CHAPTER TEN

HUGH achieved his interview with Dart that night. At nine o’clock he saw Dart striding past the hospital alone and obviously bound downtown. This was so unusual that Hugh could guess what had happened. Amanda had told him, they had quarreled, and Dart was following the normal masculine reaction of flinging out into the night.

Hugh walked onto the hospital porch and called, “Hey, Dartland, wait a minute!”

Dart paused on the road, but his face, plain in the starlight as Hugh came up with him, was dark and implacable.

“You going down for a drink somewhere?” asked Hugh casually.

“No. I’m just walking.” And he started off again.

Hugh followed for a block, conscious that he was panting and his shorter legs trotting to keep up with that long effortless stride. “For Christ’s sake!” he burst out at last, “I know you won the hundred-yard dash, do we have to prove it here? I want to talk to you, Dart.”

“Amanda has already talked to me. And I’m not interested.” Dart’s stride did not slacken.

“God, I know you’re stubborn, but I’ve never known you to be unreasonable. You might at least listen for a moment!”

Dart’s jaw tightened, he stopped so abruptly that Hugh bumped into him. “Well...” he said, “I’m listening.”

Hugh glanced around. They had reached Bosses’ Row; there were lights in the Mablett and Rubrick houses, and down the street two drunken miners were lurching towards them and singing.

“Not here,” he said. “Down in the canyon a bit, where no one can hear.”

“I don’t give a damn whether anyone hears or not,” said Dart. “If what you have to say concerns the lost mine, I’m fed to the teeth with everything about it. It’s an obsession with Amanda, and if you want to join her mania that’s your business. Go on off and hunt for it, and welcome!”

Hugh mastered an impulse to hit that contemptuous face which had not once turned in his direction, but he said quietly, “You know very well I couldn’t find it alone, or I certainly would accept your kindly invitation.—Dart, you say Andy has an obsession, but so have you. Are you afraid of the place, that you won’t even discuss it?”

Dart made a derisive sound in his throat. “Probably,” he said. “Doubtless my regrettable Indian strain lays me open to superstition not shared by the whites.”

Again Hugh controlled his temper. “Never mind about me,” he said, as persuasively as he could, “but you’re not fair to Andy. Don’t hold it against her that she showed me those notes. Try to see her side a little.”

Dart heard the slightly false ring in this. He had been angered by Amanda’s disloyalty, by the conspiracy behind his back, the buzzing and whispering over a sacred concept handed down by Tanosay. And he had been disgusted at the clutching greed he felt in both of them—gold fever, a disease as mutilating as leprosy. But now his sense of justice spoke in answer to Hugh’s words, no matter how venal their motive. And he felt a twinge of pity.

“I don’t need your pleas, Hugh, to keep me from being brutal to Andy. And you can keep those copies she made. Brood about Pueblo Encantado all you want to, if it makes you happy. But don’t ever mention it to me again.”

He turned on his heel and walked away in the opposite direction back up the mine road. Hugh stood still watching him. That isn’t the end of it, my fine arrogant friend! he thought. I’ll let you cool off a bit, and then I’ll tackle you again. Hugh was now more convinced than ever that Dart knew many details about the location of the mine. And there’d be a way of getting them out of him somehow. Every man had his Achilles heel.... Through Amanda, probably ... she’s handled it all wrong so far, but I can show her. And as he thought this the beast leaped out of hiding and seized upon Hugh again. Through its red eyes he saw the gleaming of gold, and beneath the wall of gold he saw Viola flattened, crushed and sobbing for mercy. A sudden exhilaration tingled through his body. I’ll make Dart, he thought. I can do it, I’ll find a way.

But it was through neither Hugh nor Amanda that their desire was fulfilled and Dart’s attitude was changed. It came through evil greater than theirs, through the workings of an ancient racial wrong in which Dart had had no part, but for which he suffered nevertheless.

For the next few days Amanda and Dart lived in a state of abeyance with each other. They were very polite and spoke of trivial things. They saw nothing of Hugh, nor did they mention him.

On Sunday the heat wave had broken, and the weather was golden-crisp and clear. Dart, seeing that the mine was running smoothly, took a day off and suggested to Amanda that they might go somewhere for a picnic. Amanda was pleased, and repaid this consideration by asking if he would like to picnic in the ghost town and call on Mrs. Cunningham.

“Yes, I would,” said Dart thoughtfully. “I haven’t seen her in a long time.”

So they ate their lunch on the mountainside, chatted about Mrs. Lawrence’s last letter (Jean had not written since Amanda’s abrupt leave from El Castillo), about an old gray desert tortoise which waddled by them as they ate, about the possibility of rain that night at last, since thunderheads were forming behind the northern mountains.

“But,” said Dart, “no one but a fool or a foreigner ever predicts weather in Arizona.”

Amanda smiled, willing enough to join him in fending off the interior tension. They even talked a little about the baby, avoiding all sore spots of its arrival and accommodation later. It would be a boy she was convinced, and they agreed on its name. Jonathan David, for both fathers. He would have light eyes, gray or blue. “In fact he has to,” said Amanda laughing, “since we both have—according to Mendelian Law, isn’t it?”

And underneath this inconsequential talk there ran the dark river of conflict, a river reflecting in murky flashes the underside of the two-fold shield of love and hate.

Calise, when she opened the door of her mansion to them in response to Dart’s knock, felt this at once. Her quiveringly sensitive perceptions received the full shock of the hidden turbulence, and she recoiled from the young couple on her doorstep. She was herself but just emerging from the re-enactment of her own tragedy. After months of freedom the frightful visitation had come upon her again. Again and with a sharpened horror her shrinking soul had been forced through the obscene, the grotesque motions of past adultery and murder. Her prayers were of no avail, the serenity and glimpses of the eternal light which she had thought to constitute at last the perfect armor, had all dissolved again under the hideous impact. She was not, then, yet forgiven. Repentance was not enough. There was still something more required. It must be that more prayer and fasting was required—more searching, more meditation, and for these the only possible atmosphere was one of untouched solitude.

“I cannot ask you in,” she said to Dart, her silvery voice hurried and distraught. “I’m sorry, but I cannot see you both.” And in her own mind she added the words, I cannot help you. For she saw them in need of help. Around them both she saw dark forces swirling, near Dart she saw through lurid mist an evil face, and danger; against the shimmering mountainside she saw a picture form, an image like the head frame over the mine. She heard the whir of machinery and she felt impelled to warn, but she rejected the impulse, refusing to listen, or believe. For these people would not heed, their violences and tragedies they brought on themselves, as everyone did, and they had no right to burden her with their exigence.

Amanda had been staring with concealed astonishment. Today she saw nothing of the special luminous quality she had felt before in Mrs. Cunningham. She saw nothing but a nervous old woman in black, who was acting eccentric.

“I’m so sorry we bothered you,” said Amanda soothingly. “We just had a picnic up here and we thought we’d drop in. But we’ll come some other time.”

Calise scarcely heard her. “Forgive me,” she said to Dart. “I must be alone. It’s the only way I can regain my strength.” She thrust her long pale hands out as though she would push the two people away from her. “I’ll pray for you,” she added. And she shut the door.

Amanda laughed a trifle uncomfortably. “Well, that’s that. Nice to be prayed for anyway. Do we need it?”

“I daresay,” said Dart. He was suffering from dismay. Calise had never shut him off like that before. He partially understood that it must have to do with her strange tragedy, but this repudiation was different in quality. She had fended them off as though they were dangerous or unclean. He had thought her above all pettiness. He had, in fact, considered Calise a fountainhead of strength and wisdom, despite her peculiarities. Her love of solitude and of the mountains had evoked deep sympathetic response in him. But today the sympathy had been shattered.

True to his instinctive antidote for uncomfortable thoughts, he now himself longed to go off alone into the mountains; and when they got home from their fruitless call at four o’clock he asked Amanda if she would mind being left.

“Oh, Dart, you’re not going back to that damn mine! Not on this one day off! I thought you were going to amuse me for once.”

“No,” he said slowly, “not to the mine, I was thinking of a hike cross-country maybe towards the Gila. But what would you like to do, Andy?”

She checked a sharp answer, for what was there to do? They might play a little cribbage, they might do a cross-word puzzle, but of their real thoughts they could not talk. And she loathed tramping over these deserts even if her condition had not made it unwise. “Oh, go ahead,” she said, trying to smile. “I know you get outdoors so little, always stuck underground. I can always write to Mother, I suppose.”

Dart escaped into the beauty of an Arizona sunset, into the glory of an enormous sky that rippled into violet and crimson as it touched the gilded summits of the Tortillas, and reflected itself like a ribbon of satin on the winding Gila far below. He forgot all forebodings and disappointments in the rattle of the woodpeckers, the dusk music of the canyon towhees and the whistle of the cardinals from the mesquite.

But for Amanda there was no music, no sound in the shack but the scratch of her fountain pen, and the beating of her own rebellious and discouraged heart.

 

By Tuesday of the next week, Tiger Burton had perfected his plan. He was on the swing shift this week, according to the conventional rotation between the two main shift bosses. Old Olaf the Swede remained always on the graveyard.

Tiger’s plan seemed to him virtually foolproof, and for the success of its details he had drawn upon a shrewd knowledge of psychology. First that of Bill Riley, the anxious, apprehensive young hoistman who drank a quart of coffee every night to keep himself alert. For him Tiger had procured an ounce of chloral hydrate. It was not his intention to knock Bill out completely, that would have been suspicious, just render him hazy enough so that he would not interfere.

And for Dart’s unconscious co-operation, Tiger relied on the young foreman’s well-known conscientiousness. The development work just started on the new 1000-foot level provided the ideal means.

At 5.30 P.M. Tiger, having spent some time looking over the setting and seeing that all was satisfactory, returned to the surface and waited by the collar until Dart came on top, his day’s work presumably finished.

Dart stepped out of the cage to see the shift boss sitting huddled on a pile of timber near the hoist house. Tiger staggered to his feet when he saw Dart, and stumbled towards him. “I got an awful belly-ache, Mr. Dartland,” he gasped, “kind of a colic. I can’t finish the shift.”

“Why, that’s too bad,” said Dart. “You better go to the bunkhouse and lie down. Shall I get the doctor up here?” “Oh, no sir,” said Tiger quickly. “I don’t need him, I’ve had these belly-aches before. I just got to take a good dose and wait till they stop. I had my appendix out, it’s not that—only thing is I’d ought to be down below to spit the fuses on the thousand tonight. Old Craddock and Pedro don’t do so good alone.” He waited, his arms clasped around his middle, his eyes downcast to Dart’s rubber boots.

“Oh, don’t worry about that,” said Dart, precisely as Tiger had known he would. “I’ll come back after supper, and stay underground with the men.”

“That’s fine, sir,” Tiger whispered. Suddenly sweat sprang out on his forehead, and glistened on his pallid cheeks. Dart attributed this to illness and thought nothing of it. He watched Tiger’s dragging departure towards the bunkhouse long enough to be sure the man would make it all right, then went up to the parking space and his own car.

Amanda was in a happier mood that night. She had received a long affectionate letter from her mother, enclosing ten dollars as a little gift, part of which Amanda had immediately spent on a roasting chicken, a can of sweet potatoes, a jar of jelly, and a store cake for their dinner; all delicacies usually beyond their budget. She had also bought some bottles of legal beer to add to the feast. She had further cause for rejoicing in that she had this day felt life at last. Now well into her fifth month but ignorant of the exact course of pregnancy, she had been uncertain about the flutterings she had felt during the last week. But this morning there had been an unmistakable movement, a gentle tapping as though the tiny entity within her were trying to communicate. And this to Amanda had been a revelation. The baby was real, it was there, and the surge of tender excitement awakened Amanda to her motherhood.

There were no words with which to communicate the joy of this private miracle to Dart, but it released her love for him, and weakened all the carking little tensions and conflicts which had been stifling it.

She even forebore to complain when she discovered that he must go back to the mine that night, although she had asked the Rubricks in for beer and to play cards, and this unprecedented little party would represent more gaiety than she had had in a long time.

“All right, dear,” she said, smiling at Dart, “I understand that you have to go back. I guess we can play something threehanded.... See how good I’m getting?” she said kissing the top of his stubborn black hair as she walked past, “the perfect miner’s wife!”

Dart laughed and caught her around the waist.

“Don’t squeeze Jonathan!” she cried. “Oh, Dart, it’s going to be such fun, having the baby!”

His spirits, too, were higher than they had been in a long time. Amanda’s gaiety was infectious. The dinner had been good, and above all he was grateful for the reasonableness she was showing. He had no hint of omen or portent tonight, the uneasiness he had felt last week had entirely gone.

He waited long enough to greet the Rubricks and explain. Tom and Tessie arrived all spruced up in their Sunday best. This little party was unusual for them too—except for Mrs. Mablett’s all-inclusive collations, Tessie and Tom were not generally invited to staff houses.

Tom grumbled a bit. “Ye work too ’ard, Mr. Dartland, any’ow, and why would that measly Tiger ’ave to be ailing tonight...?” but he could not help but agree to the wisdom of Dart’s return. The work on the new level was important, and must go ahead on schedule. And as they were still blasting so near the shaft down there, there was added responsibility for proper timing of the fuses and co-ordination with the hoist. Boss or foreman should be present.

“Ye didna get the telly-phone down there ye’ve been yammering for!” said Tom, cocking his grizzled head and chuckling, as Dart prepared to leave. “’Bull’ead thinks ye’re a great mollycoddle fussing so about it. ’E says ye even got at the old man.”

Dart flushed. He paused with one hand on the doorknob. “I did. I hope Mr. Tyson gave the order, too.”

“Aow. I expect ’e did since Bull’ead’s madder’n a wet hen. Says ’e’ll take ’is own good time about getting the cable. ’E said some mighty stiff things about your going over ’is ’ead to the old man.”

“Oh, hush now, Tom, do,” laughed Tessie, shaking her head. “Ye mustna tease poor Mr. Dartland. He knows what’s best, ye’ve said so yourself time and again.”

“For sure I ’ave,” agreed Tom, grinning at Dart’s frowning face. “It’s just me bit o’ fun. Ye’ll win out, sir, ye always do. Bull’ead’s no match for you.”

Dart started to speak and then stopped. There was no use explaining to Tom that this matter of the telephone was not a personal feud between himself and Mablett, at least in Dart’s eyes. It was a matter of rudimentary mine safety, of improved practice. But Rubrick had worked most of his life in small mines where such refinements had been ignored, and it was clear that he shared Mablett’s view that Dart was showing excessive caution. Dart was too sure of his own ground for real annoyance, so he merely shrugged and said, “Well, time will tell.”

A meaningless phrase which was later to find an unpleasant echo in the shift boss’s memory.

Dart kissed Amanda, nodded to the Rubricks, and strode down the path to the car. Tessie and Amanda set out a deck of cards on the kitchen table, opened three bottles of beer, and using matches for chips, were soon immersed in an enthusiastic game of Black Jack. They intended to wait and play until Dart came back off shift at midnight.

Tiger had his own room in the mine bunkhouse, and he watched from the window for the lights of Dart’s returning car. As soon as he saw them, he glided downstairs and out into the night. He concealed himself behind a creosote bush near the shaft and watched the foreman’s tall straight figure moving in the darkness exactly as Tiger had foreseen—disappearing in the hoist house for a moment to have a word with the hoistman, then walking silhouetted against the sky, until he reached the waiting cage at the shaft.

Tiger crept near enough to hear what Dart said to the eager. “Evening, Mike. Boys down below on the thousand okay?—Well, we’ll spit the fuses, after you get all the other men up, then you can go. I’ll handle the cage myself.” He stepped inside, and the skip clanged downward.

The listener in the bushes squeezed his hands tight together in an ecstasy of satisfaction. He had no particular reluctance to eliminate the eager as well as the others, but the satisfaction came from having foreseen just this decision too. Mastery over the Apache’s brain, smarter in every way than the Apache.

Tiger crept to the window of the hoist house. He watched the tense young figure on the high stool by the levers that ran the hoist.... Bill Riley hunched forward, his eyes glued to the enormous round indicator that showed by means of a revolving arrow the present location of the descending skip. The hoist drum thundered and whirred, paying off its lengths of oily black cable. The huge arrow paused on the indicator, the machinery stopped; then, from a horn high overhead on the opposite wall, there came a sharp buzz, and a red light flashed. The hoistman pulled the levers again, and the indicator arrow resumed its slow revolution.

This routine procedure was not what interested Tiger; he was watching for something else, and soon he was rewarded. Bill Riley lifted the thermos full of coffee and took a long pull. Tiger nodded to himself. Just enough dope in there to take the edge off Riley’s alertness, just enough to haze his time sense a little, so he wouldn’t get to wondering. But there was small chance of that anyway. Riley never took responsibility on his own, he stood in great awe of Dart, and his anxious mind was focused on only one thing, precise obedience to the signals.

It can’t go wrong, thought Tiger exultantly. His bony fingers caressed the reassuring bulk of the flashlight in his pocket, and the twin prongs of the wire cutter. That was all it needed. So simple, as though the Lord had planned it. He glanced around the deserted collar, then slipped behind one of the steel uprights of the head frame. There it was, the conduit running up out of the shaft, innocent inches of wire, inconspicuous as they were accessible. He had already loosened the insulation, he knew exactly where to cut. It wouldn’t take five seconds, the minute Riley received the alert-for-blasting signal, and acknowledged it.

After that there would be no more signals. But later when someone began to wonder, when indeed he himself perhaps might start the wondering, the wires would have been spliced again, the signals in perfect working order. No one would know what had happened, except that the Apache down below had somehow made a fatal mistake.

Tiger’s eyes glowed like a cat’s in the darkness, he clamped his lips tight over a burst of triumphant laughter. He eased himself cautiously down the hill below the collar and the abandoned tailings dump. Here in the darkness he would wait until the moment came.

 

At eleven o’clock Dart, replacing the absent shift boss, had checked on work in all parts of the mine, and was now prepared to go down to the thousand-foot level, where the two drillers, Old Craddock and Pedro Ramirez, had been working. He went on top with the last of the regular shift, dismissed the eager, and took the skip down again alone. It was well to have as few men as possible around when the blasting was so close to the shaft as this would be.

Dart stepped off the cage at the lowest level into a little inferno of choking heat and rock dust. The ventilation was poor down here as yet. The two men greeted him eagerly. Old Craddock was not yet sixty, but he was humped over and wrinkled like a mummy. His lungs were half eaten away with silicosis, he wheezed and coughed constantly, but he held on always just a bit longer trying to save enough money to buy a little farm back East.

Pedro was a burly brute of a Mexican, who had a certain knack with the jack-hammer and drill, but otherwise the mentality of a ten-year-old child.

“All set, mister,” said Craddock, limping up to Dart and coughing. “All ready to spit ’em.” He gestured back to the face of the cross-cut. Dart nodded and walked over to inspect.

The rock chamber in which they stood was about ten feet in diameter. On one side there was the shaft with the waiting cage, on the other the beginning of the cross-cut, a tunnel so far but eight feet deep, blocked by the rock wall in which the men had been drilling. Across the face of this rock wall there dangled eight thread-like fuses.

Dart looked at the fuses, and turned frowning to Craddock. “You’ve trimmed them already!” he said. “I told you I’d do it.”

“Gee, mister,” answered the old man plaintively, “I been trimmin’ ’em for thirty year, I know how they fire best. I want to get out of here fast. Me chest’s killing me.”

Dart nodded and accepted this. He considered that some of the fuses were pretty short, they’d not burn two minutes, but also at the back of his mind he heard Tom’s chuckling quotation of Mablett’s “Mollycoddle.”

“Okay,” he said. “We’ll signal to Riley.”

The two men stood beside him while he turned to the shaft and pulled down the signal cord five times, the alert-for-blasting signal.

It seemed to Dart that the hoistman’s response was slower than usual, but after a moment the waiting cage began to rise slowly thirty feet up the shaft, hovered, and descended back into position by Dart.

This was the proper acknowledgment of the first signal, it showed the hoistman to be alerted and ready, and that the hoist was under control. Riley would now wait for the one long ring which showed the fuses had been lit, and the men in the cage must be carried at once quickly to the surface.

“You get in,” said Dart to the two men. “I’ll light them.”

Craddock and the Mexican walked into the cage and stood together at the back. Craddock coughed long and rackingly. He wiped some bloodstainted spittle off his mouth with his hand.

Dart moved back and forth across the rock face, lighting the fuses, the glow of his carbide lamp dancing methodically in and out of the shadows with his quick controlled motions. The fuses began to sputter and hiss like little snakes, an acrid sweetish odor mingled with the smell of rock dust.

“Okay,” said Dart, he pulled the signal down once sharply and sprang into the cage with the men.

They waited.

“Jesus Maria,” said the Mexican, “whassa matter—you no give signal?”

“Of course I did, you fool!” Dart reached around the wall of the cage and pulled it again. He waited a second and then added seven convulsive jerks—the alarm signal!

A thousand feet above them in the hoist house Bill Riley sat waiting, staring at the horn on the wall which would presently buzz, at the red light which would flash. He was sleepy, couldn’t seem to think straight. How long did it usually take between the alert and the blasting signal? But Mr. Dartland was in charge so there was no use speculating. Probably lastminute change in trimming the fuses. His eyes shut and he opened them with a jerk. He reached for more coffee. Never let Mr. Dartland catch you nodding like this, be right out on your ear in nothing flat, and then how about Mary and the baby, with decent jobs so hard to get, any jobs—you got to be alert—alert—how long was it since that alert signal, maybe only a second, I don’t know what’s the matter with me I’m so dopy, I don’t want to do anything wrong. His hand went to the lever and then fell back. Can’t raise the cage without the signal—what’s the matter with you...?

Outside behind the head frame Tiger crouched near the broken signal wires. Fifteen minutes would do it for sure, then he could splice again. He laid his ear to the shaft, listening, but you couldn’t tell from that far down. There were some dull, shaking thuds from somewhere under the earth, but might be from other parts of the mine. Anyway, it was foolproof. The Apache blown into a dozen mangled pieces, like my mother was mangled, and again he had to clamp his lips tight over wild laughter.

Below in the cage the three still stood. The eight writhing fuses sputtered and hissed inexorably.

“My God—my God—” whispered Craddock staring at them. Suddenly and louder he cried in a thin whine, “My God, my God, my God-” He gave a sharp bubbling gasp and fell forward onto his face across the floor of the cage.

In the same instant Dart jumped out of the cage. He flashed to the rock face, his jackknife opened in his hand. Already the character of sputter from the three shortest fuses had changed.

The hissing red fire had crawled lip into the rock holes which led to the caps. Dart took a deep gasping breath. He dug with his knife into the holes beneath the tamping and cut the fuses. He pulled the burning ends out with his fingers and threw them to the ground. Then he cut steadily with precise motion the remaining five fuses which still protruded. He stamped out all the burning ends with his heavy boots. Then he released his breath and swayed against the wet rocky wall, staring at the eight black holes in the face of the rock. He unclenched his jaws and a warm soft trickle ran down his chin from his bitten lip.

Pedro, the Mexican, lumbered out of the cage and came over to him. “Brav’ hombre—” he said, peering at Dart. “You cut fuse—? We no blow up?” There was a foolish uncertain grin on his slack mouth.

Dart straightened slowly. “No—” he said. “No. I guess we don’t blow up.” He looked down at his right hand, the first two fingers and thumb were charred black, beginning to ooze a bloody serum, but he felt nothing.

“Somesing go wrong wid Craddock—” said the Mexican. “He fall down.”

Dart walked back to the cage. The old miner lay crumpled at the back on the planks. By the sharp yellow circle of his lamp Dart saw that the shrunken face had turned gray blue, but the man still breathed.

“Give me a hand here—” snapped Dart to the Mexican, who sluggishly obeyed. They lifted the unconscious man out of the cage and laid him on the wet ground.

Dart stared down at Craddock, then pulled the signal again. Seven sharp jerks. He waited, but there was no response. What in God’s name has happened, he thought, and looked at the wall by the shaft where the telephone should have been.

Craddock gave a feeble sighing moan, his hands fluttered then dropped to his side.

He’s dying, thought Dart. We’ve got to get him out of here—Decent air, Doctor.

“Take his feet again,” he said to the Mexican, and he knelt down scooping his right arm under Craddock’s shoulders, and around the bony chest.

“Wha’ for?” said Pedro staring. “Where you goin’?”

“Up the manway,” said Dart impatiently. “Hurry up.”

Pedro’s jaw dropped. He stared at the perpendicular iron ladder which ran up the side of the shaft. The spindle rungs a foot apart were slippery as eels from the constant drip of water. He wagged his head. “No can go up with him—” He hunched towards Craddock. “We fall.”

“Shut up!” shouted Dart. His blazing eyes glared at the Mexican. “Do as I tell you.”

Pedro gave a rebellious mutter, but he picked up Craddock’s legs.

Dart hauled the inert hundred-and-fifty-pound body up a few rungs, then rested the feet on Pedro’s shoulders while the Mexican stood below. They began to crawl up the ladder one rung at a time, grunting and heaving. Dart felt his injured right hand go numb, and tried to shift Craddock’s weight to the other arm, but his right hand was even more useless for grasping the rungs above his head, and he had to shift back.

During this maneuver Pedro’s rubber boots slipped off the slick rungs, and he gave a frightened bellow, thrashing wildly in the darkness beneath, while Dart, his ears bursting and his heart thundering, supported the whole weight, then Pedro regained his balance on the rung.

They resumed the agonizing crawl, heave, rest—crawl, heave, rest—up the hundred and fifty feet to the next level.

When they reached this next station, Dart stumbled off the ladder, laid his burden carefully down, and collapsed, panting, on a pile of lagging. He waited only long enough to regain his breath, and until the trembling of his muscles subsided, then he sprang to the telephone.

He thought for several seconds that this too would not answer, and he tried to calculate their chances of hauling Craddock the remaining eight hundred and fifty feet up the manway to the top.

Then he heard a click, and Riley’s voice said, “Hello—Yes, sir? Hello?”

“Christ in Heaven!” cried Dart. “What’s happening? Why didn’t you answer the signals?”

“You didn’t signal, Mr. Dartland—” said the thin voice plaintively, a trifle aggrieved, “not after the alert. I’ve been watching.”

“You damn fool, you’re drunk—” began Dart, and stopped. He knew that Riley would not be drunk—there was something wrong with the signal wires then—He reached over and jerked the handle.

“There’s your signal now,” said Riley through the phone. “You didn’t give it before.”

“I did —but never mind now. There’s a man hurt—Craddock. Bring the cage up to this level and then get us out of here fast.”

 

From the time they reached the surface and the blessed cool night air, the scene became blurred for Dart, though the judgment which had told him the split second when he must stop making fruitless signals to the top and start cutting fuses did not fail him.

As he got off the cage he saw Olaf and the graveyard crew lounging by the collar and smoking unconcernedly waiting to go on shift. It was not yet midnight. The whole episode underground from alert signal to the reaching of Riley by telephone from the next level had taken but twenty-five minutes. Dart pushed through the men, who started to murmur and exclaim as they saw Craddock. He walked into the hoist house, and pulled down the lever that set off the siren. The high throbbing warning of disaster screamed through the night, into the sleeping bunkhouse, down the quiet canyon.

“What’re you doing that for!” cried Riley from the hoistman’s chair. “There’s nothing wrong!”

“There’s plenty wrong,” said Dart—“and a dying man.”

Riley twisted around to see two of the miners carrying the inert form into the hoist house, laying it down on piled coats as Dart directed them. Dart turned to one of the silent miners. “Take my car and bring the doctor back, while I telephone.” Then man nodded and ran down the hill.

At the sound of the siren Tiger jumped up in his hiding place by the tailings dump. A wild exultation possessed him. Now they all knew, now he might reappear innocently, as though roused from the bunkhouse, mingle with the others and savor the delicious success.

He circled around so as to arrive from the proper direction and walked towards the hoist house. And then against the lighted doorway he saw the outline of Dart’s tall figure. He stopped dead, reeling—staring unbelieving. Dart raised his left arm in the air, a commanding characteristic gesture.

“No—” Tiger whimpered. “It can’t be him.” As he stared shaking sobs rose in his throat.

One of the miners from the bunkhouse ran past him crying, “What’s up, Burton, d’you know? What’s happened?”

At once the hysteria left him, and the habits of years came back to his support. “Don’t know,” he answered in his soft colorless voice. “Just going to find out.”

He walked on unobtrusively to the hoist house and slipped amongst the murmuring crowd, watching and listening. There might still be a way to turn the fiasco to advantage.

 

Down in the Dartland cabin Tessie and Amanda had just gathered up the cards, and were rinsing out the beer glasses.

Tom, tilting back his chair, thumbs in armholes, and contemplating his pile of matches, chuckled, “A bit rough on the fair sex, that’s wot I am—but you ladies couldn’t expect to win against an old—” He brought his chair down with a thud. “ ’Ark! Wot’s that!”

Tessie swiveled from the sink, white-faced, she stared at her husband. “The sireen—” she whispered. Again they heard it faintly born by the west wind, down the canyon.

“Cripes!” Tom jumped to his feet. “Summat’s gone wrong on the ’ill!”

Amanda gave a low choking cry.

“Naow, dear—” said Tessie quickly, putting her arm around the girl. “It’ll be all right. Ye mustna let yourself get dithery.”

Tom grabbed his coat. “I’m running back for me car, must get up there. Stay with Mrs. Dartland, Tess!”

“No—” cried Amanda. “I’ve got to go with you. I’ve got to go—”

Tessie gave her an anxious look. “We best take her, Tom—it’d be worse for her waiting—I know.”

He ran outside and back towards the town. The women stood together by the roadside; Tessie went back in the house and brought out Amanda’s coat, put it over the girl’s shoulders. As they stood there they saw the flickering lights of a car pelting down the mine road, it streaked past them——

“That’s our car!” whispered Amanda clutching at Tessie’s arm. “But that isn’t Dart driving....”

“That means naught, dearie,” said Tessie staunchly. “See they’re getting the doctor, that’s all.”

Down by the Company hospital they could see Hugh running toward the car. As it passed again, Amanda called out “Stop, Hugh—tell me—” But he did not stop; he shouted something from which only two words came back to them, “accident” and “Dart.”

Oh, dear God, thought Tessie. She kept her arm around the girl, but Amanda stood rigid as a stone statue, she made no sound.

Tom came up at once in his car, and the girl remained rigid and silent in her corner of the seat, though Tessie tried to manufacture soothing chatter.

There was a crowd outside the hoist house as they came up to it, other cars parked by the collar—and miners streaming up, gaping through the windows, questioning each other.

Tom hailed one of them who stood nearest. “God blast it, wot’s ’appened, Mac?”

“Something underground, on the thousand with Dartland,” answered the young miner.

“Is Mr. Dartland——” began Tom, glancing at Amanda.

“Oh, he’s okay,” said the miner. “It’s old Craddock what’s hurt.”

Amanda made a small mewing sound, she slipped down and forward through Tessie’s quick grasp.

“Naow, naow, dear,” cried Tessie, shaking her a little, “your man’s all right, didn’t you hear? Bear up naow, do. Think o’ the baby!”

A long shiver ran through the girl’s body and she stood up straight. She walked resolutely ahead of Tessie and into the hoist house. The outside ring of miners gave way for her, staring curiously.

She saw Dart standing alone against the wall, near a cleared space where Hugh bent over the quiet figure of Craddock on the floor. She saw that Dart’s jacket was hanging in ribbons from his shoulders. She saw blood on his dirt-blackened chin, and a purple lump on his forehead where it had hit one of the rungs. She saw that he looked dazed, his bloodshot eyes passed over her with momentary recognition, and then returned to the huge indicator by the hoist man. Then she saw his right hand, and she gave a sharp cry. “Dart—your hand!”

Hugh looked up from his examination of the still form on the floor, he followed the direction of her horrified gaze. Then he removed the stethoscope from his neck and threw it in his bag.

“Well, Craddock’s gone all right,” he announced, getting up off his knees. “Nothing to be done. Better take him away, boys.”

Two of the miners shambled forward, and at the same time there was a commotion around the door. Mablett strode in, and behind him glided Tiger Burton, who had during the last few minutes been waiting outside for Mablett’s arrival.

Mablett cast a quick glance at Craddock’s body while the men bore it off, then turned on Dart. "Now what in hell’ve you been up to? What’s the meaning of all this—? This time you’ve gone too far, my lad—you’ve killed a man with your God-damn crazy——”

“Hold on a minute, Mablett!” cried Hugh sharply, pushing him aside as a gasp went up from the men. “You can sound off when I’ve fixed that hand.”

He walked up to Dart and lifted the injured hand. It was swollen to the size of a baseball from which the thumb and first finger dangled in a bloody pulp. “Pretty thing,” said Hugh rummaging in his black bag. “Just what were you doing with it? Looks like burns.”

Dart stared down at his hand and then he raised his head and looked at Mablett. “I cut the fuses,” he said, “when the last signal wasn’t answered.”

“You never gave it, sir—” Riley pushed forward his anxious face peering from the foreman to the superintendent. “I never got it, sir,” he said plaintively to Mablett.

“Pedro Ramirez!” cried Dart, turning towards the assembled miners.

Pedro came forward shuffling, the foolish grin on his face. He had no idea what the foreman wanted now, but he nodded amiably. “Si, si—brav’ hombre. He cut fuses so we not blow up. Then we climb manway with Craddock, bad climb, Craddock too heavy.”

“Did you see Mr. Dartland give the blast signal?” It was a new voice from the back of the room. Amanda wheeled around with the others to see Tyson limping towards them, leaning on his Filipino’s shoulder.

Oh, thank God! she thought. He’ll straighten this out. She did not understand what was happening, nor what it was that was forcing Dart on the defensive. She saw that Mablett was hostile, but she discounted that. She had not seen Tiger Burton who stood just behind Mablett’s bulk, and whose whispers completed the work he had started when he greeted Mablett at his car.

Tyson limped wearily into the open circle by Dart, and repeated his question to Pedro. “Did you see Mr. Dartland give the signal?”

Pedro was frightened now. Here was the big boss himself asking questions. He licked his lips. “I dunno,” he said. “I was in the cage. He say he did.”

Mablett exploded into a roar, he lunged forward, shaking his fist at Dart and yelling at the general manager, “God-damn bastard! You can’t be blind to this, Mr. Tyson! Don’t you see what he’s done? Never gave the signal, showing off, make the men think he’s a hero, cutting fuses, wasting all that work, hauling that poor Craddock up the manway, responsible for his death—all to prove his point—to get the better of me about that God-damn telephone cable!”

Tyson shook his head. “Wait—Quiet—Keep quiet, Lute. Riley, come here.”

Tyson questioned the hoistman in a low voice. Dart stood in the same position against the wall, staring out over the heads of the hushed crowd. He seemed unconscious of Hugh, who was dressing and bandaging his injuries.

Tyson dismissed Riley. He turned and looked over the group until his tired eyes lighted with relief on Tom Rubrick. Here was a man friendly to Dart, one whose word might be trusted. “Tom,” he said, “go down to the thousand-foot level now and try the signal while we watch.”

“Yes, sir,” said Tom slowly. “There might be a break in the line just that last hundred and fifty feet, that would explain why it didn’t come through.” And as he went off to the shaft, he prayed that the signal would not work. And he tried not to think of the conversation with Dart earlier in the evening about the fight with Mablett over the telephone cable, and of Dart’s farewell remark—“Well, time will tell.”

Riley back at his post pulled the lever, the great hoist drum roared, the cable played out, and every eye watched the indicator as it crawled downward to the white number marked 1000. It stopped. There was silence. Then the light bulb on the wall flashed scarlet, and the sound of the horn rasped across the room.

All heads turned in Dart’s direction, but on his face there was no change, not a muscle quivered.

“You better go home now, Dartland,” said Tyson. “Get some rest and take care of that hand.”

The manager spoke very quietly, but not a man who heard him doubted what his opinion was. It showed in the sadness of his eyes as he looked at the young foreman, and it showed in the way he allowed Mablett to accompany him outside and listened to his furious indictment.

The men scattered without talking much. They watched Dartland and his wife and the doctor get into the car, and those three did not say anything either to each other. The men were puzzled and uncertain, many sympathetic with Dartland, who had shown a hell of a lot of guts whatever the reason. But you couldn’t get around it there’d been an accident in the mine and a man had died from it.