The World's Great Snare Read online

  E. Phillips Oppenheim

  THE WORLD'S GREAT SNARE

  A Thriller Classic

  Published by

  Books

  - Advanced Digital Solutions & High-Quality eBook Formatting -

  [email protected]

  2017 OK Publishing

  ISBN 978-80-7583-939-8

  Table of Contents

  BOOK I

  I. TWO SLEPT, AND ONE WATCHED

  II. ON THE BANKS OF THE BLUE RIVER

  III. A WESTERN LOVE

  IV. THE LAUGH OF MR. JAMES HAMILTON

  V. A HATEFUL FIGURE FROM A HATEFUL PAST

  VI. THE DESIRE OF THE WORLD

  VII. A YOUNG MAN FROM THE EAST

  VIII. A CORNER OF THE CURTAIN

  IX. A NEW PARTNERSHIP

  X. A DEBAUCH AND A TRAGEDY

  XI. THE GOLDEN EGG

  XII. THE VILLAINY OF MR. CHRISTOPHER SKEIN

  XIII. A JURY OF SEVEN

  XIV. THE TOUCH OF FIRE

  XV. A ROUGH WOOING

  XVI. EASTWARDS

  XVII. THE NIGHT CRY

  XVIII. THE PASSION IN THE DESERT

  XIX. A PRINCE OF THE WEST

  XX. MA THE BRUTE AND WOMAN THE ANGEL

  XXI. THE OFFERING OF A SOUL

  BOOK II

  I. IN THE OLD WORLD

  II. THE JUDGMENT OF FORTUNE

  III. THE THRESHOLD OF A NEW LIFE

  IV. THE SHADOW OF A MEMORY

  V. A MEETING ON THE MOOR

  VI. LIKE POISON LINGERING IN THE BRAIN

  VII. THE EARL OF WESSEMER

  VIII. THE TOTTERING OF THE BARRIER

  IX. “WHO ARE YOU?”

  X. LIKE BAFFLED BREAKERS AGAINST AN IRON SHORE

  XI. ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE GULF

  XII. THE SUNLIGHT OF HOPE

  XIII. THE BITTER WATERS MADE SWEET

  XIV. BRYAN THE PHILOSOPHER

  XV. A SILENT TOAST

  XVI. A SOUL FLITTING INTO THE SUNLIGHT

  BOOK III

  I. THE “HILARITY” STAR

  II. A SORROW’S CROWN OF SORROW

  III. THE EAST AND THE WEST

  IV. DEAD SEA FRUIT

  V. THE PROBLEM OF TWO LIVES

  VI. LORD WESSEMER’S ADVICE

  VII. THE JUDGMENT OF THE EAST

  VIII. THE SAVIOUR OF A SOUL

  IX. A BROKEN DREAM

  X. IN THE GREATER WORLD

  BOOK I

  Table of Contents

  I. TWO SLEPT, AND ONE WATCHED

  Table of Contents

  “At last!” muttered Mr. James Hamilton, opening his eyes and sitting upright on the floor. “Get up, you chaps! D’ye hear? Get up!”

  No one stirred. As a matter of fact, neither of the other two men was awake. With a final yawn the speaker stretched himself out and staggered to his feet. Then he threw himself upon a rude wooden bench, picked up the stump of a corn-cob pipe which lay upon the ground, and smoked, with his elbows resting upon the empty window-frame, and his head stretched as far as possible outside. The dull stolidity of his features was quickened for the moment into the semblance of eagerness. He was waiting to inhale the faint quivering breeze which was stealing down from the hills.

  “At last!” he growled, with his eyes, dim and bloodshot, turned towards the western sky. “What a hell of a day! There she goes, and be d—d to her!”

  The rim of a red, burning sun had touched at last the highest peak of a low range of pine-topped hills crawling around the base of the Sierras. All day long, the heat in the valley and across that level stretch of rocky, broken country lying eastwards, had scorched the earth, dried up the watercourses, and very nearly turned the brains of those few dwellers around the banks of the Blue River. Work had been given up as a thing impossible. Down below where, around the bed of the old river, a score or so of gold claims had been staked out by a little band of eager workers, reigned a deep, absolute stillness. Pickaxes, washers, pans, and all sorts of mining tools were lying about unused. Not a man had dared to breathe the burning heat and stifling air of the valley. Apart, they might have been borne for a brief while, at any late; together, they meant fever, deadly and virulent.

  After a while, Mr. James Hamilton withdrew his head from the window-frame, and cast a grim look into the interior of the shanty. Save for its occupants, it did not afford much scope for investigation, nor was there anything in its appointments which could have offended the instincts of the most rigid ascetic. On a table constructed of a couple of broad planks from which the underneath bark had not been stripped, supported upon a barrel at either end, were scattered a dirty pack of cards, two tin mugs turned upside down, and a black bottle rolling on its side. The walls were perfectly bare, and a strong woody odour, and the tricklings of pine sap upon the rafters, showed that the shanty had only recently been put together. The whole of the floor seemed to be taken up by the two men who lay there fast asleep.

  It was upon the face of the one nearest to him that Mr. James Hamilton’s attention seemed fixed. With his hands on his knees, and his pipe between his teeth, he leaned forward, watching him with a steady, expressionless scrutiny. If the sleeping man had suddenly awakened, there was nothing in the look to terrify or even surprise him. It was simply the steady, critical survey of a man who desires to impress certain features and lineaments in his memory, or compare them with some previous association.

  They were all three big men, with brawny limbs and muscles hardened and distended by physical labour, but the man who slept so soundly was almost a giant. His head, massive and tawny-bearded, was propped up against the opposite wall. One huge arm, naked to the shoulder, was passed underneath it, and the other, stretched out perfectly straight, reached the doorway. One of his feet, bare and brown, rested upon an overturned bucket; the leg, extended at full length, seemed in the tiny cabin like the limb of a giant. A red flannel shirt, unbuttoned at the throat, revealed a mighty chest, curiously white. His trousers, of coarse linen, were rolled up to the knees, and although stained and discoloured, showed traces of constant efforts at cleaning.

  Mr. James Hamilton, whose eyes had been noting this amongst many other things, suffered for the first time a shade to pass across his face. He gave vent to his feelings in an expressive grunt, and spat upon the floor.

  After that first futile summons, he seemed in no hurry to awaken his comrades. Withdrawing his eyes at last from the man who lay stretched at his feet, he carefully stepped over his body, and lounged to the doorway. The frail structure creaked with his weight as he leaned against the side, for Mr. James Hamilton himself was a fourteen-stone man, but he made himself comfortable there and folded his arms, smoking steadily, and watching the dull red ball of sun sink behind the hills. Unconsciously he contributed one more, and a necessary figure, to the dramatic completeness of the scene.

  Down from the hills stole the softly-descending darkness. There was none of the lingering twilight of an English summer. Swift shadows moved ghostlike across their bare brown sides, and hung about the valley, and the colour stole into a white moon hung in a deep blue sky. A breeze, long desired and grateful, swept through the army of pines which crowned the sheer hill behind the cabin, hanging on to its ledges and crevices, and growing out in places almost at right angles to the precipice below. Mr. James Hamilton took off his apology for a hat, and pushed his hair back from his head, to taste as much of its sweetness as he could. He even glanced over his shoulder into the cabin, and seemed to contemplate another attempt at arousing his companions. But, although he went so far as to remove his pipe from his teeth, he did not at once speak to them.

  “I reckon this is the darnedest, loneliest, saddest hole I ever came across!” he mut
tered to himself, gazing away from the valley and the shadow-crowned hills to where a great rolling expanse of broken country surged away to the eastern horizon. Mr. Hamilton’s artistic education had been neglected, and he saw no beauty in the fantastic panorama of shadowland, the lone clumps of alder-trees and bushes the very leaves of which seemed like elegant tracing against the deep clear sky, and the faint blue haze mingling with the deeper twilight. His regretful thoughts at that moment were fixed upon a certain pine-board saloon a few hundred miles beyond that uncertain line where the rolling plain touched the sky, and the music of the quivering breeze amongst the pines fell upon dull, unappreciative cars. The fact undoubtedly was, that Mr. James Hamilton was sharing a similar sensation to that which a goodly proportion of his fellow-creatures, steeped to the finger-tips in Eastern civilization, encounter every day. He was bored! The absence of kindred spirits, the enforced temperance of hard work, and, as he expressed it, the cursed loneliness of the place, were becoming insufferable. It was possible, too, that he was a little homesick; for Mr. James Hamilton was not an American, and had not been heard to express any unbounded admiration for that country. The only thing, in fact, which had won his unqualified approval were the oaths, which he had mastered with wonderful facility, and by means of which he was able, as he remarked with constant satisfaction, to express himself as a gentleman.

  Yet, although he was unaware of it, the loneliness was not quite so complete as he had imagined. Away across the broken plain, the figure of a human being was slowly limping and crawling along the rough track towards the valley; a human being in the direst and most pitiful of straits. As yet, all signs of the little settlement and the river were hidden from him. He was in a vast lonely stretch of barren country, with the great hills in front, and no sign of human life or habitation to break the deep serene silence. Every now and then a moan broke from the white parched lips, a low despairing moan of pain and deep physical exhaustion, and more than once in the short space of a hundred yards, he threw up his arms and sank down upon the ground. He was dressed in the roughest of cowboy’s clothes stained with sun and water, and torn almost to rags by the bushes of the forests. His face was worn to a shadow, and black rims were under the deep-set eyes bright with the gleam of famine. The feet were bare and stained with blood, and the hands were cut and bruised. And with it all he seemed to have the look of one utterly unused to such privations. The shape of his limbs was slender, even delicate, and the face, notwithstanding its emaciation and deadly pallor, was curiously handsome. He carried no gun or stick, but a small bundle from which the butt-end of a revolver was sticking out, and as once more his feet gave way beneath him and he sank down, his fingers closed upon it convulsively.

  He lay upon his back, and looked up at the stars which were beginning to steal into the sky. For a moment his mind began to wander. Trees and sky and space seemed to be mingling in one confused chaos. Then, setting his teeth and making a great effort, he arrested his fleeting consciousness. He raised his head a little and his lips moved.

  “Oh, God! if I could crawl but just a mile—just a mile or two further! I must be near the Blue River now! Yonder are the mountains—that must be the valley! Oh, if only I had the strength!”

  He raised himself a little more and looked around despairingly. The deep, majestic stillness of the great pine-clad hills and brooding forests, the solemn silence of night descending slowly upon the land, seemed to stir up a sudden half-frenzied anger in the traveller. Was he to die there in agony, almost within sight of his goal? To die before the yellow light faded from that great moon, and the slow-flushing morn paled the eastern skies? Even in his growing weakness, the cruelty of it and the deep, solemn indifference of all inanimate things in the face of his misery, came vividly home to him. With a curious mixture of blasphemy and devotion, he sat up and faintly cursed the distant moonlit hills, the perfumed breeze which fanned his burning forehead, and the far-off sound of a mountain torrent which mocked his dry throat and cracked lips. Then he pulled out his revolver.

  “One shot more!” he gasped. “Shall I?”

  He looked into the deep barrel, and held it to his forehead, pressing it there so tightly that when his fingers relaxed there was a livid red mark upon his temple. Then he laid it down by his side, and sitting up, sobbed out loud.

  “Oh, God help me! God help me!” he moaned. “I daren’t die! I’m afraid! Oh, for just a little more strength, only just a little! I must be nearly there!”

  He raised himself slowly on to his knees, and leaned forward on his hands. Behind him lay the great desolate plain melting into the sky. In front were the mountains, the deep gorge, the pine-topped hills; and, at their base, though he could not see it, the little shanty where two men slept and one watched.

  “I must be near there now!” he gasped. “Very near! One more effort now—one more—and if I fail—I will do it!”

  He replaced the revolver in the little bundle, and pushed back the thick hair from his forehead, with a gesture of determination. Then moving, in pain and slowly, on hands and feet, he crept on with his face towards the hills, muttering softly to himself:

  “I must not give up! I will—be brave! I will not faint! No! I will not, I will not! How brightly the moon shines through the dark trees, and what strange shadows lie across the plain! Down there must be the valley. Yes, yes; that is where they are. I have come so far—I will not give in! I shall find him. Yes, I shall find him! The ground seems unsteady! it is fancy, fancy! Just beyond those trees—that is where they will be. It is—very near. The breeze is fragrant with the perfume of the pines. It is—only a little further. I shall soon be there—very soon. Ah, what is that? How bright it is! Oh, God! do not mock me. It is a firefly, it must be—a firefly! I will not believe that it is a light. Oh, my head! How giddy I am! I must not give way. I will not! I will not! It is—ah!”

  He sprang to his feet, and raised his hands to heaven. A sudden wild joy shook him.

  “It is a light—a match!” he shrieked. “I am there!”

  * * * * *

  Mr. Hamilton’s pipe had gone out, and the tobacco was in his host’s possession. He turned round and kicked the body of the man nearest to him.

  “Hullo!” he cried. “Are you chaps turned into logs? Get up!”

  The man more directly addressed opened his eyes, gave a mighty yawn, and staggered to his feet. Then he thrust his head out of the door, and drew a long breath.

  “Whew! This is good!” he exclaimed, opening his lungs and breathing in great gulps of the fragrant pine-scented breeze which was blowing softly across the gorge from the forests beyond. “Jim, you idiot, why didn’t you wake me before?

  “Not my business!” Mr. Hamilton growled. “Shouldn’t have done it now, only I wanted a smoke. Hand over the baccy!”

  His host produced a huge pouch from his pocket, filled his own pipe and handed it over. Mr. Hamilton, still lounging in the doorway, leisurely stuffed his corn-cob as full as he could, struck a match, and thereby, in all probability, saved the life of a fellow-creature.

  Neither of the men heard the faint despairing cry of the stranger. After smoking for a few moments in silence, they were joined by the third occupant of the shanty. He was a tall, lank man, with grizzled hair, high cheekbones, and clear gray eyes. After his first uprising he stood for a brief while indulging in a succession of yawns. Then he felt for his pipe, snapped his fingers for the tobacco, and, leaning against the wall, smoked in silence.

  “Say, pal, how’s the liquor?” grunted Mr. Hamilton insinuatingly, a sudden gleam of interest illuminating his classical features. “It’s a cussed dry climate!”

  His host, who in the little community was generally called the Englishman, stretched out his hand and drew a bottle from a wooden box set on end, which appeared to do duty as a cupboard. He turned it upside down, and contemplated it thoughtfully, smoking all the time.

  “Half a bottle,” he announced. “All we’ve got, and no supplies for a week! Guess we
’d better thirst!”

  “That be d—d!” growled Mr. Hamilton. “This place is as slow as hell, anyhow. Let’s share up, and have a game of poker. Chance to-morrow! I shall cut my throat if I don’t have a drink!”

  The Englishman balanced the bottle thoughtfully in the palm of his hand

  “What do you say, Pete?” he asked, turning to the other man.

  The gentleman addressed, Mr. Peter Morrison by name, scratched his head and glanced furtively at the sullen brow and red, bloodshot eyes of the man who lounged in the doorway. The sight seemed to decide him.

  “I say let’s drink! I saw Dan Cooper this morning, and he allowed there was plenty of stuff left in the store. We shan’t have a much drier day than this, anyhow.”

  “D—d poor stuff that store whisky,” muttered the Englishman. “Two against one takes it, though. Down you sit, you chaps! Share up the liquor. Here goes! Jim, deal the pictures!”

  The men sat down without a word. In silence they drank and smoked, dealt and shuffled, lost and won. Loquacity was not a popular quality at Blue River diggings, and conversation was a thing almost unheard-of. Only, once Mr. Hamilton brought his fist down upon the frail table, and took his pipe from his mouth.

  “You chaps, I’m off next week. Gold-diggin’s a frost. D—d if I can stand it any longer. Say, are you coming, Bryan?”

  The Englishman shook his head.

  “Going to hold on a bit longer,” he answered. “Shouldn’t half mind it if it wasn’t so blazing hot!”

  “How about you, Pete?” Mr. Hamilton inquired, turning to the other man.

  “I’m in with Bryan,” was the quiet reply. “We’re pards, you know. Ain’t that so, Bryan?”

  “Right for you, my man!” was the hearty answer. “Two pairs, aces up! Show your hand, Jim!”

  Mr. Hamilton threw down his cards with a string of oaths which even surpassed his usual brilliancy.