much popularity extended to Beasley in his life as at the moment of his return to camp. When the gold-seekers beheld his convoy, with the wagons loaded with all those things their hearts and stomachs craved, the majority found themselves in a condition almost ready to fling welcoming arms about his neck. Their wishes had been expressed, their demands made, and now, here they were fulfilled.

  A rush of trade began almost before the storekeeper’s marquee was erected. It began without regard to cost, at least on the purchasers’ parts. The currency was gold, weighed in scales which Beasley had provided, and his exorbitant charges remained quite unheeded by the reckless creatures he had marked down for his victims.

  In twenty-four hours the camp was in high revelry. In forty-eight Beasley’s rough organization was nearing completion. And long before half those hours had passed gold was pouring into the storekeeper’s coffers at a pace he had never even dreamed of.

  But the first rush was far too strenuous to be maintained for long. The strain was too great even for such wild spirits as peopled the camp. It soared to its height with a dazzling rapidity, culminating in a number of quarrels and fights, mixed up with some incipient shooting, after which a slight reaction set in which reduced it to a simmer at a magnificently profitable level for the foxy storekeeper. Still, there remained ample evidence that the Devil was rioting in the camp and would continue to do so just as long as the lure of gold could tempt his victims.

  Then came the inevitable. In a few days it became apparent that the news of the “strike” had percolated abroad. Beasley’s attempt at secrecy had lasted him just sufficiently long to establish himself as the chief trader. Then came the rush from the outside.

  It was almost magical the change that occurred in one day. The place became suddenly alive with strangers from Leeson Butte and Bay Creek, and even farther afield. Legitimate traders came to spy out the land. Loafers came in and sat about waiting for developments. Gamblers, suave, easy, ingratiating, foregathered and started the ball of high stakes rolling. And in their wake came all that class of carrion which is ever seeking something for nothing. But the final brand of lawlessness was set on the camp by the arrival of a number of jaded, painted women, who took up their abode in a disused shack sufficiently adjacent to Beasley’s store to suit their purposes. It was all very painful, all very deplorable. Yet it was the perfectly natural evolution of a successful mining camp—a place where, before the firm hand of Morality can obtain its restraining grip, human nature just runs wild.

  The seedling had grown. Its rank tendrils were everywhere reaching out and choking all the better life about it. Its seeds were scattered broadcast and had ge
rminated as only such seeds can. It only remained for the husbandman to gaze regretful and impotent upon his handiwork. His hand had planted the seedling, and now—already the wilderness was beyond all control.

  Something of this was in the Padre’s mind as he sat in his doorway awaiting Buck’s return for the night. The dusk was growing, and already the shadows within the ancient stockade were black with approaching night. The waiting man had forgotten his pipe, so deeply was he engrossed with his thoughts, and it rested cold in his powerful hand.

  He sat on oblivious of everything but that chain of calm reasoning with which he tried to tell himself that the things happening down there on the banks of the Yellow Creek must be. He told himself that he had always known it; that the very fact of this lawlessness pointed the camp’s prosperity, and showed how certainly the luck had come to stay. Later, order would be established out of the chaos, but for the moment there was nothing to be done but—wait. All this he told himself, but it left him dissatisfied, and his thoughts concentrated upon the one person he blamed for all the mischief. Beasley was the man—and he felt that wherever Beasley might be, trouble would never be far——What was that?

  An unusual sound had caught and held his attention. He rose quickly from his seat and stood peering out into the darkness which he had failed to notice creeping on him. There was no mistaking it. The sound of running feet was quite plain. Why running?

  He turned about and moved over to the arm rack. The next moment he was in the doorway again with his Winchester at his side.

  A few moments later a short, stocky man leapt out of the darkness and halted before him. As the Padre recognized him his finger left the trigger of his gun.

  “For Gawd’s sake don’t shoot, Padre!”

  It was Curly Saunders’ voice, and the other laid his gun aside.

  “What’s amiss?” demanded the Padre, noting the man’s painful gasping for breath.

  For a moment Curly hesitated. Then, finally, between heavy breaths he answered the challenge.

  “I got mad with the Kid—Soapy,” he said. “Guess I shot him up. He ain’t dead an’ ain’t goin’ to die, but Beasley, curse him, set ’em on to lynch me. They’re all mad drunk—guess I was, too, ’fore I started to run—an’ they come hot foot after me. I jest got legs of ’em an’ come along here. It’s—it’s a mighty long ways.”

  The Padre listened without moving a muscle—the story so perfectly fitted in with his thoughts.

  “The Kid isn’t dead? He isn’t going to die?” His voice had neither condemnation nor sympathy in it.

  “No. It’s jest a flesh wound on the outside of his thigh.”

  “What was the trouble?”

  “Why, the durned young skunk wus jest tryin’ to set them—them women payin’ a ‘party’ call on the gal at the farm, an’ they wus drunk enough to do it. It made me mad—an’—an’, wal, we got busy with our tongues, an’ I shot him up fair an’ squar’.”

  “And how about Beasley?”

  “Why, it was him set the Kid to git the women on the racket. When he see how I’d stopped it he got madder than hell, an’ went right out fer lynchin’ me. The boys wus drunk enough to listen to his lousy talk.”

  “Was he drunk?”

  “Not on your life. Beasley’s too sweet on the dollars. But I guess he’s got his knife into that Golden Woman of ours.”

  The Padre had no more questions to ask. He dropped back into the room and lit the oil lamp.

  “Come right in, Curly,” he said kindly. Then he laid his rifle on the table and pointed at it. “The magazine’s loaded plumb up. Guess no man has a right to give up his life without a kick. That’ll help you if they come along—which they won’t. Maybe Buck’ll be along directly. Don’t shoot him down. Anyway he’s got Cæsar with him—so you’ll know. I’m going down to the camp.”

  For a second the two men looked into each other’s eyes. The Padre read the suspicion in Curly’s. He also saw the unhealthy lines in his cheeks and round his mouth. Nor could he help feeling disgusted at the thoughts of the fortune that had come to the camp and brought all these hideous changes in its wake.

  He shook his head.

  “I’m not giving you away,” he said. “Guess I’ll be back in an hour.”

  Curly nodded and moved over to one of the two chairs.

  “Thanks, Padre,” he said as the other passed quickly out of the room.

  * * *

  CHAPTER XVII

  TWO POINTS OF VIEW

  Beasley Melford was in a detestable mood. For one reason his miserable bar was empty of all customers, and, for another, he knew that he was responsible for the fact.

  Had he any sense of humor, the absurdity of the thing must have forced itself upon him and possibly helped to improve his temper. But he had no humor, and so abandoned himself to the venomous temper that was practically the mainspring of his life.

  He cursed his absent customers. He cursed the man, Curly Saunders. He cursed the girl whom the trouble had been about. But more than all he cursed himself for his own folly in permitting a desire to bait Joan Rest to interfere with his business.

  In his restless mood he sought to occupy himself, and, nothing else offering, he cleared his rough counter of glasses, plunged them into a bucket of filthy water, and set them out to drain. Then he turned his attention to his two oil lamps. He snuffed them with his dirty fingers in a vain attempt to improve their miserable light. Then, seating himself upon his counter, he lit a cheap green cigar and prepared to wait.

  “Damn ’em all anyway,” he muttered comprehensively, and abandoned himself to watching the hands of a cheap alarm clock creeping on toward the hour of nine.

  Apparently the soothing influence of his cigar changed the trend of his thoughts, for presently he began to smile in his own unpleasant way. He was reviewing the scene which his venom had inspired, and the possibilities of it—at the moment delayed, but not abandoned—gave him a peculiar sense of gratification.

  He was thinking, too, of Joan Rest and some others. He was thinking of the day of her arrival in the camp, and the scene that had followed Buck’s discovery of her. He could never forgive that scene, or those who took part in it. Buck, more surely than anybody else, he could never forgive. He had always hated Buck and his friend the Padre. They had been in a position to hand out benefits to the starving camp, and patronage was an intolerable insult to a man of his peculiar venom. The thought that he owed those men anything was anathema to him, for he knew in his heart that they despised him.

  Since the day of Joan’s coming he had pondered upon how he could pay Buck something of that which he owed him for the insult that still rankled. He had been called an “outlaw parson,” and the truth of the appellation made the insult only the more maddening. Nothing else could have hurt the man so much as to remind him of the downfall which had reduced him to an “outlaw parson.”

  He had told Buck then that he would not forget. He might have added that he could not forget. So, ever since, he had cast about for any and every means of hurting the man who had injured him, and his curiously mean mind set him groping in the remotest and more subtle directions. Nor had it taken him long to locate the most vulnerable point in Buck’s armor. He had realized something of the possibilities at the first coming of Joan. He had seen then the effect of the beautiful inanimate body upon the man’s susceptibilities. It had been instantaneous. Then had come that scene at the farm, and Buck’s further insult over the gold which he had hated to see pass into the girl’s possession. It was then that the first glimmer of an opening for revenge had shown itself to him.

  The rest was the simple matter of camp gossip. Here he learned, through the ridicule bestowed upon Montana Ike and Pete, who were always trying to outdo each other in their rivalry for the favors of Joan, and who never missed an opportunity of visiting the farm when they knew they would find her there, of Buck’s constant attendance upon Joan. He needed very little of his evil imagination to tell him the rest. With Bu
ck in love with the woman it was a simple enough process to his scheming mind to drive home his revenge upon the man—through her.

  The necessary inspiration had come that night, when the four women vultures, plying their trade of preying upon the men in his bar, had reached a sufficient degree of drunkenness. Then it had occurred to his devilish mind to bribe them into going across to the farm and paying what he was pleased to call a “party” call upon its mistress, and, in their own phraseology, to “raise hell with her.”

  It was a master stroke. Then had come Curly’s interference. The fool had spoilt it all. Nobody but Curly had attempted to interfere. The men had all been too drunk to bother, and the women had jumped at the chance of morally rending a virtuous member of their own sex.

  He laughed silently as he thought of it all. But his laugh only expressed his gratification at the subtlety of his ideas. His failure still annoyed him. Curly had stood champion for this Golden Woman, as they called her. Well, it wasn’t his, Beasley’s, fault if he hadn’t paid for his interference by this time. The men were quite drunk enough to hang him, or shoot him for “doing up” young Kid, who had been a mere tool in the matter. He cordially hoped they had. Anyway, the sport at Joan’s expense was too good to miss, and the night was still young.

  The prospect almost entirely restored his good-humor, and he was still smiling when the door was suddenly pushed open and the Padre’s burly figure appeared on the threshold.

  The saloon-keeper’s smile died at sight of the familiar white hair. Of all the people on Yellow Creek this was the man he least wanted to see at the moment. But he was shrewd enough to avoid any sign of open antagonism. He knew well enough that Moreton Kenyon was neither a fool nor a coward. He knew that to openly measure swords with him was to challenge a man of far superior intellect and strength, and the issue was pretty sure to go against him. Besides, this man they affectionately called the Padre had the entire good-will of the place.