“Jule Quintell and his crowd. Listen! About a month ago, George Harrison—he’s Quintell’s private secretary—came into my store to buy something. I’ve known him ever since he arrived in camp; that’s about two years. He’d been drinking this afternoon. We got talking, and I asked him if there was anything new—sociablelike, you know. And he said they’d been tipped off that a railroad company was figuring on building a track into camp from the main line.
“I told him I thought it’d be just the thing we needed. He laughed—oh, so nasty!—and leaned over the counter and said: ‘Mrs. Liggs, railroads generally get their own way, but they won’t in this neck of the woods. We’re going to draw a line in the sand and tell them they’ll go that far and no further.’ ‘You sure ain’t going to stop them, Mr. Harrison?’ I asked. ‘We’re going to make them come to us. And if they try their strong-arm tactics we’ll give them all they’re looking for. If it’s a case of fight we’ll make Soapweed Plains look like a slaughterhouse.’ I seen that he’d been drinking considerable and I figured he might he bragging, and I never thought nothing more about it till just now when you mentioned the spur track.”
Lex lit a cigarette and gave her a smile. “I think you’ll find he was doing that very thing, Mother Liggs—bragging. Admitting that this fellow Quintell is a power in Geerusalem and that his word is law—why, if he so much as voiced an objection to so important a factor to the camp’s progress, as a railroad, his most trusted followers would turn against him. Men nowadays appreciate the value of transportation facilities. They may buck the railroad companies on every issue and all that sort of thing, but they can’t get along without trains and they know it. Quintell wouldn’t dare put a single, solitary obstacle in the way of a spur track. On the contrary, he’ll peel off his coat and help us.”
“Don’t you be too sure about that,” said Mrs. Liggs, with a warning shake of her head. “You don’t know him, Lex. Old Nick ain’t any trickier than he is, and when it comes to being real dirty and cruel and murderous, he’s worse than the devil and all his fiends. He just plays with men—like a cat does with a mouse. Any man that crosses him is as good as gone. If Quintell can’t crush him to the wall, ruin him, run him out of camp, he has his throat cut; the buzzards finish him. And it’s all done quietly. There’s no proof or nothing. And all the time it’s getting stronger and stronger, the Quintell machine is working day and night, growing bolder, reaching out here and there and grabbing mining property, deliberately stealing it. I’ve heard that a lot of good men have been forced to join the gangsters, ’cos they’re afraid if they don’t stand in, they’ll lose their mines—if they don’t turn up missing themselves, some morning.”
Lex gave a short laugh. “I remember you warned me that evening I met him in front of your store,” he said easily; “and I’m going to repeat what I told you. It’s this: He’ll meet the wrong man—at the right time, Mother Liggs. But tell me, his power lies in the slum element of the camp only, doesn’t it?”
“You see that!” she cried triumphantly. “You ain’t got the least idea how he works, how cunning he is. No, it doesn’t! There’s mining engineers, brokers, and assayers—influential rascals—in his clique. They’re the brains of the gang. The slum element, as you call it, are just the tools and they do what they’re told—all the claim-jumping and fighting and killing. Quintell, as anybody’ll tell you, is the boss. They control the constable and the courts, and no matter what one of the gang does, he ain’t even arrested. I tell you, Lex, he’s dangerous, as deadly as sin. He’s always put me in mind of a big, horrible, poisonous spider that gets fat killing little bugs and eating them.”
“Well, there’s one satisfaction, Mother Liggs,” he replied, as he reached over and patted her hand: “The career of a bad man is usually short. He’s like a mosquito—he stings one time too many. There was Billy Gee, for example. Never was there a more contemptible scoundrel ever lived than that miserable renegade——”
“Pardon me for interrupting you, Mr. Sangerly, but are you in the mood for a surprise?”
It was Dot who spoke. While Mrs. Liggs and Lex were talking she had quietly left the table and gone into the bedroom. She stood now just inside the door, her face sightly flushed, her eyes shining with an odd light. In her hand, she held the loot of the M. & S., wrapped in her mother’s old silk shawl. Mrs. Liggs, her snowy head resting on her hand, gazed listlessly into her plate.
“A surprise is always in order, Miss Huntington,” laughed Lex. “Providing, of course, it is a pleasant one.”