The Argosy, Vol. 76, No. 3 — page 30: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

500 day in bed, and every movement of his bruised limbs had brought him pain. In the small hours of that Friday morning he had dressed, bargained at the nearest corral for a horse, and be- fore sunrise had put miles behind him on the way to the Mariquita Mine. At first his stubborn will had to goad his battered body into action. As his ride progressed, however, his stiffened limbs and flagging muscles yielded with growing grace to the grim pur- pose that drove them. His iron physique, dormant for a space, recuperated swiftly. He was like a machine which, slow to start at first, presently yields to the spell of motion and runs with increasing ease and power. , Not until he entered the headquar- ters adobe had he been conscious of any feeling of fatigue. He had dis- missed King and planned to lie down for a brief rest. But he could not leave the desk until he had tested the clue of the amalgam ball and the cha- mois skin; and now that brief note from the Mallory girl aroused feelings that made rest impossible. He got to his feet, leaned against the top of the desk, and swept his eyes around the office. There, in premises just taken over by him, Griggsby and Lacey had lived and worked—Griggs- by and Lacey, the unfortunate men who had preceded him in the service of Deane. The letter-files on the shelf, the map on the wall, the cabinet of ore speci- mens, the letter-press, the table in the center of the room, the picture of the martyred Garfield hanging near the door—all these trifling details of the room appealed to him _ strongly. They constituted surroundings which Griggsby and Lacey had known to their sorrow. A black memory was over everything —and the Mallorys were the cause! Bremerton, frowning darkly, swore to himself that he would bring home to the girl and her father the conse- quences of their deeds. Making a win- THE ARGOSY. ning proposition of the Mariquita Mine was but a part of his work; the other part was to make sure that Justice had her due. For the killing of Griggsby, the wounding of Lacey, and the work of that cowardly gang by the Phoenix town ditch, some one should pay! Bremerton passed to the open door and leaned there, looking out upon the camp. The mine lay in a shallow val- ley bordered with bleak hills covered with cactus clumps. The ramshackle structure housing the ten-stamp mill stood at the left, perched on the top of an incline of the valley floor. Flanking the mill on one side were the cyanid tanks, and hard by the tanks was the shake-roofed, shake-sided lab- oratory building. In the middle dis- tance was the bunk-house, with its shattered windows. ‘To the right of the bunk-houSe stood the chuck-shanty. Beyond Wun Sing’s headquarters was a cleft in the valley wall, in which were huddled the jacals of the Mex- icans. Between mill and bunk-house were posted the derricks, with their whips, and the shaft-house, with its hoisting engine. The whole valley was gouged and gophered and sprinkled with heaps of country rock. The road from the shafts to the head of the mill had been powdered white by hoofs and wheels and gleamed in the sun like a trail of whitewash. . There was nothing alluring in the scene, nothing even picturesque. The valley wore a forbidding, threatening look. Like a long, black serpent, the pipe-line trailed past the Mexican quar- ter, coiled around the chuck-shanty, and reared an ugly, spouting head mid- way between the bunk-house and the headquarters adobe. A branch of it crawled on to the cyanid tanks and the mill. Silence brooded over the place. The men from the dry wash were loafing about the bunk-house, and there’ was activity manifested among the Mex- icans. COMicdoo S CO@