The Hunted Woman - James Oliver Curwood (books to read for beginners TXT) 📗

of them coming in hollow, reverberating booms, others sounding as if in midair. Unseen by the watchers, the heavens were filled with hurtling rocks; solid masses of granite ten feet square were thrown a hundred feet away; rocks weighing a ton were hurled still farther, as if they were no more than stones flung by the hands of a giant; chunks that would have crashed from the roof to the basement of a skyscraper dropped a third of a mile away. For three minutes the frightful convulsions continued, and the tongues of flame leaped into the night. Then the lurid lights died out, shorter and shorter grew the sullen flashes, and then again fell--silence!
During those appalling moments, unconscious of the act, Joanne had shrank close to Aldous, so that he felt the soft crush of her hair and the swift movement of her bosom. Blackton's voice brought them back to life.
He laughed, and it was the laugh of a man who had looked upon work well done.
"It has done the trick," he said. "To-morrow we will come and see. And I have changed my plans about Coyote Number Twenty-eight. Hutchins, the superintendent, is passing through in the afternoon, and I want him to see it." He spoke now to a man who had come up out of the darkness. "Gregg, have Twenty-eight ready at four o'clock to-morrow afternoon--four o'clock--sharp!"
Then he said:
"Dust and a bad smell will soon be settling about us. Come, let's go home!"
And as they went back to the buckboard wagon through the gloom John Aldous still held Joanne's hand in his own, and she made no effort to take it from him.


CHAPTER XVIII
The next morning, when Aldous joined the engineer in the dining-room below, he was disappointed to find the breakfast table prepared for two instead of four. It was evident that Peggy Blackton and Joanne were not going to interrupt their beauty nap on their account.
Blackton saw his friend's inquiring look, and chuckled.
"Guess we'll have to get along without 'em this morning, old man. Lord bless me, did you hear them last night--after you went to bed?"
"No."
"You were too far away," chuckled Blackton again, "I was in the room across the hall from them. You see, old man, Peggy sometimes gets fairly starved for the right sort of company up here, and last night they didn't go to bed until after twelve o'clock. I looked at my watch. Mebby they were in bed, but I could hear 'em buzzing like two bees, and every little while they'd giggle, and then go on buzzing again. By George, there wasn't a break in it! When one let up the other'd begin, and sometimes I guess they were both going at once. Consequently, they're sleeping now."
When breakfast was finished Blackton looked at his watch.
"Seven o'clock," he said. "We'll leave word for the girls to be ready at nine. What are you going to do meantime, Aldous?"
"Hunt up MacDonald, probably."
"And I'll run down and take a look at the work."
As they left the house the engineer nodded down the road. MacDonald was coming.
"He has saved you the trouble," he said. "Remember, Aldous--nine o'clock sharp!"
A moment later Aldous was advancing to meet the old mountaineer.
"They've gone, Johnny," was Donald's first greeting.
"Gone?"
"Yes. The whole bunch--Quade, Culver Rann, DeBar, and the woman who rode the bear. They've gone, hide and hair, and nobody seems to know where."
Aldous was staring.
"Also," resumed old Donald slowly, "Culver Rann's outfit is gone--twenty horses, including six saddles. An' likewise others have gone, but I can't find out who."
"Gone!" repeated Aldous again.
MacDonald nodded.
"And that means----"
"That Culver Rann ain't lost any time in gettin' under way for the gold," said Donald. "DeBar is with him, an' probably the woman. Likewise three cut-throats to fill the other saddles. They've gone prepared to fight."
"And Quade?"
Old Donald hunched his shoulders, and suddenly John's face grew dark and hard.
"I understand," he spoke, half under his breath. "Quade has disappeared--but he isn't with Culver Rann. He wants us to believe he has gone. He wants to throw us off our guard. But he's watching, and waiting--somewhere--like a hawk, to swoop down on Joanne! He----"
"That's it!" broke in MacDonald hoarsely. "That's it, Johnny! It's his old trick--his old trick with women. There's a hunderd men who've got to do his bidding--do it 'r get out of the mountains--an' we've got to watch Joanne. We have, Johnny! If she should disappear----"
Aldous waited.
"You'd never find her again, so 'elp me God, you wouldn't, Johnny!" he finished.
"We'll watch her," said Aldous quietly. "I'll be with her to-day, Mac, and to-night I'll come down to the camp in the coulee to compare notes with you. They can't very well steal her out of Blackton's house while I'm gone."
For an hour after MacDonald left him he walked about in the neighbourhood of the Blackton bungalow smoking his pipe. Not until he saw the contractor drive up in the buckboard did he return. Joanne and Peggy were more than prompt. They were waiting. If such a thing were possible Joanne was more radiantly lovely than the night before. To Aldous she became more beautiful every time he looked at her. But this morning he did not speak what was in his heart when, for a moment, he held her hand, and looked into her eyes. Instead, he said:
"Good morning, Ladygray. Have you used----"
"I have," she smiled. "Only it's Potterdam's Tar Soap, and not the other. And you--have not shaved, John Aldous!"
"Great Scott, so I haven't!" he exclaimed, rubbing his chin. "But I did yesterday afternoon, Ladygray!"
"And you will again this afternoon, if you please," she commanded. "I don't like bristles."
"But in the wilderness----"
"One can shave as well as another can make curls," she reminded him, and there came an adorable little dimple at the corner of her mouth as she looked toward Paul Blackton.
Aldous was glad that Paul and Peggy Blackton did most of the talking that morning. They spent half an hour where the explosion of the night before had blown out the side of the mountain, and then drove on to Coyote Number Twenty-eight. It was in the face of a sandstone cliff, and all they could see of it when they got out of the wagon was a dark hole in the wall of rock. Not a soul was about, and Blackton rubbed his hands with satisfaction.
"Everything is completed," he said. "Gregg put in the last packing this morning, and all we are waiting for now is four o'clock this afternoon."
The hole in the mountain was perhaps four feet square. Ten feet in front of it the engineer paused, and pointed to the ground. Up out of the earth came two wires, which led away from the mouth of the cavern.
"Those wires go down to the explosives," he explained. "They're battery wires half a mile long. But we don't attach the battery until the final moment, as you saw last night. There might be an accident."
He bent his tall body and entered the mouth of the cavern, leading his wife by the hand. Observing that Joanne had seen this attention on the contractor's part, Aldous held out his own hand, and Joanne accepted it. For perhaps twenty feet they followed the Blacktons with lowered heads. They seemed to have entered a black, cold pit, sloping slightly downward, and only faintly could they see Blackton when he straightened.
His voice came strange and sepulchral:
"You can stand up now. We're in the chamber. Don't move or you might stumble over something. There ought to be a lantern here."
He struck a match, and as he moved slowly toward a wall of blackness, searching for the lantern, he called back encouragingly through the gloom:
"You folks are now standing right over ten tons of dynamite, and there's another five tons of black powder----"
A little shriek from Peggy Blackton stopped him, and his match went out.
"What in heaven's name is the matter?" he asked anxiously. "Peggy----"
"Why in heaven's name do you light a match then, with us standing over all those tons of dynamite?" demanded Peggy. "Paul Blackton, you're----"
The engineer's laughter was like a giant's roar in the cavern, and Joanne gave a gasp, while Peggy shiveringly caught Aldous by the arm.
"There--I've got the lantern!" exclaimed Blackton. "There isn't any danger, not a bit. Wait a minute and I'll tell you all about it." He lighted the lantern, and in the glow of it Joanne's and Peggy's faces were white and startled. "Why, bless my soul, I didn't mean to frighten you!" he cried. "I was just telling you facts. See, we're standing on a solid floor--four feet of packed rock and cement. The dynamite and black powder are under that. We're in a chamber--a cave--an artificial cavern. It's forty feet deep, twenty wide, and about seven high."
He held the lantern even with his shoulders and walked deeper into the cavern as he spoke. The others followed. They passed a keg on which was a half-burned candle. Close to the keg was an empty box. Beyond these things the cavern was empty.
"I thought it was full of powder and dynamite," apologized Peggy.
"You see, it's like this," Blackton began. "We put the powder and dynamite down there, and pack it over solid with rock and cement. If we didn't leave this big air-chamber above it there would be only one explosion, and probably two thirds of the explosive would not fire, and would be lost. This chamber corrects that. You heard a dozen explosions last night, and you'll hear a dozen this afternoon, and the biggest explosion of all is usually the fourth or fifth. A 'coyote' isn't like an ordinary blast or shot. It's a mighty expensive thing, and you see it means a lot of work. Now, if some one were to touch off those explosives at this minute---- What's the matter, Peggy? Are you cold? You're shivering!"
"Ye-e-e-e-s!" chattered Peggy.
Aldous felt Joanne tugging at his hand.
"Let's take Mrs. Blackton out," she whispered. "I'm--I'm--afraid she'll take cold!"
In spite of himself Aldous could not restrain his laughter until they had got through the tunnel. Out in the sunlight he looked at Joanne, still holding her hand. She withdrew it, looking at him accusingly.
"Lord bless me!" exclaimed Blackton, who seemed to understand at last. "There's no danger--not a bit!"
"But I'd rather look at it from outside, Paul, dear," said Mrs. Blackton.
"But--Peggy--if it went off now you'd be in just as bad shape out here!"
"I don't think we'd be quite so messy, really I don't, dear," she persisted.
"Lord bless me!" he gasped.
"And they'd probably be able to find something of us," she added.
"Not a button, Peggy!"
"Then I'm going to move, if you please!" And suiting her action to the word Peggy led the way to the buckboard. There she paused and took one of her husband's big hands fondly in both her own. "It's perfectly wonderful, Paul--and I'm proud of you!" she said. "But, honestly, dear, I can enjoy it so much better at four o'clock this afternoon."
Smiling, Blackton lifted her into the buckboard.
"That's why I wish Paul had been a preacher or something like that," she confided to Joanne as they drove homeward. "I'm growing old just thinking of him working over that horrid dynamite and powder all the time. Every little while some one is blown into nothing."
"I believe," said Joanne, "that I'd like to do something like that if I were a man. I'd want to be a man, not that preachers aren't men, Peggy, dear--but I'd want to do things, like blowing up mountains for instance, or finding buried