The Cowpuncher (15 page)

Suddenly it was as if a mighty hand had gripped his throat, shutting off his breath. There was a taste of sulphur in his mouth, a reddish, bubbling mist before his eyes. Dimly he heard somebody coughing and gasping.

“On!” he croaked, giving a faltering man a shove. “On—higher ground.”

Lungs bursting, brain swimming with agony, he stumbled forward. Sue suddenly fell beside him. Huck gripped her against his broad breast with one arm and with the other seized the halfbreed’s collar. On he staggered, reeling with his double burden. He dared not risk a breath, knowing that if he filled his lungs with the deadly choke damp, he would fall and never rise. On and on, lurching drunkenly, clamping one unconscious form to his breast, hauling another over the rough floor by a spasmodic effort of the will. His swelling lungs were crushing his panging heart, stifling
its beat. There was a terrific pounding at his temples, a mighty roaring in his brain. Dimly he heard old Lank’s voice shouting. He opened his mouth, drew in a great breath of the lifegiving air and slumped forward on his face.

Huck was out only a few minutes. When he recovered consciousness, two men were carrying him and Sue, whose form was still clamped in the iron grip of one corded arm.

“We couldn’t pry you loose from her,” Lank said as Huck was set upon his feet. “An’ if that saddle colored hellion pulls through, which I don’t figger he will, he shore will owe being above ground to you! You drug him ‘long outa that damn choke damp after he went down.”

“Never mind him,” growled Huck. “How is Sue?” He kneeled down beside her.

Sue, lying on her back and breathing heavily, was showing signs of coming to. In a moment she had opened her eyes. Seeing Huck’s anxious face fastened on her, she smiled up at him. It was a wan smile.

“How does it feel?” he demanded.

“Fine,” she said, and started to get to her feet.

Huck helped her up.

“Hey!” exclaimed one of the foremen, “there’s lights up ahaid!”

A sudden shouting arose. The party hastened forward, calling questions.

They found seven men crouched beside the
wall built across the gallery. None was seriously injured.

From an old miner, bruised and burned, Huck got his first definite explanation of the cause of the tragedy.

“Eeet was an open blast,” declared the oldtimer. “I hear the crackle of eet, see the flash. I know what come and throw me down on fáce in side gallery. The blow she mighty bad.”

The others nodded, a hopeless expression in their eyes.

Stretching his arms above his head and cocking an eye at the deeping pink of his lamp gauze, old Lank expressed the general opinion.

“Well, reckon we’d might as well light up our pipes and have a comf’table smoke,” he said. “Purty soon that’ll set off a big blow and finish things up quick. That’s better’n hangin’ on till we starve or go
loco.
”

The others nodded gloomy assent.

But Huck Brannon lashed out at them with a voice like steel grinding on winter ice.

“I didn’t figure on hiring quitters when I got this outfit together,” he said, “and I don’t figure on having any with me now. Get busy with those bars and picks and rip this wall down. Move!”

They moved. Accustomed to obeying his orders without question, foremen and miners went to work. Even old Lank grunted ponderously over a crowbar and loosened two stones to anybody else’s one.

Soon there was an opening in the wall. Through
this opening the eighteen men filed. Sue, then Huck last with the injured halfbreed in his arms.

“Now what?” asked Lank, pausing inside the grim chamber of the dead.

Huck gestured to the end wall. “Remember how the water oozes through there?” he asked Lank

The miner nodded.

“Which means there’s one big lot of water back of that wall,” Huck went on. “Which means there’s a big cave of some kind there. It also means that somewhere or other there’s an opening to the outside. Water doesn’t just grow in the ground. Even if there isn’t, it’s a safe bet that there’s plenty of water there to flood the Lost Padre. Well, all we got to do is dig and blow the wall down and let that water into the mine. It’s liable to be a hefty job—that wall must be pretty thick to hold back the weight of water against it—but we can do it.”

Silence followed this announcement, but it was the silence of reborn hope.

“But s’pose the mine fills plumb up back to here?” asked one of the foremen. “Then we’ll all drown.”

“It won’t,” Huck reassured him. “The force of the water will burst a way through that fall in the tunnel and it’ll drain out before it backs up this far. Anyhow, that’s a chance we got to take. All right, let’s get to work on that wall.”

They got to work, and soon the coal was coming down in showers. They worked in shifts, the periods of labor growing shorter and shorter as the hours passed and the men succumbed to the combined onslaughts of fatigue, hunger and anxiety.

Huck Brannon, grim, haggard, tireless, was everywhere at once, urging, encouraging. He was taking a moment of badly needed rest, Sue sitting beside him, when one of the men approached him.

“Estaban, he would speak with you,
Capitan,
” said the man. “I think,” he added, “that soon he die.”

Huck arose and walked to where the halfbreed lay on a bed of coats. The tortured black eyes, already glazing, flickered to meet his.

“I tell before die,” the halfbreed gasped. “I made gas blow. I set open blast. It go off ‘fore ready—block down roof and ketch me, too.”

“I figured as much,” Huck told him quietly. “Why in hell did you do such a thing, Estaban?”

“I not think to kill,” Estaban replied. “I think mine empty before blow. I do but to wreck mine. The Senor Coleman so order.”

“Coleman, eh? So he
has
been back of all this hell raising!”

“
Si, Capitan.
He hate you, and he want mine. He know if mine wrecked by explosion and set on fire and have to be flooded, you no have money to open up again. Then he buy at own price,
si?
”

Huck nodded. “So you slipped into the mine with the other hands, placed your rotten blast and set her off? Why are you telling me this?”

The dark eyes fixed on Brannon’s face. “You man! You risk life to save Estaban! Coleman know Estaban escape from pen’tentiary—do life. Jeff Eades know too. Have to do what tell. No ‘fraid now no more. Damn Coleman! Damn Eades!”

With the curse on his lips, he died.

“Huck?” Lank Mason yelled at that moment, “the drill’s hit water! Hadn’t we better set the charges now?”

They had been driving a drill four feet ahead of the pickmen, for if the wall should be too greatly weakened and the water suddenly burst through, every one of them would be drowned before they could escape the rushing flood. Suddenly the drill shot from the hands of the man who held it. A jet of water almost as hard as steel hissed from the face of the wall. With great difficulty a plug was driven into the hole. Then the workers began driving holes into the wall and loading them with charges of blasting powder.

Finally all was ready, the last hole charged, the fuse in place. The men stepped back. Old Lank Mason’s voice broke grimly on the silence.

“All right, boys,” said Lank, “you done a good job, but all yore work’s been for nothin’.”

He pointed to the gauze of his lamp. It was almost redhot. Silently, insidiously, the deadly fire damp had seeped from the coal and filled the chamber.

“Strike a match to light the fuse and we all go to kingdom come a hell-tootin’!” said Lank. “Goin’ in a minute, anyhow, if we don’t put out the lamps. Looks like I won’t get that last smoke after all.”

“Put out the lamps,” Huck Brannon said quietly.

In another moment, the last light was extinguished and the living were left with only the long rows of silent dead to keep them company in the black dark.

Sue Doyle’s quiet voice broke the silence.

“I have an idea,” she said. “Take your coats, soak them in the water and beat the air with them from here back to the opening you made in the stone wall. Half of you stay eight or ten paces behind the rest.

“When the front half reaches the wall, they hustle back here fast as they can and beat forward again. That way you’ll drive the gas away from the wall here where we’ve got the blast set.”

“By Gawd, Sue, that’s a chance!” exclaimed Huck. “I’ve heard tell of that working. You can beat the damn gas back with wet bags or coats; but this roof is mighty high. I shore wish it was a low tunnel.”

Stumbling in the dark the men obeyed Huck’s orders, flailing away with their water-soaked coats until they reached the far wall, then staggering back to repeat the process.

Finally Huck called a halt.

“All right, that’ll do if it can be done at all,” he said. “Now hustle out, all of you, and up that steep gallery to the right. Lie down and cover your heads with the wet coats.”

“What you gonna do?” asked Lank Mason.

“I’m gonna light the fuse,” Huck told him quietly.

“And if the gas lets go, you’ll be blowed to hell!” exclaimed the old miner amid a rising storm of protest. “I’m the one what’ll light that fuse.”

“No, me, I am the one!” shouted young Pedro angrily.

“Shut up!” Huck told them. “I’m running things yet a while. Do as you’re told and don’t waste time. That damn gas’ll be drifting back this way pronto.”

“Get goin’, Sue,” he ordered.

“Huck,” she said, “I don’t want to leave you.”

“Go ahead, honey,” he said. “I’ll be right with you—soon as I set the fuse.”

“If there’s any gas left,” she cried, “you’ll be—” It wasn’t necessary for her to finish.

“Now don’t start frettin’,” Huck told her softly. “Didn’t we get all the gas out of here? Sure we did. Now get moving. Everyone.”

Grumbling and muttering, they obeyed him, shuffling off through the dark. Huck waited until the last footstep had died away up the gallery. He gave them another minute to get snugly settled, and stooped over the fuse.

“Well, if she blows, the explosion will light the fuse and the boys’ll have their chance anyway,” he told himself as he scratched the match.

The little flame burned clearly, and there was no answering flash and roar. Huck touched it to the fuse-end, saw the sputter of sparks and the crawling smoulder. He straightened up, turned and raced to the gallery.

Panting for breath he flung himself down beside Sue, who gasped a muffled welcome from beneath the set coats. Her hand slopped dripping fabric over his head and shoulders and he lay with every muscle tense, awaiting the explosion.

But somehow it didn’t come.

“What’s wrong with it?” bellowed Lank Mason.

“Nothing,” answered Huck. “It’s just a slowburning fuse.” He felt Sue move beside him. “What is it, Sue?”

“Huck,” she said, “before it happens—tell me—why did you leave the Bar X?

With the sound of the sputtering fuse in his ears, Huck told Sue why he left—why he felt he had to leave.

“I had to leave because I loved you, Sue honey,” he said. “And for the same reason I couldn’t tell you how much I want to buy the spread over in the Apishapa River Valley.”

“I know, Huck dear,” said Sue. “I know…Listen!”

There was a crackling crash, strangely prolonged, a thudding rattle, then a mighty, roaring thunder. Huck felt himself and Sue lifted from the ground and slammed down again. There was an instant of blistering heat and a blaze of light that seared even through the wet covering that shielded his closed eyes. Then intense blackness which rocked and quivered to that rolling, unceasing thunder.

Huck sat up, flinging the wet coat aside, beating at incipient smoulders. His companions were moving beside him, but he could hear nothing because of that awful rushing thunder.

He knew what it was, however—the water released from the subterranean reservoir and rushing into the mine. Powder explosion and gas explosion had brought down the retaining wall, as he had predicted.

For minutes the thundering roar continued unabated; then it gradually lessened, died to a hissing rush, an intermittent gurgle. Huck fumbled a match and lit his safety lamp. There was no further danger of gas explosions with that current of fresh air which was fanning his face and pouring into the mine.

The flickering flame showed the haggard, blackened faces of Sue and his companions, but now those faces were alight with newborn hope.

“I believe you done pulled us through, feller,” said old Lank, voicing everybody’s opinion.

The masonry wall was completely demolished and the fallen blocks had been hurled aside, leaving a clear passage into the cave. Here the destruction was even greater.

Over to one side was a huge falling of slate from the roof, and behind and beneath the jumbled mass, sealed in an eternal tomb, were the remains of the mummified Indians and the broken body of Estaban Garcia, who had paid for his crimes with his life.

The end wall of the cavern was split from floor to ceiling—a gaping fissure through which trickled dark water and a strong current of air.

The air was pure and sweet. “And that,” Huck
pointed out, “means there’s an opening somewhere. C’mon, Sue, fellers, let’s find it.”

He led the way, his arm supporting Sue, and his companions, weak from hunger, exhausted by their four-day battle in the dark, stumbled in his wake, sloshing through pools of water, climbing painfully over heaps of fallen rock.

Despite the quickened promise of life, Huck was gloomy and depressed. He knew, as Lank Mason knew, that their venture into coal mining was a failure. It would take many weeks and thousands of dollars to pump out and recommission the mine. Thousands of dollars which they did not have.

“Oh, well,” he told himself at length, “I always did have a hankering for cow herding over and above anything else, but it’s hard on the other boys.”

The voice of Lank Mason, filled with excitement, snapped him out of his morose thoughts.

“Huck,” Lank was saying, “this ain’t no cave!”

“No cave?” Brannon replied absently. “Then what—”

“It’s a diggin’s!” Lank interrupted excitedly, “a diggin’s as shore as you’re a foot high. This is a old mine—a silver mine!”

His interest aroused, Huck examined the walls of the gallery along which they trudged. Lank was right. The marks of pick and drill were plain. And from time to time they passed dark openings which marked side galleries.

“Looks like she might not be worked out complete,” the cowboy muttered. “This is something to think about.”

They staggered on. They had been walking for nearly an hour over the muddy, water-rutted floor when Huck saw a faint gleam far ahead. Hurrying forward he saw that it came from a shaft of sunlight pouring through an opening in the gallery roof.

“We’re out, Sue, fellers!” he shouted exultantly, breaking into a shambling run.

Suddenly he halted, staring, eyes narrowing with wonder.

The roof of the gallery was pierced by a slanting opening strongly paved and walled with cut stone. Its upper end was brilliant with sunshine which poured down to illuminate the gallery for some distance.

But what riveted Huck’s attention was not the opening and its promise of speedy escape from the gloomy underground passages. To one side, streaked and corroded by the effects of many years immersion in water, its ponderous lock only a misshapen lump of rust, was a massive iron door with sill, jambs and lintel of cut stone.

For a long moment Huck Brannon stood staring at the unexpected portal here at the mouth of the ancient mine, his wondering companions thronging behind him. And as he stared, a possible solution of this mystery caused his blood to run wildly. Turning, he seized a sledge that had been brought along against possible emergency. In another instant the heavy hammer, wielded with all the strength of his sinewy arms, fell upon the lock. Again he struck, and again. The door creaked and groaned, flakes of damp rust showered down.

Suddenly the lock shattered, the bolt fell free from its rusted fastening. With a final crashing blow, Huck sent the door swinging open on rusty hinges that screeched shrill complaint.

Stepping forward he held his lamp high and peered into the dripping chamber which, walled and ceiled with cut stone, was of no great extent.

Old Lank, crowding close behind the cowboy, gave vent to a low whistle.

Stacked from floor to ceiling in orderly rows, were ponderous ingots, black and discolored. Huck hauled one free from its resting place of years and scratched industriously at the dull surface with the point of his knife. A clear, frosty gleam rewarded him. He held the bar for the others to see.

Old Lank whistled again, staring at the stacked ingots.

“The
five thousand bars of silver!”
he muttered. He craned his neck, swept his lamp forward. “Only there’s a helluva sight more than five thousand or I miss my guess,” he added. “Old Don Fernando de Castro shore weren’t no piker!”

“Yes,” Huck said, “this is the real Lost Padre Mine, not the one we have been working for coal.”

“But how the hell,” wondered Lank, “the water—the—”

“Don’t you see?” Huck broke in. “That hole up there ends in the old channel they cut to let the crick run over the end wall of the canyon. The crick water filled the mine and hid it when they turned it into the channel, just as the falls hid the mouth of the other mine. Old de Castro was plumb smart. He figured if anybody did happen to spot the
channel and what it meant, they’d turn the water back into the original bed and uncover the mouth of the mine down in the canyon.

“They’d think right off that they’d found
La Mina del Padre,
and when they discovered the diggings down there were worked out, they’d give up in disgust and go away. If they happened to come up this way nosing around after the water’d run out, all they’d see here would be another pool of water left when the channel emptied. Nobody’d ever suspect it as the mouth of another mine. He slipped a little in not knowing that the end wall of the gallery down below was coal and the water would, in time, seep through, and if allowed to run long enough would drain this mine. Then, of course, anyhow, he intended on coming back this way for his silver after he’d got reinforcements from Spain or Mexico.

“And,” he added with a grin, “when those hellions come up here and flooded the channel again last Spring, they walked around over top of the Lost Padre silver and never knew it. And if they hadn’t turned the water into the channel and filled up the mine again after it’d been draining for months, the chances are there wouldn’t have been enough water in it to flood our mine and put out the fire. Gents, that’s what you call justice!”

Turning, he held up the ponderous ingot in both hands.

“Take a look at this sample,” he chuckled. “We all had a helluva time findin’ it, and everybody’s due for a cut. There’ll be plenty here to pay for putting our mine back in shape, and enough left
over to give every man a nice poke of
dinero.
Pedro, you can go back to
Mejico
and marry every
senorita
you’re engaged to!”

“Me, I stay here in Colorado and get betrothed to some more,” said Pedro, after the cheering had subsided.

“I reckon Sue honey,” the gray-eyed puncher chuckled, “that that isn’t such a bad idea. How about it?”

“Sounds like a grand idea to me, dear,” replied Sue, her amber eyes luminous, her red lips parted.

“Then it’s settled,” Huck decided.

They scrambled through the opening, which, with grass and other growth fringing the edges, looked at a casual glance just like another shallow hole in the old channel bed, and headed for the canyon. It was a hard trek for starving, exhausted men, and harder for a girl, but they made it, and as the setting sun was pouring a flood of reddish light into the gorge, they burst from the growth below the site of their camp.

Men lounging about the mine mouth, which showed evidence of the mighty flood of water which had poured from it, set up a tumultuous yelling at sight of them. Prodigious back slapping and congratulations, interspersed with a yammer of incredulous questions, followed; and the exhausted survivors were hurried into cabins for food and medical attention and rest.

As Mrs. Donovan took Sue in tow, Huck cried after her.

“Take good care of her, Mrs. Donovan, and see that she gets plenty of food and rest.”

“Don’t you be tellin’ me what to do, me buckaroo,” retorted Mrs. Donovan. “I been doin’ this long before you was born.”

“Where’s Tom Gaylord, I’d thought he’d be here?” Huck asked of Ah Sing as the old cook plied him with steaming coffee and food, wiping his bruised and blackened face between bites and chattering away in a weird mixture of English, Spanish and Chinese.

Ah Sing’s face grew long.

“Mist’ Gaylold think you all dead,” he replied. “He feel mighty bad—want go ‘way. Man called Mist’ Coleman send fo’ him—say want to buy mine. Mist’ Gaylold go on bullgine mebbe come hour ago fo’ town. Sell mine come t’mollow.”