Hard Money (2 page)

Bonal, regarding him in the bar mirror, nodded pleasantly, recalling all he knew of this man's brief history. A week ago Phil Seay had come to Tronah, and inside half an hour had picked up old acquaintances, veterans of a dozen gold camps of the past. They all knew him well; they all drank with him, and not so well. Early in the morning they had roistered as far as the Melodian. It was Phil Seay who went to the faro table and quietly bought into the game. Inside an hour the faro banker had hunted up Morg Buchanan, the owner of the Melodian, with the news that his bank needed more money or the game must shut down. Morg Buchanan had taken over the faro bank himself. He kept it for exactly thirty-seven hours of straight playing, at the end of which time he had lost his money and the lease on his saloon and all its fixtures to the gray-eyed stranger with the run of luck.

That was his history, Bonal knew, and yet it told nothing about the man except that he knew how to crowd his luck. It was the quick judgment of him, his ruthlessness, his gambling and his stamina that Charles Bonal read into that winning streak, and he knew he had found his man. In that bony face, with its wide mouth and the deep-set black-browed eyes, there was something that Bonal recognized and wanted and had to have. He could even do with the quiet mockery, which was in the eyes now, and which was seldom absent from them.

Phil Seay said now, “Am I in for it again?”

“You are,” Bonal said quietly. “As soon as I finish my drink, if it's agreeable to you.”

“How many lickings do I have to take from you?” Seay asked.

“One more. Your last.”

Seay smiled at this, but said nothing. He had noticed the canvas sack which Bonal had brought in, and he surveyed the tables at the rear. Presently, when Bonal had finished his drink, they went over to the faro table in the rear corner. A word to the house man, and Seay had taken his place behind the table at the box. The four men idly gambling at the green cloth paid no attention to the change. It was only when Bonal, a cold cigar clamped in his mouth, hatless, the canvas sack on the corner of the table, started to play that their attention was aroused. Two of them dropped out to watch, but the other two played on, their small bets trailing Bonal's stakes.

Within an hour the saloon started to fill up, and the word soon got around of the game at the corner table. Another overhead lamp was brought by one of the waiters, as the circle of watchers increased.

After two hours of play, when the other two players had been replaced by three more affluent men, Seay, who had been losing to Bonal and consistently winning back a tenth of his losses from the rest of the table, said, “Maybe you'd like a back room, Mr. Bonal.”

Bonal looked up. “Would you?”

“It's your pleasure.”

“I'd like to stay here,” Bonal said and added dryly. “I'll trim you in public. I told you last night I would.”

Seay smiled and said nothing, and the play went on. There was little conversation in the circle of watchers, for faro is a game of thought, demanding quiet. At a little after eleven Bonal called for a chair. At midnight Seay called for a box of cigars. At one Seay said, “If I've calculated right, Bonal, I'll have to close my house games for funds.”

“Are you going to close this game?” Bonal asked.

“Certainly not. That was our agreement.”

Bonal nodded. Seay called a house man to him and talked briefly with him, then returned to the game. At a little past two Seay said, “Now I'm down to the lease. Are you interested?”

Bonal raised his shrewd glance to him. “Depends. If I leave it will you still try to operate the place?”

Seay smiled narrowly. “I don't like it much. If you'll accept it I'll gamble it and the fixtures.”

“Done.”

At three, when all but the poker tables toward the front were abandoned, and the crowd at the bar had become larger and noisier, Bonal leaned back in his chair and regarded the chips in front of Seay. “I believe if I win this you're through.”

“That's right.” Seay looked at him questioningly.

Bonal carefully lighted his cigar. “My boy, you've got several hundred dollars there—too little to do much with except gamble. You might even gamble well enough with it to start winning from me. Therefore, I'm finished.” He picked up his hat and regarded Seay placidly.

“Step in my office, will you, Mr. Bonal?”

“No. You cash in my chips and come with me, please,” Bonal said calmly.

“But the lease?”

“We'll arrange that later. Come with me.”

The chips were converted, and Seay and Bonal left the Melodian. The crowd on the streets had thinned out somewhat, but the sidewalks were still thronged, and the endless line of ore wagons rumbled their slow way down the street.

At the hotel Bonal led the way up to his suite and turned the lamp on the desk a little higher. While he got the whisky and glasses from the cabinet Seay sat down and looked around him. He was facing the door, so that when it opened he saw Sharon slip through. For a moment they both stared at each other, and then Seay came to his feet, silent, his expression one of puzzlement.

Hand still on the doorknob, Sharon looked around her. She was in a gray wrapper, her tawny chestnut hair loose about her shoulders.

“Do you make a practice of walking into hotel rooms at night?” she asked quietly.

Over in the dark, out of the circle of lamplight where she could not see him, Charles Bonal chuckled. “This is Phil Seay, Sharon. My daughter, Seay.” Then he added to Sharon dryly. “He came up because he was asked.”

Sharon's face relaxed a little, and only then did Bonal understand that she had been genuinely frightened. She came across the room and nodded slightly to Seay, who towered above her in muteness.

“May I stay, Dad?” she asked.

“No. You can't even have a drink with us,” Bonal said gruffly. “This is strictly business, dear.”

Sharon came over and kissed him, and Bonal said, “I'll come in later, Sharon. Go to bed.”

Sharon went back across the room. On her way she looked long, frankly at Seay, who returned the look with a kind of brash hostility before she closed the door.

Then Bonal ripped off his tie, pulled off his coat, hauled a chair around where he could put his feet on the desk and sat with his hand cupped over the brandy glass. The cigar he offered Seay was refused, and while Seay drank, Bonal regarded him covertly.

“What do you do now?” Bonal asked finally.

“I'll see what your proposition is first,” Seay said.

“How do you know I'm going to make you one?”

“You aren't the kind of a man who breaks a gambler for the fun of it,” Seay told him quietly.

Presently, Bonal said, “That's right. But you aren't a gambler, either,” and he added. “I don't mean that offensively.”

“I've been one for a week now—a good one.”

“But not before that.”

“No.”

“You have no liking for it?” Bonal asked.

Seay looked at his brandy. “For gambling, yes. For being a gambler, no.”

“Then you're not sorry I broke you tonight.”

Seay's quick smile was dry, amused. He said, “Bonal, are you trying to make me thank you for breaking me? Every man wants money. I want it, too. There are other ways to make it besides gambling. I prefer them, I think, but when I began I didn't have a choice.”

Bonal only grunted, and then he said abruptly, “I suppose you know I'm in the thick of a fight.”

“From what I hear, you always are,” Seay replied.

“I don't mean that kind—quarreling with mine shares, jockeying stock. That's a pillow fight for a man with money. I mean a real fight.” He paused and added bluntly, “A fight for survival.” He gestured toward the table, where the canvas sack of bank notes and gold still lay. “For instance, these winnings from you tonight will be sent by messenger to the coast tomorrow. Very likely, this messenger will meet my creditors on the way to here.” He smiled faintly. “Haven't you heard that, even?”

“I'm a working man, Bonal. That's my kind. We don't hear things you Big Augurs don't want us to.”

“You resent it?” Bonal asked shrewdly.

Seay nodded faintly. “A little. But someday I'll be one of you and do the same thing.”

Bonal smiled secretly. “Then you haven't heard that work on the Bonal Tunnel has stopped?”

“A rumor, yes.”

“Well, it hasn't,” Bonal said flatly. He drank off his brandy and rose and walked around the desk.

Talking, he moved the lamp over to the corner of the desk and from the bottom drawer drew out a heavy paper which unfolded into a map approximately the size of the desk top. Seay rose and stood before it: a large-scale map of the Tronah section; and Bonal let him study it. Presently, Bonal put a grimy finger on what appeared to be a large woolly caterpillar running north and south across the map, but which in reality was the Pintwater range, the group in whose eastern slope the Tronah gold and silver field was located. A dozen crosses in blue pencil located the town and principal mines on the slope. Bonal ignored these and jumped to the other side of the mountains to place his pointing finger on a stream bed which paralleled the western slope. Where he placed his finger there was a red line which ran from the stream straight east halfway to the mountains. He said, “You've never been across, have you?”

“No.”

“That red line,” Bonal said quietly, “represents the Bonal Tunnel, a tunnel cut out of rock that is driving into the Pintwater range. So far, it has covered two miles and a half of the proposed distance of three and a half miles. It ends here.” He pointed to the termination of the red line. “It will end here.” He put his finger on a spot just east of the exact center of the Pintwater range. “It will end there,” he added grimly, “if I have to dig out the rest of it myself, and with a spoon.” While Seay studied it Bonal sat down. His eyes looked tired, pouched with weariness, but the indomitability of them was unmistakable. A man of wisdom would have called Charles Bonal a fanatic, and he would have smilingly agreed and proceeded with his fanaticism. He did so now, his voice almost musing, but harsh.

“I've spent a week inquiring about you,” he said abruptly. “You seem to have hit a good many gold camps. You've worked men, lots of men. But you're not an engineer. Is that right?”

Seay looked up from the map and nodded.

“You don't have to be an engineer to understand that tunnel,” Bonal said. “But you have to understand human nature to know why it's necessary.”

Seay said nothing, and Bonal hunkered down in his chair.

“When they started mining on this field,” he said in a harsh condemnatory voice, “they sunk their shafts where they found the ore—almost on top of the Pintwater range. When they got down to a depth of a thousand feet they struck water. It filled their shafts. Instead of cutting upcasts to drain the water out, they bought pumps instead.” He raised a warning finger to Seay. “Right now, they've got the biggest pumps invented in operation, and they're barely keeping the shafts dry. In another year the shafts will be so far down that no pump invented, no pump that ever will be invented, will be able to clear them of water.”

“
Borrasca
,” Seay murmured.

“Exactly.
Borrasca
—pay out. There will be millions of dollars in gold and silver still in the ground—and it will stay there if I don't save the fools.”

“How?” Seay asked curiously.

Bonal pointed to the map. “That tunnel. It starts on the other side of the Pintwaters. It will go straight into them and halfway through them to touch the very bottom of the deepest mine shaft on this field. When it does, it will drain the water from these shafts and save the field.” He chuckled, almost with pleasure. “Since these fools didn't ask for a Messiah, I'm giving them one. One with a beard, too.”

Seay was looking down again at the map when Bonal said, “Will you take the job?”

“What job?”

Bonal slowly raised in his chair. “The job of putting that tunnel through—superintending it. I can't be here. I've got to raise money. Tonight I'm leaving for Mexico City. I've been refused loans from coast banks, from London, from Europe, from our own government. Men are laughing at my scheme, but I've got to get money for it.” He paused, watching Seay. “You're to put the tunnel through. You've got to drive these buckos, fight with any weapon short of murder, fight without money, without enough men, and with a swarm of toughs and bankers taking turns at trying to down you.” He rose and came over to the desk to face Seay. “I won't put a good face on it, Seay. Some interests in this ore field won't stop short of murder to kill this tunnel idea. The men I can trust are few. You'll be one of them. The only thing I can do is pay you well, insure your life and depend on your loyalty. Is that enough?”

Seay nodded, still looking at the map.

Chapter Two

Sharon woke at noon and found Sarita, her Spanish maid brought from San Francisco, standing over her.

“How long have you been here?” Sharon asked.

“Ten minutes, miss.”

“What time is it?”

“After twelve, Miss Sharon.”

“Heavens. And I'm to have lunch with Hugh at twelve-thirty. Is he here?”

“Yes, miss.”

Sharon rose on one elbow and looked around the room. Her clothes were laid out, and everything was in order. Still, the hotel room was depressing, and she lay back on the pillow after dismissing Sarita. Her conversation with her father at four o'clock this morning was still running through her mind. He had finished his business then, had awakened her to say good-by and had talked for more than an hour, sitting here on the edge of her bed. And in that hour she learned many things. She wondered if she was remembering them rightly, or if she had been so sleepy that she had things confused. Hadn't her father said that he'd hired a new superintendent—this man whom she'd met earlier in the evening—and that he was a professional gambler? Yet this couldn't be right. Sharon scowled and looked down at the bedspread. Yes, there was a smear of ashes that her father had dropped from his cigar, and the dirty marks of his boots where he had rested them on the edge of the bed, so she knew she hadn't dreamed it.