He toiled like two men, each swifter and more savagely efficient than himself; he upset the prim, old he-maidenish order of that carefully packed, spick-and-span camp; he rumpled the beds; strewed old clothes, books, candles, specimens, pipes and cigarette papers with lavish hand; made untidy, sprawling heaps of tin plates; knives, forks and spoons; spilled candle-grease and tobacco on the scoured table; and generally gave things a cozy and habitable appearance.
He gave a hundred deft touches here and there. He spread an open book face downward on the table. (It was “Alice in Wonderland,” and he opened it at the Mock-Turtle.) Meanwhile an unoccupied eye snatched titles from a shelf of books against possible question; he penned a short note to himself—Mr. Tobe Long—in Gwin’s handwriting, folded the note to creases, twisted it to a spill, lit it, burned a corner of it, pinched it out and threw it under the table; and, while doing these and other things, he somehow managed to shed every article of Jeff Bransford’s clothing and to put on the work-stained garments of a miner.
The perspiration on his face was no stage make-up, but good, honest sweat. He rubbed stone-dust and sand on his sweaty arms and into his sweaty hair; he rubbed most of it from his hair and into the two-days’ stubble on his face, simultaneously fishing razor and mug from the trunk, leaving them in evidence on the table. He worked stone-dust into his ears, behind his ears; he grimed it on forehead and neck; he even dropped a little into his shoes, which all this while had been performing independent miracles to make the camp look comfortable. He threw on a dingy cap, thrust in the cap a miner’s candlestick, with a lighted candle, that it might properly drip upon him while he arranged further details—and so faced the world as Tobe Long, a stooped and overworked man!
Mr. Tobe Long, working with feverish haste, dug a small cave half-way down the steep side of the dump farthest from the road and buried therein a tightly rolled bundle containing every article appertaining to the defunct Bransford, with the single exception of the little eohippus; a pocketknife, which a miner must have to cut powder and fuse, having been found in the trunk—what time also the little turquoise horse was transferred to Mr. Long’s pocket to bring him luck in his new career—a poor thing compared with the cowman’s keen blade, but better for Mr. Long’s purposes, as smelling strongly of dynamite. Then Mr. Long—Tobe—hid the grave by sliding and shoveling broken rock down the dump upon it.
Next he threw into a wheelbarrow drills, spoon, tamping stick, gads, drill-hammer, rock-hammer, canteen, shovel and pick—taking care, even in his haste, to select a properly matched set of drills—and trundled the barrow up the drift at a pace which would give a Miners’ Union the rabies. At the breast, he unshipped his cargo in right miner’s fashion, the drills in a graduated stepladder row along the wall; loaded the barrow with broken ore, a bit of charred fuse showing at the top, and wheeled it out at the same unprofessional gait, leaving it on the dump just above the spot where his late sepulchral rites had freshened the appearance of the sunbeaten dump.
He next performed his ablutions in an amateurish and perfunctory fashion, scrupulously observing a well-defined waterline.
“There!” said Mr. Long. “I near made a break that time!” He went back to the barrow and trundled it assiduously to the tunnel’s mouth and back several times, carefully never in quite the same place—finally leaving it not above the sepulchered spoil, but near the ore stack, as befitted its valuable contents. “I got to think of everything. One wrong break’ll fix me good!” said Mr. Long. He felt his neck delicately, as if he detected some foreign presence there. “In the tunnel, now, there’s only the one place where the wheel can go; so it don’t matter so much in there.”
The fire having now burned down to proper coals, Mr. Long set about supper; with the corner of his eye on the lookout for the pursuers of the late Bransford. He set the coffee-pot by the fire—they were now in the edge of the tar-brush; there were only two of them. He put on a pot of potatoes in their jackets—he could see them plainly, diminutive black horsemen twinkling through the brush; he sliced bacon into a frying-pan and put it aside to await his cue; he disposed other cooking ware in lifelike attitudes near the fire—they were in the long shadow of Double Mountain; their horses were jaded; they rode slowly. He dropped the sour-dough jar and placed the broken pieces where they would be inconspicuously visible. Having thus a perfectly obvious excuse for not having sour-dough bread, which requires thirty-six hours of running start for preliminary rising, Jeff—Mr. Tobe Long—mixed up a just-as-good baking-powder substitute—they rode like young men; they rode like young men not to the saddle born, and Tobe permitted himself a chuckle: “By hooky, I’ve got an even chance for my little bluff!”
He shook his head reprovingly at himself for this last admission. With every minute he looked more like Tobe Long than ever—if only there had been any Tobe Long to look like. His mind ran upon nuggets, pockets, placers, faults, true fissure veins, the cyanide process, concentrates, chlorides, sulphides, assays, leases and bonds; his face took on the strained wistfulness which marks the confirmed prospector: he was Tobe Long!
The bell rang.