LAFOND'S FIRST CARD
Lafond, in the meantime, had left the dispensation of drinks almost entirely to Frosty. He darted here and there in the crowd, a light of unwonted excitement in his eye.
"That thar Mike's shore waked up," commented Old Mizzou. "Never see him so plumb animated. He shore looks nutty. Dance halls is mostly too rich fer his blood, I reckon."
But Tony Houston and Jack Snowie and a dozen others by now knew better than to attribute this excitement to dance halls. Lafond possessed in his pocket a copy of Knapp's dismissal, and he had told them of it.
He told them of it mysteriously, in half-limits, pointing out tendencies and solutions to what they already knew, leaving them to draw deductions, sowing anxieties that there might spring up a harvest of distrust.
Through the woof of gayety he rapidly ran a dull thread of angry suspicion. Men made merry, and forgot all the past and all the future. Other men talked low-voiced in corners, and tried, from the distraction of drink and gayety, to draw clear plan and reflection. And always Lafond took other men aside and whispered eager little half-confidences, and went on quickly to the next.
His spirit was upheld by a great excitement, such as it had never experienced before, not even in his early and adventurous days. He seemed to himself to be mounting higher and higher on the summit of a great wave of luck, as a swimmer is lifted by the sea. And yet, behind it all, again for the first time in his life, he felt a portent in the air. It was as though the wave were rearing itself, only to curl over and break upon the shore. He laid this to nervousness, and yet it affected him with a certain superstitious awe.
So occupied was he, that he quite missed the girl's sudden exit, and was drawn from his brown study only by the sudden hush that succeeded it. In the silence a drunken voice uplifted itself loudly.
"M' work 'sh done," it vociferated. "I wan' m' pay!"
Everybody turned, prepared to laugh at this "comic relief!" Jack Snowie was addressing Billy Knapp. Billy at once became conscious of an audience, and the usual desire to appear well seized him. He smiled with the good-humored tolerance of a drunken man.
"I suppose you want me to take it right out of my pants pocket, eh, Jack?" he inquired paternally. "Of co'se you wants yo' pay! Come around in th' mornin' an' get it." He smiled again at the group that surrounded him. It appeared to be listening to this colloquy with unusual interest.
"I wan' m' pay!" reiterated Snowie sullenly, but then apparently lost the thread of his ideas and lurched away. Billy considered the incident closed. He was mistaken. The group did not dissolve; it came closer. The men had a strangely unfriendly look about the eyes. Billy did not understand it. He stepped toward one side of the circle about him. It closed the tighter to keep him in.
"What's the joke, boys?" he asked, still smiling.
The room was breathlessly still. Many of those within it did not understand the trouble, but trouble was in the air. Across a wavering line of heat could be dimly discerned the musicians, poised to start the next dance, but uncertain whether or not to begin. They did not begin. The silence was startled even by Peter's doggy yawn from the far corner of the saloon proper.
"Ain't no joke!" "That's what we want to know!" "Damned poor joke!" "You'll find out soon enough!" cried the men angrily, and then paused and looked at each other because of the jostle of words that meant nothing.
Billy flushed slowly, and his jaw settled into place.
"I'm jest as willin' to play 'horse' as anybody," he said, trying to find calm utterance; "and if this is a joke, I wishes some fellow-citizen to let me in. But, damn it!" he cried in a burst, "don't you get too funny! What the hell does you-all want me to do to carry out this yere witticism, anyway?"
The coolest and most determined looking man in the group made two steps across the floor, and confronted Billy squarely. At this evidence of earnestness, Billy lost his excitement and became deadly cool.
"Oh, it's you, Tony Houston, is it! Do you want your pay too?"
"Yes, I do," replied the man, "and I'm going to have it."
"Well," said Billy, "here's a pretty-lookin' outfit! Snowie was drunk, but this gang 's sober enough to know better, anyway. You come around to my office in the mornin', and I pays the bunch, every damn skunk, and don't you ever any of you show your faces there again. That's all I got to say."
"It ain't all I got to say," retorted Houston, standing his ground doggedly, "not by a long shot! You-all talks well, but has you got th' money?"
"What the——" cried Billy, choking.
"Hol' on thar! I repeats it"—and Houston thrust his face at Billy evilly—"has you got th' money? That's a fa'r question in business, I reckons. Has you got th' money? No, you hasn't. You got just an hundred and fifty-two dollars, and that's every red cent you has got."
Billy's immediate act of homicide was checked by this astounding knowledge of the total of his bank account. "Damn you, Tony Houston," he said slowly, at last, "I believe you're drunk too. You come in the mornin' and get paid, an' you'll find yore money comes along all right. This is a hell of a gang," he went on with contempt, "a hell of a gang! I gets you a job that lasts you all winter, and you wants your damn money in a dance hall and raises a row because I ain't carryin' a few thousan' dollars in each pants pocket. Don' think you makes anythin' by it. I lays myself out from now on to see that yore little two by four prospect holes ain't worth th' powder to blow 'em up, and I reckon I has a little influence as superintendent of this game."
"Superintendent?" cried Houston, and the men about laughed loudly.
Billy was plainly even more bewildered than angry. He considered the crowd all, as he expressed it, "plum' locoed"; but his passions, never of the most peaceful, were rising. In another moment he would have knocked Houston down and drawn his gun on the crowd which surrounded him, but that Michaïl Lafond shoved his way through the press. Billy caught sight of him with relief. Besides the plain bare fact of a row, the situation was complicated by the presence of so great an audience, before whom Billy naturally wished to conduct the affair correctly.
"What is the trouble? Here, this won't do!" cried Black Mike, as though in the capacity of proprietor preserving the respectability of his establishment.
"That's what I wants to know," cried Billy. "This (sulphurous) outfit of ranikaboo ijits has gone plum' locoed, and they stan's around yere howlin' for tha'r money as though I carries th' Philadelphy mint in my clothes!"
Lafond did not reply. He motioned the men aside, and, with the utmost gentleness, led the wondering Billy to a far corner of the room.
"I'm sorry that I have this to do, Billy," said Lafond. "I don't want to. It's none of my lay-out. But these men of yours sent them to me because I am notary public and I must do it."
Billy did not understand, but he caught the apology in Lafond's tone.
"That's all right, old man," he assured the latter, moistening his lips.
Without further preamble, the half-breed drew some papers from his breast pocket, and handed them to Billy.
The first was a review of the work done on the Great Snake group of claims, and a detailed analysis of it, carried out with astounding minuteness of technical knowledge for one so ignorant of mining as Stevens. It outlined also the work that should have been done; and it ended with a general conclusion of incompetence. The second contained his formal dismissal as superintendent. The third returned Billy's shares as his portion in the Company's dissolution, said Company having dissolved without assets.
Billy sat very quietly and read the papers over three times, while his fellow townsmen stood silent and watched him. The first perusal bewildered him, and turned him sick at heart with disappointment and recognition of the estimate in which men held him. The second brought to his consciousness that his companions were regarding him; and that, in turn, caused him to realize that his prestige was crumbled, his integrity dishonored, his abilities belittled. The third impressed on him the desperate straits in which he found himself—without money, holding a doubtful interest in claims whose bad name was by this established so firmly that no Eastern capital would ever take hold of them again, the moral if not legal debtor to these men who had worked all winter for him. The iron turned in his soul. Michaïl Lafond, sitting there in the rôle of sympathizer, was well satisfied with his handiwork. For the moment, Billy Knapp was a broken man.
He arose slowly, and passed out of the door in the dead silence of those about him.
After his exit, the dance was forgotten and an earnest discussion raged. It was no light matter. Eleven men had invested heavily in powder, fuse, drills, and windlasses for the purpose of fulfilling their contract with Knapp; and they, and twenty-two others, had put in their time for a number of months. Many of them owed for board or materials. Others, though out of debt, had spent nearly all their ready cash. They all seemed desperately close to bankruptcy, for Lafond said nothing whatever respecting his agreement to pay the contracts himself. And then again, as has been pointed out, the well-being of the whole camp had depended intimately on the success of its big mine, for the success of one enterprise like the Great Snake draws other capital to the district, rendering possible the sale of claims; while its failure always gives a bad name to a whole section.
So the ensuing discussion had plenty of interest for everybody. Lafond, as the bearer of the tidings, was besieged with questions. He was reluctant, but he answered. Besides, the facts were plain, ready for interpretation. Nobody could help seeing that it was all Billy's fault. After a time, poor Billy loomed large as a symbol of all the camp's misfortune. After a little time more, when the bar had more thoroughly done its work, a number became possessed of a desire to abate Billy.
They seized torches and a rope, ran up the gulch, and beat in the door of the office, only to encounter Billy enraged to the point of frenzy. That individual rushed them out at the muzzle of a pistol, with such a whirl of impetuous anger that it quite carried them off their feet, after which he planted his back against the building and stood there in the full light of the torches, reviling them. Why he was not shot I cannot tell. Billy was something of a dominant spirit when roused. That was the reason why, in the old days, he had made such a good scout. After he had called them all the names he could think of, he slammed the door on them. They went away without knowing why they did so.
When they got back to town, they gathered again in the Little Nugget saloon, drinking, swearing, shouting. The morale of the camp was broken. It was a debauch. They cried out against Billy, and they feared him for the moment. They made a stable-boy hide in the brush with a bottle of whisky, to watch the works, to spy on they knew not what. Lafond drank with them. He had never done so before. As they became more noisy, he fell into a sullen fit, and went to sit over behind the stove where he crooned away to himself an old chanson. He stopped drinking, but the effects remained. It seemed to his befogged mind that the wave had broken and that he was falling through the air. Shortly he would be cast up against the beach. "A fool for luck!" he muttered to himself, trying to rehabilitate his denuded confidence. He took out the Company's letter to him, saying that the deeds were at Rapid awaiting his action, and read it. Then he put a stick of wood on the fire. He shivered and rubbed his eyes. Finally he went over to the hotel, where he washed his head again and again in cold water. After a time, he returned to the Little Nugget, feeling somewhat better.
It was now daylight, although the sun was not up. The stable-boy came in from the upper gulch to say that Billy Knapp was hitching his horses to the buckboard. The news sobered them somewhat. Ten minutes later, the stable-boy again returned with the news that Knapp had loaded his buckboard, and was on the point of driving through town. A dozen men at once ran out into the street and concealed themselves behind the corners of buildings.