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She longed mightily to ask the sick man some questions, but the orders of the doctor were explicit. Did the mine-owner mean to suggest that he had identified Elliot as one of his assailants? The thing was preposterous. And yet that was plainly what he had meant to imply. If he told such a story, things would go hard with Gordon.
"Benson, we sha'n't hesitate a single moment to quarrel with the biggest mine-owner or freight-shipper this side of the Crosswater Hills if we have the right on our side. Spread it out. What did you find?" Benson sank a little lower in his chair.
I went back to the standing, and at one point in the ground, where there was a windlass and chain, lowered myself down a 'cut' a small pit sunk perpendicularly to a lower coal-stratum, and here, almost thinking I could hear the perpetual rat-tat of notice once exchanged between the putt-boys below and the windlass-boys above, I proceeded down a dipple to another place like a standing, for in this mine there were six, or perhaps seven, veins: and there immediately I came upon the acme of the horrible drama of this Tartarus, for all here was not merely crowded, but, at some points, a packed congestion of flesh, giving out a strong smell of the peach, curiously mixed with the stale coal-odour of the pit, for here ventilation must have been very limited; and a large number of these masses had been shot down by only three hands, as I found: for through three hermetical holes in a plaster-wall, built across a large gugg, projected a little the muzzles of three rifles, which must have glutted themselves with slaughter; and when, after a horror of disgust, having swum as it were through a dead sea, I got to the wall, I peeped from a small clear space before it through a hole, and made out a man, two youths in their teens, two women, three girls, and piles of cartridges and provisions; the hole had no doubt been broken from within at the spur of suffocation, when the poison must have entered; and I conjectured that here must be the mine-owner, director, manager, or something of that sort, with his family.
Do you know that when the Indian woman came he urged Sheba not to listen to her story?" "Sounds likely after he had spent his good money bringing her here," sneered the mine-owner. "He didn't. Gordon is a splendid fellow. He wouldn't lie," answered Diane hotly. "And one thing is sure if you lay a finger on him for this, it will be fatal with Sheba. She will be through with you."
He had not seen Flemister since the day of the rather spiteful conversation, with the building-and-loan theft for a topic, and on that occasion the mine-owner had gone away with threats in his mouth. Yet his letter was distinctly friendly, conveying an offer of neighborly help. The occasion for the neighborliness arose upon a right-of-way involvement.
Sir Arthur Markham, one of the largest of the mine-owners, in the height of the conflict between the mine-owners and the miners over wages, rose in the House and declared that, in his opinion as a mine-owner, the mine-owners were wrong and the miners were right, and that the mine-owners could afford to pay better wages, and should yield to the men. He was called a traitor to his class.
But the mine-owner went his way with quiet fearlessness and paid no attention to the animosity he had stirred up. The general feeling was that the trouble must soon come to a head.
They poured into the dining-room a mine-owner and his superintendent, a storekeeper from the village at the other end of the valley, a young woman school-teacher from the Indian reservation, a cattleman, and two Mexican sheepmen. While the fresh horses were being hitched to the stage Pesquiera and his guest stood back a little apart from the others.
In those high solitudes, while heaping up the yellow gold which should purchase all the luxuries of life for the woman whom sometime I should choose, I could, at the same time, be gradually overcoming my one weakness. When I did see fit to return to my native village, no man should be so calm, so cool, so self-possessed as John Flutter, Jr., mine-owner, late of the Rocky Mountains.
But I haven't anything against the man himself. He trusts me; he has defended me when others have tried to put him wise; he has been damned white to me, Flemister." "Is that all?" queried the mine-owner, in the tone of the prosecuting attorney who gives the criminal his full length of the rope with which to hang himself.
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