The rosewood bar, behind which Boss Tolley and his three barmen sweated at the height of the revelry, had cost a fortune to freight over the trail to Canyon Pass. The gaudy oil painting which hung back of the bar, to hear Boss Tolley tell it, had cost him a second fortune.
Dick Beckworth, who was Tolley’s chief dealer at the tables of chance, was a privileged character. He was supposed to be a “killer” with the ladies. He dressed his long curls and heavy black mustache as carefully as he did his sleek and slender person. Cream-colored flannel shirt, a flowing tie, velvet jacket and broadcloth trousers tucked into patent-leather boots, and a Mexican sombrero heavy with silver cord to top this ensemble, he made a picture to rival the squalid painting over the bar.
The night had been strenuous at the tables, but the gambling fever had now abated. Dick lolled gracefully in the armchair at his empty table with half-closed eyes, smoking a cigarette. Around a table near the archway between the barroom and the hall was a noisy group of miners, but they were no longer playing. Their glasses had just been refilled at the bar.
The rasping chords of a hard-working male quartette beyond the archway repeated a syncopated rhythm for the entertainment of the patrons of the tables.
From beneath the arch into the barroom stepped suddenly an astonishingly brilliant figure – a figure engraved as sharply as a cameo against the blue mist of tobacco smoke that now drifted in a thin haze throughout the barnlike place. The group of miners about the first table roared a greeting.
“Nell! Nell Blossom! The blossom of Canyon Pass!”
“Give us a song of your own, Nellie!” added one burly miner, swaying from his seat toward her, a maudlin smile on his face.
The girl’s smiling expression changed swiftly to one of flaring fury. She swept past the miners and headed straight for Dick Beckworth, who had watched the incident with a little smile flickering about his lips. The girl’s face was still ablaze. She needed no rouge or lipstick in any case to lend it color.
“Dick,” she said tensely, “I hate this place!”
“I’ve already told you I hate to see you in it,” he rejoined with apparent frankness. “Singing and dancing for these roughnecks is far beneath you.”
The flame of her anger gradually waned as she gazed down into his face. His usual calmness was somewhat ruffled by her near presence. Nell Blossom held a certain influence over him that “Dick the Devil” – his boasted cognomen among his admirers – was loath to acknowledge.
But she was sweet enough and pretty enough as she stood there to stir the most placid heart. Even the tawdry costume she wore could not detract from her charm, the red silk blouse with the V-shaped cut at the neck, belted velvet skirt to the tops of tiny riding-boots on tiny feet, her clustering curls of a golden-brown color crowned by a “cowgirl” hat – all worn as a costume in which to sing “Pony Boy,” and “Cheyenne,” which popular hits had finally reached Canyon Pass.
“I hate this place, Dick,” she said again, now wearily dropping into a chair at his elbow.
Nell Blossom possessed one of those rare complexions that remind one of nothing so much as a ripe Alberta peach. The crimson of her cheeks was vivid, but tinted away into the creaminess of her satin skin. Her lips were not too red. Her nose was a nose to be proud of without being large. Her ears were visible and like the blossoms of the dogwood tree in texture and coloring.
“You know how I feel, Nell,” said Dick, with a calm that belied his heartbeats. “I’m sick of all this, too.” He gestured gracefully with the hand that held his cigarette. A jewel sparkled on that hand. “Canyon Pass is a dirty hole. If you say the word we’ll get out of it. I’ve made a good stake. My rake-off has given me a full poke at last. We’ll go away from here, and I’ll get into some paying business. I’ll never turn a card again – for Boss Tolley or any other man. I mean it!”
The girl was looking straight into his eyes. He met that searching gaze as inscrutably as he had learned to endure the scrutiny of his opponent at the poker table.
“Do you mean it, Dick?”
“Just that.” He nodded. “As I told you yesterday, say the word and we’ll light out – now – this morning. You don’t know much about the world outside of Canyon Pass, Nell, but I’ll show it to you. And I love you – love you like the devil!”
There was a force in his final phrase, although he did not stir in his chair, that made her tremble. A vivid flush slowly dyed her cheeks and throat. It passed, to leave her blue eyes humid and her lips smiling.
“If you don’t believe me – ”
“I do,” she interrupted. “I believed you yesterday. My saddlebags are all packed, Dick, and I’m ready just whenever you are.”
A sudden electric tremor passed through the man’s nerves. He veiled his eyes for a moment that she might not see what flared into them. He rose with her.
“Get into your riding clothes and we’ll start. I’ll meet you with my horse in half an hour,” he said almost sternly.
But his eyes now answered her look of gratefulness and adoration with what she thought was a reflection of her own chaste desire.
So it came about that two other riders left Canyon Pass on this spring morning while the sun still lingered abed, and, crossing the West Fork an hour behind Andy McCann, unlike him chose the wagon-track to the summit of the canyon wall on that side of Runaway River.
“Which way do we go, Dick? To Crescent City?”
“South,” he returned, without looking at her.
“We-ell. Lamberton is further but there’s a parson there, too. That’s another reason why I’ve come to hate Canyon Pass. It isn’t decent like other towns – or even up-to-date. It never had a church or a parson. It’s got everything else – saloons, gambling halls, honkytonks, stores, a bank, a hotel, a stamp mill, an express office, even a school, such as it is. But it’s heathen – plumb heathen, Dick.”
He smiled at her then, rather a superior smile. “It’s not the only mining town that answers your description.”
“I know it,” Nell rejoined. “But I want to see the other kind of towns. Mother Tubbs says Canyon Pass ain’t got no heart, and she’s right. She says she can’t even tell when Sunday comes, only that Sam always comes home drunk that day. This is Sunday, Dick. It’s a good day on which to begin a new life.”
“Oh, life’s all right,” the gambler said easily. “Take it as you find it, Nell.”
They came up into the sunlight on the rim of the canyon wall. Once on the level trail their horses broke into a canter. They could look down at certain points into the sink of the canyon where Runaway River foamed in its narrow channel. They spied Steve Siebert with his outfit traveling on the river trail. McCann, of course, they could not see, for the canyon wall on this side was almost sheer.
Ahead, as they rode on, was the Overhang – that monstrous projection capping the scarp of the cliff, left ages ago when the canyon was roughed out by the glacial floods to threaten the pass below with utter extinction if its bulk ever fell. Parts of it had fallen some twenty years previous. This was the “big slide” which had for a time choked the river channel with soil and rubble and threatened to flood out Canyon Pass.
The scar on the steep slope of the west wall down which that slide had fallen was now masked by a hardy growth of scrubby trees and brush. But the two old prospectors never passed the place, either going out of or returning to Canyon Pass, without keenly studying the scar.
Halfway up the height had been a shelf with a hollow behind it – an ideal spot for a secret camp, for it could be observed neither from the trail on the opposite side of the river nor from the rim of the west wall of the canyon. Buried as this shelf had been by the slide, Steve Siebert and Andy McCann now marked the spot – and what it hid – and then glanced