For a little time there was no sound in the big room as Beatrice stood gazing in open-mouthed astonishment at the piles of gold and silver pieces heaped upon the table, while Hester stood at the outer door to listen. The night sounds of the mountain came in: the wind among the trees, the squeaking of a bat, the far-off yelp of a coyote. Presently, however, these faint noises were drowned in another, distant but growing nearer and louder, the angry voices of excited men and the tramp of feet upon the road.
Beatrice went to the door beside Hester and, for what seemed a very long time, stood waiting without a word spoken by any one of them, so intently were they all listening. Much as Beatrice desired that John Herrick should explain the presence of that money upon the table, she dreaded his speaking, for she wished to lose no sound of the tumult that was coming ever nearer up the hill.
The crowd of men was in sight now, climbing the last rise of the trail. They were singing some wild foreign song: it might have been Russian, Polish, Hungarian; she knew not which. The words conveyed no meaning to her, but the loud harsh cadences seemed to cry out a message of their own: a song of blind tyrannies and passionate rebellion, of cracking whips and pistol-shots, of villages burning amid curses and weeping and the cries of children. She shivered with terror as the shouting voices came close.
“If only they were Americans,” she whispered to Hester. How could any one control such a mob which scarcely understood a common tongue?
“There is no knowing what they may do,” Hester whispered in answer, “but if any one is able to quiet them, Roddy can.”
The men came tramping up to the foot of the veranda steps and stopped—a dense, huddled throng with a tossing lantern carried here and there that showed the dark faces and the shining, excited eyes. A few figures stood out against the foreign backgrounds: a handful of American and Irish laborers, Dan O’Leary, head and shoulders taller than the others, Dabney Mills hovering on the outskirts of the group, talking incessantly and entirely unheeded.
Thorvik stood on the lowest step, his back to them, bareheaded and pouring out a stream of eloquence. Two or three men stepped up to him and began an earnest discussion, which waxed hotter and hotter as the minutes passed, as the crowd quieted, and as all stood waiting. Dabney Mills joined them, shaking his head and protesting vehemently. Beatrice, leaning forward, caught enough of the broken English to understand the meaning of their hesitation. They were arguing as to which should go in first. Inside a great sum of money was spread out upon the table, with no one to guard it but an injured man and two girls, yet these disturbers of the night’s peace were quarreling as to who should enter first.
It was Dan O’Leary who pushed through the crowd finally and strode up the steps. The girls turned to watch him cross the hall and stop before the table where John Herrick sat unmoving.
“Well, boss,” the Irishman said simply, “how about it?”
John Herrick’s thin face relaxed into a smile.
“Why don’t your friends come in?” he asked.
“They’re a bit shy,” Dan admitted. “I hear them talking it over how you can shoot straighter than any other man in Broken Bow County.”
John Herrick’s smile grew broader and he got to his feet.
“Then I suppose I must go out to them,” he said, “if they won’t come in.”
He limped slowly across the hall and out upon the steps, while a great roar went up from the men as he appeared.
“The money of which there has been so much talk is in there on my table. Is there any man who cares to come in to count it?”
There was no answer, nor did any one come forward. Thorvik, hurrying from one to another, whispering, pointing, urging, seemed to have no influence at all. Dabney Mills, shrill and abusive, shouted something from the back of the crowd, but no one moved. Dan O’Leary burst into a great roar of laughter and slapped his knee.
“You should have heard them tell, on the way up the mountain, what they were going to do,” he declared to Beatrice at whose side he was standing. “Thorvik and Mills, why, they were breathing fire, and now look at them.” He stepped forward and stood by John Herrick. “Boys,” he said, “I’m through. I came up here with you to ask the boss a question, to find out if he had got away with any of the Irrigation Company’s funds. Well, I don’t care any more to ask it. I know he’s all right.”
Beatrice turned at a sound behind her and saw Olaf, followed by old Julia and Tim, come pushing through the door in the hall within. The man and the woman were both deaf and the boy slept in one of the outbuildings, so that they had only just now been awakened by the noise. Olaf’s eye was fixed unwaveringly upon Thorvik, and that worthy, suddenly becoming aware of the fact began to sidle away into the background and disappeared behind the bulk of a gigantic Slovak. Beatrice laid a restraining hand on Olaf’s arm, for John Herrick was speaking again.
“You shall have an explanation,” he began, “though I have been waiting for you to understand of yourselves. While you were talking up your strike, or rather while your leader was talking and you were listening, the Irrigation Company was coming to the end of its funds. Why? Because, after your valuable Thorvik came to this camp, construction dragged, no man did a full day’s work any more, time and material and money were being wasted until the whole enterprise was at the edge of disaster. Was it easy to raise more capital, do you think, when the whole place was seething with discontent and everybody knew that a strike was coming? No, the men who had put money into the project, far from being willing to subscribe more, were wishing they could withdraw. It came about that we moved first, and shut down the work the very night that you were ready to declare a strike. It was a good thing for both sides. We all needed a little time to think things over.”
He paused, as though for comment from his audience, but no one spoke and he went on again.
“While you have been—resting, I have been working, and I have managed to arrange for enough capital to carry on the work to the end, on one condition. When things are not to your liking, you are to use the good American way of talking things over and settling them peaceably, not the method you brought with you from over the sea, of rioting and burning and stirring up hatred between one man and another. On that basis we can go on. In a crisis like this it is always easiest to blame one man, and you have chosen to blame me. What you have been saying about me I neither know nor care, but if you had used your own wits instead of Thorvik’s, you would have seen how things really stood. And I will tell you this. Through all this time of waiting, I have kept in my safe a sufficient sum in cash for immediate use, so that when the time came to begin again, we could go forward without a day’s, without an hour’s delay. It is there, as I said, ready for you to earn it. And now have you had enough of Thorvik and his talk of revolutions? Do you want to go back to work?”
“We want to go back,” shouted a voice from the crowd.
It was an American voice, but its refrain was taken up in a dozen foreign tongues. Yes, it was plain that they were weary of their leader and that they wished to work again.
“Then go home and get some sleep and we will start work in the morning,” John Herrick said. “The money will be there to pay your next week’s wages and there will be enough for one thing besides. It will buy your precious Thorvik a ticket back to his own country and we will all see that he makes use of it.”
“But—see here,” Dabney Mills’ querulous voice rose above the murmur of approval, “I’ve be telling them——”
Then it was that Beatrice had the greatest surprise of all her life. She suddenly found herself standing on the step beside John Herrick, telling what had happened, making plain to that strange, listening group, what was the source of Dabney’s story. With her hand holding to her uncle’s, she spoke out bravely and told the whole truth—just what had really occurred and just how the reporter had spied and listened and questioned and put together his so-called facts. She even found herself at the end, telling of Dabney’s inglorious encounter with the bear.
Beatrice found herself tell............