Hard Money (3 page)

Throwing back the covers, she rose and walked over to her dressing table, picked up her brushes and rang for Sarita.

It was a little less than an hour later when she appeared in the parlor of their suite. Hugh Mathias was standing there smiling, and she walked over to him and received his kiss on her cheek and then said, “Good morning, darling.”

Her blue dress gave color to that drab room, even to the neat black broadcloth suit that Hugh was wearing. Another man might have exclaimed over the dress, but Hugh Mathias did not. His frank blue eyes admired it, and Sharon understood and smiled back at him.

“You've been drinking,” she said, pointing a finger at him.

“Customers. A machinery salesman this time. I'm going to hire a secretary with a castiron stomach to receive my callers.” Hugh grinned down at her. He was tall and wore his clothes with the easy grace of a man used to fine living. He had a mobile, friendly face beneath a smooth cap of neatly groomed blond hair, and he looked as immaculate in his way as Sharon did in hers.

“I've ordered. Shall we eat here or downstairs?” he asked her.

Sharon said, “This is stuffy. Let's go down.”

Once in the gilded dining room downstairs, they were shown to a wall table, and Sharon looked around her. Immediately she smiled at this pretence of elegance. In San Francisco, there was a beginning of fine living, and they had tried to ape it here. But the room smelled of cooked food, the waiters were unshaven, and it was easy to track a round dozen of the less well dressed diners across the red plush carpet by the dirt they had left on it. The slovenliness of the frontier still stamped it.

“I'm sorry I was late, Hugh,” Sharon murmured. “Dad came in just before he left, and we talked till all hours of the morning.”

“Was he sober?”

Sharon looked swiftly at Hugh, but the smile on his face took away the impertinence of his question.

“Of course. Why?”

“I've been hearing things.”

“Like what?”

“Like this new superintendent. Have you heard it, or did he tell you?”

“He did,” Sharon laughed. “And I've been wondering if I was sober when he told me. What have you heard?”

“Do you know him?”

“Met him.”

“He's a gambler,” Hugh said. “He owned the Melodian until your father won it from him.”

“So that was it,” Sharon murmured. “Go on.”

“I'd hate to think your father would place a man like that in such a responsible position without knowing his background. I wonder if he did know it?” Hugh mused.

“Is it awful?”

Hugh shrugged. “Your father knows how to pick men—or says he does. This time, he's got a wrong hunch. Seay is a tough. He's notorious.”

“A—a killer, you mean?”

Hugh nodded, and at the look of concern in Sharon's face, he said quickly, “Oh, not a camp bully or a renegade. He's hit every gold camp in the last ten years. He led the rush up the Frazer. He was at Reese River, and then at Rawhide. He's built railroads, won and lost fortunes. He hasn't got a profession.” He paused. “He's something of a legend among a certain class of people.”

“What class?”

“Professional mining men, cowmen, railroad men.” Hugh grinned. “Men that live by force, I should say.”

“But the killings.”

“I used the wrong word,” Hugh said casually. “He's handy with a gun. I don't think he ever committed an unprovoked murder. Is that better?”

“It's bad enough,” Sharon said, as the waiter brought their food. Hugh told her more. It seemed that yesterday Bonal had called on him, had told him of his intention to hire a new superintendent and had asked Hugh to give all the assistance which he, as manager of one of the largest mines in the Tronah field, the Dry Sierras Consolidated, could give to the new man.

“So he'd been planning on it,” Hugh said lightly and shook his head, puzzled.

Sharon said nothing. This was as close as Hugh ever got to criticizing her father, but she knew his feelings. Charles Bonal was playing for the hugest stakes of his career, and things were going against him; now was no time to swap horses in midstream.

Sharon saw the desk clerk making his way across the fast-emptying dining room to them. He paused at their table and handed Sharon a note.

“Mr. Bonal left this at the desk this morning, Miss Bonal. He said not to wake you to give it to you.”

Sharon thanked him and opened the note, read it, and over her face was a look of annoyed amusement. “Speak of the devil,” she said and handed the note to Hugh.

He read:

S
HARON
:

I forgot to mention the finances. Phil Seay is my agent here now. You'll have an allowance of two thousand a month. If necessary, go to him for more. Only go easy, honey.

Love,

C. B
ONAL

“He wouldn't sign it Father,” Sharon said, laughing a little. “That's too sentimental.”

Hugh made a wry face and laid the note on the table. “Seay's your banker, too, then.”

“I don't think you like him, Hugh,” Sharon said teasingly.

Hugh shrugged. “I don't like his reputation.” He put down his napkin and tapped the note. “Darling, if you'll marry me now you can forget things like that.”

“But I can live nicely on two thousand a month, Hugh!” Sharon protested.

“But why have to?” He leaned forward. “Don't you think I've waited long enough, Sharon?”

“Be patient, Hugh.”

“But how can I? There's no end to this fight of your dad's. We'll both be gray when it's over.” He laughed at her, but his eyes were urgent. “Do you
have
to wait, Sharon?”

“I promised Dad.”

“Get him to absolve you. There's no reason why he shouldn't.”

Sharon studied the table musingly. “You don't understand. When we're married, Hugh, Dad is going to rent five city blocks of San Francisco for the wedding party. He'll float a boat in champagne. He'll hire a private car to take us East. In London, Paris, Rome, Vienna, he'll rent whole floors of hotels.” She looked up at Hugh with quiet appeal in her eyes. “Can't you see, Hugh? That's the way he wants to do it. He's contemptuous of money. That's his way of showing his contempt.”

“And you?” Hugh said quietly. “Do you like the idea?”

Sharon smiled impudently. “I do. I think it would be fun. I think it would be fun because he'd think so.”

“But it won't be his wedding trip!” Hugh said with quiet vehemence.

“You're wrong there, Hugh,” Sharon said quietly. “It will be. It will be the last thing he'll ever force on us. I—I think I ought to allow him that. And he can't afford it now with his money tied up in this fight. Isn't it all very simple?”

Hugh shook his head in puzzlement and lighted his cigar. He looked at his watch, signaled to the waiter and said to Sharon, “I'll have to go, darling.”

“But it's only three.”

Hugh stubbornly stuck to his point, saying he was required at the mine, and saw Sharon to the foot of the lobby stairs, where he took leave of her. Climbing the stairs, Sharon wondered what she could do until dinner time. In the afternoon she usually rode with her father, whose restlessness took him over the entire camp. She was suddenly lonesome without him and just as suddenly reproved herself for it.

In the sitting room she found a man dressed in a dark blue uniform of livery, and she recognized him.

“Hello, Ben.”

“Note for you from Miz Comber, Miss Bonal,” Ben said, trying to hide the indelicate wad of tobacco in his cheek.

Sharon took the note. It was from Maizie Comber and asked if Sharon could return with the messenger.

Sharon got a light wrap, too much against the heat of the desert afternoon, and went down into the lobby, preceded by Ben. At the hitch rack a black red-wheeled top buggy hitched to a beautiful team of bays was waiting, and Sharon climbed in. Ben swung the buggy around into the stream of traffic, and they made their slow way north heading out of town.

Immediately the heat of the desert sun drove through the buggy top and was all around her. She lay back in the cushions, lips parted a little for air, and watched this colorful parade. It was at times like this that she could not understand this boom camp of Tronah, nor her place here. Abruptly to the west, the gaunt and savage Pintwaters tilted to serrated peaks, their burned and scarified slopes like some gigantic sneer of nature. There was color here, but dark and ominous color of tawny cinder and without a sight of the blessed green of foliage. The high mines up near the peaks she recognized by the jutting shelf of dump heaps, but they were almost invisible unless an observer knew their locations. Here, then, was this strange camp of Tronah, a town sprung up on the very desert at the base of a desert mountain range. Water was piped thirty miles from the blue sierras to the west. Every stick of lumber, every bit of firewood, every bite of food—everything that went to make up life—had to be freighted in here. It was not entirely real, Sharon thought sometimes, as she considered it. To the east there was a vast expanse of rock and sand reaching halfway across the state. Only rare water-holes made it passable at all. To the south and the north it was the same, endless desert, different only in the gauntness of its rock and sand. Overhead all day long, the sky was barren of clouds and the sun poured its thirsty heat down on everything alike, searing it, draining it of life until it was another part of this dead wasteland.

Later, when they mounted one of the many ridges, the town disappeared, and there was nothing, save this rocky and rutted road, to indicate that man had been here. The desert swallowed it up, the long gray sage-stippled miles of sand and rock to the east meeting the rise of the foothills in an unbroken line.

Perhaps in defiance of this awesome sight, Sharon said, “Is Mr. Comber back yet, Ben?”

“Yes, Miz Bonal. He got back last night, late, I reckon.”

“Too late to see Dad?”

“Yes ma'am.”

The road angled in toward the mountains here and then fell abruptly into a little valley. The eye was drawn immediately and irrevocably to one spot in this valley, for here were three tall cottonwoods, the only green of this landscape. The house beneath them was only secondary, although it tried bravely to be the main attraction. It succeeded only in being defiant.

Of cut stone, masoned with the skill which only wealth can buy, it stood sturdy and square, three stories, with a gallery running across the front and white painted gables jutting from its slate roof. A graveled drive looped a wide fountain in front of the house where a thin stream of water rose high and fell upon itself in this still desert heat.

A woman was waiting on the porch, and when Ben wheeled around and pulled the team to a halt at the steps the woman said gruffly, “Ben, you look at that pair of bays.”

Ben said, “Yes, Miz Comber.”

“They look black to you?”

“No, Miss Comber.”

“Why ain't the blacks hitched?”

Ben spat heartily and pushed his hat back off his forehead. He acted now as if he were used to this, and on more familiar ground. “Miz Comber, you can't keep a pair of high-blood horses like this penned up without they don't get fatter 'n hawgs.”

“Then use the brown buggy, you fool!”

“You tole me to take the black one.”

“Brown with the bays and this one with the blacks!” Maizie Comber glared at him, and entirely without ill feeling. She was a middle-aged woman with a pleasantly blowsy face holding deep lines of character incised beneath the flesh of easy living. Her hair, black shot with gray, was piled high on her head and held a magnificent shell comb. Her gown was a gorgeous and elaborate affair of red silk, and down the front of it were food stains. A pair of easy-fitting and worn Indian moccasins peeped out from beneath its hem.

“Come in, Sharon, away from that old fool,” she said bluffly.

Sharon was smiling as Ben, grinning sheepishly, helped her down. A monstrous fortune dug from the Tronah field had not changed Maizie Comber from the rough and good-natured wife of a rough and good-natured freighter. She was as plain as in the days when she used to water her husband's freight teams at the stage stop west of Placerville.

Following Maizie, Sharon walked through the foyer and into the wide hall that ran almost the length of the house. Inside was a kind of opulence that was breathtaking. Through the great double doors to the right the oak parquetry floors stretched through three big rooms, the first a salon, and was brought up against the far wall of the third room where a great fireplace, flanked by tall fluted pillars of Carrara marble, rose almost ceiling high. This room was the library, where ordered rows of books, some of them collectors' items, filled three big walls. They were dusted weekly and never opened, for neither Abe nor Maizie Comber liked reading. The big salon held a great bronze piano with mother-of-pearl keys. On the far wall was a Romney portrait, untastefully flanked by two huge tapestries, one depicting the story of the prodigal son, the other the siege of Troy. Frail gilded chairs were grouped about the wall. A vast mirror, edges a gilded writhing of rosebuds, covered the wall opposite the piano. The windows, of French plate glass, were hung with Venetian lace and blinds. Overhead twin crystal chandeliers glittered, while yards of oriental rugs underfoot almost subdued their elegance.

The other rooms were like these, rich, expensive—and tasteless. Maizie padded down the corridor, oblivious to it all, and opened a door, which let onto a small corner room. Sharon caught sight of a woman just rising out of a chair in front of a table holding a silver tea service.

“Beulah, pick up them tea traps and clear out,” Maizie said. “Bring some more.” The servant rose and started to clear the table, and Sharon glanced obliquely at Maizie. But Maizie was unashamed of the fact that she had been discovered taking tea with her servant, and Sharon loved her for it. This room was as simple as Maizie's simple tastes could make it. The chairs were old, comfortable, and the mahogany secretaire in the corner was scuffed and unpolished. The rug was plain and worn, and the only pictures in the room were photographs of the old Petersburg mine where Abe Comber had made his money. Moreover, the room had the air of being lived in, held the smell of food, of perfume, of tobacco and of dust.