The Furnace of Gold Part 25

"Hey!" he cried. "Van Buren! Come on! Come on! She's dyin' and all she wants is you!"

"What's wrong with you, man?" inquired the horseman, halted by the fellow's words. "What are you talking about?"

"Queenie!" gasped the fellow, panting for his breath. "Took poison--O, Lord! Come on! Come on! She don't want nothing but you!"

Van turned exceedingly pale.

"Poison? What you want is the doctor!"

"He's there--long ago!" answered the informant excitedly, and swabbing perspiration from his face. "She won't touch his dope. It's all over, I guess--only she wants to see you."

"Show me the way, then--show me the way. Where is she?" Van shook the man's shoulder roughly. "Don't stand here trembling. Take me to the place."

The man was in a wretched plight, from fear and the physical suffering induced by what he had seen. He reeled drunkenly as he started down the street, then off between some rows of canvas structures, heading for a district hung with red.

At the edge of this place, at an isolated cabin, comprising two small, rough rooms, the man seemed threatened with collapse.

"May be too late," he whispered hoa.r.s.ely, as he listened and heard no sounds from the house. "I'm goin' to stay outside--and wait."

The door was ajar. Without waiting for anything further, Van pushed it open and entered.

"There he is--I knew it!" cried Queenie from the room at the rear. It was a cry that smote Van like a stab.

Then he came to the room where she was lying.

"I knew you'd come--I knew it, Van!" said the girl in a sudden outburst of sobbing, and she tried to rise upon her pillow. Agony, which she had fought down wildly, seized her in a spasm. She doubled on the bed.

Van glanced about quickly. The doctor--a young, inexperienced man--was there, sweating, a look of abject helplessness upon his face. The room was a poor tawdry place, with gaudy decorations and a litter of Queenie's finery. In her effort to conquer the pains that possessed her body, the girl had distorted her face almost past recognition.

Van came to the bedside directly, placed his hand on her shoulder, and gave her one of his characteristic little shakings.

"Queenie, what have you done?" he said. "What's going on?"

She tried to smile. It was a terrible effort.

"It's n.o.body's fault--but what was the use, Van?--what was there in it for me?"

"She won't take anything--the antidote--anything! There isn't a stomach pump in town!" the doctor broke in desperately. "She's got to!

It's getting too late! We'll have to force it down! Maybe she'd take it for you." He thrust a goblet into Van's nervous hand. It contained a misty drink.

"For G.o.d's sake take this, Queenie," Van implored. "Take it quick!"

She shrank away, attempting with amazing force of will to mask her pain.

"I'd take the stuff--for your sake--when I--wouldn't for G.o.d," she faltered, sitting up, despite her bodily anguish. "You don't ask me to--do it for you."

"I do, Queenie--take it for me!" he answered, wrung again as he had been at her smiles, an hour before, but now with heart-piercing poignancy. "Take it for me, if you won't for anyone else."

She received the gla.s.s--and deliberately threw it on the floor. The doctor cried out sharply. Queenie shook her head, all the time fighting down her agony, which was fast making inroads to her life.

She fell back on her pillow.

"You didn't--ask me--Van 'cause you love me. n.o.body--wants me to live.

That's all right. Do you s'pose you could kiss me good-by?"

The look on her face was peculiarly childish, as she drove out the lines of anguish in a superhuman effort made for him. And the yearning there brought back again that thought he had voiced before, that night--why couldn't the child have had a chance?

The doctor was feverishly mixing another potent drink.

Van bent down and kissed her, indulgently.

"Force her to take it!" cried the doctor desperately. "Force her to take it!"

"Queenie," Van said, "you've got to take this stuff."

Her hand had found his and clutched it with galvanic strength.

"Don't--make me," she begged, closing her eyes in a species of ecstacy that no man may understand. "I'd rather--not--Van--please. Only about a minute now. Ain't it funny--that love--can burn you--up?" Her grip had tightened on his hand.

The doctor ran to the window, which he found already opened. He ran back in a species of frenzy.

"Make her take it, make her take it! G.o.d!" he said. "Not to do anything--not to do a thing!"

Queenie smiled at Van again--terribly. Her fingers felt like iron rods, pressing into his flesh. As if to complete her renunciation she dropped his hand abruptly. She mastered some violent convulsion that left the merest flicker of her life.

"Good-by, Van--good luck," she whispered faintly.

"Queenie!" he said. "Queenie!"

Perhaps she heard. After an ordeal that seemed interminable her face was calm and still, a faint smile frozen on her marble features.

Van waited there a long time. Someway it seemed as if this thing could be undone. The place was terribly still. The doctor sat there as if in response to a duty. He was dumb.

When Van went out, the man on the doorstep staggered in.

The moon was up. It shone obliquely down into all that rock-lined basin, surrounded by the stern, forbidding hills--the ancient, burned-out furnace of gold that man was reheating with his pa.s.sions.

Afar in all directions the lighted tents presented a ghostly unreality, their canvas walls illumined by the candles glowing within. A jargon of dance-hall music floated on the air. Outside it all was the desert silence--the silence of a world long dead.

Van would gladly have mounted his horse and ridden away--far off, no matter where. Goldite, bizarre and tragic--a microcosm of the world that man has fas.h.i.+oned--was a blot of discordant life, he felt, upon an otherwise peaceful world. As a matter of fact it had only begun its evening's story.

He stood in the road, alone, for several minutes, before he felt he could begin to resume the round of his own existence. When he came at length to the main street's blaze of light, a deeply packed throng could be seen in all the thoroughfare, compactly blocked in front of a large saloon.

Culver, the Government representative in the land-office needs, had been found in his office murdered. He had been stabbed. Van's knife, bought for Gettysburg, had been employed--and found there, red with its guilt.

All this Van was presently to discover. He was walking towards the surging mob when a miner he had frequently seen came running up and halted in the light of a window. Then the man began to yell.

"Here he is!" he cried. "Van Buren!"

The mob appeared to break at the cry. Fifty men charged down the street in a species of madness and Van was instantly surrounded.