With the inrush of the crowd Gordon laid a hand on Harrison's arm, lifting his eyes in mute appeal, and Harrison, understanding, picked him up bodily in his arms and got him away to one side. Here, for ten minutes, he lay weakly enough, his head against Harrison's knee, his eyes half closed. Then, somewhat unsteadily, he struggled to his feet, and walked over to his still prostrate foe. Martin's grin, this time, was sincere, and his faint handshake had a friendly pressure.
"All right," he said weakly; "no kick comin'. I know when I'm up against a better man, and you done me fair."
Gordon straightened up, and spoke that all might hear. "Look here, gentlemen," he said, "I'm afraid I've started off badly. I'm out here on business, and I need the good-will of every one of you. Perhaps later on you may be glad of mine in return, but we can't tell about that now. All I want to say is that I didn't look for a fight, but since it came along I'm glad it's over, and I hope we'll all be better friends for it. I'm afraid I only beat Bill here by accident, and I'll bet I feel a good deal worse done up than he does." He paused and drew a fifty-dollar note from his pocket, handing it to Stickney with a smile, "I'm afraid I shan't be with you to-night," he added, "but I want you gentlemen to have a drink on me, all around, and then do a repeat as long as the money holds out, and I never want a better fight than I had to-day."
Amid the general murmur of approval he nodded to Harrison, and together they started back for town. That evening Gordon spent alone in the hotel, in greater pain than he would have been willing to admit; but in tavern and bar-room and store his fame waxed mightily, and the next morning every man, woman and child in Seneca township knew that Mr. Richard Gordon, a "minin' sharp" from the effete East, had suddenly appeared among them, and had most emphatically "made good."
CHAPTER V
[A QUESTION OF FINANCE]
The three men were seated together in Gordon's tiny room in the hotel. The shades were drawn, and the lamp on the table diffused at one and the same time light, heat, and a reek of ill-smelling oil. A scattered mass of papers, notes, jottings, memoranda, littered the room, and from the midst of this disorder Gordon, flushed, perspiring, for once lacking his usual calm, was seeking to bring about some semblance of system and order. Seated at the table, coat and vest tossed aside, he went through a regular routine, seizing on a paper and reading it through, then either tearing it up and tossing it aside, or transcribing its contents, his fingers flying furiously over the typewriter's clicking keys. Steadily and rapidly he did his work, and steadily the little heap of typewritten pages at his right hand mounted higher and higher still.
Jim Mason, sprawled comfortably in the armchair, smoked in silence, apparently waiting with calmness for the completion of the task. Jack Harrison sat on the side of the bed, awkward and uncomfortable, his troubled gaze shifting from Mason to Gordon and back again with the air of one who wishes to see a puzzling silence brought to an end.
Finally Gordon cast the last discarded memorandum from him, whirled the last sheet of copy from the typewriter, and with a heartfelt sigh of relief pushed back his chair. "There," he cried, "that's out of the way; and now let's see what we've got to show for it."
For a moment he sorted and arranged the typewritten sheets; then, looking up at the others, he spoke eagerly, anxiously, almost with a note of entreaty in his tone. "I hate to rush this thing through this way," he said, "and under ordinary circumstances I wouldn't do it, but you understand the situation as well as I do. This is the time you want to give me a free hand on the stock market end of the deal, just as later on, when you want all kinds of new-fangled machinery and all that sort of thing, I shall have to let you get it, though I won't know whether we need it or not. In other words, it's a mutual affair. You don't know and don't care just the precise moment when the stock ought to be listed, and I don't know and don't care about the difference in the rock on the sixth level and the seventh, but you want to let me run the incorporation and the market end, though you're not especially interested in them, and I want to let you run everything connected with the mine, though personally I don't care half so much about all that part of it as you do."