With wild speed he ran along the streets, leaping down the short flights of steps that broke the ascending sidewalks. He thrust people aside and rushed on, gray-faced and fiery-eyed. For the second time in his life there was murder in his heart.
Through the darkness of his mind memories of her passed like slides across a magic lantern. A sudden picture of her that day long ago at the spring, when she had asked him to let her mother stay in his cottage, rose up clear and detached on his mental vision. He heard again the broken tones of her voice and saw her face with the tears on it, childish and trustful, as it had been before the influence of Jerry had blighted its youth and marred its innocence.
The fury that possessed him rose up in his throat. He could not have spoken. He could only run on, tearing his way through the crowds on C Street, across it to a smaller thoroughfare and down that to where the dark mass of the Cresta Plata buildings stood out against the night. He heard the distant hum of the machinery, and then, unexpected and startling, the roar of men. It was like the noise when the day shift came up and every ascending cage was packed solid with miners.
As he approached the door the men began to come out, streams of them, some running, others gathering in knots. Hundreds of men poured into the night, gesticulating, shouting, congesting in black groups, whence a broken clamor of voices rose. He realized the strangeness of it, that something was the matter, but it was all dim and of no importance to him. His mind held only one thought. Rushing past them he cried:
“Barclay! Is Barclay up yet? Do you know where Barclay is?”
An Irishman, who stumbled against him in the dark, paused long enough to shout to him:
“It’s Barclay that’s hurt. Hurry up, Colonel, they’ll be wanting you inside. It’s a doctor I’m after. God knows if he is where they say he is, there’s no life in him now.”
CHAPTER VIII
THE AROUSED LION
Black Dan, as he walked to the office that Friday morning, had been giving serious thought to the situation of his son-in-law. Mercedes had not spent the summer in Virginia as her father had hoped and expected. When he saw her in San Francisco, as he did every few weeks, she talked of her delicate throat and expressed a fear of the climate. It was evident that she could not or would not live there.
That his daughter loved her husband Black Dan had no doubt. And as he walked to the mine that morning he was pondering a scheme he had lately been considering of sending Jerry to San Francisco, to be placed in charge of his large property interests. Though he regarded his son-in-law with contemptuous dislike, he could not deny that the young man had worked hard and faithfully all summer. Moreover, the stealthy watch kept upon him had revealed no irregularities in his conduct. In a place and at a time when men led wild lives with wilder associates, Jerry’s behavior had been exemplary. His life had been given to work and business; women had no place in it.