In the Shadow of the Hills by George C. Shedd (the best ebook reader for android txt) 📕

the leather chair. Old and shattered as Judge Gordon had suddenly become, wretched as Weir saw him to be, the engineer nevertheless felt no pity. The man had been in the conspiracy that had ruined his father; he suffered now not because of remorse but through fear of public opinion; and was a fox turned craven because he found himself enmeshed in a net. And to save his own skin he was selling out his friends.

Weir's face went dark, but Pollock quickly stepped forward and drew him into a corner of the room.

"Keep calm, man," was the lawyer's low advice. "Do you think if we had him tied up as tightly as I've made him believe that I should propose a compromise in his case. He's the weak link. Do you think I've had an easy time the last three hours bringing him to the point he's at? I had to invent evidence that couldn't possibly exist. I had to give him a merciless mental 'third degree.' I told him if he refused I was going to Sorenson with the same offer, who would jump at the chance. And, my dear man, we haven't, in reality, enough proof to convict a mouse since you lost that paper. So now, so far as he's concerned, you must bend a little, a very little--and you'll be able to hang the remaining three."

This incisive reasoning was not to be denied.

"I yield," said Weir.

Beaming, Mr. Pollock walked back to the table.

"Mr. Weir consents," he stated. "Mr. Martinez, if you will go to your office and bring the necessary forms and your seal we can make the transfers and statement and wind the matter up."

An hour later Judge Gordon had signed the deeds, stock certificates from his safe and bills of sale spread before him, passing the ownership of lands, cattle and shares in companies to Pollock for equitable division between Weir and the Dent heirs if found. The old Mexican servants were called in and witnessed his shaky signatures to the papers.

At the statement regarding the Dent shooting and Weir fraud, which Pollock had dictated to Martinez with Gordon's assistance, he staggered to his feet while the pen dropped from his hand.

"I can't sign it, I can't sign it; they would kill me!" he groaned.

The two aged servants stared at him wonderingly.

"My dear Judge, they'll never know of it until it's too late for them to do anything--if they ever know," came the easterner's words, in smooth persuasiveness.

Judge Gordon brushed a hand over his eyes.

"Give me a moment," he muttered.

He stood for a time motionless. Then he walked across the room and opened a door and entered an inner chamber.

"He won't live a year after this," Pollock whispered to his companions.

The speaker could have shortened the time immensely and have still been safe in his prophecy. For when at the end of five minutes he sent the woman to request the Judge to return, she stumbled out of the bed-chamber with affrighted eyes. She said the Judge was asleep on his bed and could not be aroused.

Sleep of the profoundest, the men discovered on going in. And in his fingers was an empty vial. So far as Judge Gordon was concerned Weir had had his revenge.


CHAPTER XXII

AN OLD ADOBE HOUSE

Revenge Weir had. But even in death Judge Gordon, true to his evasive, contriving character, had tricked him; and the irony lay in the fact that in this last act the trick was unpremeditated, unconscious, unintentional. Instead of the signed confession, necessary above everything else, which seemed almost in his fingers, the man had left a little poison vial.

Night had settled over the earth when the three men, after directing the Mexican servants to bring the undertaker, went out of the house, for considerable time had been occupied in the discussion and the preparation of papers preceding Judge Gordon's tragic end. With him Mr. Pollock carried the documents pertaining to the property restitution. These, considered in connection with the suicide, would constitute something like a confession, he grimly asserted.

Avoiding the main street of San Mateo they drove out of the town for camp. The first part of the ride was pursued in silence, for each was busy with his own thoughts in consequence of the sudden shocking termination of the meeting. When about half way to camp, however, their attention was taken from the subject by a sight wholly unexpected, a scene of high colors and of a spirit that mocked at what had just happened.

Some way off from the road, at one side, two bonfires burned brightly before an adobe house, the flames leaping upward in the darkness and lighting the long low-roofed dwelling and the innumerable figures of persons. At the distance the place was from the highway, perhaps two hundred yards, one could make out only the shadowy forms of men--of a considerable number of men, at that.

"I never saw any one at that old tumble-down house before, Martinez," Weir remarked, lessening the speed of the car. "Always supposed it empty."

"No one does live there. The ground belongs to Vorse, who leases it for farming to Oterez. Perhaps Oterez is giving a party there. They are dancing."

Weir brought the machine to a full stop, with suspicion rapidly growing in his mind. The place was owned by Vorse, for one thing, and the number about the house was too large for an ordinary Mexican family merry-making, for another. In view of what had occurred the previous night all "parties" in the neighborhood of the dam deserved inquiry, and this house was but a mile from camp.

They could now hear the sound of music, the shrill quick scrap of a pair of fiddles and the notes of guitars. Against the fire-light too they could distinguish the whirl of skirts.

"Just run over there, will you, Martinez, and have a look at that dance?" Weir said. "See how much whiskey is there, and who the people are."

The Mexican jumped down, climbed through the barb-wire fence bordering the field and disappeared towards the house.

"I told you about some one giving the men booze last night," the engineer addressed his remaining companion. "We found the place off south along the hills where that business happened, and stationed a man there to warn us if another attempt was made to use the spot. But I shouldn't be surprised if this is the location used for to-night; it has all the signs. We suspected that this evening would be the real blow-out and if the men are going there I shall send down the foremen and engineers to break it up. Vorse's owning this house and his being the source of the liquor is almost proof. I met Atkinson returning to the dam when you sent him back from town and he'll know something is up if the workmen have been melting away from camp. This is simply another damnably treacherous move of the gang against us to interfere with our work, starting a big drunk and perhaps a row. We'll stop it right at the beginning."

"Are the officials of this county so completely under Sorenson and his crowd's thumbs that they won't move in a case like this?" Pollock questioned.

"Yes."

"Then we must act on our own initiative, as you say."

"That's our only recourse. Giving whiskey isn't actually an illegal act--and they're giving it away, not trying to sell it here without a government licence."

"The thing's illegal if it's part of a conspiracy to disrupt our work, and if we can secure proof that such is the fact it will but add one more item to the score to be settled with these San Mateo outlaws."

"There are more men going there. See them?" Weir asked. "You hear them on the road ahead of us. They're ducking through the fence and crossing to the house. Our workmen. The thing's plain now; they had word there would be another 'party' to-night, but they didn't know just where until they received word this evening. I suppose the whole camp except a few men will be here."

"Won't they turn ugly if you interfere?"

"Can't help that. I'll send men down with axes and when the booze is poured on the ground it makes no difference then; the men will be kept sober. If they are stubborn, I'll run a new bunch in and fire these fellows. But I don't imagine they will quit work, however surly, for they know whiskey's no excuse. Men usually cool down after a night's sleep."

From where they sat and since Weir had turned out his car lamps, they could see the steady string of men emerging from the darkness of the field and approaching the house, to quickly dissolve in the gathering already there. In their lively steps, as well as in the eager voices occasionally raised along the dark road, the men's desire to join in the debauch was apparent.

With the swelling of the crowd the scraping of the fiddles became louder, the dancing more furious, shouts and yells more frequent, while a dense line of men passing and jamming in and out of the door pointed only too plainly that inside the house liquor flowed. This would be no matter of a few drinks per man, but a big drunk if not stopped.

Martinez confirmed this opinion on his return.

"There are two barrels inside and a couple of fellows are dipping it up in tin cups like water," said he. "They're not even troubling to draw the stuff; the barrels have been placed on end and the heads knocked out. It will be the biggest spree San Mateo ever saw, with plenty of fighting after awhile. Women, you know, always start fights during a spree."

"Those surely are not women from town," Weir exclaimed.

"Oh, no. I never saw them before. Brought in here from somewhere--Santa Fe perhaps, El Paso more likely. You know the kind who would mix with that crowd--tough girls. They're wearing low necks and short skirts, red stockings and all that. You know the kind. Out of joints and dives somewhere. There's only a dozen, but they keep circulating and dancing with different ones. I just put my head through a window to look inside, which is lighted by a big kerosene lamp hanging from the roof; and I tell you, gentlemen, it made me sick the way those two fellows were dipping up whiskey and the crowd drinking it down."

"And more men coming all the time," Weir stated.

"And more coming, yes. It will be very bad there by midnight. Vorse and Burkhardt and Sorenson are managing the thing, of course." Martinez lighted a cigarette and stepped into the car. "No mistake about that, for Vorse's bartender is one of the men at the barrels. And I imagine Judge Gordon knew this thing was coming off though he made no mention of it."

"Since we were ignorant of the matter, he naturally wouldn't inform us," Pollock remarked, dryly.

"Time to put a stop to the show before it grows bad," Weir stated resolutely. And he started the machine.

"If it can be stopped," Martinez replied.

That was the question, whether or not now it would be possible even to reach and destroy the barrels inside the house, what with the numbers who would oppose the move and what with the state of intoxication that must rapidly prevail at the place.

For as they drove away they could