Through all these bickerings and compromisings the Lawrenceburg fight held on, giving us the most trouble and costing the most money. Blackwell proved himself to be a scrapper of sorts, leaving no expedient untried in his attempts to tie us up and put us out of business. Shortly after we began developing in earnest, he put a shaft-sinking force on the nearest of the Lawrenceburg upper claims on the hillside above us, hoping, as we supposed, to flood us out by tapping one of the numerous underground water bodies with which the region abounds and turning it loose on us. At least, we could imagine no other reason for the move, since the growing dump at this upper working was entirely barren of ore, and remained so.
On our own part we were able to get back at Blackwell only in small ways. When he tried to shut us out of our wagon road right-of-way in the gulch, we beat him in the courts and made him pay damages for obstructing us. Later, when his upper dump began to encroach upon our ground, we sued him again and got more damages, with a peremptory order from the court to vacate.
Still later we took Phineas Everton away from him. The assayer had had some disagreement with Blackwell, the nature of which was not explained, but which I, for one, could easily understand, and Everton, apologetic now for his early suspicion of us, had told Barrett that he was open to a proposal. The proposal was promptly made and we installed Everton as our assayer and expert in the town offices, fitting up a laboratory for him which lacked nothing that money could buy in the way of furnishings and equipment.
Consequent upon this change, Barrett and I both saw more of the Evertons. They took a small house in town and Polly welcomed us both, making no distinction, so far as I could determine, between the president and the secretary-treasurer. Barrett's attitude toward Polly puzzled me not a little. He was a frequent visitor in the cottage on the hill, but he rarely went without asking me to go along. If he were really Mary Everton's lover, he was certainly going about his love-making most moderately, I concluded.
I like to remember that I was loyal to him at this time in spite of the puzzlement. It is perhaps needless to say that these cottage visits had done their worst for me and I was hopelessly in love with the sweet-faced, honest-hearted young woman who had grown out of the brown-eyed little girl of the Glendale school-days. Nevertheless, I was still able to recognize the barrier which my conviction, imprisonment and escape, together with the ever-present peril of recapture, interposed; also I was able to recognize Barrett's prior claim, and the fact that he could leave wife and children the priceless heritage of a good name and a clean record—as I could not.
Touching this matter of peril, the period of our beginnings as a corporation was not without its alarms. Twice I had seen Kellow at a distance, and once I had stood beside him at the hotel counter where he had been examining the registered list of names at a moment when I, all unconscious of his presence until I was elbowing him, had stopped in passing to ask a question of the clerk. That near-encounter showed me that I was neither better nor worse than the man who had stood, loaded weapon in hand, on the sidewalk in the heart of a June night, coldly deliberating upon the advisability of committing a murder. I was conscious of a decent hope that Kellow wouldn't look up and recognize me—as he did not—but coincident with the hope the homicidal devil was whispering me to be ready with the pistol, without which I never went abroad any more, even to cross the street from my rooms to the office. And I was ready.
This mania, which seemed fated to seize me at any moment when my liberty was threatened, added another stone to the barrier of good resolutions which I had builded in behalf of my loyalty to Barrett and a more or less chivalrous consideration for Mary Everton and her future peace of mind. If the ex-convict might not venture, the potential man-slayer was at a still greater disadvantage.
I recall, as vividly as if it were yesterday, how the first small breach was made in this barrier of good resolutions. Barrett and I were in Denver together, joining forces in our regular monthly fight with the smelter pirates. We had been to the theater and were smoking bedtime cigars in the mezzanine lounge of the Brown Palace. I have forgotten the name of the play we had seen, and even the plot of it; all that I recollect is that it turned upon the well-worn theme of loyalty in love.
Barrett seldom talked of himself or his past, even to me; and I was closer to him, I think, than anyone else in the West. But the play seemed to have touched some hidden spring. Almost before I knew it he was telling me of his college days, and of his assured future at that time as the only son of a well-to-do New England manufacturer.
"Those were the days when I didn't have a care in the world," he said. "My father was the typical American business man, intent upon piling up a fortune for my mother and sister and me. I couldn't see that he was wearing himself out in the effort to get ahead, and at the same time to give us all the luxuries as we went along; none of us could see it. His notion was to put me through the university, give me a year or so abroad, and then to take me into the business with him.… Don't let me bore you."