The Mountain Divide
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For an ordinary man, indeed, there was no escape toward the river. A wall of rock fell a hundred feet to the water’s edge. The crowd, growing every moment as the word passed that Dancing was whipped, left the hunted man and his companion little time for decision. Dancing, in truth, needed but little. His purpose was fixed the instant he saw himself cut off from every other chance. He halted only on the brink of the precipice itself. Catching Bucks’s arm, he told him hurriedly what they must do and cautioned him. “It’s the last chance, sonny,” he murmured, as his iron fingers gripped the boy’s arm. “We can make it–if you do exactly as I tell you.”
The gathering cries closed in behind them while they were taking off their shoes. Creeping on his hands and knees along the brow of the cliff, Dancing felt out his location with his fingers. And with that sixth sense of instinct which rises to a faculty when dangers thicken about a resolute man, the lineman found what he sought.
He caught at the root of a rock-bound cedar, swung himself over the cliff, and called to Bucks to follow. Bucks acted wholly on faith. The blackness below was impenetrable, and perhaps better so, since he could not see what he was undertaking. Only the roar of the river came up from the depths. It sounded a little ominous as Bucks, grasping the cedar root, swung over and after an agonizing instant felt a support for his feet. He stood on a ledge of rock so narrow that it gave only a footing even in daylight, but Bucks was called on to descend it in the middle of the night.
For any man to have attempted the feat seemed to him, the next morning, sheer insanity. Dancing, however, knew the treacherous face of the river wall. To his gigantic size and strength he united the sureness of a cat in climbing up or down a mountain arête. Often he had crept with a telegraph wire, unaided, where his best men hung back even in harness. There was, in fact, no time now for halting. The rioters, eager on the trail, were calling for torches, and, if discovered before they reached the water, the lives of the two men would be snuffed out by dropping rocks on their heads.
Flattening himself as he had been bidden to do and with his cheek laid to the face of the sheer rock, clasping from time to time with his outstretched left hand such slight uneven surfaces as he could feel, Bucks moved to the right after Dancing, who gripped his extended right hand and led him foot by foot down the perilous way. Not a word was spoken, hardly a breath drawn, as the lineman felt for his slippery foothold with the deftness of a gorilla, and, pressing Bucks’s hand as the signal to take a follow step, he made a slow but steady descent.
The roar of the river already sounded in Bucks’s ears like a cataract, but the shock of extreme danger had numbed his apprehension. Chips of the sharp granite cut his feet like knives, and he knew that the sticky feeling upon his bare soles was blood oozing through the broken skin. He had already given up expectation of ever leaving the gorge alive and merely responded to his companion’s will. The one thought that came to his mind was curiosity as to what Dancing ever expected to do if they reached the bottom without accident.
Suddenly above the roar of the river he heard the muffled crack of fire-arms coming as if out of another world. He wondered whether they themselves were already being fired at, but experienced nothing more than curiosity in the thought. Only the pressure of the big hand that gripped his own impressed itself powerfully upon his consciousness, and at each squeeze he put his foot forward mechanically, intent on a dull resolve to obey orders.
He presently felt a new signal from the long fingers that wound around his own. He tried to answer by stepping, but Dancing whose face was turned away, restrained him. Then it flashed on Bucks that the lineman was signalling Morse to him, and that the dot-and-dash squeezes meant: “Half-way down. Half-way down.”
Bucks answered with one word: “Hurrah!” But he squeezed it along the nerves and muscles like lightning.
He could hear the labored breathing of his companion as he strained at intervals every particle of his strength to reach a new footing of safety. Every vine and scrubby bush down the cliff wall was tested for its strength and root, and Dancing held Bucks’s hand so that he could instantly release it if he himself should plunge to death.
Bucks had already been told that if this happened he must hang as long as he could without moving and if he could hold on till daylight he would be rescued by railroad men. All this was going through his head when, responding to a signal to step down, and, unable to catch some word that Dancing whispered, he stretched his leg so far that he lost his balance. He struggled to recover. Dancing called again sharply to him, but he was too wrought up to understand. Dizziness seized him, and resigning himself, with an exclamation, to death, he felt himself dropping into space.
In the next instant he was caught in Dancing’s arms:
“Gosh darn it, why didn’t you jump, as I told you?” exclaimed the lineman, setting him up on his feet. “You pretty near clean upset us both.”
“Where are we, Bill?” muttered Bucks, swallowing his shock.
“Right here at the water, and them fellows up there beating the bush for us. There’s shooting down town, too. Some new deviltry. How good a swimmer are you, Bucks? By gum, I forgot to ask you before you started.”
“I can swim better than I can climb, Bill.”
“We’ve only a quarter of a mile and downstream at that. And the current here would float a keg of nails.”
“How about rocks, Bill?” asked Bucks, peering dubiously toward the roar of the rushing river.
“All up-stream from here,” returned Dancing, edging down the shelving table toward the water. “Lock arms with me so I don’t lose you, sonny. What in Sam Hill is that?”
Far down the river the two saw a tongue of flame leaping into the sky. They watched it for a moment. Dancing was the first to locate the conflagration, which grew now, even as they looked, by leaps and bounds. The two stood ready to plunge into the river when a fire of musketry echoed up the gorge. The lineman clutched Bucks’s arm.
“There’s fighting going on down there now. What’s that smokestack? By Jing, the roundhouse is on fire!”
CHAPTER XXII
They plunged together into the river. The water, icy cold, was a shock, but Dancing had made no mistake. They were below the rocks and needed only to steady themselves as the resistless current swept them down toward the railroad yards.
Bucks demonstrated that he could swim and the two seemed hardly in the water before they could fully see the burning roundhouse. A moment later, chilled to the bone but with his mind cleared by the sharp plunge, Bucks felt his companion’s arm drawing him toward the farther shore where, in the slack water of an elbow of the stream, Dancing led the way across a shoal of gravel and Bucks waded after him up the riverbank.
They hastened together across the dark railroad yard. The sound of firing came again from the square in front of the railroad station and thither they directed their fleeing feet. To the right they heard the shouts of the men who were fighting the fire at the roundhouse and the hot crackling of the flames. They reached the station together and entered the waiting-room by a rear door.
Men were running everywhere in and out of the building and the waiting-room was barricaded for war. Bill Dancing caught a passing trainman by the arm.
“What’s going on here?”
The man looked at the lineman and his companion in surprise: “The gamblers are driving the vigilantes, Bill. They’ve got all Front Street. What’s the matter with you?”
Dancing caught sight of Bob Scott coming down the rear stairway with an armful of rifles, and, without answering the question, called to him.
“Hello!” exclaimed Scott halting. He started as he saw Bucks. “Were you with him? And I’ve been scouring the town for you! Stanley will have a word to say to you, youngster. They thought the gamblers had you, Bill,” he added, turning to the lineman.
Dancing, a sight from the pounding he had taken, his clothing in tatters, and with the blood-stains now streaked by the water dripping from his hair, drew himself up. “I hope you didn’t think so, Bob? Did they reckon a handful of blacklegs would get me?”
Scott grinned inscrutably. “They’ve got the best part of your shirt, Bill. How did you get off?”
“Swam for it,” muttered Dancing, shaking himself. “Where’s Stanley?”
“Out behind the flat cars. He is arming the vigilantes. We’ve fenced off the yards with loaded freight-cars. They’ve fired the roundhouse on us, but the rifles and ammunition that came to-night are upstairs here. Take some of these guns, Bill, and hand them around in front. Bucks can follow you with a box of ammunition.”
Scott spoke hurriedly and ran out of the door facing Front Street Square. A string of flat cars had been run along the house-track in front of the station, and behind these the hard-pressed vigilantes, reinforced now by the railroad men, were taking up a new line of defence. Driven through the town in a running battle, they were in straits when they reached Stanley’s barricade.
Following a resolve already well defined, the railroad chief conferred with the vigilante leaders for a brief moment. He called them to his office and denounced the folly of half-way measures.
“You see,” said Stanley, pointing to two dead men whom the discomfited business men had brought off with them, “what temporizing has done. There is only one way to treat with these people.” He was interrupted by firing from across the square. “In an hour they will have every store in Front Street looted.”
The deliberation for a few moments was a stormy one, but Stanley held his ground. “Desperate diseases, gentlemen,” he said, addressing Atkinson and his companions, “require desperate remedies, and you must sometime come to what I propose.”
“What you propose,” returned Atkinson gloomily, “will ruin us.”
Stanley answered with composure: “You are ruined now. What you should consider is whether, if you don’t cut this cancer of gambling, outlawry, and murder out while you have a chance, it won’t remain to plague you as long as you do business in Medicine Bend, and remain to ruin you periodically. This is always going to be a town and a big one. As long as this railroad is operated, this ground where we stand is and must be the chief operating point for the whole mountain division. You and I may be wiped out of existence and the railroad will go on as before. But it is for you to accept or reject what I propose as the riddance of this curse to your community.
“The railroad has been drawn into this fight by assault upon its men. It can meet violence with violence and protect itself, or it can temporarily abandon a town where protection is not afforded its lives and property. In an emergency, trains could be run through Medicine Bend without stopping. The right of way could be manned with soldiers. But the railroad can’t supply men enough to preserve in your town the law and order which you yourselves ought to preserve. And if we were compelled to build division facilities, temporarily, elsewhere, while they would ultimately come back here, it might be years before they did so. What else but your ruin would this mean?”
He had hardly ceased speaking when the conference was broken in upon. Bob Scott ushered in two men sent under a flag of truce from the rioters. The offer they brought was that Rebstock and Seagrue should be surrendered, provided Stanley would give his personal pledge that the two should not be shot but sent out of town until peace was restored, and that they should be accorded a fair trial when brought back.
Stanley listened carefully to all that was said:
“Who sent you?” he demanded.
“The committee up street,” returned the envoys evasively.
“You mean Levake sent you,” retorted Stanley. He sat at his desk and eyed the two ruffians, as they faced him somewhat nervously. They at length admitted that they had come from Levake, and gave Stanley his chance for an answer.
“Tell Levake for me there will be no peace for him or his until he comes down here with his hands behind his back. When I want Rebstock and Seagrue I will let him know. I want him first,” said Stanley, dismissing the messengers without more ado.
CHAPTER XXIII
He had resolved that Levake was to be punished, but it was not a unanimous voice that backed the railroad leader in his determination. Weak-kneed men in the conference wanted to compromise and end the fight where it stood. Even Atkinson was disposed to make terms, as the party returned to the barricade.
“No,” repeated Stanley. “Levake is the head and front of this whole disorder. As long as he can shoot down unarmed men in the streets of Medicine Bend there will be no law and order here. While men see him walking these streets unpunished they will take their cue from him and rob and shoot whom they please–Levake and his ilk must go. A railroad, on the start, brings a lawless element with it–this is true. But it also brings law and order and that element has come to Medicine Bend to stay. If the machinery of the law is too weak to support it, so much worse for the machinery. I don’t want to see blood shed or property destroyed, but the responsibility for this rests with the outlaws that are terrorizing this town. And I will spend every ounce of ammunition I have and fight them to the last man, rather than compromise with a bunch of cutthroats.
“If any man here feels differently about this, he may step out of the barricade now,” continued Stanley, addressing those of the townsmen that listened. “There will be no hard feeling. But this is the time to do it. Worse is ahead of us before we can clean the town up as it will have to be cleaned sometime. The longer you leave the job undone, the harder it will be when you tackle it.”
A movement across the square interrupted his words, and a messenger waving a white handkerchief came over to the barricade to ask for a surgeon for a wounded man. There were some who opposed sending any relief to men that had forfeited all claim to humane consideration. Doctor Arnold, however, was summoned, and Stanley finally determined that the matter should be left to the surgeon himself–he could go if he wished. Arnold did not hesitate in his decision. “It is my duty to go,” he decided briefly.
“I don’t quite see that,” muttered Atkinson.
The white-haired surgeon turned to the leader of the vigilantes. “It is not a matter of personal inclination, Atkinson. When I took my degree for the practice of medicine, I took an oath to respond to every call of suffering and I have no right to refuse this one.”
Leaving his own injured with his assistant, the surgeon told the messenger to proceed and the two walked across the square and up Front Street to the Three Horses. Arriving there, Arnold was asked to dress the wound of a man that had been shot through the breast in the fight along Fort Street. While he was working over his patient, who lay on a table surrounded by a motley crowd of onlookers, Levake walked in. He nodded to the surgeon and drawing a pocket knife, while Arnold was cleansing the wound, sat down beside him to whittle a stick.
“I hear your man, Stanley, wants me,” began Levake after an interval.
“I guess you hear right,” returned Arnold dryly.
“Tell him for me to come get me, will you?” suggested Levake.
“If he ever comes after you, Levake, he will get you,” returned Arnold, looking the outlaw straight in the eye. “There isn’t any doubt about that,” he added, resuming his task.
Levake whittled but made no reply. He watched the surgeon’s work closely, and when Arnold had finished and given directions for the wounded man’s care he walked out of the place with him.
“Tell Stanley what I said, will you?” repeated Levake, as the railroad surgeon left the door and started down street.
Arnold made no answer and Levake, taunting him to send all the men the railroad had after him, followed Arnold toward the square.
The surgeon understood that it was Levake’s purpose to engage him in a dispute and kill him if he could. Arnold, moreover, was hot-tempered and made no concealment of his feelings toward any man. For this reason, despite his realization of danger, he was an easy prey.
To the final taunt of the outlaw the surgeon made rather a sharp answer and quickened his pace, to walk away from his unpleasant companion. But Levake would not be shaken off, and as the two were passing a deserted restaurant he ordered the surgeon to halt. Arnold turned without shrinking. Levake had already drawn his pistol and his victim concluded he was to be killed then and there, but he resolved to tell the outlaw what he thought of him.
“I understand your game perfectly, Levake,” he said after he had raked him terrifically. “Now, if you are going to shoot, do it. You haven’t long to live yourself–make sure of that.”
“No man can threaten me and live,” retorted Levake harshly.
“I came up here, an unarmed man, on an errand of mercy.”
“I didn’t send for you.”
“You would kill me just as quick if you had, Levake. What are you hesitating about? If you are going to shoot, shoot.”
Throwing back his right arm, and fingering the trigger of his revolver as a panther lashes his tail before springing, Levake stepped back and to one side. As he did so, with the fearless surgeon still facing him, a man stepped from behind the screen door of the deserted restaurant. It was Bob Scott.
The old and deadly feud between the Indian and the outlaw brought them now, for the first time in months, face to face. In spite of his iron nerve Levake started. Scott, slightly stooped and wearing the familiar slouch hat and shabby coat in which he was always seen, regarded his enemy with a smile.
So sudden was his appearance that Levake could not for an instant control himself. If there was a man in the whole mountain country that Levake could be said to be afraid of, it was the mild-mannered, mild-spoken Indian scout. Where Scott had come from, how he had got through the pickets posted by Levake himself–these questions, for which he could find no answer, disquieted the murderer.
Arnold, reprieved from death as by a miracle, stood like a statue. Levake, with his hand on his pistol, had halted, petrified, at the sight of Scott.
The latter, eying the murderer with an expression that might have been mistaken for friendly, had not Levake known there could be no friendship among decent men for him, broke the silence: “Levake, I have a warrant for you.”
The words seemed to shake the spell from the outlaw’s nerves. He answered with his usual coolness: “You’ve waited a good while to serve it.”
“I’ve been a little busy for a few days, Levake,” returned Scott, with the same even tone. “I kind of lost track of you.” But his words again disconcerted Levake. The few men who now watched the scene and knew what was coming stood breathless.
Levake, moistening his dry lips, spoke carefully: “I don’t want any trouble with you here,” he said. “When this town fight is over, bring your warrant around and I’ll talk to you.”
“No,” returned Scott, undisturbed, “I might lose track of you again. You can come right along with me, Levake.”
With incredible quickness the outlaw, half-turning to cover Scott, fired. The cat-like agility of the Indian answered the move in the instant it was made. Scott was, in fact, the first scout from whom mountain men learned to fire a revolver without aiming it and it was not without reason that Levake sought no encounter with him. For Scott to draw and fire was but one movement, and hating Levake as a monster, the Indian had long been ready to meet him as he met him now, when he should be forced to face him fairly.
A fusillade of shots rang down the street. The air between the two men, feinting like boxers in their deadly duel, filled with whitish smoke. Arnold, stunned by the suddenness of the encounter, jumped out of range. In the next moment he saw Levake sink to the sidewalk. Scott, springing upon him like a cat, knelt with one hand already on his throat; with the other he wrung a second revolver from Levake’s hand. The surgeon ran to the two men.
Levake, panting, lay desperately wounded, as Scott slowly released his grip upon him. The Indian rose as the surgeon approached, but Levake, his eyes wide open, lay still.
“You are wounded, Bob,” cried Arnold, tearing the stained sleeve of Scott’s coat from his shoulder. The scout shook his head.
“We’re in danger here,” he replied, glancing hurriedly up the street. “We must get this fellow away.”
The two picked the wounded man from the ground and started quickly down street with him. The shooting, now so frequent all over the town, had attracted little attention outside the few that had witnessed the swift duel, and the two railroad men made good progress with their burden before the alarm was spread. But the surgeon saw that the strain was telling on Scott, whose shoulder was bleeding freely. He had even ordered his companion to drop his burden and run, when he heard a shout and saw Bill Dancing running across from the barricade to their aid.
Half a dozen of the rioters, shouting threats and imprecations, were hastening down Front Street after Levake and his captors to rescue their prisoner. Scott, reloading his revolver as Dancing relieved him of his end of the burden, stood free to cover the retreat. He fired a warning shot at the nearest of their pursuers. A scattering pistol fire at long range followed. But the railroad men crossed the square in safety, and the big lineman, with Levake in his arms, carried him single-handed into the barricade.
The surgeon and Bob Scott followed close. Bucks was first to meet the wounded scout, and the railroad men, jubilant at Levake’s capture, ran to Scott and bore him down with rough welcome. Levake was laid upon a bench in the station and Scott followed to his side. Arnold, joining the scout, made ready to dress the wound in his shoulder.
“See to Levake first, doctor,” said Scott, “he needs it the most.”
As he spoke, Dancing hurried into the room. “Bob, the car shops are on fire.”
Scott ran to the east window. It was true. The rioters, supplied with oil and torches, had made their way in the darkness through Callahan’s picket line near the river and set fire to the shops.
Stanley was eating a hasty supper in the despatchers’ office.
Within a few minutes the blaze could be seen from all the east windows of the station. Almost at the same moment, through the north windows fire was seen breaking out in one of the big stores in Front Street. As Stanley rose from his midnight meal, Atkinson ran in with word that a band of rioters, well armed, had attacked a train of boarding-cars defended by the roundhouse men.
The sky, bright again with the flame of conflagration, made a huge dome of red, lighting the railroad yards across which men were now hurrying to make fresh dispositions for the emergency.
The vigilante leaders saw impending, in the Front Street fire, the ruin of their business property. There were no longer men enough left to fight the flames and guard the fire-fighters. A point had been reached in which life and property were no longer taken into account, and efforts to restore law and order were facing complete failure. It was then that the most radical of all measures, the last resort of organized society in its resolve to defend itself, was discussed. The vigilantes, as well as the railroad men, now realized that but one measure remained for saving Medicine Bend and that was the extermination of the outlaws themselves.
CHAPTER XXIV
The men in the barricade were lined up for orders. Ammunition was passed and volunteers were called to form a charging party. The vigilantes formed in the glare of the burning shops.
From the head-quarters of the rioters in Front Street came scattering shots and cries as a huge volume of sparks shot up into the black sky. Ten men under Hawk and ten under Dancing made the supporting party for the vigilantes, who asked only that a line of retreat be kept open. This Stanley had undertaken to provide. Atkinson, making a wide détour back of the station, led his men down the railroad tracks and, reaching a point where concealment was no longer possible, double-quicked up Fort Street and charged with his party across the little park.