Five minutes earlier I had been facing the world a free man; free to go and come as I pleased, free to sit and smoke with a friend in the most public place in the camp. But now I slid from my chair with my hat pulled over my eyes and crept to the door, watching Kellow every step of the way, ready to bolt and run, or to turn and fight to kill, at the slightest rustling of the upheld newspaper. Once safely outside in the cool, clean night air of the streets I despised myself with a loathing too bitter to be set in words. But the fact remained.
It was like the strugglings of a man striving to throw off the benumbing effects of an opium debauch—the effort to be at one again with the present. The effort was no more than half successful when I stepped into a late-closing hardware store and bought a weapon—a repeating rifle with its appropriate ammunition. Barrett had said something about the lack of weapons at the claim—we had only the shot-gun and Gifford's out-of-date revolver—and I made the purchase automatically in obedience to an underlying suggestion which was scarcely more than half conscious.
But once more in the street, and with the means in my hands, a sudden and fierce impulse prompted me to go back to the hotel lobby and kill the man who held my fate between his finger and thumb. Take it as a virtue or a confession of weakness, as you will, but it was only the thought of what I owed Barrett and Gifford that kept me from doing it.
So it was a potential murderer, at least in willing intention, who took the long trail back under the summer stars to the hills, with the rifle and Barrett's shot-gun—the latter picked up in passing the sampling works—nestling in the hollow of his arm. God or the devil could have given me no greater boon that night than the hap to meet Kellow on the lonesome climb. I am sure I should have shot him without the faintest stirring of irresolution. By the time I reached our gulch I was fuming over my foolishness in buying the rifle—a clumsy weapon that would everywhere advertise my purpose. What I needed, I told myself, was a pocket weapon, to be carried day and night; and the next time I should go to town the lack should be supplied.
For by now all scruples were dead and I was assuring myself grittingly that the entire Cripple Creek district was too narrow to hold the man who knew, and the man who was afraid.
XV
The Broken Wagon
The day following the Kellow incident being Sunday, the three of us snatched an hour or so in the early forenoon for a breathing space. Sitting around the plank table in the bunk shack we took account of stock, as a shopkeeper would say. It was apparent to all of us that the blazoning abroad of our secret could not now be long delayed. A new gold strike yielding ore worth anywhere from one to twenty-five dollars a pound was startling enough to make a stir even in the one and only Cripple Creek, and it seemed nothing short of a miracle that we had not already been traced and our location identified.
It was Barrett's gift to take the long look ahead. At his suggestion, Gifford, who was something of a rough-and-ready draftsman, sketched a plan for the necessary shaft-house and out-buildings, fitting the structures to our limited space. When the fight to retain possession should begin we meant to strike fast and hard; Barrett had already gone the length of bargaining, through a friend in town, for building material and machinery, which were to be rushed out to us in a hurry at the firing of the first gun in what we all knew would be a battle for existence.