The Popular Magazine/Volume 58/Number 4/The Implacable Friend/Chapter 14
CHAPTER XIV.
DURING THE NIGHT.
After the hearing, Ticely and his brawny young partner walked up the creek to their cabin, almost in silence. Waring made a fire and cooked supper, while the elder man found relief from the strain he was under by vigorously 'chopping wood. As silently as they had entered the cabin, they ate their simple meal. Then they lighted their pipes and looked at each other.
“What did you think of it, Bruce?” asked Ticely nervously.
“I think” Suddenly laying down his pipe, Waring rose from the table and sat on the edge of his bunk. “God Almighty, Fred! tell me the truth about it. You know I'll stand by you all I can.”
Ticely flung his own pipe down. “Damn it, Bruce, I've told the truth—to them and to you. What do you mean, anyhow?”
If it was a simulated asperity it was well executed, and Waring was instantly uncomfortable. His deference for Ticely as an elder, a better educated, and almost superior being, had survived the intimacies of camp life. Though Ticely had generously—as Bruce felt—admitted him to a comradeship of equality, he still retained a certain timidity of demeanor and utterance which not even his risen sense of something seriously wrong in his partner could wholly banish. Nevertheless, he was now resolved that nothing should balk his efforts to gain the truth.
“Don't misunderstand me, Fred. I don't doubt the facts you stated. Even Judge Manners didn't do that. But there's something else that gave those fellows their big hunch—something else than that poke and those telegrams. Something else, even, than that diary that they found in your bag.”
“Did you think for one moment that I faked that diary?” asked Ticely, in a sorrowful voice.
“Why, Fred, it must have been your Klondike diary. You've told me about that big pay you fellows ran into in ninety-nine when you worked that lay on 'Swede' Anderson's claim. And if the year wasn't on it”
“Apparently it wasn't!”
“They'd naturally think it was our own Midas prospects. But, still, beyond even that, there must have been something that gave them the key to those things—something in the way you acted!”
“Look here, Bruce,” said Ticely, very deliberately, “I'll be frank with you—franker than I have ever been. You are innocent in business. You're too—well, you're too matter of fact. Don't you know yet what business is? Any kind of business, from shoeing horses to organizing a trust? It's exactly and precisely the same. You put your best foot foremost. You try in every way you can, without, of course, doing anything actually wrong, to put your proposition over. When you sell a garment, you know the way you have to act and what sort of thing you have to say. You don't actually claim that there is so much wool in it, but if the prospective purchaser derives the impression that it's wool, or contains a great deal of wool, it helps you build the conviction in his mind that it is a good garment and that he wants to buy it. You make everything look as pretty as you can. You don't make things really pretty. The artist, designer, or manufacturer does that. The salesman merely creates a belief that things are attractive. And the less attractive they really are, the greater the triumph of salesmanship. I'm accounted a good salesman, as perhaps you know.” Ticely bit his lip thoughtfully: “I'm beginning to believe I'm too good a salesman!”
“You certainly have been in this case, Fred Ticely, or I miss my guess,” replied Waring soberly.
Ticely frowned. “They bought, or bit—call it what you will. And now they're welshing like curs. Of course, I made it look good. I had to. But I defy them to produce one scintilla of truthful evidence that I used any other means than those of salesmanship; subtle, indirect, perhaps, but—salesmanship!”
“But you made them think what wasn't true?” Waring said it respectfully but in deadly earnestness. And with equal earnestness, Ticely replied:
“And every man, woman—yes, and child, on top of God's footstool does the same thing, consciously or unconsciously, every hour, almost, of their lives!”
Waring slowly shook his head. “No, it can't be. It can't be!”
“It's so. Look at it carefully, cold-bloodedly, and you'll find it's so. You'll know it some day, if you don't now.”
“Fred, just one more question—about this memorandum book. Did you just happen to find that old diary, or did you”
Ticely interrupted him. How much through a deliberate intention to interrupt, how much through a really sudden memory of Waring's gently pressing elbow, only the Conscious Light in men's hearts could have told.
“When they asked me about it, Bruce, while you were standing close to me, why did you”
Bruce interrupted him.
“What's that?” he asked, listening.
He heard a light footfall on the path outside the cabin, and in another moment a gentle knock sounded on the rough planks of the door. Waring knew that step, and bounded across the cabin.
“Joan!”
She entered and closed the door. Without preface, she said very distinctly: “The men are having a miners' meeting. They are very, very angry, and—I know this from some one who was there—they are dissatisfied with father's advice. They mean mischief, The person who told me this thinks you had better leave the camp at once.”
“Does your father know of this?” asked Ticely.
“Probably; I did not wait to find him. I came up here instantly, so that—if you wished to go, you might lose no time. This person suggested”
“I don't want to hear what the person suggested,” interrupted Waring harshly. Then, “Please pardon me, Joan!”
“Miss Manners!” she corrected him,
He bowed his head.
“Aren't you—going?” she asked.
He came up close to her and looked her intently in the face.
“What do you think!”
She gazed into his clear eyes. “I hoped—in spite of what I heard to-day—I hoped you would not, at least.”
“You are right. We will not go!” His jaw set strongly with his words.
“It is kind of you, Miss Manners, to risk detection by telling us,” acknowledged Ticely. “I thank you.”
She did not appear to hear him. She had turned her back to both of them and put her hand in her loose khaki bodice. When she turned again she laid a blued Colt's revolver upon the table.
“I suppose you have your own. But—here is an extra one.” As she looked at Bruce, who was regarding her with drawn brows, she seemed about to speak again. But abruptly she fled from the cabin. The two men stood as if petrified. Then Bruce took his cap and turned to Ticely.
“You were asking me, when Miss Manners interrupted us”
Ticely studied a moment. “Why, simply—when they asked me about the diary—why did you nudge me and frown slightly, as if you wanted me to refuse to say what it was? Why didn't you want me to explain about it?”
Bruce walked toward the door.
“It would have done no good; in fact, only would have made 'em madder. And, besides, it might prevent” He snapped his teeth against the completion of his sentence. Then he looked at Ticely narrowly. “How about that diary?”
“How about that nudge?”
Waring smiled mirthlessly. “This seems a game of answering one question by asking another.” Quite abruptly he went out and closed the door behind him.
Swiftly he ascended to the bench claim. By going to his shaft by a slightly different route each day he had avoided making any trail. He found that Ak Tuk had already taken out the remains of the burned-out fire and hoisted several buckets of the wet, sticky gravel. Bruce examined it attentively, and noted that it was very sticky indeed—evidently he was now in the sediments overlying the bed-rock gravel. He judged that one more fire would uncover the bottom of the old channel.
They worked in silence for an hour and a half, picking the warmed and thawed gravel and hoisting it to the dump. Not until the last bucket of thawed dirt was lifted did Waring sample the dirt. It was a most excellent prospect—for top gravel. He wished the fire had been a bigger one, and the shaft had thawed deeper.
“Come on, Ak Tuk,” he called, seizing his ax. “We make plenty fire to-night—big thaw. Maybe bed rock to-morrow. Mebbe plenty need good pay. Might help some!” he added, more to himself than to the native. It was nearly midnight when they lighted the new fire and threw upon it a quantity of small quartz bowlders which, becoming almost red-hot, would later sink beneath the ashes and continue the thawing of the frozen mass. Then they walked down the hill.
Bruce did not know what was going to happen to-morrow. He knew only that he would stand shoulder to shoulder with the man who had been his benefactor, and who was the loved and loving husband of that dainty woman who had traveled three thousand miles to a filthy, disease-ridden swamp and nursed him like a mother through a mortal illness.
But the man was gone! On the table, under a frying pan, he found two notes. The first read:
- To The Midas Mining and Development Company and all others whom it may concern:
- As I do not propose to allow myself to be mistreated by a gang of lunatics, I am going to Nome, where I shall hold myself answerable in a proper way to any claims that any one decides to bring against me. My partner, Mr. Waring, who knows nothing whatever of any of my operations in Nome, and is in no way responsible, personally, for my conduct there, will remain and represent me in any matters affecting the interests of Ticely and Waring on Midas Creek, Frederick R. Ticely.
The other note was addressed to Waring:
- If you hadn't left the cabin so suddenly, I would have told you that I did not propose to remain and knuckle down to that bunch of swine. You are safe enough, I suppose; but to make certain of it, I am leaving the other letter. I am taking the route that only you and I are familiar with. Please burn this letter, Bruce. And good luck to you. Ticely.
Bruce promptly burned it, and—after thinking it over for a long time—he burned the other letter also! Then he clenched his fist at the man who had departed, and cursed him for a coward.
He sat on the table and, oblivious of his surroundings, thought it all out—all of it, from the beginning when they had taken him, a youth buried in toil and ignorance—taken him with no thought, no purpose, save the spontaneous, disinterested kindness of their hearts—and given him his glorious chance. This would have been reason enough, with any of a different stamp than Waring, to aid Ticely in his flight. But in Waring's veins coursed blood of no strains but the indomitable. The instincts that make for the open, where no boldness of brain, no keenness of eye, no strength of arm, but one's own wrests from the earth the wherewithal of happiness and content, were Waring's. A scion of frontiersmen, he looked to no man for help and shrank from no man in fear. To him, the one unpardonable sin, more despicable than theft, more atrocious than murder, was cowardice; the one unpardonable shame that would pursue the very soul, quitting life and earth, was the shame of the fugitive.
“He can't do it,” he groaned. “Damn him, he can't do it—not to himself and not to his wife!”
He struck the table with his naked fist, and the jumping ink bottle reminded him of something—of his locations on the bench. They might prove very good, indeed, and—in case he did not come back—those poor devils who apparently had lost their all, must have another chance, and a quick one, without the ruinous delays of tedious legal redress.
He found in a book at the side of his bunk a number of blank deeds belonging to Ticely. These he filled in, referring frequently to a list in Joan Manners' handwriting. Then he wrote Joan a note, and, wrapping it up with the deeds and Joan's revolver, gave it to Ak Tuk, with some instructions.
He threw some grub into a barley sack, strapped on his gun belt, and made for a flat up the creek where the idle horses were pastured. Here he caught the one which his practiced eye picked as the best for his purpose, and led him to a big birch from whose limbs many packsaddles and several riding saddles were slung. In a few moments he was doing what Ticely undoubtedly had done—guiding his horse up the shallow channel of the creek, leaving no trail. He followed the main stream two miles and then ascended the channel of a tributary nearly to its head. Satisfied that his trail from now on could never be discovered, he struck out for the high ridge. His partner had several hours the start of him, was probably well mounted, and would ride hard. Moreover, his exact route was uncertain. Bruce knew it only as the high moose trails which follow along the crest of the ridges. But he knew in his heart that he would find Frederick Ticely.