Cole of Spyglass Mountain

by Arthur Preston Hankins

He puzzled for hours, of course, over who had shot him, and why. Naturally he thought often of The Whimperer and Slim Wolfgang—the only people in that country who could possibly have a grudge against him—but always he discarded them as his possible assailants for the reason that it seemed illogical they could harbor a hatred so fierce as to make them try to murder him. After long contemplation, he was forced to adopt the conclusion that some deer hunter had shot him by accident and had fled and left him to his fate rather than face the possible consequences.

Madge Mundy came to see him one afternoon, and apologized for not coming sooner, pleading that she was almost distracted over the grave matters in her camp and was kept busy from morn till night.

She sat beside his bed and smoothed back his raven hair with her soft, cool hand. Joshua was nearly well and suffering not at all, but immediately he convinced himself that he was very ill and needed these tender ministrations. His gray-blue eyes looked up into her reddish-brown eyes pleadingly, and Madge, too, believed that he needed these tender ministrations. At any rate she continued them, and Joshua lay with eyes closed, trembling with ecstasy, afraid to look into her face again for fear that she would see that he was in the seventh heaven of delight.

They talked of Shanty Madge’s problem, but with Joshua, at least, the words, “slide” and “tunnel” and “dynamite” were spoken with a caressing cadence that carried an undercurrent of meaning.

“I guess all is lost,” Madge had told him when first the subject was brought up.

And now she continued: “The entire top of the hill keeps slipping in an easterly direction directly into the tunnel. We are able to stop it with timbers and baled hay—which last we are using now as likely to form a more solid wall to hold the slide—but as soon as we attempt to go ahead and fire a shot, no matter how light, the roof caves again, and down comes another avalanche. Of course we are working toward the slide from the other end of the tunnel, too, and so far the roof holds there. But it’s a long tunnel, and where we’re losing time is in not being able to progress a foot with this end.

“Another big engineer has come from New York, and he says nothing more can be done than has been done. Everybody is up in the air. And—and, Joshua, I have given up and turned the outfit over to Demarest, Spruce and Tillou. I’m on salary now. I’m through. I know when I’m whipped, and I must make the best of it. In the end, of course, we’ll have to sign over everything to them, and I guess they’re no more anxious than I am to continue the heart-breaking work. That slide is like the heads of the Hydra that Hercules slew. Its heads grew as fast as one was lopped off, you know, until Hercules applied a firebrand to prevent their growth. And I—I’m just through forever with railroading, Joshua—that’s all. Joshua, we’ll be broke.”

She was near to tears, and Joshua cursed the bullet that had laid him in a bed in Dr. J. Miles Stanhope’s flimsy hospital.

“Madge,” he said, “I’m going to tell you something; though, if you are convinced, it will perhaps hurt you. Maybe I’m the Hercules to apply the firebrand to your nine-headed monster. I firmly believe that I could have stopped that slide when it first occurred. I believed so the day I went to your camp and examined the top of the hill and the tunnel. But there were big engineers on the job as well as two old-time contractors, and I thought surely they would find a way to solve the problem. Then when days and days passed and nothing was accomplished I hated to offer my services for fear I’d be laughed at and told to mind my business. I’m only a construction stiff in the eyes of those fellows, you know, and they would have put me in my place in short order.

“But things looked different when Demarest offered twenty-five hundred dollars to the man who could stop the slide. Then it seemed to be open to anybody, and I was on my way to your camp when I picked up this bullet. If I had succeeded I would have felt wretched, to think that I could have done the same at the first and had failed to offer my services until the reward was announced. But I guess you would have understood.