The pioneer

by Geraldine Bonner

It seemed to the Colonel complete confirmation of his fears. Allen leaving Wednesday morning would reach San Francisco some time that night. Evidently his plans had been made beforehand, for the ship he had taken was one of the fastest merchantmen on the Pacific and was scheduled to leave at midday Thursday.

Nothing was suspected at Virginia yet, and June was there alone. At any moment now, the information being in the hands of more than one person, Allen’s flight might be made public, and she, his only representative, would become the victim of the rage of the petty creditors who would swarm about her. He was the one human being upon whom she could call. No duty or business would hold him from her. A thrill of something like joy passed through him when he realized that now, at last, he could stand between her and all trouble—a lion with its cub behind it.

He took the evening train for Virginia, hoping to reach Reno the next morning and catch the branch line into the mining town. But luck was against him. A snow-shed was down near the summit. Though it was only the latter half of September, a premature blizzard wrapped the mountain heights in a white mist. For eight hours the train lay blocked on an exposed ridge, and it was late afternoon when it finally set the Colonel down at Reno.

The delays had only accelerated his desire to be with June. During the long hours of waiting his imagination had been active, picturing her in various distressing positions, besieged by importunate creditors. He hired the fastest saddle horse in the Reno stables and rode the twenty-one miles into Virginia in an hour. It was dark when he reached there. The swift ride through the sharp autumnal air had braced his nerves. He was as anxious as ever to see her, but he thought that before he did so he would stop for a few moments at the Cresta Plata and see Rion, explain his early return, and learn if anything was known in Virginia of Allen’s flight.

The office was already lighted up and behind it the great bulk of hoisting works loomed into the night, its walls cut with the squares of illumined windows, its chimneys rising black and towering against the stars. A man who came forward to take his horse told him that the gentlemen were all in the mine with a party of visitors. The Colonel, hearing this, turned his steps from the office to the door of the hoisting works a few yards beyond.

The building, full of shadows despite the lanterns and gas jets ranged along its walls, looked vacant and enormous in its lofty spaciousness. The noise of machinery echoed through it, the vibration shaking it as if it were a shell built about the intricacies of wheels, bands, and sheaves that whirred and slid in complicated, humming swiftness against the ceiling. The light struck gleams from the car tracks that radiated from the black hole of the shaft mouth where it opened in the middle of the floor. It was divided into four compartments, and from these a thin column of steam arose and floated up to the roof. Here and there a few men were moving about, and aloft behind their engines were the four engineers. They were mute as statues, their eyes fixed on the dials in front of them which registered the movements of the cages underground; their ears on the alert to catch the notes of their bells, to them intelligible as the words of a spoken language. Near the shaft mouth sitting on an overturned box was Rion Gracey.

He saw the Colonel and rose to his feet with an exclamation of surprise and pleasure. The elder man, drawing him aside, told him the reason of his return and asked him news of June. Moving toward the door they conversed together in lowered voices. The Colonel, now convinced that no suspicion of the nature of Allen’s absence had yet reached Virginia, felt his anxieties diminished. He said that he might attend the dinner which Black Dan was giving that evening to the Easterners. Rion was now waiting for them to come up. Barclay and the women ought to be up at any moment; they had been underground nearly two hours, an unusual length of time, for even on the thousand-foot level the heat was intense.

His anxieties soothed, the Colonel left the building, his heart feeling lighter than it had felt for two weeks.

With a step of youthful buoyancy he mounted the steep cross-streets which connected by a series of stairs and terraces the few long thoroughfares of the town. He was out of breath when he saw the dark shape of the Murchison mansion standing high on its crest of ground against a deep blue, star-dotted sky. His approach was from the side, and that no lights appeared in any of the windows in that part of the house did not strike him as unusual. But when he reached the foot of the long stairway and looking up saw that there was not a gleam of light to be seen on the entire façade, his joy suddenly died, and in its place a dread, sharp and disturbing, seized him.

For a moment he stood motionless, staring up. The shrubs that grew along the sloping banks of the garden rustled dryly in the autumn night. There was something sinister in the high form of the house, mounted aloft on its terrace, no friendly pane gleaming with welcoming light, no sound near it but the low, occasional whispering of dying vegetation. As he ran up the steps, his footfall sounded singularly loud and seemed to be buffeted back from empty walls.