CHAPTER VIII
THE SECOND OFFER
It was a few days later and Tom Graves was sitting side by side with Gamble in front of the latter's cabin, contentedly rolling a brown paper cigarette, looking out at the dipping, peaking mountains and listening to the sounds of pickaxe and blast that drifted across from the tunnel of the Yankee Doodle Glory, where the miners had begun their early morning shift.
Directly below his feet lay the old stage route, long disused, last memory of the gold seekers who had once followed the glittering metal lure to the Hoodoos. It was still in fairly good condition, ruts and grooves apart, bottled up between rock ridges five hundred feet high, their crevices giving foothold to stunted pines, gnarled fir trees, and an occasional "bearberry" bush, their bases sheltering thick, lacy growths of young spruce. The rocks stood out sharply and threateningly, like gloomy sentinels silhouetted against the tight-stretched sky, while the road beneath lay bathed in purple and umber light.
It was quite early in the morning. The shivering sun rays blinked through the pines and gilded the opposite crags; they trickled down leisurely to a ribbon-shaped granite ledge and a sparkling little brook fringed by bush and willow.
"Lonely country," suggested Gamble, who was a recent arrival from some old, teeming Pennsylvania mining town.
"Aha! Lonely. And safe," replied Tom, lighting his cigarette and sending a thick plume of smoke straight up into the still air. "No trouble here in the hills. I used to swear by the range. Still do. But I guess old Truex is right. The hills are all right, too. There is no meanness here, no cheating, no swindling, no …" And then, looking intently through puckered eyes, "say, if there isn't somebody coming! Down yonder! Along the old road!" and, following Tom's outstretched finger, Gamble saw a tiny, brown spot moving along rapidly between the rock ridges.
"Can't see his face," went on Tom, who had fetched a pair of field-glasses from the cabin, "but traveling in considerable style, whoever he is."
Gamble took the glasses.
"You bet," he replied; "some style!"
For the tiny, brown spot was a low buckboard driven by one man, side by side with another, and was filled to overflowing with pieces of luggage—two Gladstone bags, a plaid roll, a canvas roll, a linen-covered trunk, three guns in pigskin cases, a large creel and fishing rod and a camera.
"Where do you think they are going?" asked Tom.
"Must be coming here. The road leads to Goat Peak. That's the end of it, and there's a pretty smooth ascent from there up to this cabin."
"I guess so. Wonder who it is, though," replied Tom and, half an hour later, while Gamble had walked over to the Yankee Doodle Glory, his wonder grew into surprise and his surprise into dull, unreasoning anger.
For, around an out jutting, frayed rock that marked the end of the Goat Peak Trail, followed by a lanky, perspiring Palouse farmer youth, laden with most of the pieces of luggage that had crowded the buckboard, came Baron Horst von Götz-Wrede, smiling, debonair, superbly sure of himself, with hand outstretched.
"I have heard so much about your free and open Western hospitality that I decided to have a try at it," he laughed. "Here I am! My word!" he continued in his curiously British accents, "you don't seem a bit glad to see me. Have I broken in on the hermit's meditations about peace and the pure life?"
Tom stiffened. Then, very quickly, he stepped forward and shook the offered hand. For, after all, the man of the Far West is very much akin to the desert Arab in his peculiarly rigid code of honor, his peculiarly sweeping code of hospitality; hospitality even to the blood enemy who touches his tent ropes.
"Glad to see you." He tried to give to the words a ring of that welcome which, deep in his heart, he knew to be missing. Then, pointing at the guns and the fishing rod, "Come here for sport? Not much game here, I am afraid, and the trout are as shy as butterflies."
The Prussian officer had paid off the young farmer and sent him on his way. He turned to Tom with a smile of utter, winning sincerity.
"Mr. Graves," he said, "I have been told by men who know that you Westerners are jolly good poker players, pretty hard to bluff, and so I shall put my cards on the table, face up. Of course I am awfully fond of sport and I'd be glad to pot one of your big horns. But my real reason in coming here was to have a look at that famous mine of yours, the Yankee Doodle Glory. I have heard a lot about it, and I am frightfully curious by nature."
Tom was frankly astonished. He knew that the sensation of the ore strike in his mine was no longer a matter of absorbing interest to any one, and so he said: "Why, that's ancient history."
"Perhaps to you, the Americans. But not to …" The Baron checked himself quickly. He bit his lips as if trying to cut off the word he had been about to pronounce. He seemed strangely flustered for a moment, and his English, usually so carefully modulated, so ultra-British in every delicate shade of inflection, suddenly took on a thick, rasping, guttural tang.
"You see," he stammered, "the papers say a good deal about it, and …"
Tom Graves took pity on the other's evident embarrassment. He had no idea why the man should be ill at ease, and he dismissed the fact of it as some mad, inexplicable, foreign idiosyncrasy.
"Sure," he said, "that unknown metal. I get you," and he did not notice that the German, at the words, had turned slightly pale and was studying him intently from beneath his lowered eyelids.
"Well," Tom went on, "have a bit of breakfast, and then I'll take you round to the diggings and you can gopher about there to your heart's content."
He said it laughingly. For all at once it had struck him that he had every reason in the world to be glad of the other's presence here in the Hoodoos. As long as he was here, he was away from Bertha Wedekind, and that was a point gained. And so, his native hospitality fired by his love, his jealousy, his self-interest, Tom set about preparing breakfast. He heated up the coffee, threw half-a-dozen slices of fat pork sizzling into the skillet, and mixed the proper ingredients for that Western culinary marvel prosaically called flapjacks.
"Here you are," he said, when everything was finished and, passing to his guest the frying-pan filled with pork, "have some mountain veal! And say—" laughing, jovial, now thoroughly at his ease, "don't dirty any more plates than you have to. Gamble and I are taking turn and turn about, and this is my day to cook and wash up and get messy generally. Fall too, stranger!"
Breakfast finished, he took Baron von Götz-Wrede to the mine tunnel and into the hands of Gamble while he returned to the cabin, sat himself upon a stone, and smoked, doing nothing successfully and blissfully.
Late that night, after dinner, with their guest in the back room hunting in his Gladstone bag for cigars, Gamble turned to Tom Graves with a sudden, hurried whisper.
"Did you say that fellow's an officer in the German cavalry?"
"Sure. Why?"
"Well, he knows as much and more about mining engineering than I do and, believe me, I am no slouch at the game. He …"
"Shut up!" whispered Tom.
But it was too late. The Baron had come into the front room. He must have overheard the last sentence, at least caught the sense and drift of it, for he laughed, very much like a schoolboy surprised in a naughty prank.
"I do know mines, don't I, Mr. Gamble?" he asked. "Well, I am not ashamed of it. You see, we Prussian army chaps, while we like our career, of course get tired of drill, drill, drill all the time. We get bored to death with saber and lance and martingale. We have to have relaxation of some sort, you know, and I have always taken a great deal of interest in what's going on in the bowels of the earth."
"You're certainly some little expert," commented Gamble admiringly, and the Baron inclined his head.
"German efficiency," he replied, and it was difficult to tell if he was poking fun at himself or at the others.
Gamble went to bed early leaving Tom and his guest in front of the blazing, crackling log fire. Tom was sleepy and happy. He was about to doze off when the German's words startled him into immediate and full wakefulness:
"How much will you take for the Yankee Doodle Glory?"
The American looked up sharply. "You want to buy?"
"Yes. Outright. For cash. Name your figure, Mr. Graves."
The latter did not like the other's abrupt, dragooning manner, and—he was a good poker player. He folded his hands behind his head, kicked out his feet towards the full warmth of the fire, and yawned elaborately.
"I don't know as I want to sell," he said finally, with utter carelessness. "I guess I'm sort of stuck on these old Hoodoos. No. I don't know as I want to sell powerfully bad."
"Five hundred thousand?" asked the Baron, taking out check book and fountain pen.
Tom grinned mischievously. "Oh, you carry your munition along, do you? Well, it's no go. I don't want to sell. At least I don't know that I do … yet!"
"When will you know?"
"Perhaps next week. Perhaps never."
The Baron gave a short, impatient laugh. "I thought you Americans were such quick, sharp businessmen."
"I'm not a businessman. I'm an ex-cowpuncher, and I've all the time in the world. Let's turn in."
"Verdammt noch 'mal!" The Baron lapsed into hectic, vituperative German. But he controlled him self. "I make that offer six hundred thousand," he continued.
Tom Graves rose.
"Quit tilting the jackpot," he advised. "I'm not playing;" and that was all the answer the other could get out of him though that night. All the following week he returned to the attack, periodically raising his bid until he had reached an even million, and even Tom kicked himself for a stubborn fool. "But," as he explained it afterwards, "I never sell when the other fellow is too damned anxious to buy. It may be punk business, but it's me!"
At the end of the week Tom decided to return to Spokane.
"You can stay here. Gamble'll take good care of you," he told the Baron.
But the German said he would come along to town, and all the way to Spokane he repeated his offer for the Yankee Doodle Glory, raising his bid time and again, and finally driving Tom into an access of American abruptness.
"Stow that nagging. You aren't my wife, nor my mother-in-law, and you aren't even my side-kick. I don't want to sell, and hell, brimstone, and damnation can't budge me when I've made up my mind, see?"
Von Götz-Wrede choked down an angry word. Then he was again his old, suave self.
"Well, never mind. I shall ask you just once more …"
"Look here! I told you I …"
"Just once more … before I leave Spokane. You see, I shall leave here to-morrow night."
"Oh, you're off?"
"Yes, my leave is over. Back to the regiment, and the drill."
Tom smiled. He thought of Bertha. Here was one rival at least eliminated for good. So he essayed a mild, white lie. "I'm mighty sorry to see you go."
"And I am sorry to leave. I've had a ripping time. Thanks for your hospitality, and if ever you come to Germany …"
"Me—to Germany?" Tom Graves laughed out loud at the idea. "Say—I don't …"
"You never know what may happen. Anyway, if ever you happen to be in Berlin, look me up." He was again the soul of sincerity. "We like men like you over there. Strong men, big, powerful, daring, upstanding; and there's one or two things you could teach us …"
"Nothing except riding a little pony," smiled Tom.
"Exactly. And that's a lot. You see, I am in the cavalry, call myself a good horseman, have ridden for my regiment at Olympia, in London. But compared to you … My word!"
And the young Westerner, touched in his weak spot, decided that the man was not so bad after all and thought to himself that perhaps he would let him have the Yankee Doodle Glory. There was really no sense in not selling.
But, since he considered Martin Wedekind his mentor in all things financial, he ran out to the house in Lincoln Addition that evening and put the case before his friend, in all its details, including the Baron's extraordinary knowledge of mines and mining.
"Shall I sell?" he asked.
Wedekind shook his head. "No. Don't sell to …"
"To the Baron?"
"To any German! To anybody unless you know exactly who and what he is. No, no! Don't you ask me to give you any reasons. Just do what I tell you, will you?"
"Sure!"
And so, the next day, when Herr von Götz-Wrede called on him for his final decision he was met by such a staunch, hard "No! I won't sell, and that's flat!" that the German gave up.
"All right, Mr. Graves," he said, waving a careless hand. "All right. Only, please keep it to yourself. Don't speak about that offer I made you. People would think me slightly—oh—touched."
"But why do you …?"
"I am a rich man, I have hobbies, and I like to gratify them. That's all. By the way," shaking hands again, "do come over to Germany and look me up."
"No. I don't want to travel."
"Don't be so provincial. Come on. You're a rich man, a man of leisure. Do come. Promise me that you'll come!"
"No!"
"I shan't take no for an answer." He lifted a threatening finger. "Honestly, unless you promise me, I am going to stay right here in Spokane, and nag you every day about selling the Yankee Doodle Glory!"
"All right, all right!" laughed Tom. "I promise!"
"You'll come this year?"
"Yes, yes, I promise anything you wish as long's you shut up about that mine!"
"Thanks. That's corking. Here's my address. 'No. 67, Xantener Strasse, Berlin, W.' I'll be mighty glad to see you over there!"
And there was such a charming, sincere smile on his lips and in his eyes that Tom decided all his former antipathy had been nothing but rank envy and jealousy; and so he grasped the German's hand and cried enthusiastically:
"You bet I'll come!"