"Just after ten."
"Come with me!" cried Tom, springing from his chair and seizing the lantern. "I know what"s happened now!"
With us two close at his heels, he led the way to the spot where Yetmore"s empty house had stood. Not a vestige of it remained, except the upper part of the chimney, which lay p.r.o.ne in the great hole dug out by the violence of the explosion.
"Boys," said Tom, in a tone of unusual gravity, "if you live a hundred years you"ll never have a narrower squeak than you"ve had to-night. If Long John did this--and I"m pretty sure he did--he meant to blow up my house, but being misled by those two windows, he has blown up Yetmore"s house instead. You never did, and I doubt if you ever will do, a better stroke of work in your lives than when you put in my second window!"
CHAPTER XIII
THE ORE-THEFT
At half past five next morning Joe and I slipped out of bed, leaving Tom Connor, who had to go to work again at seven, still fast asleep. While Joe quietly prepared breakfast, I went out to examine by daylight the scene of last night"s explosion.
The first discovery I made was the imprint in the mud of footsteps, half obliterated by the rain. The tracks were very large and very far apart, proving that the owner of the boots that made them was a big man, and that he had gone off at a great pace; a discovery which tended to confirm in my mind Tom"s guess that it was indeed Long John who had done the mischief.
At this moment the tenant of the house next to the east came out--Hughy Hughes was his name; a Welshman--and as he walked towards me I saw him stoop to pick up something.
"That was a rascally piece of work, wasn"t it?" said he, as he joined me. "Scared us "most to death, it did. See, here"s the fuse he used. I just picked it up; fifteen feet of it. Wonder who the fellow was. Pretty state of things when folks take to blowing up each other"s houses. Like enough Yetmore has his enemies, but it"s a pretty mean enemy as "d try to get even by any such scalawag trick as this."
This speech enlightened me as to what would be the general theory regarding the outrage. It would be set down as an act of revenge on the part of some enemy of Yetmore"s; and so Tom and Joe thought, too, when I went back to the house and told them about it.
"That"ll be the theory, all right," said Tom. "And as far as I see, we may as well let it go at that. We have no evidence to present, and it would look rather like malice on our part if we were to charge Long John with blowing his best friend"s house to pieces just because we happen to suspect him of it. And so, I guess, boys, we may as well lay low for the present: we shan"t do any good by putting forward our own theories.
"I dare say," he went on, after a moment"s reflection, "I dare say, if we were to go around telling what we thought and why we thought it, we might influence public opinion; but, when you come to think of it, we have no real proof; so we"ll just hold our tongues. Are you in a hurry to get home?"
"No," I replied. "We shan"t be able to plow for two days at the very least, so there is nothing to hurry home for."
"Well, then," said Tom, "I"ll tell you what I wish you"d do. I must go back to work in a few minutes, but I wish you two would go down town and hear what folks have to say about this business, and then come back here and have dinner with me at twelve. Will you?"
"All right," said I. "We"ll do that."
We found the town in a great state of excitement. Everybody was talking about the explosion, which, as the newspaper said, "would cast a blight upon the fair fame of Sulphide." Yetmore"s store was crowded with people, shaking hands with him and expressing their indignation at the outrage; the universal opinion being, as we had antic.i.p.ated, that some miscreant had done it out of revenge.
Joe and I, squeezing in with the rest, presently found ourselves near the counter, when Yetmore, catching my eye, nodded to me and said:
"How are you, Phil? I didn"t know you were in town."
"Yes," said I, "we came in last evening and spent the night in Tom Connor"s house."
Yetmore started and turned pale.
"In Tom Connor"s house?" he repeated, huskily.
"Yes," I replied. "We were asleep in his back room when that explosion woke us up."
At this Yetmore stared at me for a moment, and then, as he realized how narrowly he had missed being party to a murder, he turned a dreadful white color, staggered, and I believe might have fallen had he not sat himself down quickly upon a sack of potatoes.
A draft of water soon brought back his color, when, addressing the sympathizing crowd, Yetmore said:
"It made me feel a bit sick to think what chances these boys ran last night. Every one knows how hard it is to tell those houses apart; and that fellow might easily have made a mistake and blown up Tom Connor"s house on one side or Hughy Hughes" on the other."
"Yes," said I; "and all the more so as Joe and I last evening put a second window into Tom"s house, so that any one coming across lots after dark might just as well have taken Tom"s house for old Snyder"s."
"Phew!" whistled one of the men in the crowd. "Then it"s Hughy Hughes that"s to be congratulated. If that rascal _had_ made such a mistake, and had chosen the second house from Tom"s instead of the second house from Snyder"s we"d have been making arrangements for six funerals about now. Hughy has four children, hasn"t he?"
I could not help feeling sorry for Yetmore. Convinced as I was that he had at least connived in a plot to destroy Tom"s house, I felt sure that he had been far from intending personal injury to any one; and I felt sure, too, that he was thoroughly sincere, when, rising from his seat and addressing the a.s.semblage, he said:
"Men, I"m sorry to lose my house, of course--that goes without saying--but when I think of what might have happened it doesn"t trouble me that much"--snapping his finger and thumb. "I tell you, men, I"m downright thankful it was _my_ house that was blown up and n.o.body else"s."
As he said this he looked at Joe and me, and I felt convinced that it was to us and not to the a.s.sembled throng that he addressed his remark.
The people, however, not knowing what we did, loudly applauded the magnanimity of the sentiment, and many of them pressed forward to shake hands again.
Yetmore had never been so popular as he was at that moment. Everybody sympathized with him over his loss; everybody admired the dignified way in which he accepted it; and everybody would have been delighted to hear that some compensating piece of good fortune had befallen him.
Strange to say, at that very moment that very thing happened.
Suddenly we were all attracted by a distant shouting up the street.
Looking through the front window, we saw that all the people outside had turned and were gazing in that direction. By one impulse everybody in the store surged out through the doorways, when we saw, still some distance away, a man running down the middle of the street, waving his cap and shouting some words we could not distinguish. We were all on tiptoe with expectation.
At length the man approached, broke through the group, ran up to Yetmore, who was standing on his door-step, shook hands with him, and then turning round, he shouted out:
"Great strike in the Pelican, boys! In the old workings above the fifth--Yetmore"s lease. One of those pockets of tellurium that"s never been known to run less than twenty thousand to the ton. Hooray for Yetmore!"
The shout that went up was genuinely hearty. Once more the mayor was mobbed by his enthusiastic fellow citizens and once more he shook hands till his arm ached--during which proceeding Joe and I slipped away.
We had not gone far when I heard my name called, and turning round I saw a man on horseback who handed me a letter.
"I"ve just come up through your place," said he, "and your father asked me to give you this if I should see you."
The note was to the effect that the rain had been heavy on the ranch, no plowing was possible, and so we were to stay in town that day and come down on the morrow after the mail from the south came in, as he was expecting an important letter, and it would thus save another trip up and down.
We were glad enough to do this, so, making our way up the street past the knots of people, all talking over and over again the two exciting topics of the day, we retraced our steps to Tom"s house, where we got ready the dinner against Tom"s return. Shortly after twelve he came in, when we related to him what we had learned in town; demanding in our turn particulars of the great strike.
"It"s a rich strike, all right," said Tom, "but there isn"t much of it--about five hundred pounds--just a pocket, and not a very large one.
But it is very rich stuff, carrying over three thousand ounces of silver and a thousand of gold to the ton. The five hundred pounds should be worth ten or twelve dollars a pound. They"ve found the same stuff several times before in the Pelican, always unexpectedly and always in pockets."
"Then," remarked Joe, "Yetmore will have made, perhaps, six thousand dollars this morning."
"No, no," said Tom; "he won"t have done anything of the sort; though I don"t wonder you should think so after the way the people have been carrying on down town. They"ve just been led away by their enthusiasm.
Most of "em know the terms of Yetmore"s lease well enough, but they have forgotten them for the moment. Yetmore pays the company a certain percentage of all the ore he gets out, and it is specially provided in the lease that should he come upon any of the well-known tellurium ore, the company is to have three-fifths of the proceeds and Yetmore only two-fifths. He"ll make a good thing out of it though, anyway."
"You say there"s about five hundred pounds of the ore: have they taken it all out already?" asked Joe.
"Yes, taken it out, sorted it, sacked it in little fifty-pound sacks, sewed up the sacks and piled them in one of the drifts, all ready to ship down to San Remo to-morrow by express."