The Golden Woman Part 25

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 pa.s.sed 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 b.u.t.te 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 cla.s.s 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 germinated 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 h.e.l.l, 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 Caesar 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 pa.s.sed 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 gla.s.ses, 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.

"d.a.m.n '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 pa.s.s 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 Buck 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.