The dark shaft beside me sent up its dank breath of stale powder fumes, and the acrid odor was as the fragrance of a fertile field ripe for the sickle. In this reeking pit at my elbow, gold, the subtle, the potent, the arbiter of all destinies, stood ready to fight for me. The liberty which I had stolen, but which had first been stolen from me, would shortly find a defender too strong to be overthrown by all the prejudice and injustice which are so ready to fly at the throat of helplessness. The reinstatement, which I had been unable to win as a mendicant ex-convict, I could buy with gold in the open market; and when it should be bought and paid for, all the world would clap and cry, Well done!
Barrett had gone to bed exacting a promise that I should call him at two o'clock. But I let the hour go by, and another, and yet another, until the stars were paling in the east when I got up, stiff in every joint, to meet Gifford as he came up the gulch. He was haggard and weary, trembling like an overworked draft horse, and he had to lick his lips before he could frame the words which were to be our alarm signal.
"It's all over," he croaked hoarsely. "The wagon's broke down a couple of miles below, right out on the open mountain-side. We've been working like hell all night trying to drag the load down to some place where we could hide it, but it was no good. Dixon's gone on to town to get another wagon, but the mischief is done. Come daylight, everybody on this side of Bull Mountain will know what's in that wagon, and where it comes from."
The carpenter was practically dead on his feet from the night of fierce toil, and in addition to his weariness was half-famished. He had come in while it was yet dark to get something to eat, and was planning to go back at once. I aroused Barrett promptly, and together we tramped out to the crest of the spur overlooking the Lawrenceburg workings and the mountain-side below. In the breaking dawn, with the help of Barrett's field-glass, we could make out the shape of the disabled wagon on the bare slope hundreds of feet below. Early as it was, there was already a number of moving figures encircling it; a group which presently strung itself out in Indian file on a diagonal course up to our gulch. The early-morning investigators were taking the plainly marked wagon trail in reverse, and Barrett turned to me with a brittle laugh.
"That settles it, Jimmie. The secret is out, and in another half hour we'll be fighting like the devil to keep those fellows from relocating every foot of ground we've got. Let's go back and get ready for them."
XVI
In the Open
Though there was between twenty and thirty thousand dollars' worth of high-grade ore lying unguarded in the broken-down wagon two miles below, we promptly forgot it. Losing no minute of the precious time, we hastened to restake our claim, marking the boundaries plainly and putting up "No Trespass" notices to let the coming invaders know that we were alive and on the job. We knew very well that our boundary lines would be disregarded; that in striving to cover every foot of the unclaimed fragments of the original triangle, the excited gold-seekers would overlap us in all directions. But we meant to have the law on our side.
Our next move was a hurried covering of the shaft mouth with planks provided for just such an emergency; this and a barricading of the shack against a possible rush to loot it. By working fast we were ready by the time the vanguard of the rush appeared as a line of toiling climbers at the foot of the gulch. Barrett glanced at his watch.