Читать книгу Alton of Somasco - Harold Bindloss - Страница 10

Deringham spent several weeks at Somasco without arriving at any understanding with its owner. This, however, did not cause him any great concern, because he had at his doctor’s recommendation decided on a somewhat lengthy absence from England, and found himself regaining health and vigour with every day he passed in the pleasant valley. He was also desirous of gaining time, because he had left negotiations for the formation of a company to take over an enterprise he was interested in in train, and, while these could proceed as well without him, a favourable termination would, by relieving him from immediate financial anxiety, enable him if it seemed advisable to adopt a firmer tone in any discussion respecting Carnaby. Alton had in the meanwhile quietly avoided the subject.

Affairs were in this position when he sat one evening with his daughter on the verandah, glancing now and then down the valley. It was very still and peaceful, and trails of white mist crept about the pines, while, though the paling light still lingered high up upon the snow, a crescent moon was growing into visibility against the steely blueness behind the eastern shoulder of a hill. Deringham, however, was listening for the thud of hoofs, and wondering if the mounted man sent down to the settlement would bring any letters for him. His daughter sat close by him, dreamily watching the darkness roll higher about the pines. She had not as yet grown tired of Somasco, and found its owner an interesting study. He was of a type that was new to her, and the girl of a somewhat inquiring disposition.

Presently she turned to her father. “How long shall we stay here?” she said.

“I don’t know,” said Deringham. “It depends upon the Canadian, and in the meanwhile I am picking up a good deal of useful information about the mineral resources of this country. Alton of Somasco seems to be a somewhat intelligent man.”

“Yes,” said the girl thoughtfully. “It is a little difficult to dislike him.”

“I,” said her father, smiling, “do not know that there is any great necessity, or notice signs of a marked endeavour on your part to do so.”

The girl glanced at him inquiringly. “You mean?” said she.

“Nothing,” said Deringham. “Only the Canadian is also a man. Well, we shall be going on to Vancouver presently.”

The girl laughed a little. “That is incontrovertible,” she said. “Why not go on now?”

“There are reasons,” said Deringham somewhat gravely. “For one thing I hope to be in a position shortly to make terms with him.”

“But Carnaby is his,” said the girl.

“Yes,” said Deringham, “unless he gives it up.”

His daughter appeared thoughtful. “I scarcely think he will!”

Deringham laughed a little. “It might be possible to find means of inducing him.”

Alice Deringham shook her head. “From what I have seen of Mr. Alton, I fancy it would be difficult.”

“Well,” said Deringham dryly, “we shall see.”

He had scarcely spoken when a soft drumming sound came out of the stillness. It grew steadily louder, was lost in the roar of the river, and rose more distinct again, while the girl, who realized that a man was riding up the valley, wondered with unusual curiosity what news he would bring. She also grew impatient, for that staccato drumming seemed to jar upon the harmonies of the evening, and she walked to the balustrade when the sound swelled into a thudding beat of hoofs. The man was crossing the oatfield at a gallop now. Then the sound rose muffled out of the gloom of the orchard the trail ran through, and she felt curiously expectant when once more the rider swung out into the shadowy clearing. She afterwards remembered the vague apprehension with which she watched and listened, for it seemed to her that some intangible peril was drawing nearer with the galloping horse. A minute or two later Seaforth came into the verandah with a packet of letters in his hand.

“There are several for you, sir,” he said, handing Deringham some of them, and passed into the house shouting, “Harry.”

Deringham glanced through his budget, and his face changed a little, while his daughter noticed the set of his lips and the clustering wrinkles about his eyes. There was a telegraphic message, but he put it aside and opened a bulky envelope whose stamp he recognized. Then the missive he took out rustled a little in his hand as he read:

“I’m afraid negotiations are not progressing well. Mortimer, as you will see by enclosed copies of correspondence, demands a revaluation which would not be advisable before he will underwrite any of the capital.”

Deringham laid down the letter, and his daughter turned suddenly at his exclamation. “The fools should have bought him off!” he said.

Then he took up the telegraphic message and read, “Scheme impracticable. Cannot compromise with Mortimer. Harper and the Syndicate against us. Details following.”

Deringham said nothing, but sat staring before him with a face that seemed to have grown suddenly grey and haggard, until his daughter spoke to him.

“Have you had bad news, father?” she said.

The man, who had been sitting so that the light which shone out from the room behind them fell upon him, moved. “I have,” he said. “This message informs me that at least ten thousand pounds have been virtually taken out of my pocket. As it happened, I wanted the money somewhat badly.”

He rose, and entering the house met Alton coming out of it. The Canadian brushed past him with a letter in his hand, and Deringham turned a moment and looked after him. The financier’s face was not pleasant just then, and there was a curious glitter in his eyes, while Seaforth, who was following his comrade, stared at him as he passed, and came up with Alton on the verandah.

“What has gone wrong with Deringham?” he said.

“I don’t know,” said Alton lightly. “Do you think anything has?”

“That,” said Seaforth, “is what I am asking you. He looked condemnably ugly just now. One could have fancied that he contemplated killing somebody.”

Alton laughed. “Got a little business trip up, I expect,” he said, and moved forward as he spoke. “Here’s word from Mrs. Jimmy. She wants to know when I’m going to begin. Women are very persistent, Miss Deringham, but this one has some reason.”

“They usually have,” said the girl. “I do not, however, know Mrs. Jimmy.”

“Of course,” said Alton, smiling. “Still, I expect you’ll see her up here presently.”

It was a day or two later when Alton returned to the topic of Mrs. Jimmy, and he was then kneeling in the stern of a canoe which slid with a swift smoothness down the placid lake as he dipped the glistening paddle. Miss Deringham was seated forward on a pile of cedar-twigs, with a wet line in her fingers, and in no way disturbed by the fact that she had caught nothing. Such expeditions had become somewhat frequent of late, and though the girl sometimes wondered what she found to please her in the company and conversation of the bush rancher, the fact that she usually went with him when he crossed the lake remained.

“I have seen that trail of smoke up there before. Where does it come from?” she said languidly, pointing to a distant film of vapour that drifted in a faint blue wreath along the slope of a hill.

“That,” said Alton, “is the Tyee mine.”

“I have heard of it. They find silver there?”

“Yes,” said Alton dryly. “They find a little.”

“There is silver in those mountains, then?” said Miss Deringham.

Alton nodded. “Lots of it. Still, it costs a good deal to get out, and then it doesn’t pay for the mining occasionally. That’s the trouble with the Tyee.”

“Still, it must pay somebody, or they would not go on,” said Miss Deringham.

Alton laughed a little. “Oh, yes,” he said dryly. “It pays a man called Hallam and some others of his kind who got up the company. Still, sometime and somehow, I think he will be sorry he stole poor folks’ money.”

“You,” said Miss Deringham, smiling, “are an optimist, then?”

Alton gravely glanced about him, and the girl fancied she understood him as she followed his gaze from snowpeak down the great pine-shrouded hillside to the river frothing in the valley. “I don’t know, but one feels there’s something beyond all that,” he said. “It didn’t come there by accident, and it has all its work to do. Sun and frost and sliding snow grinding up the hillside very sure and slow, and the river sweeping what it gets from them way down the valley to spread new wheatfields out into the sea.”

“But,” said Miss Deringham, smiling, “we are speaking of men, and I don’t quite see the connection.”

“Well,” said Alton, “they have their place in the great machine too, and must work like the rest, and do something to make it more fruitful, in return for the food the good earth gives them.”

“A good many men don’t seem to realize the obligation,” said Miss Deringham.

Alton nodded. “No, but I can’t help thinking they’ll be dealt with somehow. They’re just stealing from the others.”

“You are a socialist, then?”

“No,” said Alton, “I don’t think I am. It seems to me that every man is entitled to all the dollars he can get by working for them honestly, and there’s a place somewhere in this great world for him, if he has the grit to get up and look for it as he was meant to do, but it has no use for the man who wants to sit still and think about his dinner while other folks work for him.”

“Still, he may have earned the right to do so,” said the girl.

“Well,” said Alton grimly, “most of that kind I’ve met with seemed to have stolen it, and one or two of them had, for a few thousand dollars, sent good men to their death. When you’ve seen your comrades sickening and starving on rotten provisions in the snow, or washed out down the valley by the bursting of a dam that was only built to sell, you begin to wonder whether it would be wrong to wipe out some of that crowd with the rifle.”

The veins swelled on his forehead, and there was a smouldering fire in his eyes, while the girl suspected he was alluding to some especial member of the class, and noticed that his eye seemed to follow the smoke of the Tyee. Then he laughed.

“I guess I’m talking nonsense again, but there’s a little behind it, and I feel that you can pick it out,” he said. “Now I’m not good at amusing women, but you and Mrs. Jimmy seem to understand me.”

“Who is Mrs. Jimmy, and does her husband belong to Somasco?” asked the girl, with a smile.

Alton laid down the paddle, and took off his hat. “Jimmy,” he said solemnly, “is dead. He was my partner, and his wife is a friend of mine. She was in some ways very like you.”

“They had a ranch up here?” said Miss Deringham languidly.

“No,” said Alton. “It wasn’t often they had ten dollars. She was a lady bar-keep down in Vancouver before she married Jimmy. He was a trail-chopper in this country. I don’t know what he was in the old one.”

“And,” said Miss Deringham, “Mrs. Jimmy resembles me?”

She regretted it next moment when she saw Alton’s face. It expressed subdued surprise, and the girl felt irritated with herself.

“Yes,” he said gravely. “Human nature’s much the same at the bottom, whether it has gold on the top of it or the dints of the hammer, and Mrs. Jimmy was good all through.”

“That,” said Miss Deringham, “is distinctly pretty.”

“Well,” said Alton smiling, “I didn’t mean it that way. Work was scarce in the province, and I’d lost my cattle when Jimmy went up with me into the ranges to look for silver. He brought his wife along, because he had no dollars or anywhere to leave her, and it was a mighty tough place for a woman where we camped under the big glacier. We stayed right there most of the winter. There was only frost and snow, and the wind that whirled it about the pines, and, until it froze up, we lived a good deal on salmon from the river. They were dead when we got them, and some of them rotten.”

Miss Deringham shivered. “And when the river froze?” she said.

“Then,” said Alton gravely, “there were days when we lived on nothing, and worked until we couldn’t hold the pick to keep from thinking. Still, we got a deer now and then, and we had a very little flour. It was mouldy when we bought it, but we hadn’t dollars enough for anything better. Mrs. Jimmy got sick and thin, but she never grumbled, and was always waiting bright and smiling when we crawled back into the shanty. Anyway, we found no silver that would pay for the getting, though we knew it was there.”

“How did you know that?” said Miss Deringham.

“Well,” said Alton, “a Siwash told us something. He crawled in starving one day, and though we hadn’t much over we fed him. For another thing we felt it in us that we were on the right trail.”

“That,” said the girl, “does not sound possible.”

Alton nodded. “No,” he said. “Still, one gets taught up there in the bush that there’s more in a man than what some folks think of as his reason. Well, we made a tough fight, and were beaten.”

Miss Deringham glanced at him covertly, and noticing his quiet, bronzed face, steady eyes, and big brown hands, felt that the struggle had been very grim and stubborn. “So you gave it up?” she said.

“Yes,” said Alton, “for a time, and I had my hands full with other things when Jimmy went back again. He had piled up a few dollars and left the woman behind him. He took the trail with a good outfit and a pack-horse, but he didn’t come down again, and when Mrs. Jimmy got anxious I went up to look for him. It was a good while before I found him sitting under a pine, and he had found the silver, though it wasn’t much use to him.”

“Was it a rich vein?” said the girl.

“Yes,” said Alton solemnly, “I think it was, from the specimens he had brought along, but, and it’s difficult sometimes to see why things should happen that way, he couldn’t tell me where it was. Jimmy was dead, you see.”

The girl shivered visibly. “It must have been horrible.”

“No,” said Alton gravely. “He was sitting there very quiet in the snow with his hand frozen on the rifle, and there was a big dead panther not far away; but I was more sorry for Mrs. Jimmy than I was for him. Jimmy hadn’t always been a trail-chopper, and one could see he had been carrying a heavy load he brought out from the old country. I think he was tired.”

“And the silver still lies hidden up there?” said Miss Deringham.

Alton nodded. “Yes,” he said. “I’ve hunted for it twice, but couldn’t find Jimmy’s trail. By and by, and because the woman wants it, I’m going back again.”

“But it would belong to anybody who found it now,” said Miss Deringham.

“No,” said Alton quietly. “A half of what I get there belongs to Mrs. Jimmy. The dead man has a claim.”

“I am not sure that most men would think so. You are generous,” said the girl.

“No,” said Alton. “I’m just where I can, and it hurts me to owe anybody anything, whether it’s a favour, or the other thing.”

Miss Deringham understood him, and reflected as she glanced at him out of the corners of her eyes that her father would do well if he dealt openly with this man. She fancied he could be remorseless in a reckoning, and she had now and then of late had unpleasant suspicions respecting Deringham’s intentions concerning him.

Alton took up the paddle, and the pair found Deringham waiting them when they landed. They crossed the valley together, and the girl, who had seen little of industrial activity, became interested when at her father’s desire they followed Alton into the mill. A cloud of pungent smoke hung about it, and the steady pounding of an engine jarred through the monotone of the river, which was low just then, while there was a pleasant fragrance in the open-sided building where brawny men moved amidst the whirling dust with the precision of the machines they handled. Alice Deringham could see with untrained eyes that there was no waste of effort here. The great logs that slid in at one end passed straight forward over the rattling rollers, and made no deviation until they went out as planking. Silent men and whirring saws, whose strident scream changed to a deeper humming as they rent into the great redwood trunks, alike did their work with swift efficiency, and once more the girl glanced with a little wonder at the man who had organized it all.

“This appears to be a remarkably well-laid-out mill,” said her father.

Alton laughed a little. “We shall have a bigger one by and by,” he said. “The only thing I’m proud of is the planer, and she cost me a pile of dollars. I had to cut down all round before I could buy the thing, and then I pulled her all to pieces, and fixed her up myself.”

Alice Deringham followed her father towards a big, humming machine that was tearing off the surface of the planks fed to it and flinging them out polished into whiteness. Alton glanced at it admiringly.

“Yes, I’m proud of that,” he said. “It was a tight fit buying her, and now she’s saving me dollars every day.” Then he turned to a stooping man. “You’re crowding her a little.”

Alice Deringham noticed the resentment in the man’s face, which was not a pleasant one, and that, in place of relaxing the pressure, he seemed to thrust a little more strenuously upon the plank he guided; but that was all she saw, for the next moment there was a crash and a loud whirring, and a cloud of woody dust was flung all over her.

Alton sprang forward through it, and a big leather belt suddenly stopped, but the girl could never clearly remember what happened next, for the dust still whirled about her. There, however, appeared to be a brief altercation, and as Alton moved towards him the other man dropped his hand to his belt. Guessing what the action meant, Alice Deringham shrank back with a little shiver, and her father appeared to grasp the man’s shoulder. Alton swayed suddenly sideways, and then hurled himself forward, while next moment two men fell violently against the wrecked machine. One of them seemed to be helpless in the grasp of the other, and staggering clear of the planer they went reeling through the mill. Then there was a splash in the river, and Alton returned alone, breathless and somewhat white in face.

“Sorry, but there was no other way out of it,” he said a trifle hoarsely. “Now I’ve got to size up the ruin, if you’ll excuse me.”

Deringham turned away with his daughter in time to see a dripping object crawl out on the opposite side of the river. “Are you still pleased with your tame bear?” he said ironically.

The girl laughed a little, though her colour was perhaps a trifle higher than usual. “There is a good deal of the beast still unsubdued in him,” she said.

Deringham nodded. “Still, he had some provocation, and I think he was right. So far as I could follow the discussion, the other man meant to question his ability to dismiss him, with the pistol.”

Alice Deringham said nothing further upon the subject until Alton joined them as they sat out on the verandah that night. “You are not pleased with me?” he said.

“There is nothing to warrant me telling you so, and I may have been mistaken,” said the girl reflectively.

“No,” said Alton, “that’s the pity; but couldn’t you remember just now and then that you are friends with me?”

“Things of this kind make it a little difficult,” said Miss Deringham.

“Well,” said Alton, “that machine cost me twelve months’ grim self-denial, and the fellow broke it out of temper because I spoke to him.”

“It was,” said Miss Deringham, “sufficiently exasperating, but was the rest justifiable because you were a stronger or bolder man than him?”

Alton laughed a little. “You don’t understand. I did it because I was afraid,” said he. “Now if I hadn’t been, I’d have backed that man right into the river without touching him.”

The girl glanced at him and then lapsed into a ripple of laughter. “I’m afraid I must give you up,” said she.

Just then Deringham came into the verandah, and Alton turned towards him. “It’s a little difficult to put it as I would like to, but I’m glad it was you. You know what I mean.”

Deringham appeared a trifle embarrassed. “I’m not sure that you are indebted to me at all,” he said. “I only seized his shoulder, and you would not have expected me to look on?”

Alton shook his head. “I don’t think he would have missed if you hadn’t done it, and I will not forget,” he said. “This thing will always count for a good deal between you and me.”

He went away, and Alice Deringham glanced at her father with a flush in her face. “I did not understand before. The man had a pistol and you took it from him?”

“No,” said Deringham, with a curious little laugh. “I meant to knock his arm up, and am not sure that I did it. It was, considering all things, a somewhat disinterested action.”