Читать книгу The Essential Max Brand - 29 Westerns in One Edition - Max Brand - Страница 181

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The little camp awakened to a swirl of activity in the morning. Whatever were the problems of Dawn and Ronicky, the rest of the crowd was interested in gold. Gold had haunted their dreams. Gold wakened them in the first gray of dawn. Gold drove them through a hasty breakfast, and for the sake of gold their picks and shovels were deep in the dirt in the hollow well before sunrise.

Their united efforts had rolled away the boulders which were scattered over the surface of the designated spot. Below, they found a soft soil, and the hole sank rapidly. Five feet down, however, they struck a dense layer of clay, which had to be chewed out bit by bit with picks.

The laborers paused, growling, but Jack Moon himself leaped down into the pit and caught up a pick. The others now fell to with a will, and an hour of terrific labor pierced the clay and let them down again into gravel and sand.

They had driven through the depth of the mound which the landslide had tumbled over the place, when the sun rose red through the eastern trees, and now, warming to the work, they pushed the hole deeper and deeper.

Learning from the experience of the first pit, they made the excavation this second time much wider at the top and sank it in two steps, from each of which, when the bottom was reached, they could pass the soil in relays to the surface. By noon they were down a full fifteen feet below the true surface of the ground, and now the entire crowd was at work at the same time. The pace was slower than when they worked in shifts, but the progress downward was more steady, a continuous stream of sand and gravel pouring over the lip of the pit as it was deepened below.

Two men brought down provisions for a quick lunch, and in ten minutes the work was resumed. For there was great need of haste. Never before had the band of Jack Moon been retained so long in one place. The long immunity which Moon and his followers had enjoyed was indubitably owing to the swiftness with which they gathered, worked, and dispersed, each man to a separate quarter. One day together was comparatively safe. Two became rash. And to spend three days together was actually putting one’s head in the noose. This being the third day of their assemblage, and the second they had camped on one spot, there was not only love of gold but fear of death to spur them on.

Midafternoon saw them down to twenty feet; but now they were working through a dense stratum, and the progress was slow. Besides, the whole crowd, from Hugh Dawn to Ronicky, was exhausted.

Suddenly there was a yell from little Bud Kent as he jerked something from the ground with his shovel. He had pried up an ancient pick, and now he raised it above his head, the iron a mass of black rust, and the haft sadly decayed. But it was proof positive that they were not on a blind trail. Some one had dug here before!

Who thought of weariness now? On they went with a shout and a roar. The gravel and sand flew up in a ceaseless shower. A dozen backs were rising and falling swiftly. The pebbles chimed and rang as they whipped up from the polished shovel blades.

It was exactly half past four when the next sensation came. They were down a shade more than twenty-two feet when Jack Moon, again in the pit, raised, without a word, poising it high on his shovel—the blackened skull of a man.

That hideous specter cast a blanket of silence over the group, then a groan of disappointment. Jerry had turned away, sick.

“Nothing more!” Bud Kent remarked in disgust. “Maybe old Cosslett did dig this hole and dug it deep; but it was only because he wanted to get this gent out of sight. It’s a burial ground, not a treasure cache. Boys, we’re through!”

“Wait a minute, Bud,” called Jack Moon. “Look here. There’s a nice little hole drilled through this skull between the eyes. Took a bullet to do that, son. What did somebody say awhile back? That Cosslett might of had a couple of gents dig this hole and then shot them into it and covered the bodies up? Well?”

That possible explanation at least gave them renewed hope. Labor began again. And in ten minutes they had uncovered and removed two complete skeletons!

Still the hole sank to twenty-three feet, twenty-three and a half, twenty- four, twenty-four and a half! Not a word had been spoken, now, for an hour. Lanterns had been brought and were lighted, ready for use as the evening came on. And already their glow began to be as bright as the twilight.

Presently from Corrigan, a big brute of a man, wielding a shovel with steady might, came a dull roar of excitement. The gravel flew up from his blade as the others in the narrow pit stood back. Then, from the three workers in those cramped quarters, came a single-throated wail of excitement. The scraping shovel had cleaned off the top of an iron-bound chest!

The yelling from the bottom of the hole was redoubled by the echoes along the sides of the pit and raised again by the men working at the mouth. They crowded about it as Jack Moon, with a hoarse shout, called to those below to make way for him.

Next instant he was down into the bottom of the pit, he wrenched a pick from the hands of one of the diggers, and, sinking it through the top boards of the chest, he tore one of them up. Below was a quantity of cloth or canvas. One slash of his knife divided it. Then by the light of the lanterns which had been lowered from the surface as far as possible, every eye at once caught the gleam and glitter of yellow—the unmistakable shimmer of gold!

The heart of the girl swelled until she could hardly breathe as she waited for the shouts of rejoicing. But not one came. Men were trembling, wild of eye, but their loudest voice was a husky whisper. Only Jack Moon was speaking aloud, and he was ordering them to pass the stuff up to the surface. It rose from shaking hand to shaking hand, and up on the lip of the pit came a gathering heap of gold spilling at the feet of the girl. She gazed on it, incredulous.

There was power, happiness, freedom in that growing heap of yellow. It was an arm to pursue and a strong hand to support. It could reward and punish. It could actually buy a life. How many, indeed, had already been paid down freely to win this same metal from the earth, to take it again from the rightful owners, and, last of all, to hide it?

Her father, frantic with joy, clambered from the pit, kneeled by the mass, buried his hands in it, and then looked up to her with a maniacal laugh! Others were coming up. The chest had been gutted of its contents. And as fast as they reached the top of the ground, hand after hand, shaking with joy, was buried in the treasure. Then Baldy McNair broke the charm.

“Get down again, boys!” he cried. “This is only the beginning. There’s a ton of gold here. But what’s that? Not seven hundred thousand dollars! There must be more—ten times as much—maybe twenty times as much! Who knows? Come down again and dig!”

But the heavy voice of the leader answered him as Jack Moon climbed up from the pit.

“Hold the lanterns out. Look down yonder,” he commanded.

They obeyed. The chest had been smashed to pieces by Moon and put to one side, and in the clear place below it they saw the wet glimmer of bedrock.

“There’s no more,” explained Moon. “One dollar of gold always makes ten dollars’ worth of talk. And there you are! You’ll find no more treasure. That’s what Cosslett put down under ground, and that’s all he got. The rest is just talk—that I believed like a fool. But ain’t this enough? Over six hundred thousand dollars, boys. Split that by twenty for example—there you have thirty-three thousand dollars apiece. Is it enough?”

They had been promised ten times that much before. But half a million in talk did not equal the actuality of less than a tenth of that in sheer gold. On the damp pile of sand on the edge of the pit they apportioned the loot, with the aid of a pocket scales. There was a share for each of Moon’s twelve men, and for the leader himself three shares. To Ronicky and Dawn went also a share apiece. Seventeen shares, then, were apportioned.

Full darkness came while Moon still weighed and apportioned the gold with his scales. The dust had been hammered into small bars of every conceivable shape for the sake of security in handling, and now the men put their shares away in saddlebags or pieces of the canvas which had been used to cover the treasure in the chest, and some even divided the loot in small pieces and put it in their pockets.

And so at length they started up the hill for their camp, staggering under their burdens, yelling and singing as they walked, for all the world like a procession of wild drunkards. Corrigan helped the leader bear the crushing burden of his own portion.

On the way Moon found an opportunity to drop back to the side of Jerry Dawn.

“Don’t worry,” he said softly. “I’ll find a means of getting all this into the hands of the gent to whom it belongs—your father!”

“No, no!” whispered the girl, by this time completely misled. “You mustn’t dream of it! They’d do murder before they’d give it up. Besides, we’re amply repaid!”

“Tush!” Jack Moon smiled. “There’s ways of handling these gents. And I know all the ways!”