The Popular Magazine/Volume 58/Number 4/The Implacable Friend/Chapter 12
CHAPTER XII.
THE NUDGE.
Between seven and midnight of that night there were several groups in earnest conversation. The news had quickly spread that the big mining company, whose operations had stimulated by far the larger number of the camp followers to their present undertakings, had failed to locate the big pay, that Ticely and Waring had claimed to have uncovered. That Ticely and Waring had, in words, made no such claim was a circumstance unknown to many and of consequence to none. It was “supposed” to be a rich strike—nothing like it since Dexter in the Nome country and Cleary at Fairbanks! And if it was really true—but thunderation! it couldn't be!—that there was nothing in it—that the creek was a fake—
That was the burning question. It was also an explosive one, but the fuse was slow. It would take hours yet, or days. For when weeks have been consumed in the fixation of an idea it cannot be dislodged in a moment. Nor is the process of extraction a painless one, or unaccompanied by alarmingly inflammatory symptoms. Manners, who was well acquainted with many of the Midasites, as they had been dubbed in Nome, strolled from group to group, having little to say to each but closely noting the thought and temper of all.
Among his own immediate associates it had been decided to bring the whole matter to “a show-down;” to put all their own cards on the table, and demand the same thing of Ticely and Waring. Manners had earnestly counseled forbearance; and though he knew that, as a petty justice, he had no sufficient jurisdiction to legally try the issue of a criminal charge, even if the men would have brooked the delays of a formal court proceeding, he had declared his willingness to conduct a hearing the next day which should have something of the character of a regular trial.
Meantime, early in the evening, Ticely had gone in search of Waring whose private prospecting of the bench in the heart of the woods had made him, each evening, a late comer to their cabin. Sometimes, indeed, he had remained out all night. The elder man looked for him in the timber camp of the axmen, and wandered about for some time, calling him. But Bruce was nowhere on the mountainside. Very late the previous night he had walked the length of the bench, which was much farther up the slope than the zone of cutting, and staked it into claims from end to end. This evening, when his fires were set in the bench shafts, he had left Ak Tuk to watch the thawing and had come down to the creek with copies of the location notices in his pocket—all made out, of course, in the name of Ticely and Waring. He headed straight for the recorder's office.
He found the recorder doing up her supper dishes, and anything but communicative. “What's the matter, Joan,” he asked, hurt by her curt replies to his overtures at conversation.
At first evading him, she finally told him what her father had told her of the strange conference that afternoon in the adjoining office. It was now Joan's turn to question Bruce, and his to be curt, or at least reticent—almost taciturn. And pain grew in her heart with the suspicion, which in a less loyal and trusting woman would doubtless have been certainty—that Bruce Waring was saying little because he had little that he could truthfully say in his defense.
Realizing what her thought must be, fearing that his perturbation might move him to some indiscretion of speech, he abruptly handed her the location notices. “Please file these Joan,” he requested. “Don't record them; just stamp them and seal them up.”
“Very well,” she said, a little stiffly. She wondered what it meant.
Bruce took his hat and walked to the door. He turned.
“I know it must seem queer to you, Joan dear, that I don't—want to talk of this. I—can't, that's all. I'm—sorry. I'd do anything but Oh, Lord!” He bolted from the place; and Joan, when she was sure that he had really gone, went to bed and cried herself to sleep.
Stalking to his cabin, Waring also went immediately to bed, for he was dog tired. And he, too, wept—in the way of such a man; a peculiarly manifested phenomenon compounded of sighs, mutterings, cuss words, hair fretting—even the casting of boots into distant and resounding parts of the cabin. It did not even occur to him to alter his predetermined course of conduct.
Ticely, entering some hours later, and finding his junior partner sleeping heavily, did not disturb him. But he caught him in the morning, before Bruce left the cabin, and told him to be sure to come to the commissioner's office early in the afternoon.
“What for, Fred?”
“Investigation,” replied Ticely sleepily. “They've got to bed rock in two of the holes, and—there's hell a-poppin'.” Then, waiting for no comment, he turned on his side and resumed his slumbers.
At one o'clock Bruce came down the hillside, and entering the cabin, found and pocketed his automatic. He looked for Ticely's, but it was gone.
“All right!” he muttered, and went down to the commissioner's building where he stared at whosoever stared at him among the knots of men standing about the place. The mining company members were all there, and Ticely was chaffing them good-humoredly in return for remarks whose distinctly sinister character seemed to go over his head. He sobered appreciably during the hearing!
Manners told the partners that they were charged with obtaining money and goods under false pretenses, a crime which could only be tried in the district court at Nome. His jurisdiction enabled him, however, to sit as a committing magistrate, to determine whether there was probable cause for holding them to answer before that court, but he was plainly disqualified from performing this duty because of his financial interest in the case. The other members of the company, he explained, wanted him to hear it, anyhow—if Ticely and Waring were willing to subject themselves to a formal hearing—and had asked that their statements be reduced to writing.
“I told them—sure,” said Ticely to his partner.
“It suits me,” assented Waring.
The room had filled with scowling men. Joan, quite pale, sat at a small table, with a stenographer's book and pencil, and took down her father's examination of the debonair king of Midas Creek. The story that all of the Midas mining company men, and not a few of the other stampeders, already knew was rehearsed, Ticely answering promptly and, apparently, without evasion. Then Manners. asked him where he had obtained the poke of dust he brought to Nome.
“Up at Shungnak, on the Kobuc,” replied Ticely.
“Didn't you tell Con Redbank here that it was Candle dust?”
“I did. It was none of his business, and he knew perfectly well that any one not wishing his affairs made public would answer him untruthfully. However, the reason I said 'Candle' was because I had an idea that those Shungnak miners, who treated me mighty well when I was through there, did not want to advertise their diggings to the idle and curious in Nome. No such objection could apply to Candle, which is a long-established camp, as I am told.”
There was a slight buzzing stir in the room, a profound dissatisfaction, it seemed, with an explanation which, on its surface, was unassailably logical and natural.
“Did you not, in the presence of Ed Rosslyn, here, who was assistant radio operator at the time, send two telegrams to friends, or alleged friends, in Seattle virtually claiming that you had made a big strike?”
Ticely looked incredulous. “I sent two telegrams, yes. I certainly claimed to have made no big strike, though.”
Manners produced copies of the telegrams, in code and decoded, and handed them to Ticely, who merely remarked that whatever might be true of the imaginations of “some people in Nome,” it could not be denied that they were highly gifted sneaks. Upon which Manners immediately retorted:
“It has been thought you were quite willing to be spied on: you left your code book in your room!”
Again there was a stir, truculently murmurous, which Ticely cut short by the prompt rejoinder: “Which I certainly never would have done had I considered secrecy a vital matter. What did I say in those telegrams? Why not read them?”
Manners did so, very slowly—and realized as he read them that in no express terms had Ticely made claim of a rich strike.
“I expect those fellows up, by the way,” remarked the sender of the telegrams. “And when they come, I think they'll be satisfied that while this creek is no bonanza, as yet, it's a mighty good prospect for men who are willing to work for a living instead of expecting to buy a Klondike for a few hundred dollars!”
The thrust, deep as from a rapier's point, evoked a light laugh from a few, a rasp of hate from more. Still others merely winced and scowled.
“Another thing—probably the most serious,” pursued Judge Manners. “Did you not leave in your room, where it could be seen by any”
“Sneak who crawled in-there” supplied Ticely with casual contempt. He was really appealing to the many against the few.
“Where, I repeat, it could be seen by any person disposed to examine your effects, a little memorandum book purporting to contain a record of pannings made in January?”
Waring, who stood at Ticely's side, his face as nearly expressionless as he could hold it, turned slowly and looked at his partner anxiously, as the elder man replied: “I had such a diary, yes. I think I had been rummaging among my things trying to find something, and doubtless the diary turned up among those things.”
“It ran like this, didn't it?” Manners read from a small sheet of paper. “'January 3d. Bottom gravel, eighty-five cents; coarse, also very fine, and brighter than the creek; bed rock, twenty-two dollars to sixty dollars; scraped pan, one hundred and seventy-five dollars. January 5th: Gravel thinner, three dollars and sixty cents; coarse, fine, and bright average of three pans; bed rock, five pans, average, one dollar and fifteen cents; scraped pan, four hundred and sixty dollars,' and so on?”
Joan, not having to take down this reading, dropped her pencil and turned wide brown eyes upon the writer of the diary. Waring, alert, his lips compressed, lessened, unperceived, the few inches' space between Ticely's elbow and his own.
“Was the diary from which these extracts were copied a fake diary?” asked Manners.
Evenly, with perhaps a shade of reproach, but amiably withal, came the reply: “It was not.”
“Will you explain these entries?”
Ticely, conscious of a gentle pressure of Bruce's elbow, glanced a fleeting instant at his partner's face, and caught its message of dissent—a shake of the head so slight as to be perceptible to no one else—except Joan, who faced him!
“I will not!” said Ticely. It is probable he intended to say that, anyhow. A murmur low, hissing, almost, followed his reply.
“Why not?” asked Manners sternly.
“You'll probably know why, some day,” replied Ticely airily. But he perceived he was losing. Instantly, then, he changed his tactics. Where witty sarcasms and perfect plausibility were impotent with this character of men, anger might bluff them. He flamed!
“I'm glad you asked me those questions!” His voice rose a little in pitch, a little in loudness. “I've been wondering what the devil kind of a strike you fellows imagined you had here, anyway—for a few thousand dollars or so apiece! Now I get you. You gumshoed me from the minute I hit Nome. I don't mean you, judge. I mean whoever did it. You shadowed me, pried into my business, stole my papers, acted like rats! Why? To fool yourselves—as men always do, who want to get something for nothing. Well, you did it. You salted yourselves and I hope you're satisfied. I've let you go as far as you liked and answered your questions—practically all of them. There are certain things you have no right to know, and you're not going to know.”
He seemed to cool down a little after this tirade. In a somewhat gentler and more respectful tone: “Get down to brass tacks. We've got a darn good prospect here, and if she turns out well—as she will, take it from me—we've got the whole creek and the whole country round it. What more do you want?”
“You'll see!” said Collins, enraged beyond restraint. He, too, evidently, had hoped against hope.
“Gentlemen,” Manners hastened to say, “I have presented our case, and listened to Mr. Ticely's replies. He does not deny the facts you allege, but puts a different interpretation upon them.” He paused, disagreeably consicous that what he was about to say would intensify rather than curb the mounting passion of his hearers. “An interpretation which we have no present means of refuting, however any of you may doubt the truth of it. If this were a judicial proceeding, as a judge I could not hold either Mr. Ticely nor, of course, Mr. Waring, to answer for fraud. That we have been bitterly deceived, all of you know, and Mr. Ticely himself knows it now, if he did not know it before.”
Above the angry murmur that filled the room, rose the shrill, scathing voice of Othmer: “No, oh, no! He didn't know it before!” And his words were sardonically echoed by others.
Manners finished determinedly. “Whether he knew it or not, boys, I'm afraid there's no just way, and there's certainly no legal way, of holding him responsible for the deception.”
“He done his work too slick—the damn thief!” yelled Bill Colwell, the giant blacksmith, shaking his great grimy fist. And the hubbub rose into a roar.
“Out of here, fellers!” cried another, and the crowd surged through the door.
Manners, long before, had risen from behind his table.
“I'm sorry for this, Ticely,” he said ominously, shaking his head. “I've done what I could—against my own interest, perhaps—to give you a chance to explain—to really explain.” He bit his lip and shook his head again. “I can't answer for what they'll do now.”
“They'll come to their senses, of course,” declared Ticely, but his face belied the confidence of his words.
“I wouldn't bank on that too strongly, if I were you,” warned Manners.
When the door closed on Ticely, Joan, pale to the lips, turned to her father.
“It's all over, is it, dad? We've lost everything?”
“I suppose so. I hoped up to the last that perhaps”
“He was very mysterious about that diary. He said we'd probably know some day”
“Bluff, pure bluff. There's no doubt they've got nothing to speak of on the creek here. As to their having deceived us—Ticely handled those accusations mighty cleverly. If it wasn't for the diary, I'd almost be inclined to think they might be innocent. Waring though—I hoped up to the last he would clear himself.”
“I did, too,” she confessed, with averted face. “But Bruce—Mr. Waring couldn't very well say what he knew, if it was against Mr. Ticely, could he?”
“N-o, I suppose not. Even if they didn't cook it up together, Waring must know that nobody would believe him—in fact, they'd only hate him the more for trying to plead ignorance of what Ticely did in Nome.”
“Daddy, I could still have cherished the belief that he didn't know what Ticely was going to do, and that loyalty, even more than policy, kept him silent, if I hadn't seen—father, I saw him nudge Ticely, just before Ticely refused to answer about the diary. My—heart—broke—then!” sobbed Joan.
Manners put his arm around the motherless girl and stroked her dark hair.