Page:The Pacific Monthly vol. 14.djvu/98

 unipers. "I tell you, boys, the whole d — camp ought to be wiped out. All I ever got could be put in yer eye," floated up to him in a drunken, whining voice.

Suddenly the big mill hushed its pounding with a wheeze and the whistle shrieked and screamed to the dwellers of the camp. A moment later a hundred lights were lit and loud cries and hurrying of hob-nailed feet jumbled in a roar.

The powder tunnel was on fire ! The old, dry, half rotten timbers were blaz- ing and crackling. Air vents could suck fire as well as air. A quarter of a mile to water — and up hill. A carload of giant would split old War Eagle from top to bottom and the mill — the store — the homes would be literally bombarded to splinters by huge bowlders slung frcm a mighty catapult.

Jack Wilson, a diabolical grin on his drunken face, sat on a rock a mile up the mountain muttering, "The whole d — camp will be wiped out."

Far up the gulch the fren'-^ied people ran to escape the awful cannonade soon to open.

The superintendent and Prescott, their clothing smoking and eyebrows gone, etayed, hoping to the last to catch the roaring monster gasping for breath and strangle it.

"Come on, Prescott !" shouted Banners. "The camp's gone. Let's sa\ e the women — my family — God! Did they go with the rest?'"'

The bookkeeper stood, a wild look in his eyes, gazing into the furnace.

"Come on !" shouted Banners in his ear, trying to drag him.

"fSave them — Mollie — I'm going in — the other end — tear down the timbers — feed them to the fire."

Banners looked him in the face.

"Five minutes more she'll go. Good-bye, Prescott," and lie was gone.

Prescott jerked up a tuft of green grass, dipped it into a bucket of water, then, clinching it in his teeth, he grasped an a.\e and plunged into the mouth of the blazing tunnel.

The fire, now half way in, sucked him. gleefully on, and the heat seemed to bake him to the marrow. If he could only get through it. Smoking timbers were falling around him now. His arms clasped around his head, he charged the flames with the fierceness of a wild beast.

Fie fell; rose to his knees; he felt himself a coal of fire and loving tongues licked him. He crawled. The hot track rails marked great sears into his arui? and legs. The heat grew less. Up now with the axe while strength was left, and he hurled timber after timber into the eager flames, wrenching them loose "when he could, and chopping the rest.

Twenty feet of cleared space ! and the flames lashed themselves into a fury as Prescott's hand felt the powder-house door. Three or four feeble blows battered it open and he fell in across a case of fuse.

The crowd up the gulch waited in vain for the rending of War Eagle. The superintendent led them back to their homes, thanking God^ but no one- heard a word from his lips.

They gathered about the mouth of the tunnel, and when the superintend(>nt. followed by two shift bosses bearing a blistered form came out, they understood, and bared their heads.

A doctor knelt, and when they heard the words, "A good nurse." the brown bowlders of old War Eagle were nearly jarred from their beds by the cheer that went up — for one brave man.

Every woman in camp volunteered as nurse, but the doctor was one of those sly diplomats who believe one's heart should be in his work, so Prescott's blisters were lotioned and bandaged in the superintendent's own home.

A telegram arrived from the president of the company :

"Give P anything he wants. Two thousand shares deposited to his credit."

The superintendent blinked only once and answered.

"Mollie is all he wants."